THE MATH:

If we don’t participate by thinking it through we remain unprotected for the next assault.

+ The powerful force of the PR campaign can disconnect us from our own survival instincts and our allegiance to Natural Law.

+ Their Pattern of deception and concealment of harm leads to addiction, disease and death.

+ We must understand and memorize Their Playbook.

+ We must use the wisdom gained from past mistakes.

+ Cognitive dissonance has led to errors in our reasoning.

+ We must defend ourselves against those we thought were defending us.

+ Until we disable the corrupt revolving door we have an active breach in our defense.

+ Our over-reliance on external systems undermines our ability to defend ourselves or others.

+ The genocide in Gaza has illuminated the Pattern & Playbook for all to see.

+ The tactic of using False Claims was effective on enough of the public to get us and keep us in Bad Wars for the past 70 years and counting.

+ The tactic of using False Claims was effective on enough of the public to get us to buy and use Bad Products that cause disease and death.

+ As the Watchdogs produce truth of the falsehoods, the opposition will bury and attack this evidence.

+ Bad Companies pledges to self-regulate obstruct actual protection of public welfare.

+ Bad Companies manufacture doubt and controversy to keep us from the Truth.

+ The Captured allow evil to succeed.

+ The Captured allow disease and death to escalate.

+ The Captured allow the degradation of our land, water, and food.

+ Smear Campaigns prevent us from actively opposing Bad Wars.

+ Smear Campaigns prevent us from actively opposing Bad Products.

You and I may perceive deadly toxins or harmful drugs as bad things that could kill us. But Bad Companies just see them as products—foundational revenue streams with limitless growth. The adverse effects from these products—the addiction, disease and death—are health problems for us, but they are only PR problems for the Bad Company.

If you search through Big Business-type sites there is lots of advice for how to manage a corporate crisis and “rehabilitate search & brand reputation”. This includes putting out positive content, press releases, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) stories to “outrank the negative” and “replace defensive reactions with visible operational improvements to rebuild trust”. Also suggested is utilizing experts—“PR agencies with internal crisis playbooks to weather major storms”.1

But, like the original false claims sold to us about the product decades earlier, the “improvements” will be just as false.

The Sleight of Hand tricks a Bad Company performs are considered reasonable and appropriate operations to shuffle past obstacles and “leverage existing advantages to drive growth”. It is of great importance, to our health, that we do not also misinterpret these practices as anything less dangerous than what they are—lying, cheating, and getting away with murder.

We drill down into each distinct technicality of the craft they use, not to be fanatical or fatalistic, but because the deceptive actions which directly affect us are all very specific and technical. A general awareness of “corporate corruption” doesn’t give us a precise enough protection.

In war, analysis of the enemy’s military strategies is this specific and technical. But as long as we perceive the Bad Company as something other than an enemy we are at war with, their commercial operations often dissipate into the environment of our everyday life and we don’t combat them in a decisive, clear cut manner.

The current war against Iran has shown us all that the deeper the understanding of the enemy’s offensive game plan, the more exacting the defensive strategies can be.

Iran has spent the last 25 years watching the American way of war in its neighborhood. It watched U.S. campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria. It watched how the American military built up majestic, lightly defended bases across the region. It watched how American power likes to open wars: blind the enemy, wreck command-and-control, suppress air defenses, kill senior leadership, and fracture state control. Any competent adversary would have learned from this American way of war. Iran did. It would have been foolish for Tehran not to build a military system designed to withstand exactly that kind of opening blow.2

Key action = they watched. Eyes open. They paid keen attention to every detail of the US military’s schemes, weaponry, stockpiles and capacities. They studied American offensive patterns. These weren’t difficult to see, because it was the same moves over and over. Recognizing and accepting those, they developed countermoves. And every Iranian military countermove thus far has worked, to vanquish and humiliate two of the most powerful, nuclear-armed militaries in the world.

Iran even countered American propaganda techniques and outperformed its opponent in the public relations game as well:

Western neo-cons may be questioning why their most recent pitch for war, of which they did not bother to update one word of from the last century’s, is not working this time around to amass the essential initial consent from the American as well as greater global populace. The answer is that somebody has been studying their Playbook.

For so long, those who mastered the techniques of public relations—all the psychological warfare they learned from Bernays and the early masters—held the advantage because they held the tactical expertise. The same shift that has shrunk Legacy Media’s advantage by the democratization of the independent voices of the world wide web, may just as organically transfer what has been up until now a dominion of the whole PR game to a new generation whose full understanding of those tactics affords them not only more efficient and effective defensive strategies, but also new offensive strategies of their own, including beating the enemy at their own game.

SLEIGHT OF HAND TRICKS

In a typical shell game, watchers are challenged to follow the movement of three shells and a pea. In the games our opposition plays, there are too many shells for the naked eye to track, and the shells never stop shuffling. It’s been very difficult for the public to keep watch on moves this quick and sneaky, since most of the maneuvers are made behind closed doors.

But, like with all Bad Company stratagem, once a maneuver succeeds to dupe us, they will use it again and again, and all the industries will use the same move, and so those on watch should be able to spot the cons. Even though their bag of tricks is extensive, it is very worthwhile and constructive for us to dig through them. The advantage we have as individuals—always—is gleaning wisdom from past games to recognize the patterns of their movements, so to not be fooled by them anymore ourselves.

“WHITEWASHING” is the use of PR to create a false positive image of a company, to “clean” its reputation, usually because its so dirty in reality. There are a variety of ways industry virtue signals through advertising without being at all virtuous. There’s actually too many categories of this to list— greenwashing, bluewashing, pinkwashing, carbonwashing, sustainability washing, wokewashing, purpose washing, ethics washing, local washing, and more! All to create the impression of responsibility without the actual evidence of any net-positive result for the world and to hide the company’s true net-negative environmental and societal impact.

While this scam is probably the easiest for people to recognize, there are some sweeping expansions of this practice that are quite unbelievable to behold.

A few years ago, the CEO of Philip Morris International called for a ban on cigarettes within a decade. This noble sacrifice, which would outlaw its own Marlboro brand, was part of the company’s new vision to “see the world without cigarettes”. And even urging “the sooner it happens, the better it is for everyone.” Total corporate redemption—that’s a powerwash!

I know few would be quick to put faith in Big Tobacco’s amazing transformation, that a company whose products kills 8 million of its customers a year will miraculously now begin to make the world better for everyone. But there are still many Sleight of Hand features that appear in the wake of this scheme for us to unpack and learn from.

The “NEWER/SAFER” ploy is when the industry introduces another product, an allegedly “safer” version, which is not at all safe and creates another problem. The claim all rests on that added “R” which means it just has to kill slightly less than their original deadlieR product. Even if that could be considered a benefit, it’s rarely even ever true.

Unlike an amazing magician or sleight of hand artist, the moves Bad Companies make wouldn’t fool a child, but somehow they work to hoodwink our regulatory bodies and by extension the public.

The amazing artistry from Big Tobacco was waving a magick wand to turn a cigarette into an e-cigarettes and then voilá—it is now a treatment option. The false claim that the new products could help people quit smoking original cigarettes had no evidence to support it, as studies comparing the use of electronic cigarettes, placebos, and nicotine patches demonstrated no significant differences in abstinence rates. In reality, teens who vape are more likely to begin smoking cigarettes and many young people who use e-cigarettes also smoke cigarettes.

But because the FDA believed the magick, or was part of the magick, e-cigarettes were marketed to consumers as cessation or harm-reduction tools and therefore fell outside the purview of FDA’s authority to regulate the products. This fabricated illusion allowed the tobacco industry to dodge all the stringent marketing and packaging regulations for a full decade while they manifested their new base of replacement smokers.

As the less-magical reality—the deaths and disease and addiction—creeps in to break the spell, the wand is brought out again and again to transform bad to good.

Cue the latest Philip Morris International product—IQOS, which stands for “I quit original smoking”. Cue the new whitewashing slogan— “The future is smoke-free!” Because, you see, the company’s new investment is in heated tobacco products. Heat is different than smoke! Now (don’t) watch closely….cigarettes burn tobacco and nicotine, and that has severely negative health effects. But vapes don’t burn tobacco, they burn e-juice and nicotine and that has severely negative health effects. But IQOS don’t burn e-juice and nicotine, they heat tobacco and nicotine and this is going to be safe, without negative health effects.

Will this latest version of nicotine delivery prove safe, or even safeR, this time?

The FDA has taken the magick wand to create a brand new illusion. In July of 2020, the regulators authorized IQOS as a “Modified Risk Tobacco Product”, which is defined as a product which lowers individual risk and benefits the overall public health. So, according to our official protectors, this new tobacco product—the nicotine heat stick—benefits our overall health. Why should we be skeptical of their stance?

“PMI’s own in vivo clinical data on biomarkers of potential harm in Americans show that IQOS is not detectably different from conventional cigarettes”

“Smokeless cigarettes not as harmless as claimed, study says”

“The overall body of evidence was not sufficient to demonstrate that completely switching from combusted cigarettes to the IQOS system reduces the risk of tobacco‐related disease or harm.”

The cancer-causing chemicals released from IQOS are the same as those in cigarettes3. Researchers did find one difference though—because the battery-charged devices time out, users speed up their ‘puff rate’ and end up inhaling more nicotine4.

The reality pitted against the illusion are reports that IQOS exposure causes cell damage, lung disease, induces oxidative stress, triggers unexpected organ toxicity, and significantly increases platelet thrombus (clot) formation, increasing the risk of atherosclerosis.56

Here the FDA uses its own brand of word wizardry. They allow the products to come to market while they disclose, somewhere behind the curtain, that: “IQOS cannot be endorsed or promoted as “safe” or “FDA approved.”

The smoke-free segment of Philip Morris International generated sales of $17 billion this year, up over 24% from just last year7. It’s booming. PMI boasts about the 43 million+ legal‑age consumers who have chosen their latest offering. Sales of their smoke-free products is now their “main growth driver”, representing 43% of the company's total gross profit, with IQOS revenues far surpassing those of their cigarette brand Marlboro8. Well done again, Big T! Keep on growing!

Of course, these winning games are played by all Bad Companies.

When Dupont was finally pressured by enough legal action from a perpetually-poisoned public, the Bad Company “voluntarily phased out” the forever chemical PFOA from the market (after 80 years of claiming it was safe, after the chemicals made it into the blood of 97- 99% of the U.S. population and 90% of its drinking water910).

In 2009, the industry voluntarily phased in their “newer/safeR” replacement product, a next-generation chemical called GenX. This product is also composed of toxic fluorochemicals, but the chemical structure is slightly different than that of the toxic fluorochemicals in PFOA. GenX is used in all the same products as PFOA— food packaging, paints, cleaning products, non-stick coatings, outdoor fabrics and firefighting foam, including in the food wrapping from 27 different fast food chain­s. GenX was approved for market by the EPA without adequate safety testing.

Between April 2006 and 2013, DuPont filed 16 reports of “substantial risk of injury to health or the environment” about its new chemical and submitted them to the EPA. They cite numerous health effects in animals including reproductive problems and cancer. All the same adverse effects we got with PFOA.11

In 2016, environmental research showed that GenX is more challenging to remove from water than PFOA. In 2021, the EPA deems two GenX chemicals more toxic than the PFOA they replaced. The agency finds that GenX is associated with harmful effects—in humans. In the kidney, blood, immune system, liver, and it is linked to reproductive problems, abnormal thyroid conditions, pre-eclampsia, low birth weight, high cholesterol, and kidney and testicular cancers.1213

What did the EPA do when it found out the replacement was even more dangerous for humans and the environment? Did it remove GenX from the market or the environment? No, silly, we are just beginning the saga with this one, don’t get ahead of yourself! Rather than banning the compound, the agency actually reversed course a few weeks ago and moved to rescind legally enforceable national drinking water limits for GenX and several other forever chemicals.14

Biopharmaceutical company Merck’s reputation was (temporarily) destroyed due to the Vioxx scandal in 2004, when it was revealed its drug doubled the risk of heart attack, the company buried this information and kept the product on the market for years, causing thousands of heart attacks and deaths. Patients were immediately transitioned to similar drug Bextra made by Pfizer, until it was soon discovered this drug had even greater risk of heart attack plus was linked to a severe and potentially fatal skin condition called Stevens-Johnson Syndrome (where the user’s skin falls off).15 Pfizer was even sued by its own shareholders for this because "through its own fraudulent conduct, Pfizer concealed the same information as its predecessors." In this case, the crafty shuffling is not to a newer product, just another different company’s product, that is also not safe. After Bextra was forced off market, patients transitioned to another Pfizer drug Celebrex, which is currently available but with a black box warning and the company is not allowed to advertise it to the public.

On the Big Agriculture side of the game board, Bayer-Monsanto also played the Newer/Safer whitewash trick with glyphosate. In 2023, Bayer pledged to remove glyphosate from Roundup products sold to U.S. consumers (for home use only). The Bad Company replaced glyphosate with combinations of four chemicals, two of which are banned in the European Union. The new Roundup formulations are 45 times more toxic to human health, on average. They also pose significantly greater risks to the environment. And, it has been found that original glyphosate is still being detected in American Roundup products.

Because the Big Ag giants needs to keep the American consumer in the dark about what they are buying (or they might not buy it), the industry has long fought the labeling of its GMO products, playing a game of hide-and-seek with the public. In 2016, the Obama Administration passed a law that required USDA to label foods that are bioengineered, as is done in 60 other countries. But the regulatory agency created a '“LOOPHOLE” by declaring that genetically modified material that wasn’t “detectable” didn’t have to be disclosed. This sleight of hand was a big favor to the manufacturers who through their processing could easily render such ingredients “undetectable” in the final product. The loophole was pretty significant as the exemption affects ingredients like corn and soy oils, which make up 70% of all GMO food products in the grocery stores.

USDA also created another subterfuge for the Bad Companies by allowing them to use QR codes instead of the clear written words “GMO” or “bioengineered” anywhere on the product. The customer would have to use their phone to scan every piece of food in order to seek the truth that the agency was lawfully required to provide them.

A recent victory of note is that a Federal Court this year overturned USDA’s word wizardly loophole. The judge’s opinion explained the crafty trick, “There is an obvious and important difference between whether a substance is actually present and whether, using a particular method, one is able to detect that the substance is present.” The court also ruled that the QR code-only disclosure ruse is unlawful. And now the branch of government in place to oversee food safety is again asked to enforce the food safety law they were supposed to enforce 10 years ago.

