Heidi, Author at Narativ https://o.narativ.org/author/heidicuda/ Where Truth Lives Tue, 16 Nov 2021 09:39:59 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.1 https://o.narativ.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/cropped-Screenshot-2023-03-11-at-12.38.41-AM-32x32.png Heidi, Author at Narativ https://o.narativ.org/author/heidicuda/ 32 32 121231461 The GOP’s Next Big Lie https://o.narativ.org/2021/09/27/the-gops-next-big-lie/ https://o.narativ.org/2021/09/27/the-gops-next-big-lie/#respond Mon, 27 Sep 2021 07:05:51 +0000 https://o.narativ.org/?p=51538 Homeschooling is the new anti-vax movement. Not content with pushing the health care system to the brink, the team that brought you ‘Hydroxychloroquine for Covid’, wants to bankrupt the public schools system. by Heidi Cuda and Zev Shalev Watch Part 1 of the Gop’s Next Big Lie above. Extreme rightwing operatives are coordinating their narratives, selling […]

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Homeschooling is the new anti-vax movement. Not content with pushing the health care system to the brink, the team that brought you ‘Hydroxychloroquine for Covid’, wants to bankrupt the public schools system.

by Heidi Cuda and Zev Shalev

Watch Part 1 of the Gop’s Next Big Lie above.

Extreme rightwing operatives are coordinating their narratives, selling fear in bundles. These narrative clusters are easy to spot, as audiences are emotionally carpet bombed with orchestrated talking points and repetition.

A recent speech by Dr. Simone Gold of America’s Frontline Doctors—a Council for National Policy-funded group, according to Shadow Network author, Anne Nelson—offered a textbook example. Gold is moving on from the COVID-19 skeptic, vaccine disinformation, anti-masking conspiracy rhetoric to incorporating attacks on education. The speech took place in the San Francisco Bay Area city of San Jose at the Values Advocacy Council Family Night. VAC is a pro-life Christian organization featuring upcoming events with Judge Jeanine Pirro and Mike Pompeo.

“Effective fighting is with rescuing the future, and that is with home schooling,” Gold told the VAC audience.

She began her speech with an anti-science word salad before launching into public education bashing. Gold, who was arrested for her participation at the January 6 Insurrection, equated vaccines with denial of freedom. Among her false claims were “the vaccinated are the superspreaders” and “asymptomatic spread is not a thing,” and because she is both a doctor and a lawyer, her words carry weight with her audiences.

Watch Part 2 of the Gop’s Next Big Lie above.

“OBSESS OVER TYRANNy’

“You must start obsessing over the tyranny,” she said at the event. “The reason the Communists decided to use medical tyranny over other forms of tyranny is because it’s the most effective.”

Her propaganda speech concluded with two key points: home schooling is the way to avoid raising a mind-poisoned by Communists; and she made the announcement that America’s Frontline Doctors will be opening cash-only clinics. Currently, they offer for-profit telemedicine appointments. The Intercept just published an exposé revealing that AFLD is making millions off of telemedicine selling hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.

“Never did you and I think that children would be turned against God, country, and family by the schools, but that is exactly what’s happening,” she said. “You must leave the public school systems, it must be bankrupted! Probably the biggest thing you can do is pull your children out of the poisonous environment.”

She then started pushing home “micro-schooling” with multiple families. “It’s not 100 percent free, but it’s really close to free… perhaps you downsize,” she said. And then she added: “Please retain early treatment meds…”

She concluded with the fact that people can buy the medications at the AFLD website. Lastly, she told the audience about the upcoming cash-only AFLD clinics. We made multiple attempts to reach AFLD, Simone Gold, and the CNP for comment.

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Dr, Simone Gold found time to spread anti-vaccination lies to insurrectionists while breaking the law on January 6. Now she has a new issue: homeschooling.

it’s about chaos

Dr. Nick Sawyer, who announced the launch of the anti-medical disinformation website “nolicensefordisinformation.org” on Narativ Live, said Gold’s rhetoric must be viewed within a larger context of the lingering impacts and objectives of the Trump administration.