The government agencies work sleight of hand-in-hand with the corporations to develop new opportunities for trickery. One arena to keep our watchful eyes on is “biosimilars.” These are biologics that the FDA considers “highly similar to and [with] no clinically meaningful differences from an existing FDA-approved reference product.” As such, they are eligible for an “abbreviated licensure pathway.” As such, “FDA may approve a biosimilar for indications or populations without direct clinical studies in those indications or populations if the manufacturer provides adequate scientific justification”. I’m not saying I have evidence of harm from an untested biologic product, I’m just saying the loophole looks like an excellent way to shuffle past watchful eyes if there ever is any.

A key method of manipulation used to deceive the public into thinking something is actually safer or better is to focus on relative rather than absolute risk. If we were (able) to ask—does this new product pose a risk of harm? The answer is—absolutely. But often, the only question asked is—does this product pose slightly less risk, or even just a different risk, than the previous harmful product.

Philip Morris could not provide evidence that switching to IQOS reduces any risk of disease or harm compared to continuing to smoke cigarettes, because there is no evidence. But that was never their intended endpoint. Instead of the unachievable reduced risk, they went for reduced exposure. But who cares about reduced exposure, reduced anything, if it doesn’t reduce risk of harm? The new device emits lower levels of some toxicants, but that is a worthless endpoint considering it increases exposure to up to 80 others, many of which are cancer-causing. Yet, the irrelevant distinction was enough to grant them authorization and the highly-sought after “Modified Risk” label.

The weary-eyed people struggling to keep watch on the endless shuffling of shells will likely never fully understand this deceptive labelling, they will just be misled by the illusion of less-risk. The legal extended label for the nicotine heat stick is “Modified Risk Tobacco Product for reduced exposure” which masterfully mixes up the real meaning—that consumer risk has only been modified by reducing exposure to a few toxicants, but not all, and the risk for addiction and disease are in no way modified or reduced.

Can you imagine your local fire department using game like this? Because a wildfire produces less exposure to certain toxicants than an electrical fire, they don’t bother to protect any houses or people from wildfires because they produce less smoke and “less exposure” compared to electrical fires. Non-sense.

After the truth about a bad product or corporate misconduct finally comes to enough light, there is often a big scale public relations “REBRANDING” campaign. Bad products jump from company to company, companies jump from industry to industry, names change for products and companies, all to keep the public and watchdogs playing an endless game of whack-a-mole. The results of this game are that Bad Companies never lose a day of momentum or profit, and the American population gets sicker and sicker and lives an average of 2500 less days than it used to a generation ago.

Once a company does so much damage that their reputation is shot, they often create a spin-off company so that can continue the dirty work under an untainted new name.

In 2015, Dupont created a spin off company with the new name Chemours. Then Chemours introduced the PFOA replacement, the new also-toxic GenX product. And then they polluted the waters and poisoned the people, and have now been sued thousands of times over the environmental release of forever chemicals.

Here’s one of many representational examples of the merger name-change switcheroo that keeps the average citizen’s head spinning trying to track the lineage of bad corporate DNA.

American Home Products (AHP) was a massive American conglomerate and one of the largest pharmaceutical and consumer goods corporations in the United States since the 1920s. The company was widely known for its “anonymous” operational strategy, as it owned an expansive portfolio of household-name brands (Advil, Preparation H, Robitussin, Chapstick, Woolite, Chef Boyardee…) but the corporate name was kept off its product labels.

In the late 90s, the company’s popular diet cocktail drug Fen-Phen, used by over 6 million overweight Americans, was found to cause fatal heart valve damage and pulmonary hypertension. There was a massive product recall and AHP suffered billions in legal liabilities from thousands of lawsuits.

In 2002, AHP rebranded and changed its name to Wyeth, allowing the company to shed its tarnished reputation and focus on pharmaceuticals. In 2009, Pfizer acquired Wyeth, for its pipeline of vaccines and biotech products. In 2012, Nestlé foods bought the infant nutrition division from Pfizer and renamed it Wyeth Nutrition. The original corporation with the bad reputation they earned from the heart attacks is just a sedimentary substratum that most will never dig up again. The part to remember is that only the name changes. The masterminds and managers, the agenda and the strategies, live on.

The rebranding also works in reverse, where a Bad Company can acquire a company with a “good” name so to hide its degenerate business practices under a trusted household brand to reap more profits in disguise.

This is what the Tobacco giants did when sales dropped due to the tsunami of their negative PR. RJ Reynolds bought Del Monte and Nabisco, and Phillip Morris bought General Foods and Kraft. Here they could continue their craft out of the spotlight of their previous crimes. Here they could use their methods not just on the marketshare of consumers who could be convinced to smoke, but on the limitless marketshare of consumers who need to eat food. And then they degraded the food products that the people need to eat by chemically engineering them to elicit cravings—their specialty.

Here is a good overview/recap which highlights the full circle total market dominance of a company in “the flavor business”.

If an individual is found responsible for killing someone, they will go to jail and the story of their crime will follow them for the rest of their life. If a Bad Company kills lots of people with its product, the public will rarely be able to follow their crime story through all the sleight of hand mergers upon mergers. The legacy of corporate criminality behind any of our household products or drugs is long buried and usually unknown to the present-day consumer.

“BLAME SHIFTING”—the attempt to transfer the criticism or disfavor of a Bad Company or Bad product to another company, product, issue, or scapegoated individuals.

Once a Bad Company uses the spin off trick to rebrand into a different entity, they can try to toss the stink of societal damage to them, as Dupont did with Chemours in order to cleanse itself of the forever chemicals scandal.

Chemours throws DuPont under the bus, alleges company chose to discharge PFAS into the Cape Fear River

Blame is transferred, back and forth and all over, where it is scattered and confused. The locus of responsibility is now debatable, in popular opinion and in the courts. Watchdogs then have to battle on multiple fronts and the public dialog can turn to the question of which company is more to blame, which one do we go after, as opposed to how do we stop this industry from doing all this damage.

Following the federal felonies and bankruptcy of Purdue Pharma in 2019, many of the other opioid manufacturers—Endo, Allergan, Johnson & Johnson and Teva Pharmaceuticals—were put on trial in multiple states for their contributions to the epidemic. In an attempt to muddy the waters surrounding the opioid epidemic’s emergence, the drugmakers blamed everyone but themselves—“rogue doctors”, “Mexican drug cartels”, “Chinese producers”, and “dark web internet sales”.16

But their main scapegoat was of course Purdue. The mudslinging against the already-dirty company, making these other companies appear relatively cleaneR in comparison, was the heart of their defense. This is referred to as the “empty chair strategy”—‘We’re not to blame, they are!'” And the strategy was successful for the opioid manufacturers to win major victory in California, and in several other state lawsuits.

Like a game of Hot Potato, the accountability for the biggest crises in our country has been flung from company to company, from company to government agency, even agency to agency, and then as always, from presidential administration to administration.

The Bad Companies’ most-winning dodge is to put all the onus on the regulatory agencies, as they are the ones who approve and label their products as safe: “They said we could sell it—blame them! Yes, we made the harmful products, but they authorized them!”

Then the regulators blame the companies for not giving them all the necessary data and not volunteering the evidence of harm: “They never told us it was unsafe—blame them! Yes, we authorized the harmful products, but we didn’t technically approve them and we never officially said they were safe!”

The most recent play in this game which threatens the state of American public health is the currently ongoing U.S. Supreme Court case Monsanto v. Durnell, in which Bayer-Monsanto’s entire defensive argument relied on this clichéd blame shift tactic. They claim that because the EPA continues to rule that glyphosate is unlikely to be carcinogenic (despite thousands of state juries and court judgments finding that it is), federal law should then preempt states from requiring cancer warning labels or awarding any damages through state juries. The Monsanto attorneys’ premise was simple and repeated, “The agency has given us the green light.” If the Supreme Court sides with Monsanto-Bayer, this will close up the only avenue to justice for citizens harmed by pesticides and put the safety of all us solely in the hands of these two players—the Bad Company who poisons and their captured regulators who allow them to. A decision is expected in July.

And, in the long never-ending game with cigarette companies, the hot potato just got thrown back to their regulators, the FDA, who last month added the most egregiously corrupt shell yet for the corporations to hide under. In April 2026, the agency granted marketing authorization to four flavored vaping products (which is a reversal on policy about fruit flavors because they attract children) and shifted its enforcement guidelines to effectively allow other unauthorized, unapproved, formerly-known as illegal vapes to stay on the market while undergoing scientific review (as opposed to after).

“While these products are authorized to be sold in the United States, it does not mean these products are safe, nor are they “FDA approved.” All tobacco products are harmful and potentially addictive. Those who do not use tobacco products shouldn’t start.”

Those young kids who we know are lured in by fruity flavors should not start using, but we are going to temp them and market to them with mango and blueberry nicotine products and then hope they find their way to their favorite FDA website to receive the only barrier of protection between them and the more than 500 different toxic chemicals in the product, which is this recommendation that they shouldn’t start. “We told them not to start—blame them!”

The agency says all this policy reversal is an effort to tamp down on underage use of the tobacco products.

The head of the FDA Dr. Marty Makary and many of his staff resigned over this last straw—Trump’s going over their heads to “save the vaping industry”—and after receiving too many complaints from vaping lobbyists when they tried to shift course on this issue and block the fruit flavored devices from being authorized. They lost the battle to protect kids from blueberry cigarettes and now they’re fired or resigned.

And finally, what is probably the most dastardly maneuver of all the sleight of hand tactics, is when after a Bad Company’s product causes disease and death they then make moves into a different industry sector to capitalize on “THE BACK END” from the damage they caused.

In the late 1980s, the pharmaceutical giant Glaxo Smith Kline (GSK)’s held the best-selling prescription drug—the heartburn remedy Zantac. Decades later, independent research found that the medicine degrades over time into a carcinogen. When it was eventually pulled off the market and in 2024, GSK had to pay $2.2 billion to settle lawsuits for the drug causing cancer in over 80,000 claimants. But—rather than this enormous settlement cost halting revenue growth, GSK’s profit grew by 5% that quarter, driven by robust sales in its cancer treatments Jemperli and Zejula. It’s like betting on red and black in roulette—you can’t lose!

As we are now hyper-aware, Bayer owns all the Monsanto herbicides and pesticide products which numerous studies show increases the risk of cancer in the population who uses them1718 . The counties in America with the most pesticide use have the highest rates of cancer. The farming midwest is now considered the cancer belt. Here is a visual of cancer deaths doubling to 5 million since the introduction of the toxic products.

Bayer now operates across the sectors of agriculture, agrochemical, and pharmaceuticals and consumer health—as everything is everything in the hyper-consolidated corporate world.

Bayer has targeted it will pull in $10 billion in oncology therapeutic sales (cancer products) by 2030.19

In one of the cruelest ironies of modern capitalist history, Bayer is making billions treating cancer on the pharmaceutical side while simultaneously fighting tens of thousands of lawsuits on the agrochemical side from the individuals who got cancer from using or living anywhere near the use of their products.

There is no way my riff on the grotesqueness of this paradox can outdo Bayer’s own words as they hype the good news to shareholders in their Global Overview (you’ve got to read). ”With chronic diseases on the rise, the demand for healthcare and innovative solutions is growing globally.” Makes sense—huge growth in disease! Keep on growing, Bayer!

All Bad Companies either build profit at the expense of public health or benefit off the poor health of Americans. But the true psychopaths of megacorporations do both, which we can masochistically refer to as the “double dip”. They reap profit from both the cause and effect of the harm.

And once we fully accept that, it won’t be shocking to swallow the arrogance of this next example:

Purdue Pharma’s blockbuster drug Oxycontin is responsible for igniting the opioid epidemic that has killed more than 1.25 million Americans from drug overdose since 1999. In 2014, after 15 years of knowingly addicting customers, the company then brainstormed how to turn the millions of people who were now addicts into their next business opportunity, by acquiring the rights to the the opioid-reversal agents Narcan and Suboxone. Purdue executives recognized, as all Bad Businessmen would, that opioid addiction treatment was now a very “attractive market”. Purdue’s sales force could easily market these new products to the same doctors who were prescribing large amounts of opioids and had their hands full with all the addicts, who company president Richard Sackler referred to as criminals and scumbags.

Again, I cannot do justice to the actual sentiment of the marketers, but you can read it in Part III of the Minnesota Attorney General’s case against Purdue. Kathe Sackler perfectly elucidates for us this section’s tactic—the “opportunity to expand our offering as an end-to-end pain provider”. And the perfectly clear and obvious, though heinous, corporate logic—“Addiction treatment is a good fit and new natural step for Purdue”.

Too outrageous to be true, right? Here’s the StatNews headline from 2024:

FDA approves Purdue Pharma’s controversial new overdose-reversal medication

And, just to round things out perfectly, we will return to Philip Morris International and their most ludicrous reaches into the irresistible Back End of their particular harm cycle. As we’ve shown, this industry has been double-dipping for decades, with its continued sale of cigarette products around the globe while introducing vapes and IQOS unethically marketed as smoking cessation devices.

After these companies spread disease through a variety of nicotine products, and then moved into Big Food to make the population sick, obese and undernourished from their now-addictive, ultra-processed “food products”, they can now cash in on their slice of the most profitable and lucrative business sector (second only to tech)—U.S. “healthcare”.

America spends $4.9 trillion annually on healthcare and ninety percent of that goes to people with chronic health conditions, according to the CDC. 76 percent of American adults have at least one chronic condition, and more than half have two or more.20

Cue Philip Morris International’s “urgent goal” to transform itself into a wellness company! PMI states their roadmap goals on their website:

“As we work to become a company that has a net positive impact on society, we believe in the importance of continuing to invest in a future that allows us to expand our offerings to products that are suited to address unmet consumer and patient needs within the wellness and healthcare space.”

Cue the acquisitions:

Philip Morris seals deal for UK’s Vectura despite health group concerns

Vectura is a British pharmacy company that makes…wait for it…asthma inhalers!

“The market for inhaled therapeutics is large and growing rapidly, with significant opportunities to address unmet needs,” says the CEO of PMI.21 So many new open markets in the unmet needs of the chronically diseased consumer!

This tactic is best known as the Problem-Reaction-Solution model (often associated with the Hegelian dialectic). By intentionally manufacturing a crisis, a manipulator can seamlessly position themselves as the savior by offering a pre-planned solution.

Big Tobacco is aggressively moving into biotech, pharmaceuticals, and cannabis. Facing declining smoking rates, all the major companies are spending billions to secure their futures in “botanical therapeutics” and medical treatments which specifically target smoking-related illnesses. How the Bad Companies plan to introduce fruit flavors into the wellness market remains to be seen! I don’t think Big Pharma needs much help in the dependency department, but if anyone can make these drugs more addictive, it’ll be these Tobacco guys.

Similar to, similarly heinous to, in fact almost verbatim to Purdue’s rationale that addiction treatment is its next “natural step”, is Philip Morris’ motivation to make respiratory drugs its next key focus. The company says it is simply “part of a natural evolution into a broader healthcare and wellness company”.

There is nothing natural about this evolution, just like the de-evolution of Americans into a sick and weakened society is perversely, inversely unnatural.

The purpose and result of all these sleights of hand, and the frenzied tempest of deception they create, is that we eventually lose sight of the pea under the shells. The through line of criminal activity is broken and we are unable to connect what we are being offered at present to what we received in the past, to our detriment.

How many of us who know well to resist any product from Big Tobacco make no correlation to those same individuals and same strategies when freely opting for a snack from Kraft or Nabisco? How many of us mistrust pesticide manufacturers from all their bad press but never realize the medicine on our nightstand comes from the same producer?

Because the Bad Companies know that most of the public won’t pay close attention to the layers of sneaky moves beneath any particular claim, they just need to be able to say something, anything, that gives the appearance of “improvement” over the previous harmful product or behavior.

Whether whitewashing to spruce up the damage or rebranding to paint over it, there are a multitude of methods industry uses to hide their dirt under some kind of artifice. All to create for themselves another chance to profit from a fresh revenue stream. In most all of the above examples, this new stream in the back end appears to be healthcare. More specifically and technically—Biotech.

Big Pharma is biotech, Big Agrochemical is biotech. Big Tobacco is actively pivoting into biotech, as I write this.22 One monster with many arms, all shuffling shells and funneling profits in their direction. This clear and conspicuous trend across all major industry players has a name—“Pharmaceuticalisation”, Pharmaceuticalisation is the socio-technical process by which human conditions, capabilities, and behaviors are translated into opportunities for pharmaceutical intervention. For Bad Companies, this has meant shifting business practices to mirror those of pharmaceutical companies, either by acquiring pharma companies or presenting pharma-like, (“savior”-like) public image PR. For the consumer, the people, the shift is from human problem-solving toward drugs.

This latest image presented by the worst characters in our saga may look clean like a doctor’s pure white lab coat, but the image of the actual reality is what we must see clearly—the contaminated state of our environment and the degraded state of our population’s health, created by their Bad Products. They are not helping society to solve these problems, they are not improving the quality of our soil or water or food, they are not improving our health or extending our lives. They are merely shuffling shells around, all the way to the bank.

Megacorporations offering “solution products” from their pharmaceutical arms, while still profiting off of the “problem products” is an indignity equal only to the public voluntarily buying both products from the same source.

There is no newer/safer version of a Bad Company. Unless it is a bankrupted, jailed and out of business Bad Company. It is always, and only, the people who pay the ultimate price if we get tricked into into buying things from our arch enemies—those who kill the most of our fellow Americans, the ones with their sites on our family, our bodies, at this moment.

There is now full awareness of our nation’s health crisis. The people are depressed and stressed about it. This study of the opposition’s Playbook is what we need to better manage the health crisis created by the corporate crisis of incessant Bad Products.

The health and survival of our population requires more than a general knowledge of all the corruption. Until we have an intricate knowledge of every spec and schematic of the offensive strategies launched against us, we can still get outplayed.

+ The Sleight of Hand tricks prevent us from actively opposing Bad Products. =

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We are all in this together! I’m not the first to say it! See you next chapter….

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THE MATH:

If we don’t participate by thinking it through we remain unprotected for the next assault.

+ The powerful force of the PR campaign can disconnect us from our own survival instincts and our allegiance to Natural Law.

+ Their Pattern of deception and concealment of harm leads to addiction, disease and death.

+ We must understand and memorize Their Playbook.

+ We must use the wisdom gained from past mistakes.

+ Cognitive dissonance has led to errors in our reasoning.

+ We must defend ourselves against those we thought were defending us.

+ Until we disable the corrupt revolving door we have an active breach in our defense.

+ Our over-reliance on external systems undermines our ability to defend ourselves or others.

+ The genocide in Gaza has illuminated the Pattern & Playbook for all to see.

+ The tactic of using False Claims was effective on enough of the public to get us and keep us in Bad Wars for the past 70 years and counting.

+ The tactic of using False Claims was effective on enough of the public to get us to buy and use Bad Products that cause disease and death.

+ As the Watchdogs produce truth of the falsehoods, the opposition will bury and attack this evidence.

+ Bad Companies pledges to self-regulate obstruct actual protection of public welfare.

+ Bad Companies manufacture doubt and controversy to keep us from the Truth.

+ The Captured allow evil to succeed.

+ The Captured allow disease and death to escalate.

+ The Captured allow the degradation of our land, water, and food.

+ Smear Campaigns prevent us from actively opposing Bad Wars.

The majority has shown it now has eyes to see the lunacy in the claims and arguments regarding U.S. + Israel’s latest war in Iran, thanks in part to an increased clarity the people now possess from the last (and also current) war in Gaza. Some of that may be due to just how clunky and flagrant and undeniably unsound the moves have been.

The important confirmation we need next is that the people will also be able to recognize the Pattern & Playbook in all current commercial campaigns, so to shield themselves effectively against those highly engineered operations as well.

When it comes to war, the smear campaign will target the entire body of resistance. In the fight against corporate malfeasance, the opposition attacked is usually a much smaller group, often a single individual activist or whistleblower.

Recall from our study of Bad Arguments, the Ad Hominem fallacy—attacking a person’s character or background instead of addressing their argument. The deceiver is hoping the surface attack on the messenger will be enough to deter us from ever considering the actual content of the message. The tactic is so common and overused, you’d think it would be an obvious and easily surmountable red flag, but in fact it is still one of the most efficient tricks, every time.

This approach focuses on “character assassination,” aiming to isolate the individual and destroy their personal reputation, to render the individual untrustworthy, incompetent, or immoral, thereby removing their influence. The personal life, morality, or private information of the target will be attacked rather than professional work; rumors will be spread about scandals, financial misconduct, or personal indiscretions.

Slander on character is actually the tamer side of the intimidation. Campaign “attack dogs” are released against opponents, which with the upgrading from AI have now grown to entire “bot armies” sent out over the internet to spread lies. Threats and execution of lawsuits present the real and present danger of financial ruin. And beyond reputational and economic injury, many whistleblowers and truth-tellers have been suicided and killed for their speaking out against powerful corporations.

In the 1960s, consumer protection activist Ralph Nader wrote a book exposing General Motors car safety issues. Concerned that the book might jeopardize sales, GM hired private investigators to harass him. The company’s detectives tapped his phone to listen to his private conversations, made harassing phone calls, questioned his friends about his private life, and hired women to attempt to seduce him. (Nader sued the company for this, where GM settled and publicly apologized).

In the 1990s, tobacco scientist Jeffrey Wigand turned whistleblower against his company Brown & Williamson, exposing the manipulation of the level of nicotine in their products to create and sustain addiction, which they had falsely denied. The company hired Investigative Group International, who produced a 500-page dossier entitled “The Misconduct of Jeffrey S. Wigand Available in the Public Record”1, which included the most minor of drivers license application errors to outright lies about him, and was distributed to all media. His harassment eventually escalated to termination of his severance and health insurance, lawsuits which also threatened his livelihood, and anonymous death threats against him and his young daughters.

Robert Bilott, the environmental attorney famous for exposing PFAS contamination by DuPont, faced significant intimidation in the form of a long-term corporate campaign to discredit him and his legal work against them. The company, which heavily influenced the local community who were mostly all employed by DuPont, created an extremely hostile environment for the truth, with local newspapers and community groups working as company proxies to question the motives of the lawsuit and breed mistrust of Bilott. Industry front groups with DuPont executives in its leadership team created websites and propaganda to paint the environmental activism as efforts to “deceive the public, threaten our jobs, and destroy our way of life”. All this succeeded to pit neighbor against neighbor, those who were desperate to protect their livelihood against those fearful of or already sickened by the toxic chemicals. (In the middle of his fight against Dupont, Bilott developed a mysterious, unexplained palsy-like neurological condition which doctors were never able to diagnose.)

As discussed in previous chapters, the sustained harassment from the Monsanto corporation’s (now Bayer) smear campaigns are exemplary for their ferocity. The company operated a “fusion center” as part of a sophisticated, multi-year campaign to monitor, surveil, and discredit journalists, activists, and any critics of the company.

Under oath in one of the Monsanto glyphosate trials, the firm’s executives revealed a confidential 2017 program aimed at countering all their opponents called “Let Nothing Go”. The strategy organized responses to any and all media coverage and social media posts involving the company or its products, leaving nothing, not even Facebook comments, unanswered or unsmeared.2

Once the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) declared the glyphosate in Monsanto’s RoundUp product a probable carcinogen, the company plan detailed how they would “orchestrate outcry and outrage” from the “public” against those UN scientists.

Through industry front groups they published dozens of articles critical of the cancer agency, many of them containing personal attacks on the scientists involved in the glyphosate review. The publications accused the scientists of everything from “corruption, distortion and fraud,” to “conspiracy, lying and secrecy”, even “personal profit and ideological vanity”, despite the fact that the cancer group were volunteers.

Scientists or science work groups are not inherently built to withstand this level of abuse—the denigration and harassment of its employees and weakening of its finances—and very ill-prepared to deal with the infiltration. The persecution the scientific community has faced creates a deep reluctance to make themselves a target by presenting truths that displease a Bad Company.

Unlike with a war campaign that the population is watching closely, these corporate smear campaigns are rarely noticed by the average citizen. But the effects most definitely trickle down to the consumer, in these cases of our consuming toxins without proper warning.

When it comes to Big Pharma’s use of these tactics, it would likely take me the rest of my life to research every specific hit piece published against whomever was trying to get in the way of their profits. There are right now watchdogs in every corner of the world entering the ring with this most mighty Goliath and since most of them lose you will never likely hear the tales.

Here is one story of what you get in West Virginia, or any state, if you support the 30 year-old 340B program aimed to keep rural hospitals afloat and help low and middle-income Americans access expensive prescriptions. After a bill to protect the program promoted by state Senate President Craig Blair was passed, a dark money group dropped hundreds of thousands of dollars into his next primary election spreading falsehoods about him.

Blair claims there is zero truth behind the smear campaign against him but enough West Virginians believed the slurs and he lost his seat.

The exact same mud was slung in Oklahoma when legislators attempted to pass their own bill on 340B aimed to protect essential medical services, including cancer treatments and obstetrical care, across their state. Big Pharma’s lobbying and smear campaign loomed again and succeeded to organize a veto of the bill.3

“Today, rural Oklahoma lost to Big Pharma,” read the statement from the lawmakers. “Out-of-state and foreign drug companies and the dark money interests working for them successfully derailed the most important legislation introduced this year to help the health care providers who serve our most vulnerable communities…These groups spread blatant lies and misinformation to attack us and our fellow conservatives in the Legislature. They claimed we support illegal immigration and gender transition surgeries for minors, when nothing could be further from the truth.”

By conflating those who back a bill which passed the House with overwhelming support with those who back these other unpopular procedures—even though this supermajority GOP Legislature banned these procedures two years earlier—Big Pharma’s feeble cut & paste false claims were enough for industry to win and the people who need health care to lose.

Some of the smears we still contend with are decades, even a century old, yet can still persist to dictate what is undesirable for us, without any reevaluation of the reasoning since the initial false claim.

As we discussed in the Blind Guides of the Body chapter, homeopathy was an established medical system widely used since the 1790s. But, as part of the initial takeover by the pharmaceutical industry, after they shut down all the homeopathic hospitals, pharmacies, and medical schools, the subsequent smear campaign was launched. The propaganda, spread far and wide, claimed anyone who practices, uses, or believes in these formerly-accepted methods would now, suddenly, be considered a “quack”.

One hundred years ago, the most respected members of society utilized and benefitted from homeopathy—influential writers such as William James, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Louisa M. Alcott, Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, Charles Dickens, Yeats, Dostoevsky, Goethe, also figures like Mahatma Gandhi and former American Presidents James Garfield and William McKinley. Yet, once the smears were invented and disseminated, the powerful pharmaceutical giants were able to thoroughly topple an entire field of industry viewed as competition to theirs.

This “quackery” smear would need to brand all those pillars of the community—the big influencers and all believers and beneficiaries of the discipline—as not only wrong, but crazy. And this manufactured claim has held strong in America for over a hundred years. (In France, however, 95% of doctors currently use homeopathy.)4

The Playbook tactics run their course, behind the scenes of public focus, to accomplish the Bad Company objectives:

• Claim only their products are legitimate and good; all competing options are dangerous and bad.

• Capture a scientific group to publish a seemingly-legitimate report condemning the competition’s arguments as junk science.

• Remove the competing options from the market to cut off society from access, and from the information and wisdom of the past.

• Smear anyone using or discussing the competing options.

In the case of Big Pharma versus their competitors who also attempt to serve public health, the early smear campaign pejoratives still prevail today: quack, crank, New Age, or pseudoscience. A read through wikipedia’s page on Alternative Medicine illuminates how much of any natural or holistic practice—complementary medicine, functional medicine, integrated medicine, acupuncture, etc—can still be labeled “quackademia”, even as they also acknowledge that the top academic medical centers like the Cleveland Clinic, the Mayo Clinic, Stanford University, UCLA, and UC San Francisco all have integrative or functional medicine departments.

The industry also attempts to eliminate the desired products from the marketplace all together, on the basis of the false claim that the Bad Company’s product is the better or only solution for what the world wants and needs, on the basis of the smear that the competing products are unscientific and dangerous. Natural remedies, supplements, and alternative therapies are restricted, removed, or made impossible to access or afford by the same monopolistic methods that impede farmers from acquiring organic seed in a domain where the top 10 Big Ag producers control over two-thirds of the seed market and none of them offer anything organic.

If the Bad Companies are unable to rig it so we can’t get the competition’s products, the smear campaign attempts to make it so we won’t want them. This is really the ultimate “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for” Jedi mind trick. Convincing us we don’t really want these natural or holistic therapies, we only want the pharmaceuticals. We don’t really want to bother with organic diets, we only want genetically modified food. We shouldn’t trust the quacks, we should only trust the convicted felons! And amazingly, convincing us that our politics should take precedence over our physical health.

None of us wants to be thought of as a quack, or as someone who got fooled by one. Most of us might be very hesitant to risk trusting our bodies to anyone who has one of the pejorative labels somewhere in their wikipedia, (even if we might not follow how or who gave them this label). However, it is critical we realize that any adept PR campaign, if they had enough money and influence, could replace the negative descriptor word with a positive one in the circulating mantras and wikis, and then there would likely be an instant stampede to acquire these non-Pharma therapies and products, once the public felt like they were allowed to listen to alternative perspectives without stigma. These labels become extremely impenetrable gates which block us from a whole host of potential remedies and advances, and keep us corraled into the limited space of believing only their claims and using only their products.