“Donald J. Trump and his former senior advisor Steven K. Bannon’s ‘deconstruction of the administrative state’ has now reached deadly new levels,” said Sawyer, an emergency medicine physician who volunteered in a New York City COVID-19 ward in 2020. “Their ruthless, highly strategic authoritarian power grab twists every fundamental American institution to meet their ends, no matter the means.

“Many examples of their successful takedowns are clear for all to see today. Our country has been torn apart, leaving one of our two major political parties aligned with seething white supremacists hoarding loads of ammunition in preparation for the full takedown of the ‘deep state.’ And at the same time, they are weaponizing a deadly pandemic—a synergy of chaos into catastrophe. Their lead medical propagandist, Dr. Simone Gold is simultaneously working to destroy the institution of medicine, foment a distrust of science, education, and thus the truth. As the dismantling of the administrative state nears completion, a new one is being built. One based on a new reality where reality is no longer based on facts, but rather only what the authoritarian says. Democracy dies in darkness, indeed.”

As Zev explained the ramifications of Gold’s attacks on education for the Narativ Live audience, he brought into focus the larger picture: “The home schooling campaign is just the latest in a series of big lies from the GOP designed to wreck confidence in a US institution. Just like Stop The Steal and the anti-vaccination campaign, this isn’t about truth, it’s about chaos.”

Heidi concurred, noting the home schooling rhetoric was not only aimed at bankrupting public education—as Gold said in her speech—but also at indoctrinating the next generation of right-wing zealots.

For the complete story, watch “The GOP’s Next Big Lie” on Narativ Live.

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Time to Arrest Trump https://o.narativ.org/2021/09/27/time-to-arrest-trump/ https://o.narativ.org/2021/09/27/time-to-arrest-trump/#respond Mon, 27 Sep 2021 06:25:27 +0000 https://o.narativ.org/?p=51528 A former US Assistant Attorney tells Narativ the time to act against Donald Trump is now. RIchard Signorelli says there is a small window in which Trump can be indicted before some statutes of limitations run out and the politics of an election year kick in. By Heidi Cuda and Zev Shalev Part 2 of […]

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A former US Assistant Attorney tells Narativ the time to act against Donald Trump is now. RIchard Signorelli says there is a small window in which Trump can be indicted before some statutes of limitations run out and the politics of an election year kick in.

By Heidi Cuda and Zev Shalev

Part 2 of Waiting on Justice. Narativ’s interview with Richard Signorelli.

Former Assistant United States Attorney, Southern District of New York, and criminal defense lawyer, Richard Signorelli, came on Narativ Live and in a long-form interview with Zev, pulled no punches. He referred to Donald J. Trump as a “madman,” a “sociopath,” “not that bright” and a continuous danger to America. In addition, Signorelli blamed Trump for hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 deaths.

Zev opened the interview with the question on everyone’s mind: just what exactly is taking so long to prosecute Trump?

Signorelli said it’s a very complex case, and we won’t know what’s going on behind closed doors in relation to the investigation of the Insurrection, the planning, and the overthrowing Democracy.

”The hope is that things are going on behind the scenes,” he said. “At the right time and in the right way, indictments will be filed, arrests will occur, and hopefully Trump will be brought to justice.”

He revealed an interesting take on Attorney General Merrick Garland, predicting he will either go down in history as failing the country in its time of need or he is brewing up a massive federal case against Trump.

“There are cases he could bring now,” he said. “The Mueller Report lays out a case of obstruction of justice, and that should have been brought by now. Even Bob Mueller testified that this is a criminal case that could be brought. The second case is campaign finance fraud involving Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels.”

Part 2 of Waiting on Justice. Narativ’s interview with Richard Signorelli.

Donald Trump IS THE TRUMP ORG.