From our earliest interactions in the community, we have learned as social animals that it is troublesome and disadvantageous to be ostracized from the group. These behaviors emerge as early as the grade school playground. The declaration that “Sally has cooties!”, proclaimed out of nowhere and shouted with glee by all, compels everyone to run away from Sally, shunning her for what could be an agonizing amount of formative time. The mob rule mentality quickly and instinctively distances itself from the accused; it does not linger to question the accusation. We all innately understand the accompanying dynamic—if you were to step forward to say, “But, I like Sally, I don’t think she has cooties”—we know what will likely happen next. You will now have the cooties, the mob turns on you, you will be shunned from your peers.

As adults, we could surely withstand the slur of cooties, because no one is going to take that seriously. Yet our current societal climate has never been more saturated and burdened by pejorative-heavy discourse, not too-far evolved from playground taunts. What is officially referred to as the “outrage economy”—social media that relies on rage-baiting to drive engagement and revenue—has produced a bounty of derisive ammo now used in common vernacular far beyond just the Twittersphere. “Trumper” or “insurrectionist” or “racist” to smear conservative political views; “Libtard” or “snowflake” or “cuck” to humiliate liberal leanings, and the accusations of “fascist” and “extremist” hurled from both sides.

Where in Trump’s first presidency, certain extreme theories from the Right which rallied support for his campaign were painted as “QAnon”, in his second presidency, certain extreme theories from the Left which allegedly fueled multiple attempts against Trump’s life are now painted as “BlueAnon”. These labels serve to throw out a lot of necessary skepticism and analytical hypothesis with all the craziness bathwater, and disincentivizes critical discussion all together. There are a lot of extreme and wild theories within each camp, however it is the discussion and analysis which would allow us to separate the wheat from the chaff, which is precisely why these efforts would have to be characterized and exemplified as an undesirable or wasted effort—getting into the ring with the whack jobs—so instead we don’t bother considering or investigating any of it.

Not long ago, it was considered crazy QAnon conspiracy theory to claim Jeffrey Epstein was a central figure in a global “Deep State” pedophile cabal that controls world events, as was their accompanying theory that "Epstein Didn't Kill Himself".

Epstein was found dead in his jail cell in 2019 and his death was officially called a suicide. Today, 63% of Americans believe Epstein was murdered, while only 14% believe he killed himself5. By using the former socio-political metrics, this large majority would have to been labeled crazy QAnon conspiracy theorists for believing this.

Same judgment would have to be put on anyone who read the files released this year, which detail a systemic sex-trafficking operation, including accounts of rape and sexual abuse, often involving underage girls "lent out" to prominent elites, or anyone who saw the bizarre and debauched “birthday card” from his rich and powerful billionaire besties. Those who concluded that this sure looks like a deep state pedophile cabal would technically fall under the crazy/conspiracy label.

To quote Breaking Points (the most popular independent populist news program online), “The culture war is used to distract people from the real problems in society around the globe—which is the power of these very billionaires—so it’s not crazy to imagine that they found all these “kooky” conspiracy theories useful.”

Crazy conspiracy theories morph into things that now everyone believes, once the actual truth comes out. After the transition, do the writers of history and wikipedias go back to change the labels for anyone who believed these theories previously from kook to—what? Early adopter?

The smears against the act of theorizing on your own (critical thinking) delay the acceptance of the reality until the truth becomes so obvious that the majority is forced to prioritize the undeniable evidence over its disdain for the smeared group it’s been persuaded to believe are crazy for believing the reality before they did.

This stock go-to smear that anyone mistrusting the system or its “official narratives” is a conspiracy theorist—used effectively since the CIA invented the term to make a pejorative out of any investigation beyond the official narrative about JFK’s assassination—may finally be losing its influence in the same way the antisemitism smear is no longer working to silence criticism against the U.S./Israeli War Machine.

The problem, for us, as always, is that the truth comes out long after the damage is done during the time when the smears were working to keep us from seeking the truth. We often won’t accept the reality until after the bodycounts have become impossible to spin as conspiracy. The tactics used against the truth-tellers not only extend this delay in acceptance but makes it very difficult for society to admit to it even after the truth is irrefutable.

Remember from The Dark Fog of Cognitive Dissonance chapter, the “effort justification” (also referred to as the Sunk Cost Fallacy), when someone has invested heavily in a belief, action, or group, admitting they are wrong feels like a painful admission that they wasted time and energy.

Once a good share of the population has to some degree believed in the PR pejorative slogan (or not thought critically on it or pushed back against it), and even likely then used the pejorative slogan themselves, out loud or in social media somewhere, it then marries this share of the people to the campaign and corners them into positions very difficult to maneuver out of, even if allegiance to the campaign does not benefit them, even if the effects of the campaign are actually harmful to them or others.

We can get trapped on the side of the Bad Company’s false reality and hyped into the social polarities the smear tactics also aim to provoke—the war between who believes what—which sabotages our chances for much-needed discussion and debate on the issues affecting us all. It’s difficult to find common ground with a group of people you’ve already vehemently opposed or openly distanced yourself from. It’s not a coincidental byproduct of their strategy that it feels socially impossible to change our mind and reevaluate in the midst of a smear campaign. This is the intended goal and why the accusations they supply to the public discourse are so ugly and toxic.

We should never lose sight of or underestimate the fact that society in the last decade has lived through an extremely intense and precarious cancel culture movement. Polling at the movement’s height in 2021 found that 64 percent view ‘cancel culture’ as a threat to their freedom and that most people in the U.S. were afraid they would be fired if they expressed their real views on social media. From the #MeToo Movement’s beginnings in 2017 to the mass cancellations in the Antiracism movement of the 2020s to the attempted takedowns of the top “anti-Semitic influencers of 2025” (like Ms Rachel, Tucker Carlson and Greta Thunberg), we’ve all had a front row seat to the sport of cancellation, whipped into a frenzy out of nowhere at any moment. Your closest friends and family, and surely your employer, could turn on you and throw you to the lions without pause. In this environment where no one feels safe, most will self-censor for greater protection. History has shown that the accusations don’t have to be true, or even widely believed, to do the trick of persuading everyone in your playground to distance themselves from you and keep their own mouth shut.

Veteran investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson wraps it up best in her book (I recommend): “The Smear: How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What You Think, and How You Vote“:

Behind most major political stories in the modern era, there is an agenda; an effort by opposition researchers, spin doctors, and outside interests to destroy an idea or a person. The tactic they use is the Smear. Every day, Americans are influenced by the Smear without knowing it. Paid forces cleverly shape virtually every image you cross.

A very few players run the campaigns, determine the targets, create the pejoratives, the spins, the falsehoods. The rest of us only contribute to the campaign by believing those, by neglecting to identify the source of the accusation and any ulterior motivations, by neglecting to think through their arguments using logic and wisdom from past campaigns. If all a Bad Company has to do to remove opposition is to attach an unseemly name to that faction, then we as a society still remain at the elementary school level of reasoning.

The campaigners work tirelessly to provide us an endless supply of mud to sling, which will always eventually solidify around our stance, ensuring we can no longer move to any other position. As long as we’re all cemented into the standpoints they’ve constructed—battling each other instead of the actual sources of harm, and in a state of cognitive dissonance because we were backed into views which often conflict with our actual values and needs—we remain stuck and defenseless against their agendas.

There is some encouraging news to report on the Watchdog scene, which illuminates another instance of the people prevailing over a current smear campaign which had been working successfully to undermine support for one of our most serious public health issues. A few weeks ago, the U.S. House voted 280-142 to approve an amendment which strips liability protections for pesticide manufacturers from the 2026 Farm Bill. Led by a Republican, the amendment blocked the immunity that was about to be awarded to Bayer/Monsanto and the agrochemical criminals to clear from their path the endless lawsuits they faced for the endless harm caused by their product. (Approximately 200,000 Roundup lawsuits have been filed at this point accusing RoundUp of giving the victims cancer, just to remind.). All accounts credited this win to a Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) uprising.

Three days before this monumental victory over the current state of captured politicians and regulatory agencies who were set to give Big Ag exactly what they demanded, “The People vs Poison” rally was held on the steps of the Supreme Court in D.C. (as justices weighed in on yet another Bayer lawsuit). The event was a coalition of concerned parents, farming reps, environmental activists, and politicians, who all gave rousing speeches to the crowd about the fight against corporations poisoning Americans. Since the invention of the term in 2024, all these voices now fall under the label of MAHA.

If we were navigating purely by common sense, common values, common desires, (the people want to eat healthy food and drink clean water free of poisons and toxins which cause disease and death), we would not expect a heated battle—between the people—on this subject. But the PR campaign gets in the way of the common sense and the obvious consensus, and does its job to somehow shrink the numbers and hinder the momentum against the Bad Companies who want to sell the poisons, and now want the government to shield them from what they call “crippling liability” when people get cancer from their products.

As we’ve been discussing, the Bad Company, in this case Bayer-Monsanto, knows full well who their target opposition is—it’s these pesky moms and environmentalists!

The smear against MAHA is two-fold and both strategies have been highly successful. One is that tired 100 year-old strategy, the aforementioned “crazy/quack” label Big Industry uses to discredit all those who prefer healthier natural ingredients to synthetic toxic ones (they even call it chemophobia, as if the preference is actually an irrational fear).

This NYTimes op-ed The Kind of Moms Who Fall for ‘Make America Healthy Again’ —sets up the negative connotation in the headline with the verb “fall for” (defined as tricked, deceived, or fooled), and then goes on with a pejorative-filled dissection of the kind of group dumb or crazy enough—“crunchy moms” and “hippie-leaning momfluencers”—to “often fall for bad science”. (Even though the author, a mom herself, admits she also does not want Red Dye #6 in her kids’ food.)

As we’ve shown, industry third parties love the newspaper op-ed sections where they are allowed to malign via an “individual opinion”. Remember the Spraying Roundup on Crops Is Fine. Really headline from last September, followed by the actual journalism a few months later which conceded A Study Is Retracted, Renewing Concerns About the Weedkiller Roundup , and finally reported on the fact that the 25-year-old landmark paper on the safety of glyphosate was ghost-written by Monsanto. The real facts come out, but that does not often reverse the smear or stop it from circulating.

The other smear against MAHA is obvious and predictable. Even though there has been a decade-old non-partisan grassroots movement focused on nutrition, health freedom, and chronic illness, some very simple well-understood math explains the stigma that has been attached to it once given its new name: Trump = MAGA = MAHA. So, if we are against Trump, as many are, we are therefore against MAGA, and therefore against MAHA. We are then compelled to align with the fear or disdain of this movement who Trump technically resides over, and perhaps even smear them ourselves. Only problem is, darnit, now we’re stuck on the side against fighting to get poison out of our food and water. This is the pickle the Democrats have been in since Trump won the 2024 election with the help of MAHA, even though their party has a longer record of supporting food safety, environmental regulation, and organic agriculture.

A 2026 survey indicates that over 83% of Americans are concerned about too many chemicals in our food and everyday products, with a similar majority wanting the government to take more action on regulation to do something about it. That’s the reality. That large percentage means this is a collective will which transcends political affiliation. But, even though the majority feels this way, the campaigns run by the political and media spin doctors can still make it undesirable or risky for any of us to visibly or audibly support this group.

The signal of change that appeared last week is that at the People vs Poison rally classified as MAHA, there were a handful of prominent Democrat lawmakers who participated, exemplified by this speech from Cory Booker.

What this illustrates is that these (first few) Democrats have overcome the fear of the smear that this cause enjoins you to Trump and Trumpers. The politicians understand that their constituents want and need them to venture out of their safe silos in order to protect the health of the community, although of course we still recognize that they are mostly fueled by a motive to win back voters who once aligned with Democrat environmental values, considering they’ve been silent on these issues up until now. Yet we will not complain, as the bi-partisan presence in this movement also scores a second win in the People vs Smear battle. Since there were representatives from both sides of the aisle actively promoting the same message, the captured media could not easily smear the participants at this rally as “Trump supporters” as they did all last year, or more commonly, ignore the event all together.

I’m one of those who believe the intrinsic state of man is “love thy neighbor”. The development of intensely-collaborative, shared cooperative structures—”the village”—is widely recognized by anthropologists and evolutionary biologists as the foundational cornerstone of Homo sapiens sociology. This set up has enabled humans to overcome immense environmental pressures and flourish in complex social systems. It takes deliberate interference—an alternative version of “the story” of reality zealously repeated to the humans—to disrupt this default position and persuade groups to silo off from each other. So, whenever we are experiencing negative feelings contrary to love for our neighbors, it is crucial to scan the scene to identify if a smear campaign is in effect.

Is there a person or a group of people we have been made to hate or made fearful of? If so, are there concrete (not hypothetical or potential) harmful outcomes which have come from this group, like disease and death? What Bad Company stands to gain power and profit if we hate and fear this group and handicap their efforts to stop the harm coming from the Bad Company? Could this Bad Company be employing a smear campaign as part of the Playbook they use to ensure they can continue profiting and continue to harm people and the planet without adequate resistance?

Like those rural citizens who were made so afraid of “Far Left Swamp” ideas that they voted against saving their own county’s essential medical services, or the moms who want to protect their children from unsafe ingredients but don’t want to be called MAHA during a Trump administration, we can be swayed to act (or abstain from acting) against our own beliefs, against the most up-to-date logic, against our best strategies for survival. We will often cut off our own foot before putting it down where the PR campaign has deemed is the wrong side of the gate that they control.

Hard numbers and hard logic should be able to beat a Bad Company’s lies and manipulations. Seeking and understanding the truth about the environment we exist in should be the ultimate goal, even over wins in the culture war or any particular election. Because the truth-tellers, if they were successful, were allowed to be, would save lives. The smear campaigns don’t just sully the reputations of protesters and watchdogs, they actually thwart their efforts to stop mass killings of humans.

But—things are breaking apart in the monolithic political polarity game. The Right is being splintered as opposition to war is being prioritized over opposition to the other political party. The Left is splintering as opposition to getting sick and dying by the hands of Bad Companies is being prioritized over opposition to the other political party. Once unstuck from our rigid positions on opposite poles, we can enter the large space in between, where nuanced perspectives allow for more complex comprehension of the dangers in our country we most need to defend ourselves against. If allowed into this space, liberated from the manufactured opinions created by a smear campaign, we quickly see that ALL of us want to be at peace, safe and healthy at home, and we’re willing to collaborate to attain these inherent, inalienable, fundamental human rights.