Signorelli, who calls himself an attorney/activist, reminded viewers that the Trump Organization is “Donald Trump” and said he believes that Allen Weisselberg, a Trump Organization executive indicted for financial fraud, will cooperate with federal prosecutors.

Signorelli said Trump should be kept on the ropes, and tried individually for every case.

”The reason he did what he did and is still doing what he’s doing is he’s never been held to account,” said Signorelli. “He’s been able to get away with everything his entire life. He is a bully. He’s almost like a mob boss. He speaks in code.”

He added: “Trump is doing damage to our democracy, he’s being assisted by right-wing media, by corrupt and craven GOP officials, and he is supported by millions of voters who have been lied to repeatedly. Every day our democracy gets weaker. He will run again even if he’s indicted, even if he’s a prisoner.”

Signorelli said the only way to stop Trump is to charge him criminally. He said that might remove some of his teflon.

Support Narativ’s truly independent journalism. Become a member at Patreon for as little as $5 a month or at the recommended $10 a month tier.

Clear and Present Danger

“The time to act against Trump is now,” he said. “Donald Trump in handcuffs is the best way to do this.”

Signorelli said the pushers of disinformation who are running rampant in America need to be sued out of submission, and that includes the networks airing propaganda, and politicians who are being influenced by money and power to spread COVID-19 disinformation. He believes civil lawsuits against the governors in Florida and Texas are warranted.

A viewer asked Signorelli what role Mitch McConnell played in or current problems, and he said, “Mitch McConnell has overplayed his political hand. This is a man whose whole political career has been based on maintaining power at any cost. He overplayed his political because he normalized a psychopath.”

“I was so naive in 2016, when Trump was elected, I was so sure the Republican Senators would be a check on him. I can’t tell you how naive I was that they let him get away with everything. They got their judges, they got their tax cuts, and they forgot about what was really important in our country: integrity, our democracy, our Constitution. Once we lose it, McConnell’s gonna feel real bad about it in the twilight of his life. Apology not accepted.”

Because he believes Trump presents a clear and present danger, and has done so much damage, and continues to do damage, he said he’s a whole different kind of “criminal and madman.”

When a viewer asked if Trump was a mobster, Signorelli responded: “He acts like a mobster…He’s hellbent on destroying us in plain view. I wouldn’t put anything past him if he thought he could make a buck. I think he’s his own mobster.”

Support Narativ’s truly independent journalism. Become a member at Patreon for as little as $5 a month or at the recommended $10 a month tier.

LISTEN TO NARATIV ON SPOTIFY

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GHOST IN THE ANTI-VACCINE MACHINE https://o.narativ.org/2021/09/17/ghost-in-the-anti-vaccine-machine/ https://o.narativ.org/2021/09/17/ghost-in-the-anti-vaccine-machine/#comments Fri, 17 Sep 2021 13:48:32 +0000 https://o.narativ.org/?p=51436 Watch “The Peddler” above. By Heidi Cuda and Zev Shalev Narativ’s investigation into why people aren’t getting vaccinated brings us to the White Coat Summit and a mysterious peddler of lies. Sean Conner, an open-source investigator in Austin, Texas, who owns a litigation support firm, had a rather curious meeting. “Out of the blue, one […]

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Watch “The Peddler” above.

By Heidi Cuda and Zev Shalev

Narativ’s investigation into why people aren’t getting vaccinated brings us to the White Coat Summit and a mysterious peddler of lies.

Sean Conner, an open-source investigator in Austin, Texas, who owns a litigation support firm, had a rather curious meeting.

“Out of the blue, one of our larger clients called and asked if I could come sit in on a meeting they were having later in the day,” Conner told Narativ Live. “It’s about vaccines they said.”

Soon after the meeting started, Sean realized that while the topic was indeed about vaccines, it was not at all what he imagined. The outside attorney who had requested the meeting turned out to be a raving anti-vaxx, proselytizing lawyer who tipped him off to a virulently anti-vaxx website: vaxxchoice.com*. *This website is NOT SECURE and should only be access with the necessary security in place.

“In the meeting, whenever I asked where they got their statistics from or for a citation, they would continually refer me to this website,” he said. “Over and over, to every question, like this site was the Wikipedia of anti-vaxx information or something.”

So down the rabbit hole Conner went. Having been curious about the application of OSINT methodology to his legal research, he went all in and put together a “merry band of shit-posting hackers,” whose advanced open source techniques and data gathering tools quickly identified the owner/operator of the site as an attorney named Todd Callender. For a few days, however, his name was all they could find.

Homepage of Vaxxchoice.com; this website is NOT SECURE and should only be accessed with the necessary security in place.

CAUGHT ON TAPE

“It was bizarre, actually,” said Conner, “bizarre and kind of impressive. This guy had done such a good job of scrubbing himself off of the internet that we couldn’t find a current image or picture of him.”

So who is Todd Callender? According to Conner’s investigation, he is a 52-year-old attorney originally from Colorado who currently lives in the Bahamas. He is a ghost online, with no social media, a thin Linked-In page, no interviews or articles to speak of, and who gave the key-note address of the law-tract at the Council for National Policy organized and funded America’s Frontline Doctors “White Coat Summit: A Year Later” at the end of July.

The video of his speech at the event, which was not open to the media or the general public, was nothing short of alarming.

“We would not have known what he looked like had Dr. Simone Gold not posted the videos from the conference,” said Conner.

The speech attempts to outline the legal theory of a “case” against the federal government for the manufacturing of what Callender said were “nanoparticles, genetically modified to track, record, provide signals, intelligence, programming, and complete control over humanity.”  The goal of this criminal enterprise, Callender said, “is to tag, track, code, rate, measure, restrict, manipulate, and dominate every person and their rights.”

This case, he told the crowd, is already written up as a criminal complaint and can be found on his website “vaxxchoice.com” to download and be used as a template. (Again, use security measures if viewing site.)

The curious case of Todd Callender, founder of “vaxxchoice” an online purveyor of Covid lies and vaccination falsehoods.

“NOT VACCINES”

In a shiny, ill-fitting suit, conjuring God and the evils of the ultra-liberal elites, he injected phony narratives about how liberal elites were waging biowarfare weapons with the Chinese government to cause destruction. He also introduced frightening rhetoric about the Nuremberg Code principles, about how just doing your job isn’t an excuse, and referred to the COVID19 pandemic as the “plandemic.”

He said “of course they’re not vaccines,” referring to the proven vaccines currently saving lives, as “experimental gene therapy shots.”

In Conner’s deep dive on Callender, his crew learned the vaxxchoice.com website was owned and operated by Saint Matthews Assurance, which proclaims  to be the first tribal insurer licensed by the Modoc Tribe in Oklahoma.

He learned that the address of Saint Matthews was actually a Native American heritage museum and when contacted, they knew nothing about Todd Callender, Saint Matthews Assurance or vaxxchoice.com.

“This cost us about three days,” said Conner. “By creating a fake company and placing that fake company on a Native American reservation, we spent way too much time trying to figure out how to verify if the company even existed. Finally, I just called the number they provided, and then it was so obvious.” 

A GHOST WITH RUSSIAN TIES

Among Conner’s additional findings:

  • Callender has 266 companies in his name in the Bahamas with various titles.
  • His company in the U.S. is called the Corporate Law Firm Inc.
  • He has an insurance consultancy group called CotswoldGroup.net, which conjures the sterling reputation of the UK’s Cotswold Group dot com, a private investor service, specializing in  intelligence led fraud.
  • Cotswoldgroup.net website has not been updated since 2013.