+ Smear Campaigns prevent us from actively opposing Bad Products. =

THE MATH:

If we don’t participate by thinking it through we remain unprotected for the next assault.

+ The powerful force of the PR campaign can disconnect us from our own survival instincts and our allegiance to Natural Law.

+ Their Pattern of deception and concealment of harm leads to addiction, disease and death.

+ We must understand and memorize Their Playbook.

+ We must use the wisdom gained from past mistakes.

+ Cognitive dissonance has led to errors in our reasoning.

+ We must defend ourselves against those we thought were defending us.

+ Until we disable the corrupt revolving door we have an active breach in our defense.

+ Our over-reliance on external systems undermines our ability to defend ourselves or others.

+ The genocide in Gaza has illuminated the Pattern & Playbook for all to see.

+ The tactic of using False Claims was effective on enough of the public to get us and keep us in Bad Wars for the past 70 years and counting.

+ The tactic of using False Claims was effective on enough of the public to get us to buy and use Bad Products that cause disease and death.

+ As the Watchdogs produce truth of the falsehoods, the opposition will bury and attack this evidence.

+ Bad Companies pledges to self-regulate obstruct actual protection of public welfare.

+ Bad Companies manufacture doubt and controversy to keep us from the Truth.

+ The Captured allow evil to succeed.

+ The Captured allow disease and death to escalate.

+ The Captured allow the degradation of our land, water, and food.

In situations where great harm is inflicted on the masses—

First, they lie—Playbook tactic #1. Those producing the harm launch a campaign of FALSE CLAIMS to overwhelm and overshadow the actual truth.

Then, they assemble an army of liars—Playbook tactic #2. CAPTURED entities spread the False Claims, bury and conceal the truth of harm, and rewrite the rules so the deceivers always win and their agendas can continue.

Not all companies produce harmful products, just the Bad Companies. So, only the bad ones need to implement deceptive cover ups. The Military Industrial Complex always uses deceptive cover ups to lead us into war.

The citizenry is naturally inquisitive and concerned about all products and all foreign entanglements, but only the Bad Companies and Bad Warmongers reject that questioning and refuse any proper debate.

If any of the people get too investigative or too close to uncovering their cover ups, the Bad Companies or War Machine will implement another additional strategy to attack these people, using tactic #3—the SMEAR CAMPAIGN.

Some people “have eyes to see” the harm and others don’t. It’s not a matter of vision faculty, it’s a matter of choice. Some choose to see, others choose not to. (I believe, after a certain point, this becomes less a conscious choice and more an unconscious habit.)

Of those who see harm, some people say something, while others don’t (at lease not where anyone can hear them).

The people who see the harm and speak out about what they see range from government officials, insider whistleblowers, lawyers, activists, and journalists, to average citizens.

But once a Smear Campaign is underway—designed to ruin the credibility of those who speak, and dissuade any others from speaking—it takes a distinctly resolute type of personality to stay the course of bearing witness in spite of the attacks against them. These are our brave Watchdogs.

Bad Companies understand well that the only obstacle standing in the way of achieving all the projected success from their corrupt campaign are these individuals and groups. So the campaigners must stamp them out before they ever get a chance to gather a large audience.

Obviously, the same tactics used to support the original false claims about their bad product will be used to spread false claims about the Watchdogs.

First, they will lie. About the character of the Watchdogs, their personal history, affiliations, and alleged ulterior motives. They’ll spread rumors, distortions, half-truths, or outrageous lies—anything to create doubt about the authenticity and integrity of the truth-tellers.

The Bad Company or War Machine knows full well the kind of harm they are creating and so can easily predict where the Watchdog opposition will come from. They can launch pre-smears, or “poisoning the well”. This is where adverse information about a future target is preemptively presented to the public, with the intention of discrediting or ridiculing something that the target person is surely going to say or stand for, before they even step up to the mic.

A pejorative is a derogatory term used to express criticism or disregard. By creating a new negative term to attach to whichever watchdog is on their heels, or is forecasted to be, the Bad Company can blanket smear a whole group, which will be anyone who believes the truth of harm exposed about their products. They then create a false narrative that these people, now identified by (only by) this new repugnant descriptive, is a group that no one wants to be associated with. The subtle and invisible hand of the PR campaign, using all its tools of media control and propaganda, will suggest, everywhere, that these are people society has already deemed offensive, even if you can’t remember being offended before the campaign began. Before long, the pejorative catchphrase mantra will be embedded in the mouths of the masses, circulating on its own volition.

The entire breadth of the smear campaign will be just another false claim. Not to sell a bad product or a bad war, but to sell the public lies about the motivations of our lead defenders against those. A manufactured resistance to the actual resistance, using surrogates of captured officials and media as “message force multipliers”, to whip up genuine controversy, contempt, and fear toward the targeted faction and justify the censorship of their message.

The smear campaign utilized by the advocates of the war in Gaza illustrates for us the most common components of the strategy when trying to demonize an entire movement as a whole.

The label—using a simple, emotionally charged pejorative to characterize the group as a monolithic, dangerous entity.

Conflation— when two similar but disparate concepts are treated as the same. In order to smear, this is done intentionally, to create a false equivalence between different perspectives. Any opposition to Israel’s military actions against the Palestinian people was conflated with a threat or hatred toward all jews. The denouncement of Zionism was conflated with the denouncement of Jewish people.

The Straw Man logical fallacy— misrepresenting someone’s argument to make it easier to attack. For example, “My opponent is against all jews, but I think that’s bad”, is an easy argument to win. Opposing all jews is bad, however that is not the argument those opposing Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians were making.

The False Dilemma logical fallacy— Presenting only two options when more exist, forcing a choice between them. For example, “You either support Israel’s actions (no matter what) or you are antisemitic.” This “you’re either with us or against us” mentality severely reduces the likelihood of policy debate or any deeper, nuanced dialog.

One day after the October 7th attack by Hamas, immediate, intense protests erupted worldwide. Thousands gathered in New York City’s Times Square to show solidarity with Palestine and their right to resist the occupation.

The same day, on the Harvard University campus, more than 30 student groups issued a letter stating they held “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence”. This generated significant tension on campus in the following week, and forevermore.

The smear campaign against this resistance kicked in immediately.

In the Sixties, the Vietnam War protesters were labelled deserters or commies. Those who opposed the Iraq War in the 2000s were labelled unpatriotic traitors who refused to “support the troops”. And, as we are all acutely aware, anyone criticizing the war in Gaza could be instantly labelled an antisemite or pro-Hamas domestic terrorist.

By November of 2023, students and activists were reporting harassment, even death threats. Universities utilized code-of-conduct violations to suspend students, evict them from housing, and withhold degrees. They were blacklisted and doxxed, to ruin future job opportunities. Many student protesters had active job offers revoked by employers.

The front group Accuracy in Media parked a mobile billboard truck just outside Harvard’s campus, its screens displaying the names and photos of students allegedly involved with the letter opposing the Israeli regime. Above their faces read the title, “Harvard’s leading antisemites”.

All this worked effectively, as it usually does, to make the individuals advocating for the Palestinian cause increasingly uneasy about the professional, social, and physical repercussions they could face for expressing their views.

“Any graduate students who support Palestine have to come to a decision on whether or not they’re willing to put their future career on the line before they speak up.”1

Because of the very real and very fatal antisemitism which led to the Holocaust during WWII, the western world had been deeply predisposed to take seriously any anti-Jewish sentiment since then. This anxiety had roots in society’s experiential reality, it was not abstract or invented.

A fear campaign works best when it can build upon an actual existing worry in the community. The claim of antisemitism embedded in the smear campaign against the Gaza War dissenters had its origins in a time when so many people had genuinely suffered death and heartbreak from this bigotry. The promise to “Never Forget” had no expiration date and so there has been no mechanism to determine if and when the facts or personalities of present have changed the calculus of the past. Without proper analysis of the most current intel—more importantly, the permission to even do the analysis, publicly—the more timely and accurate sentiments and viewpoints had not yet been uncovered, publicly.

Presuppositions are things tacitly assumed before an argument or course of action gets underway. These underlying assumptions are taken for granted in a statement, in order for it to make sense.

The United States-Israel relationship rests upon an extremely solid presupposition, assumed to be true with no need for discussion—that because of the long-standing "special relationship" between the two nations, the US always offers "ironclad" support to Israel.

Arguments built on presuppositions are difficult to challenge because they begin by assuming everyone agrees with the absolute truth of their core claims, placing the burden of proof on the challenger and often sealing themselves off from evidence-based critique. These arguments rely on deeply held, axiomatic beliefs that are rarely questioned during routine debate, making them behave more like foundational commands rather than propositions that need verification.

Thus, anyone who dissented from such a firmly implanted moral position—America must always protect Israel—has to make a very difficult (sounding) counter claim. They must dare to ask for reevaluation. A new perspective which asks society to consider that what was once thought of as inarguably principled may now be misguided under new circumstances is an extremely risky stance, vulnerable to attack.

Recall from our study of Bad Arguments, the Appeal to Tradition— Rather than interrogate the logic behind a certain action, the argument assumes the action is logically sound because it’s been done for a certain amount of time. The fallacy says “we’ve always done it this way.”

The challengers during 2023 were upending the presupposition of tradition held for 70 years, that the State of Israel was perpetually the victim of violence (as opposed to the producer) and so required unconditional aid to defend itself. Even though there was manifest evidence that Israel had offensively attacked multiple countries in the Middle East in recent history—including Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and of course Palestine, over and over—any call for updated reassessments could still be condemned, almost by knee-jerk reflex.

That is precisely why, when we think through it all here, we analyze using statistical logistics and prioritize the metrics of death counts, first and foremost. We cannot anymore afford to rely on antiquated traditions, unquestioned presuppositions, old or bad arguments.

Such as:

Appeals to Emotion Fallacy: a type of informal fallacy that occurs when someone attempts to manipulate the emotions of an audience to win an argument, often in the absence of factual evidence or logical reasoning. While fear or pity can be a powerful tools, it becomes a fallacy when emotional rhetoric is used instead of logic and evidence to support a claim.

The Appeal to Fear was: “If we don’t support Israel’s war unconditionally, antisemitism will injure or kill the Jews.”

The Appeal to Pity was: “You wouldn’t want to see Jewish people suffer, would you?”

The smear campaigns subsequently use those same simple and broad, yet less-logical assertions: “Those who don’t support Israel’s war will injure or kill Jews”; “Those who don’t support Israel’s war want to see Jewish people suffer”—therefore we must denounce these people.

Those of us who respect Natural Law don’t want anyone to suffer. Yet, it’s too poor a foundation for argumentation to say—this thing could cause suffering, this thing could cause harm or death, we should all be scared of this thing. We could do that all day long, for almost any thing, issue, or scenario. This is why it’s important to correspond our fear levels with the greatest actual threats, things that in actuality cause the highest death counts.

And this is why it’s important to use the most up-to-date intelligence and not more-heavily rely on wisdom of the past—building fear around this thing that once did cause harm or death. Our fear levels should match our present day reality and not any other technically non-existent or hypothetical reality.

It can seem cold and callous to reduce emotional experience down to hard numbers, but it is often the most rational way to fully examine expansive, complex situations.

The October 7th Hamas-led attack on Israel resulted in 1,195 deaths. In contrast, the Israeli offensive in Gaza has killed 72,116, with 171,798 injured (all these numbers likely an undercount2). Since October 11, 2025, the first full day of the so-called ceasefire, Israel has killed at least 631 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 1,700.3

While over a thousand very violent Israeli deaths at the hands of Hamas is horrific in and of itself, what the critics of the war campaign countered with, immediately, were the undeniable statistics of death that proceeded the attacks on October 7th:

This chart comparing Palestinian and Israeli deaths goes through 2007. Another 7,428 Palestinians were killed since 2008 in the occupied territory, and over 165,000 injured. 2,464 Palestinian children were killed by Israeli forces before 2023. 87% of those were boys.4

All deaths are bad, that is mostly inarguable. The argument for supporting Israel’s two and a half year assault on Palestine was based upon the 1,195 number of deaths. This number proved the Israelis were targeted victims and justified the need for America to come to their defense.

The question on the other side of the debate has always been “where is the argument based upon the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed by Israel over the decades before the Oct. 7th attack?” It is a legitimate and logical inquiry, but it had been perpetually suppressed, up until recently.

The rejection of the PR campaign’s false claim was not arguing that “antisemitism does not exist” or that “antisemitism is not a threat”. The position was that the risk of death in allowing Israel to continue what it is doing to the Palestinian civilians is much greater than the risk of death from antisemitic sentiment growing here at home.

This is another Bad Argument in play, the False Dichotomy—the fallacy that you must choose between unconditionally supporting Israel or be an antisemite, when in reality it is possible (and also desirable) to oppose both the Israeli military’s genocidal actions and any bigoted antisemitism in our country. These positions are not mutually exclusive of each other.

If both sides of an issue are allowed to present their figures, the implicit accusation that only one side’s argument will lead to suffering of innocent people is rendered hypocritical, and the smear loses its power. We can’t do the essential benefit-risk calculations—weighing two harmful situations against each other—if we’re only given half of the factors.

In the 1960s, the Cold War fears of global communist expansion were so great that those who opposed the United States going to war against the communist North Vietnamese were smeared as commie-sympathizers. The omitted line of inquiry here was—how many American deaths had this scary communism produced?

While the “Red Scare” frightened many, if the public debate was able to weigh the death counts of Americans by communist threat versus death counts of Americans going to fight the communist threat on foreign soil in hand to hand combat, the actual latter numbers would likely have overwhelmed the fear-based hypothetical ones given in the War Machine’s false claims.

Same deal with the Iraq War. The opponents of that campaign were smeared as "supporting the enemy", all the way to the comical pejorative "freedom fries" which anyone over 40 may remember was used to denounce France's opposition to the US invasion.

Americans were not at risk of dying from the Iraqi regime. The War Machine presented fraudulent intel about potential yet non-existent weapons and made deceptive correlations to 9/11 to utilize Appeal to Fear fallacies. But anyone attempting to compare reality to fallacy with hard data could be swiftly accused of giving "aid and comfort" to our new worst enemy Saddam Hussein.

The first cleavage in the solidity of this much-used war campaign PR strategy appeared instantly after the October 7th attack two and a half years ago. At that time, it was a startling shock to the system to see Pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel protests gather organically 24 hours after the fear event. This revealed that sizable numbers in the younger generations were not basing their reasoning upon the presuppositions of their elders, in regards to our unwavering fealty to Israel. Their rationale was far more based in the logic of death count figures.