If Callender was a ghost everywhere else online, the one place he seemed very much alive was in the Panama Papers and the Bahamas Companies Registry. According to the Panama Papers, Callender is a co-owner of “ZAI HoldCo. 1 Ltd,” which is jointly operated by Dr. Ray Zimmerman in the ZAI Capital Group, which Callender also operates with Ian Towell. Both Zimmeman and Towell live in the UK.

Callender’s registered address for ZAI HoldCo. 1 in his capacity as shareholder is in Russia, the premier neighborhood in Moscow’s western suburbs, where the powerbrokers live in a gated community. Among the most expensive real estate in the world. It’s where Stalin, Lenin, Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great lived, as well as current military intelligence, including Putin’s former personal security chief Viktor Zolotov.

Dr. Ray Zimmerman, his partner in ZAI, had his NOMAD license revoked, and he can no longer be associated with alternative investment markets on the London Stock Exchange.

Among the things Callender did not say in his anti-vaxx speech at the White Coast Summit is his family owns a vaccine technology company called PharmaJet. His mother is Dr. Kathleen Callender, a dentist and co-founder of Pharmajet. His sister, Heather Callender Potters, is the co-founder and vice chairman and chief advocacy of shareholder relations.

On August 23, PharmaJet announced that they were part of a group which received emergency authorization for the world’s first plasmid DNA vaccine for COVID19, using needle free injection systems. PharmaJet is in the middle of delivering on a $10 million dollar contract with the World Health Organization (WHO).

Callender, who said he is an international lawyer in his White Coat Summit speech, filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of Sergeants Daniel Robert, Holli Mulvihillin and the rest of the military branches Colorado. His defense used the same hackneyed tropes and conspiracy theories he relayed in his speech to try to gain a temporary restraining order against getting vaccinated. The Judge tossed it out, with a vigorous denial, calling the motion “specious.”

“Yeah,” said Conner. “One does not simply form a class action. Especially when the class size would be nearly 2 million.”

Narativ Live reached out to Callender with questions for this story, but received no response. We also requested comment from Callender’s family.

“At this point we have a pretty good track on him so any activity he engages in we will see if he really believes the anti-vaxx narrative he is spinning or if it is a false front,” said Conner.

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OPERATION JANE https://o.narativ.org/2021/09/17/operation-jane/ https://o.narativ.org/2021/09/17/operation-jane/#respond Fri, 17 Sep 2021 13:24:08 +0000 https://o.narativ.org/?p=51430 By Heidi Cuda and Zev Shalev Anonymous hacks a vast right-wing internet hosting network. The hack of Epik yields 180 GB of data from the deepest depths of American depravity and exposes thousands of extremist figures, media, activists and politicians. We knew Operation Jane was coming. The hacktivist group Anonymous announced it was going to […]

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By Heidi Cuda and Zev Shalev

Anonymous hacks a vast right-wing internet hosting network. The hack of Epik yields 180 GB of data from the deepest depths of American depravity and exposes thousands of extremist figures, media, activists and politicians.

We knew Operation Jane was coming. The hacktivist group Anonymous announced it was going to mess with Texas over its draconian abortion law, and it did.

Heidi woke up Saturday morning and saw that Texas-Gop.Org, the official Texas GOP site was hacked. She screenshotted the home page before they took down server, and the site was “Rickrolled,” with a full-length video of Rick Astley. The hacktivists also posted and image of “Goatse”–a grotesque symbol of a naked man’s large anus. Goatse is early internet trauma meme, and for Anonymous, the posting of the members is like leaving a calling card. It is also intended to associate disgust with the GOP.

Along with a banner naming Ted Cruz as the Zodiac Killer, Anonymous made it clear to those who visited the site, they are taking direct fire at America’s growing authoritarianism. The evidence? Two days later, Anonymous took credit for a massive hack of the server and proved it by dumping 180 gigabytes of data from its exploit of the server and its hosting company, Epik.

Epik hosts a myriad of extreme right websites and social media sites. Epik’s CEO Rob Monster refers to himself as a “Christian libertarian” in his bio, and did not respond to comment for this story.

“This seems like the work of some old school hackers, based on the use of inside jokes, who are trying to retaliate against the rise of authoritarianism,” said Steven Monacelli, the independent investigative journalist in Dallas, Texas, who broke the story of the Epik hack. The data was made available to journalists and researchers at ddosecrets.com/wiki/epik.

Epik has been associated with such sites as GAB, InfoWars, Parler, the Daily Stormer, the app QAlerts, and TexasGop.org. Strange optics, that the GOP of Texas would be associated with sites linked to white nationalism and trauma inducing imagery.

Her sherpa in the murky world of Anonymous is Josh Fidel, a technologist dedicated to exposing and combatting the bastardry of the Q’s, and he said: “Epik is the hosting site for alt-right nazis, and theocratic fascists… and anonymizes them so the public can’t see who is behind them.”

“What Anonymous did was went in behind the scenes and ripped out Epik’s last ten year’s of data out and is showing the world who these people are and what they’re doing,” he said. “That could be very troubling for the people who ran those accounts. The world is going to see just what kind of evil lurks in the hearts of men.”

Fidel described Anonymous “as a gigantic toddler with very sharp knives, who you don’t want to piss off, but every now and then they cut the right target.

“They’re feral children, the lost boys of the internet, and and as they grow older, they’re trying to do better.”

Monacelli said the massive leak that has occurred with Epik may help reveal the network topology of the far right, “who is doing what, and where the intersectionality is.

“Whether it will reveal criminal activity is a fair hunch,” he said. “It could trigger some abuse complaints, but all that remains to be seen.”

FINDING BAUSMAN

OSINT researchers are beginning to reveal names linked to unsavory domains. Zev brought us the story on Narativ Live about a pro-Kremlin operative named Charles Bausman, with ties to cult leader Sean Moon, who hosted pre-Insurrection events at his Pennsylvania properties before fleeing to Moscow. Well, Josh Fidel and his team found Bausman-owned sites listed in the Epik dump.

“There will likely be a lot of light shone online revealing the underbelly of the far right that has been shielded from scrutiny until now by Epik’s anonymization of these sites,” said Monacelli. “It may help reveal the early drip of how disinformation is seeded out.”

Monacelli became an independent reporter after working in corporate tech, which he said felt like being a “stormtrooper on the Death Star.” 

Both the hack of TexasGop.Org and Epik revealed a technical ineptness by those who appear to be facilitating what appears to be some kind of evil.

The Twitter site that is distributing the domain names and owners appearing on Epik sites, “Epik Fail Data Leaks,” which can be found at @epikfailsnippet, sent Narativ Live the following:

“At the very least, Epik is guilty of the laziest design possible. They should have segmented their user’s data across various databases, utilized multiple access credentials, and only user then should’ve had access to their production application.

“Instead… they charged their customers an additional fee to ‘protect their data’ (via a Domain Add-On from http://Anonymize.com) and when a customer would sign up, Anonymize would assign them a UserID. Unfortunately, Epik chose to use that UserID as the prefix for the domain’s WHOIS registration’s contact email address. Thus, providing the keys to go directly from domain name to ‘anonymous’ domain owner with one line of code.

“It’s clear that Customer Protection was not part of Epik’s culture. This is evident by passwords stored as plaintext and unhashed credit cards with expiration dates in the future.”

Epik’s CEO Monster held a post-breach prayer meeting. Anonymous was on the guest list.

Epik CEO Rob Monster, bottom photo, holds a post-breach open forum prayer meeting.