The ubiquitous smears were finally being challenged by arguments that included the devastating loss of life numbers that the Palestinians (as well as Libyans, Syrians, and Iranians for that matter) had incurred at the hands of the Israeli military. Yet, the vilification of this challenge was still in full effect.

The greater public was aware of the growing protest movement against the war in Gaza, but also very much aware of the existing danger in criticizing Israel. When truth-tellers first stepped forward, onto a battlefield where the well-known smear tactics were active, there was a discernible and detrimental lack of support from outside their group.

The imminence of the smear works to first vilify the dissenters, and secondly to create a fear of the smear in everyone else who might consider supporting the dissenters. There is an easy, instinctive way for this second group to avoid drawing any criticism onto themselves—and that is to do precisely nothing.

The March 2024 polling showed that 63 percent of Democrats say they felt the need to be extra careful when discussing the Israeli-Palestinian issue outside their home, as well as 41 percent of Republicans (who felt informed on the issue). This is nearly three times the number as those who said the same about the Russia-Ukraine war.

The tone was very much set in the environment when it came to supporting Israel, discouraging the majority of society from risking expressing any inkling of dissent, much less a very-public social media post supporting Palestinians or their advocates.

The protesters were the only concrete representation of opposition to the war in Gaza, but the majority’s silence left them hanging out to dry, where they would be extremely vulnerable to the campaigners’ strategies. President Biden was starkly silent on the issue, and Dem leaders like Chuck Schumer denounced the college protests as acts of violence.5

The attacks on the resisters then only escalated, as did the corresponding apprehension to have any association with them. By May of 2024, at least 2,000 people had been arrested at protests nationwide.

A YouGov poll that same month found that 47% of Americans opposed the college protests, and only 28% supported them.

In the hindsight of all the civilian deaths and displacement and starvation of the Palestinians since that time, we might want to feel like we agreed with the resistance in 2024. We might tell ourselves that perhaps we were too busy or too old to physically participate in any protest but our heart was anti-war. Or, if we were averse to the approach on the campuses and streets, we showed our views on the genocide in some other place, some other way.

Maybe we did voice our disapproval—outside the home— where it could be visible or audible to crucial decision-makers or fellow members of the majority. But if we did not, if our feelings of comfort or safety in doing so were jeopardized in some way, it was likely due to our fear of the smear.

We can audit our own record to investigate if the campaigners, by means of these tactics, were able to subvert our moral instincts in any way, to ultimately undermine any of our direct action. Because, I guarantee they tried to. If we can identify the points where we lost any of our self-determination, we can also scrutinize how our power was taken away, and most crucially, if any of it was given away without a proper fight.

I’ll insert a reminder that this AAR is not to guilt trip anyone about leaving our fellows out to dry, but to get better at recognizing when our true beliefs and values are at odds with our words and actions (or lack thereof). This inner conflict creates the psychologically stressful state of cognitive dissonance, which can then perpetuate the cycle of our vulnerability to more smear tactics and manipulations.

We know that the PR campaigns manufacture doubt, which breeds this dissonance, which keeps us resting, or dare we say trapped, in the grey fog of neutrality. We are not just kept neutral on an issue that may be legitimately complex, but also neutral and therefore silent and inactive toward the defamatory claims about our fellows, which we know in our heart to be false.

In the case of Gaza—Did we really believe that anyone who opposes Israel’s military action is antisemitic? Or that anyone who sides with the Palestinians is pro-Hamas? If not, was our contesting of those claims observable?

We all navigate through the same swampy waters of a smear campaign, whether or not we are the specifically-targeted pejorative group. The campaign requires our consent, not just for its assertions about the controversial war or product being promoted, but also for the lies it tells about the campaign’s opponents.

Our first line of defense against the enemy is having eyes to see the harm caused by the Bad War or Bad Product. The second line is having eyes to see the tactics in play that are trying to persuade us to aid the enemy’s offensive and turn on this first line of defense once they start speaking out about what they see.

When resistance to the War Machine or Bad Company emerges, this group will be smeared, in some fashion, by the campaigners. The success of their strategy relies on whether enough of the people will pick up the torch and burn the newly-defined antagonists at the stake, on behalf of the campaign. If the people refuse to do that, then the fire dies out and a “fair fight” can proceed. So, whenever smear campaigns are successful, at diminishing or handicapping or defeating those who dare to voice dissent, it will be because the citizenry assisted in those efforts, by (implicitly or explicitly, consciously or unconsciously) joining forces with the enemy’s agenda.

There is strength in numbers—one way or the other.

Therefore— if we have recognized the harm and understand what’s going on in The Pattern & Playbook, the next step is to give recognizable support to the side of Truth in the battle against our enemies of deception. That first line is the brave (or often just early) group of citizens who first (and ideally immediately) call out the false claims. The second line is the rest of us—will we or will we not support the defensive line?

In the early 2024 situation, 3/4 of the country was still feeling too tentative to voice their views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in public, and only a quarter of the population supported the protesters who were vocally in opposition. It would be one thing to keep silent as the watchdogs took the mantle of resistance if you were for the war in Gaza. But staying silent while the watchdogs held the defensive ground against something we also opposed, is something else.

The people can actively aid and abet the PR campaign by repeating the pejorative mantras to advance the spread of the smear. And/or they can passively aid and abet it by ignoring the group who is fighting back.

Where we stand now, in our journey cycling through the Pattern & Playbook, is the new Iran War campaign. And here, we can examine where we the people are diverging from our pattern.

The latest YouGov poll shows more Americans disapprove of U.S. military action in Iran (48%) than approve of it (37%).6 These sentiments are very distinct from the start of previous wars which began with high public support. In 2003, 76% of Americans approved of the decision to go to war in Iraq; 92% of Americans approved of military action in Afghanistan; 97% of Americans supported the U.S. entering World War II.

I will posit that the recent defanging of the go-to smear campaigns has a lot to do with this unprecedented and sustained disapproval. At this point in the pattern, the smear tactics would now be launching against the dissenters of this new war. But, all of the pejorative options—antisemite, commie, un-American, or traitor—are on their last legs. The public has finally recognized this element of the War Machine’s weaponry and grown a thicker skin to protect itself from the slurs and their damage.

The proponents of this new military action are of course using the same (verbatim) bad argumentation, illogical number-crunching, and false claims to sell the war. America is not at risk from Iran’s potential yet non-existent nuclear weapons, nor is Israel. The ground troops that may likely be sent to the foreign soil to protect us from the non-existent threat will unfortunately rack up the death count numbers to far exceed the hypotheticals. And these are clearly the metrics that the majority are now using to calculate their opinions and consent. Just 7% of Americans approve sending in ground troops.

Just a few years ago, these exact lies and Playbook tactics worked to get a majority to approve of and consent to support and fund the war in Gaza. Now, these tricks are no longer working. The antisemitism smear campaign, highly-effective up until now, is no longer working. Those changes in the Pattern are coming from US, not Them.

At this stage, these improvements in our defense are not resulting in less war or less toxic products. The results are the dismantling of our internal system—less denial, less apathy, less hopium delusion, and most importantly less reliance on our leadership to tell us what is true or what is good for us. This advancement is commendable and vital to our future well-being.

Their system carries on unaltered. They do whatever they want to increase profits to the elite class, and they care nothing for what the people want, which is peace, and to be safe and healthy at home. For as crazy and as bad as things look and feel right now, we can at least acknowledge there is more awareness and verification about our leadership’s lack of concern for us, despite whatever they’ve promised. In the fifth week of this war, what exactly has Congress done to effect this situation which 60% of the country is opposed to, as thousands more American soldiers are on their way to extreme danger in battle? What vote, veto, law, authorization, or limitation—have we seen?

The Constitution vests the power of declaring war with Congress; therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they have deliberated upon the subject, and authorized such a measure. —George Washington, 1793

Whatever “good arguments” may be used for why the people’s will amounts to nothing since their representatives cannot act on their behalf, their inactions will speak louder than those words. We see with our eyes the actual reality, the actual truth. And this Truth is what each of us must defend and protect—inside ourselves.

We battle against any methodology or warfare that attempts to separate us from our true perceptions, beliefs, and values. We battle against our own internal mechanisms—the excuses, rationalizations, justifications, fallacies, self-deception and apathy— forged over time by living through the Pattern & Playbook our entire lives, to overcome the resultant cognitive dissonance and become better equipped to enlist in the real war, between Truth and Lies. We don’t yet have the defenses to stop the Military Industrial Complex from warring on foreign lands. We do, always, have the defenses to stop it from making us deceive ourselves about any part of it.

If we can shield and preserve what we know in our hearts to be true, we can avoid getting tricked into believing the lies of a smear campaign and shunning the resistance we should instead be supporting.

+ Smear Campaigns prevent us from actively opposing Bad Wars. =

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Drop Site News

Mass funeral for children killed in school strike; Israel weighs “buffer zone” in Lebanon; Gaza food and fuel supplies dwindle

At least 787 people have been killed since Israel and the U.S. launched the war on Iran. President Donald Trump says the war could last more than four weeks and may involve a ground invasion. Secretary of State Marco Rubio says the U.S. “knew there was going to be an Israeli action,” so the U.S. acted first. State Department…

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4 months ago · 499 likes · 2 comments · Drop Site News

THE MATH:

If we don’t participate by thinking it through we remain unprotected for the next assault.

+ The powerful force of the PR campaign can disconnect us from our own survival instincts and our allegiance to Natural Law.

+ Their Pattern of deception and concealment of harm leads to addiction, disease and death.

+ We must understand and memorize Their Playbook.

+ We must use the wisdom gained from past mistakes.

+ Cognitive dissonance has led to errors in our reasoning.

+ We must defend ourselves against those we thought were defending us.

+ Until we disable the corrupt revolving door we have an active breach in our defense.

+ Our over-reliance on external systems undermines our ability to defend ourselves or others.

+ The genocide in Gaza has illuminated the Pattern & Playbook for all to see.

+ The tactic of using False Claims was effective on enough of the public to get us and keep us in Bad Wars for the past 70 years and counting.

+ The tactic of using False Claims was effective on enough of the public to get us to buy and use Bad Products that cause disease and death.

+ As the Watchdogs produce truth of the falsehoods, the opposition will bury and attack this evidence.

+ Bad Companies pledges to self-regulate obstruct actual protection of public welfare.

+ Bad Companies manufacture doubt and controversy to keep us from the Truth.

+ The Captured allow evil to succeed.

+ The Captured allow disease and death to escalate.

There are natural environmental dangers—like fires, floods and earthquakes—which humans have not been able to eliminate or triumph over. But the death counts from these catastrophes pale in comparison to those produced by the most fatal man-made environmental hazards. These are products voluntarily invented, manufactured, and sold to us by Bad Companies who hope to make hundreds of billions of dollars off their creations.

The story of Capture by Big Agrochemical goes like this:

The people want to eat healthy food and drink clean water free of poisons and toxins which cause disease and death.

What the enemy has manifested for them is food and water polluted with deadly chemicals and pesticides which no branch of our government will remove from the environment or food supply.

It is not at all a stretch to use the word enemy to describe the agrochemical industry, considering its origins in warfare.

Chemical companies DuPont and 3M have deep, direct roots in military industrialization, transitioning from wartime production of explosives and gunpowder to agricultural chemicals and forever chemicals. The industrial component these companies created for the atomic bomb was later renamed Teflon to be used as a coating on our frying pans.

The chemical research conducted in World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War by the major pesticide companies who now dominate our modern food production, led to the creation of deadly weapons such as mustard gas, nerve agents, Agent Orange, etc.

The onus is on anyone out there to identify the point in the historical narrative of these corporations where they switch gears from militaristic dominance over the natural world into any kind of beneficial or harmonious stewardship. The chemical research was not put to bed when the wars ended, it was repurposed. The character and the motives of the Bad Companies remain the same. The modern chemical warfare formerly waged against human enemies is now waged against life’s inconveniences, pests and weeds. In all cases the toxicity affects far more than their intended targets. In all cases the end result is ecological disaster.

In the time of World War II, one of the world’s largest chemical & pharmaceutical companies was IG Farben, a conglomerate of six German corporations, including our current Big Ag giants Bayer and BASF. The company became notorious for its alliance with the Nazi regime, building a chemical plant at Auschwitz which utilized concentration camp slave labor, and producing synthetic goods and gasoline critical to the German war effort. The company repurposed their cyanide-based commercial pesticide to make Zyklon B gas, which was used in Nazi gas chambers to murder approximately 1.1 million people during the Holocaust.

One of the Nuremberg Trials was the IG Farben Trial, where 23 IG Farben directors were tried for war crimes and 13 convicted.

After the war, in 1951, IG Farben was split back into its six constituent companies, which later merged into to three successor companies—Bayer, BASF, and Hoechst.

Also in 1951, all of the IG Farben war criminals were released from prison early due to “good time credits”. Bayer then re-hired several of the former Nazis to high-level positions in the company.

Bayer AG is now the world's largest agrochemical company, and one of the largest global pharmaceutical and biomedical companies. BASF is the world’s largest chemical producer. Hoechst went through further mergers to become Sanofi, one of the world’s largest multinational pharmaceutical and healthcare companies.

Bayer is the leading global manufacturer of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). Just two companies—Bayer and Corteva Agrisciences (which is DowDuPont)—own about 80% of the GMO patents.1

Since their introduction three decades ago, GMOs are now in an estimated 70% of packaged goods in grocery stores.

In 1998, a few years after the FDA approved genetically-engineered foods for market, the agency admitted in court that it had made “no dispositive scientific findings,” about the safety of consuming them. And this state of ignorance on how GMOs might affect humans is where we still stand today.

Every few months I do a search to check up on the safety testing of these products, just because it’s still so hard for me to fathom and accept that nothing has changed in 30+ years of regulation, even though so much has changed for the worse in human health. But the answer always comes back the same:

The FDA does not require mandatory pre-market safety testing or approval for genetically engineered (GE) foods, instead operating a voluntary consultation program where developers, not the agency, are responsible for ensuring safety. While most developers participate, there is no legal requirement to notify the FDA, nor does the FDA independently test GMOs.

If you search “are genetically engineered foods harmful?” you will repeatedly come up against this corporate doublespeak: “No evidence has validated that eating food with GMO ingredients is harmful.” What needs to be understood, by now, is that when it comes to investigating harm, the “absence of evidence is NOT evidence of absence.”

Failing to find proof of harm in the funded research does not mean we can declare harm does not exist, only that it has not been detected yet. And the best way to never detect harm is to never do the research.

There are no long-term clinical trials or peer-reviewed studies directly observing the health effects of GMO foods on humans. There have been no human epidemiological studies to try to correlate increases in GMO food consumption and increases in negative health outcomes in the U.S. population, where they are consumed in large quantities.

There are plenty of animal studies which link GMOs to serious adverse effects, including organ abnormalities and cell and tissue damage, gastric and uterine disease, stomach inflammation, kidney and liver damage, with potential outcomes including a rise in tumor incidence and increased mortality.

Now let’s search: “Why haven’t we studied health outcomes of GMOs on humans?” Answer: “Long-term, direct, randomized human clinical trials on Genetically Modified Organisms are rare because scientific consensus holds that current GMOs are safe and nutritionally equivalent to conventional counterparts, rendering such studies scientifically unnecessary.”

The scientific consensus came from…no studies???

The only method currently in use for determining any negative effects of genetically modified products in people is to let them eat the food and see what happens. “What has happened” is the skyrocketing food intolerances, allergies, and chronic disease in the decades since the launch of GMO crops and foods. It’s one kind of misdeed to turn the populace of your own country into test subjects for this investigation. But to then ignore the real world outcomes of the experiment as the participants suffer the effects is a whole other kind of cruelty.

Nineteen out of 28 countries in the European Union, including Germany and France, have banned genetically modified crops since 2015. The Greenpeace EU food policy director explained their rationale, “A clear majority of the EU’s governments are rejecting the Commission’s drive for GM crop approvals. They don’t trust EU safety assessments and are rightly taking action to protect their agriculture and food.”

But, due to the capture of government by Big Agriculture here in the United States, the biotech agenda carries on unabated on our soil.

This Guardian article explains how the 2013 “Monsanto Protection Act” put GM companies above the federal courts, so “not even the US government can now stop the sale, planting, harvest or distribution of any GM seed.”

The journalists recap the totality of the capture by the industry: “A revolving door allows corporate chiefs to switch to top posts in the Food and Drug Administration and other agencies; US embassies around the world push GM technology onto dissenting countries; government subsidies back corporate research; federal regulators do largely as the industry wants; the companies pay millions of dollars a year to lobby politicians; conservative thinktanks combat any political opposition; the courts enforce corporate patents on seeds; and the consumer is denied labels or information.”

Most GMO crops (corn, soy, canola) are processed into ingredients used in the vast majority of Ultraprocessed Foods which constitute roughly 70% of the U.S. food supply, and are finally getting the deserved attention for making our population so sick.

The argument used for these products is their affordability. But, the irony is that these relatively cheap foods cause very expensive diseases and environmental destruction, making them the most expensive foods ever grown.

A 2024 review of 45 metanalyses, covering nearly 10 million study participants, found convincing evidence that a diet high in ultraprocessed foods increases the risk of death from cardiovascular disease by 50% and the risk of anxiety by 48%. And the emulsifiers used in the processing is a full-blown disaster for gut health.

An important new UN report came out last year showing how a handful of mega-corporations control the entire global food system, with devastating consequences for food security and inflation; climate change and biodiversity; and human rights and health.

As with Bayer and BASF, chemical giant DuPont aided the Nazi German war effort by providing them with crucial patents, technology and material resources, and maintained business connections with various corporations in the Third Reich from 1933 until 1943. Irénée du Pont, the president of the company during the buildup to World War II, was a financial supporter of Nazi Führer Adolf Hitler.

The modern day ecological disaster Dupont and 3M have foisted on innocent countrymen in America since the 1950s, from the forever chemicals PFOA/PFAS, is the type of crime against humanity only a truly Bad Company can commit, as illustrated in this decades-long horror show of undisclosed lesions, tumors, liver damage and cancer.

Should we classify our U.S. regulatory supervision and repeated approval of their chemical products as a lesser crime against humanity?

By the 1980s, the FDA had studies showing PFAS chemicals could pose health risks under a range of circumstances, but they continued to approve expanded uses of the chemicals, in addition to new types of PFAS.2 It took until 2010 for FDA scientists to issue a toxicology memo raising concerns about PFAS in food packaging.

The Environmental Protection Agency was first formally alerted to the health hazards of the forever chemicals in 1998. The agency began formal investigation and regulatory action in 2000, and by 2005, its Science Advisory Board identified PFOA as a likely human carcinogen. In 2012, the EPA tested for PFAS in public water systems. The results showed that as many as 110 million Americans are exposed to PFAS in their drinking water. In the same year, a landmark medical study found a probable link between PFOA exposure and six diseases: testicular cancer, kidney cancer, high cholesterol, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease and pregnancy-induced hypertension.

So—for decades, and through present day, the horror show of deadly toxicity forced upon humans was examined, supervised and approved by our government regulators. If the offense was merely an incomprehensible ongoing negligence or incompetence, we would still need to indict whomever managed this failure. But, it is clear that the disregard for the dangers posed by these products is far more intentional.

In 2019, FDA’s own tests confirmed PFAS are in our food, but the FDA downplayed the risks. The agency also developed a new test method and detection limits, which undercounts detections of PFAS. The numbers these new methods produce conceal the chemicals presence in our food. Consumers are exposed to the toxins through their water, food and through household goods, but FDA continues to ignore all of the different routes of exposure when setting safety limits and providing advice to Americans.

The EPA employs similarly sinister tactics to hide the dangers from us. The Intercept series on the corruption at the EPA Chemical Division falls into the “can’t make this s**t up” category of offense after offense brought to light by whistleblowers within the agency—senior staff making chemicals appear safer, dodging restrictions on their use, minimizing estimates of how much is released into the environment, removing references to the harms—consistently and deliberately evading their duty to properly calculate human exposure on hundreds of chemicals that put the public at risk.

Out of the 70+ bills Congress has introduced to address the dangers of forever chemicals, just four have become law, and none of those addressed the underlying responsibility of industry or provided close to sufficient funding. Most of the other bills died in the “Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works”. Two-thirds of these committee members received campaign contributions from the PFAS manufacturers.3

Where we stand today—

A total ban on all PFAS compounds is not yet in effect.

The FDA has announced a phase-out of PFAS in food packaging. To translate the doublespeak— “announce” does not translate to “action”, and “phase-out” timelines can translate to “indefinite” periods.

For example, the EPA last year extended the compliance deadline for PFOA/PFOS drinking water standards from 2029 to 2031. In The Playbook, this is tactic #7— Delay . Remember that it’s been 14 years since the EPA first tested the water systems and confirmed over a hundred million Americans are exposed to unsafe limits.

As the majority of the captured Federal government still works to limit regulation on forever chemicals, states are filling the policy void with their own legislation. The MAHA mandate produced a large volume of PFAS-related bill activity in the 2025 state legislative session—over 350 bills addressing PFAS were introduced throughout 39 states. Only 27 of those 350 have been enacted thus far, but the momentum grows, and we pray the corrupted federal agencies continue to be circumnavigated.

As we’ve examined in previous chapters, the introduction of GMO crops has led to a significant, long-term increase in the application of pesticides and herbicides. Glyphosate use in the U.S. rose over 750% in the two decades following their introduction. Studies continue to conclude that “the exposure to pesticides is well known to cause serious damage to both environment and human health.”

In case anyone needs a recap of any of this, you can scroll down in this Greenpeace article to the “I’m Not an Idiot” section. The verifiable truth is that “Monsanto(/Bayer) and other agricultural chemical companies lied about their products, covered up the damaging data, and corrupted government officials in order to sell their toxic products around the world.”

Despite evidence of harm, the federal government turned a blind eye when it came to monitoring glyphosate—failing to test for it on food and in our bodies for over 40 years, despite doing so for other commonly used pesticides. And rather than restricting its use, the EPA has raised the legal threshold for residues on some foods up to 300-fold since the 1990s.4

A few years ago, the U.S. judicial system finally stepped in to overrule the EPA’s continual, wrongful approval of the product, and its inaccurate conclusion and subsequent deceptive labelling which falsely claims there is no cancer risk.

The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the EPA’s 2020 approval of glyphosate was  unlawful. The court concluded that EPA flouted its own cancer guidelines and ignored the criticisms of its own experts, stating, “EPA did not adequately consider whether glyphosate causes cancer and shirked its duties under the Endangered Species Act (ESA)”.

Last year, as the new administration settled in, a group of 79 Republican members of the House and Senate, fulfilling their obligation to their captors, sent a letter to the new heads of HHS, EPA and the Secretary of Agriculture regarding pesticide policy. The letter urged them against listening to the “malicious policies” of environmentalists, arguing that the agrochemical products are subject to a “robust, risk-based regulatory system which focuses on protecting human health.”

Agribusiness federal lobbying in 2025 exceeded $219 million, marking a significant 20% increase over the previous year.

This is where we stand today; the results of that influence—

November 2025 - “Trump EPA Approves Its Second ‘Forever Chemical’ Pesticide in Two Weeks” (Yes, creating PFAS pesticides, to add to the glyphosate herbicides.)

December 8 2025: “Under Former Chemical Industry Insiders, Trump EPA Nearly Doubles Amount of Formaldehyde Considered Safe to Inhale”.

January 5 2026, “US EPA dismisses WHO Cancer Agency Determination that Widely Used Herbicide is ‘Probably Carcinogenic’” (Atrazine, which has been banned in more than 60 countries).

The Trump administration pesticide office is controlled by two former lobbyists for the American Chemistry Council.

And, believe it or not, major news outlets like the New York Times continue to fuel the all-important doubt and controversy, this late in the game: “Spraying Roundup on Crops Is Fine. Really.” (from September, 2025). A published opinion which claimed there is “no compelling evidence that glyphosate causes cancer,” even though the Times reported in 2019 “A federal jury found Tuesday that Monsanto's popular weedkiller Roundup was a “substantial factor” in causing a California man's cancer.”

The latest news on the subject, from February 18 2026, is President Trump’s executive order intended to boost domestic production of glyphosate, while also granting legal immunity to manufacturers of the products (to put an end to the 200,000 lawsuits Bayer has already lost or is facing for causing cancer).5

We should mention one positive move. Oppositional legislation came quick in response to Trump’s order in the form of the bipartisan “No Immunity for Glyphosate Act”. It likely won’t get much support in captured Congress, but the issue making big headlines is progress, even if only from being caught up in the swell of current Trump disapproval. Remember that just five years ago, only 25% of Americans were even aware of the herbicide, or its dangers.

It starts with awareness. And so, we press on…

For millennia, and up until the development of agrochemicals, farming methods were naturally, always “organic.”

“The past teaches us that we don’t need synthetic fertilizers and pesticides to grow abundant, healthy food. We can create sustainable chemical-free gardens that work with nature, not against it.”

The transformation of our farming practices from these harmonious and sustainable methods to the biotechnological agrochemical methods of today was not what the people—most specifically the farmers—wanted or needed. They were not asking for frankenseeds made in genetic engineering laboratories to replace the seed-saving customs used since the dawn of man, nor the blanket spray of toxic chemicals needed to preserve the new GE crops, nor the chemical coated packaging used to deliver them to market. They want to grow good, nourishing food for their families, neighbors and fellow Americans, like they did before World War II, when organic methods were the norm, before the chemical giants took over the country.

Big Ag’s capture of our government fueled this transformation. It sanctioned the monopolistic mergers and consolidations of agriculture suppliers and seed companies who now systematically crush independent farmers in what is aptly called “corporate feudalism”. Its lobbyists successfully ghostwrote “farm relief” policy that laundered $130 billion of our tax money into industry pockets instead of to the crushed farmers. And it soaked our universe with destructive and deadly poison.

This video heartbreakingly illustrates how lobbying trade groups funnel emergency aid farm subsidies to the very Bad Companies who are driving farmers to ruin and suicide.

In this article “Farmers Pay Big Ag to Lobby Against Them”, you can read about another capture byproduct, a program known as “checkoffs”. This is where large and small farmers pay mandatory fees under the guise of boosting agricultural sales, but in reality their dollars end up in a slush fund for Big Ag interests.

Not only are American farmers sued and harassed if they don’t comply with the conglomerate agendas, but since European markets have banned genetically engineered crops from the U.S, they lose around $300 million per year in export markets. All these forces have created one of the most severe economic crisis in our country. Since the 80s, the U.S. has lost over half a million small to mid-size family farms.6 Farm bankruptcies surged 46% in 2025, due to unsustainable debt and trade instability. Rural areas experienced a 48% increase in suicide rates between 2000 and 2018.7.

The cruel “irony” is that the precarious state of American agriculture, which is now so completely structured around biotech products like glyphosate, cannot weather any disruption in their crop protection tools and stay in business. Because millions of family farmers operate within the system the Bad Company conglomerates have built up over so many years, their dependency is now too big a Jenga piece to pull out in one move.

Yet, the only significant moves being made all still go in the wrong direction.

The New Federal Farm Bill named the “Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026” (H.R.7567) will be debated March 3 in the House Agriculture Committee. It contains provisions that significantly rollback pesticide safety standards, preempt state/local warning labels, shield manufacturers from lawsuits, and weaken environmental protections.

(You can write your Congressional representative to vote against the Farm Bill if those provisions are not removed.)

The traditional solution to all these many harms is regulatory action. If working as intended: Public health experts could set stricter standards for industrial food products and monitor industry performance, with real legal penalties in place for violations. Advertising, from drug ads to crappy food for children, could be severely curtailed, similar to restrictions placed on the tobacco industry (before they transitioned into Big Food). Tax incentives could be set such that healthier ingredients and processing methods become the more profitable course of action. In addition to creating these new regulations, the FTC and DOJ could address market domination by pursuing antitrust actions more aggressively.

The main obstacle to achieving these meaningful legal restrictions is of course the capture of regulatory bodies by Bad Industry. These problems, while daunting, are not insurmountable, and many food and environmental advocates remain focused on a rescue of these types of governmental controls.

But—the “debate” and “controversy” are still continuously manufactured and inserted into the conversation in our country, as if a huge portion of the population is arguing against the idea of reforming any of these agencies or corporate policies and fighting to maintain the status quo of our present predicament. Any of these arguments should be quickly shut down by comparing our outcomes to other countries of the world who have reformed and improved these situations.

Look to all other nations where glyphosate is banned, where GMO foods are banned, where drug advertising is banned. The EU uses a “precautionary principle“ (banning substances until proven safe), while the U.S. generally allows substances until proven harmful. The U.S. allows hundreds of additives and pesticides banned elsewhere.

And what is the result:

In 2025, the United States was ranked #61 in the world for life expectancy, dying 6 years earlier for women, 7 years earlier for men, compared to the healthiest countries. Among high-income countries, we show the slowest progress in reducing risk of chronic disease deaths, which have surged 700% since the Big Agrochemical takeover post-WWII.