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GOP REAPERS https://o.narativ.org/2021/09/13/gop-reapers/ https://o.narativ.org/2021/09/13/gop-reapers/#respond Mon, 13 Sep 2021 05:56:14 +0000 https://o.narativ.org/?p=51376 NARATIV INVESTIGATES WHY SO MANY AMERICANS CHOOSE TO REMAIN UNVACCINATED AND FINDS OUT THE EXTREMIST COUNCIL FOR NATIONAL POLICY HAS A BIG ROLE TO PLAY IN SPREADING VACCINATION LIES. WATCH PART 1: GOP REAPERS WITH SHADOW NETWORK AUTHOR ANNE NELSON AND ER DOCTOR NICK SAWYER. Dr. Nick Sawyer is mad as hell, and he’s not […]

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NARATIV INVESTIGATES WHY SO MANY AMERICANS CHOOSE TO REMAIN UNVACCINATED AND FINDS OUT THE EXTREMIST COUNCIL FOR NATIONAL POLICY HAS A BIG ROLE TO PLAY IN SPREADING VACCINATION LIES.

WATCH PART 1: GOP REAPERS WITH SHADOW NETWORK AUTHOR ANNE NELSON AND ER DOCTOR NICK SAWYER.

Dr. Nick Sawyer is mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it anymore. 

“Disinformation by unethical doctors is getting more and more intense,” Sawyer said. “Their intention is to prolong the pandemic and create further chaos and division.”

Sawyer, an academic emergency medicine physician in Sacramento, California, said the COVID-19 pandemic has been weaponized by bad actors.

“The evidence that Trump has been coordinating with Putin to destroy American democracy and turn it into an autocracy is incontrovertible. That’s the end game,” Sawyer said. “The U.S. population has been the target of a massive, coordinated disinformation campaign that began before Trump became president.  It intensified in recent years after the GOP began deploying Russian style information warfare on the American people. Using the classic strategy known as the firehose of falsehoods, their intent is to cause mass confusion. That’s why so many people don’t have any idea that the COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective, because through disinformation doctors, they are able to get the wrong message to the right people at the right time. They’re still doing it, and the resulting number of unvaccinated COVID19 patients currently overwhelming our emergency rooms and hospitals across the nation is unsustainable.”

Sawyer said up until last month, there was little to stop the physician-fueled flood of lies, which many deemed protected by the First Amendment. 

But the Federation of State Medical Boards recently issued the following statement from its Board of Directors: “Physicians who generate and spread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation or disinformation are risking disciplinary action by state medical boards, including the suspension or revocation of their medical license.” 

“There is absolutely zero question as to who should be held accountable,” said Sawyer, who has been documenting the disinformation doctors in Trump’s orbit. 

“I was shocked when I heard doctors saying ‘let’s head towards herd immunity, let’s get everyone infected,’ all that life threatening nonsense, and then all these quacks in front of the Supreme Court spread all those lies about hydroxychloroquine and now push anti-vaxx hysteria,” Sawyer said. “The really disappointing thing is, this entire time, organized medicine and organizations who license and monitor doctors for professional misconduct have been silent. Namely, while the American Medical Association has focused on ways in which doctors can fight COVID19 disinformation, they have remained silent on the issue of sanctioning the doctors who spread these lies. And until very recently, state medical licensing boards hadn’t said a word about the lies being spread by these physicians, who are doing it to profit off the suffering of our fellow citizens and to help Trump and the new GOP reach their political ends.

“In 2020, before the vaccines became available, I was looking around, and seeing all this human suffering and death and I’m thinking, ‘This is the first time that a decision made by the federal government has directly impacted me in a negative way that I can feel.’ This is literally harming me, and putting me and my family at risk.”

PART 2: THE NIKKI MINAJ EFFECT

He said the group taking the lead on spreading dangerous disinformation is America’s Frontline Doctors, who launched their website in June 2020. We attempted to reach out to America’s Frontline Doctors for comment, but have not received a response.

Sawyer said it’s important that there is finally a way to target disinformation in his profession, because for him, it’s personal.

He was among the volunteers who flew to New York during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and worked 12 to 14 hour days overseeing a 40-bed intensive care unit.

“Every patient was intubated and had COVID19,” Sawyer recalled. “This was when the refrigerator trucks were there. I was at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, and they were understaffed and under resourced. Elmhurst is not a small hospital, they have the capacity to run 35 ventilators at baseline. When I arrived, they had 160 COVID19 patients on ventilators at their hospital. Queens County in New York City was the hardest hit county with the highest number of COVID19 deaths in the nation for months and months.”

Sawyer was in New York April and May of 2020, working under intense circumstances when little was still known about the novel coronavirus. 

Dr. Nick Sawyer personal photos from his time in New York. Top left, Nick on the COVID19 ward; Top right, New Yorkers thank the medical staff; bottom, the view of the refrigerator trucks from the COVID19 ward.

“It was horrendously sad, people weren’t receiving the standard of care due to the overwhelming number of patients needing intensive care,” he said. “I had to have families say goodbye to their loved ones over Facetime, and that was just crushing for everyone involved. Managing all these patients was a really intense experience and almost all of them died.”

He said none of the medications being trialed at the time, including hydroxychloroquine, showed any benefit to patients, and when unethical doctors started to tout hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure, he quickly reached out to author Anne Nelson, who wrote Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. She confirmed that America’s Frontline Doctors was an organized disinformation campaign orchestrated by the Council for National Policy (CNP), a secretive organization bringing together radical-right groups, their funders, business leaders, and Republican politicians and staffers – including those who worked for Trump.

Nelson said: “The America’s Frontline Doctors project was activated in an April 2020 call among CNP president William Walton and members of the Trump campaign.  They were looking for arguments to reopen the country at the height of the first COVID wave, in order to hold mass campaign events and boost the economy in advance of the fall election.  Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party Patriots, one of the four top officers on the CNP executive committee, hosted Dr. Simone Gold and the ‘White Coat Summit’. America’s Frontline Doctors launch in Washington on July 27.  Other members of the CNP, such as Charlie Kirk, promoted Gold on their social media platforms. Since then, Gold has been a featured speaker at the CNP meetings (as revealed in published videos).  She and Jenny Beth Martin were featured at the January 6 protests. Gold and her associates have gone on to falsely defend hydroxychloroquine as a COVID cure, and to sow vaccine hesitancy.”

Nelson documented her findings here: https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/

We reached out to the Council for National Policy and Dr. Simone Gold, who is the lead on multiple lawsuits filed against COVID-19 vaccine enforcement, for comment but did not receive a response.

Sawyer said he can only believe the CNP-backed doctors are chaos agents. 

“It’s part of creating mass confusion and hysteria in order to destroy the truth,” he said. “That is the whole purpose. That all started with Kellyanne Conway with alternative facts, and Rudy Giuliani saying ‘truth isn’t truth.’ And it all added up to where we are today, where there are two separate realities. With the election there are two realities, the COVID19 pandemic there are two realities, everything.”

Perhaps the current fate of Rudy Giuliani, whose law license has been suspended in New York and Washington, D.C., due to spreading disinformation, may foreshadow events to come. With the new decree by the Federation of State Medical Board, doctors who spread disinformation may receive similar punitive consequences.

“My stake in this is I’m exposed to it every day, and now that there are multiple safe and effective vaccines free to anyone in the U.S. who wants one, there is no reason I should still be seeing people die from this illness. I recently had an unvaccinated patient in their 20’s die of COVID19 in my emergency department. If they had been vaccinated they would almost certainly be alive today.  Also, if I get COVID19, am I one of those random people who is going to be perfectly fine, about four out of ten people who get the virus have no symptoms at all, or am I going to be part of the small population of otherwise healthy people who get COVID19 and die, or have long term effects we see in COVID long-haulers? I have no idea,” he said. “But I do know unless we shut down the disinformation pipeline, we are all at greater risk.”

Sawyer made the debut of his disinformation doctors website on Narativ Live: nolicensefordisinformation.org, to give people the tools to report doctors who spread vaccine myths.

(Heidi Cuda first reported this story in the Hark Herald Press).

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