Big Tobacco, Big Ag, Big Chemical, Big Food, Big Pharma—they all became Big by consolidating into a handful of massive companies that have used their size, influence, and money to push out any competitors that might offer more healthy products and capture any entities who might block their highly-profitable destruction.

It’s all the same story. The Pattern & The Playbook are identical across the board.

It’s all the same monster. Biotechnology is the emerging “backbone” of this monster. Through the mergers and acquisitions and consolidations of agrochemical, food, and pharmaceutical companies, we end up with large Bad Company players that span across multiple industries (like Bayer, BASF, Syngenta, Corteva, Pfizer, J&J, Novo Nordisk) all who leverage biotech to dominate markets and replace as many traditional processes as possible with biological ones.8

And, it’s all the same personalities. When you hear about the exclusive, clandestine meetings of the richest and most powerful in the Swiss Alps, those men (and a few women) are not there to ski and relax. The World Economic Forum gathers to collaborate on agendas which promote policies that harm democracy, increase inequality, put profit over public health, and advance corporate control. To merge, acquire, and consolidate power. Up until this year, it used to considered “conspiracy” to speak of these players as participants of a global elite plot. But every day that passes in 2026, another shocking connection comes to light through the Epstein Files to expose just how real this network is and just how diabolical their deeds really are.

They are the captors and the captured. They are our enemies who desecrate the environment we exist in and ruin our chances for health and happiness.

We have become more and more accustomed to our captured world—but that does not make it normal or right or inevitable.

To the beloved and deeply-appreciated readers who have continued this far into the examination— you likely no longer need any more arguments to convince you of the malevolence. But due to the cycling Playbook tricks which never cease no matter how close we are to what looks like “the end” of one of these eras of destruction, we all still need to fully comprehend, memorize, and rehearse the argument, which lives here as a resource and reminder, in order to share with others. Sharing is caring!

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+ The Captured allow the degradation of our land, water, and food. =

We are all in this together! I’m not the first to say it! See you next chapter….

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THE MATH:

If we don’t participate by thinking it through we remain unprotected for the next assault.

+ The powerful force of the PR campaign can disconnect us from our own survival instincts and our allegiance to Natural Law.

+ Their Pattern of deception and concealment of harm leads to addiction, disease and death.

+ We must understand and memorize Their Playbook.

+ We must use the wisdom gained from past mistakes.

+ Cognitive dissonance has led to errors in our reasoning.

+ We must defend ourselves against those we thought were defending us.

+ Until we disable the corrupt revolving door we have an active breach in our defense.

+ Our over-reliance on external systems undermines our ability to defend ourselves or others.

+ The genocide in Gaza has illuminated the Pattern & Playbook for all to see.

+ The tactic of using False Claims was effective on enough of the public to get us and keep us in Bad Wars for the past 70 years and counting.

+ The tactic of using False Claims was effective on enough of the public to get us to buy and use Bad Products that cause disease and death.

+ As the Watchdogs produce truth of the falsehoods, the opposition will bury and attack this evidence.

+ Bad Companies pledges to self-regulate obstruct actual protection of public welfare.

+ Bad Companies manufacture doubt and controversy to keep us from the Truth.

+ The Captured allow evil to succeed.

Bodily autonomy is one of the most fundamental rights we have as human beings. The standard definition is: having the ultimate control over decisions that affect one's body and future. It is about respecting each individual's right to govern their own body without external pressure or interference.

Handing over such vital decision-making would be the highest representation of trust. Giving this trust to a failed regulatory system or a Bad Company with high death counts seems very unwise.

The story of Capture by Big Pharma goes like this:

The people want to be healthy and they don’t want products that cause disease and death.

What the enemy has manifested for them is a country with the worst health outcomes among all high-income, developed nations, where adverse drug events (ADEs) are the third leading cause of death.1 2

Drug companies have a legal responsibility to provide profits for their shareholders. They do not have a legal responsibility to give patients the best and safest treatment. They can literally be sued by their own shareholders if they allowed the public welfare to undermine their quarterly profits. So it’s not difficult to then conclude that whatever they are selling should be intensely scrutinized.

However, as we know, Big Pharma has successfully captured so much of our political and regulatory body that this scrutiny is at its weakest. Our leaders and regulators are put in place to watch out for any danger encroaching on society. Since captured, they only falsely claim to keep watch while all they oversee is the bad guys easily breaching a pretense of defense and sneaking right past the blinded security guards.

The domination the Bad Companies and their captured armies have over the population is most definitely interference that undermines our right to have control over decisions that affect our body and future.

The pharma lobby is consistently the single largest lobbying force in the United States, spending hundreds of millions annually to influence policy and impede reform, often outpacing other major sectors like tech and energy.

More than two-thirds of Congress cashed a campaign check from Big Pharma in 2020. Pfizer’s political action committee alone contributed to 228 lawmakers. Over 50 lawmakers have reported investing in pharmaceutical and health product companies, with Pfizer being one of the most popular stocks among members of Congress.

The watchdog organization Open Secrets gives the “Top 20 Congress Member Recipients of Money from Pharmaceuticals / Health Products, 1990-2024”, of which Kamala Harris is #1 and President Biden at #2, each with over $9 million received.

Like 2020, last year was a record-shattering lobbying blitz from the industry as they launched a calculated counteroffensive to the MAHA movement’s current populist reforms.

Big Pharma’s predatory behavior and profit-seeking practices of today arose in part from the rules that govern it—found in our tax code, antitrust laws, and corporate governance regulations. The rules of our economy have changed, largely due to the corruption of those who make the policies and laws, to serve corporations over people. If lawmakers were freed from their bondage, they could also rewrite the rules back again to ensure that drug companies put health before profits.3

Until they are freed, the Captured politicians will continue to not do anything about the problem of the captured regulators.

The Food & Drug Administration (FDA)—the security guard between the people’s health and harmful products—has been resting in the enemy camp for a very long time.

This 2022 NYTimes article explains how the pharmaceutical industry finances about 75 percent of the FDA’s drug division, through a controversial program called the PDUFA (Prescription Drug User Fee Act), where drug manufacturers fund the agency under the cover of fees paid for review of their drug applications. (The PDUFA has been reauthorized through 2027). It would take a certain kind of denialist psychology to believe the FDA would not be heavily influenced to approve the products of an industry that pays three-quarters of their budget.

This two-year investigation found that from 2013 through 2022, 73% of these drugs were approved by the FDA with no evidence that they worked.

Once drugs are approved for market, the products are given the critically important package insert, or label. This acts as the definitive, FDA-approved, scientific guide for the safe and effective use of medication. It is supposed to provide essential, evidence-based information on proper dosage, potential adverse reactions, contraindications, and warnings—including "boxed warnings" for serious risks.

At the center of Purdue Pharma’s marketing campaign for Oxycontin was a single sentence in its original label: “Delayed absorption as provided by OxyContin tablets, is believed to reduce the abuse liability of a drug.” This FDA-sanctioned phrase was how they convinced doctors and patients that the drug was less addictive and less likely to be abused. Unfortunately for millions of victims, the company did not hold clinical trials or conduct any studies to show that OxyContin was less likely to be addictive or abused, so no part of that crafty phrase was backed up by actual science. No one, on record, admits to where the vague “is believed to” part came from, but once on the label it was enough to assure safety to the entire medical community without a shred of evidence.

In 2016, the former FDA Commissioner rebuked the agency on 60 Minutes, saying that the FDA’s wrongdoing, as well as that of the pharmaceutical companies and the physicians "has been one of the great mistakes of modern medicine".

The majority of new drugs approved for market aren’t even necessary. The BMJ found that less than half of approved new drugs in the US and Europe between 2011 and 2020 added any substantial therapeutic value over existing treatments. And, of all the drugs approved by the FDA between 2000 and 2008, 75% were copies of old ones.

New drugs are often more expensive than their older competitors. Patients are paying higher and higher prices for new drugs prescribed over older ones when new does not in the majority of cases mean better. Big Pharma wages a decades-long war on repurposed drugs with the ever-pressing goal of protecting the market for novel, patented, obscenely profitable and often barely tested toxic medications.

The influence of the pharmaceutical industry in the drug approval process has terrible consequences for patient safety. A 2017 Yale study found new safety issues emerged in 1 in 3 FDA-approved drugs between 2001-2010.4 Knowing that adverse effects from legal prescriptions are a top leading cause of American deaths means that prescription drugs are not only fatally dangerous but needlessly fatally dangerous, as regulators fail to uncover safety risks of new drugs at alarming rates.

This ProPublica article: “FDA Repays Industry by Rushing Risky Drugs to Market” explains in greater detail how the agency has increasingly fast-tracked expensive drugs with significant side effects and unproven health benefits.

The pharma companies don’t just produce costlier drugs, they also remove the cheaper, proven-effective drugs already on the market.

I recommend this segment on 60 Minutes from 2022 which showcases this issue, where every day nearly 300 life-saving drugs may be in short supply in America’s hospitals because they do not make enough profit for the industry:

The drug companies also intervene in the supposedly-free market with their war on any non-pharmaceutical product or natural supplement. Pressured by their pharma funders, regulators have vigorously sought to limit access to alternative therapies—the homeopathic and naturopathic forms of medicine. Patients’ right to choose from a wide range of medical treatments is frustrated, as natural remedies are also often excluded from insurance coverage or priced out of reach due to the relentless pharma lobbying. The great irony being of course that while the FDA somehow overlooks safety signals from Big Pharma products, they seem to be very eagle-eyed about the safety of these natural remedies.

This elimination of any non-pharma competition started long ago. The 1910 Flexner Report, Medical Education in the United States and Canada, commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation and supported by the American Medical Association (AMA) and Rockefeller philanthropies, resulted in the closure or merger of over 75% of U.S. medical schools (including five of the then seven Black medical colleges.). This massive restructuring specifically targeted alternative institutions teaching naturopathy, traditional homoeopathy, chiropractic, osteopathic medicine, and eclectic forms of therapy, by designating them “non-scientific”. Before this, just over a century ago, America had 100 homeopathic hospitals, and over 1,000 homeopathic pharmacies, and all the top universities taught homeopathy.5

Carnegie and Rockefeller (often characterized as the "godfathers" of modern Big Pharma due to their immense influence of “restructuring medicine”), lobbied and captured and used the same Playbook tactics as today. Rockefeller/Carnegie grants to schools were conditioned upon adopting an allopathic-only curriculum, forcing many to abandon alternative methods to stay afloat.

The capture of today extends of course into all government health agencies.

The NIH (National Institutes of Health) has a team of government scientists who invent treatments for diseases, vaccines, and more, and then license them to pharma corporations, who pay them royalties. According to the watchdog group Openthebooks, pharmaceutical companies paid governmental science $2.7 billion in royalties. The watchdogs won two lawsuits forcing the NIH to disclose which scientists are on patent licenses for which medical innovation, which private companies are paying them and how much they’re paying. This information has been hidden from the public, as is the obvious conflict of interest. (In the first lawsuit, NIH hid the names of the companies that were making the payments, and in the second suit the agency redacted how much money individual scientists received.)6

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) has accepted hundreds of millions of pharma dollars through its third-party The CDC Foundation while their disclaimers pledge otherwise, according to a petition filed by Watchdog groups (Public Citizen, Knowledge Ecology International, Liberty Coalition, Project on Government Oversight, and U.S. Right to Know).7

We’ve discussed how Bad Companies have also captured the research sectors—scientists, universities, and academic journals—and fund biased studies to compete with any real science which would cause them problems. For example, a meta-analysis shows 95.1% of independent studies found potential harm from e-cigarettes compared to only 7.7% of industry-funded studies.8

A 2015 study by researchers at John Hopkins found the pharmaceutical industry funds six times more clinical trials than the NIH. Industry funding, compared to public sources, currently accounts for two-thirds of medical research worldwide.9

As we pointed out last chapter, Academia is perilously beholden to whomever supplies their grant funding. Other systemic pressures like the “publish or perish” culture, combined with the preference of some journals to publish industry-positive findings, can create perverse incentives for university researchers to “cook” or mine data to produce a desired result.

Universities have also become dependent on the revenue from clinical trials conducted on their campuses, and so have turned a blind eye to the embellishment of their academics’ CVs with publications ghostwritten by industry. While there are still punitive measures for students who engage in plagiarism, faculty who are guilty of submitting ghostwritten work from pharma third parties are not subject to the same treatment. This all creates not just a serious problem for campus morale and academic leadership, but more importantly for the public at large, a crisis of “tainted expertise”.10

Once Big Pharma has command over the funding of any research, it can then influence how that research is conducted, using a number of creative methods to skew results in their favor.

One trick commonly used is the “surrogate endpoint”. This is where they replace a direct, long-term measure of clinical benefit (like mortality or quality of life) with a substitute marker (like lab values or imaging changes) that produce some kind of result they can tout even though it may not predict actual patient benefit.

“Low dose comparison” is when they compare a new drug against a lower dose of the competitor drug to make their product appear more effective.

Through what is called “selective question framing”, studies are designed with questions that ensure favorable outcomes, such as comparing a new drug to a suboptimal treatment rather than to the best available, or comparing against another drug which also produces negative side effects instead of against a water or saline placebo.

For instance, the clinical studies behind the Merck Vioxx scandal were skewed in the drug’s favor through a selective trial design that compared their drug to naproxen (Aleve) rather than to a placebo. They were able to produce a misleading presentation of the evidence that somehow made Vioxx only look risky by this comparison.

Once they’ve produced their selective evidence, pharmaceutical companies pressure the FDA to consider only the results of these private investigative trials. Those “user fees” mentioned above are private contributions paid out by industry to ensure representatives from Bad Companies are able to sit in on deliberations and control how clinical trials are reviewed by the FDA in order to secure product approvals. Through this revenue capture, industry becomes the de facto financier of FDA’s entire regulatory mechanism.

Peer review is the quality-control process where experts in a specific field evaluate studies and research papers for credibility, accuracy, and rigor. What many don’t realize is that researchers who do peer review of drug company-sponsored trials do not get access to all the raw data they would need to make a proper evaluation. All they get is the analysis of data drug companies give them, which obviously leaves the door wide open for unethical manipulation and unscientific obfuscation.

This move also creates a brilliantly illicit loophole tactic referred to as “intentional non-disclosure”. By law, the FDA is required to deny applications where information “shows that the drug is not safe”. But this mandate cannot be executed as the agency has no way of technically distinguishing whether or not it is in possession of a full clinical record.

When drugs get to our doctors—the point of sale for us—neither doctor nor patient may be aware that the regulators approved the drugs without a complete knowledge of their risks, side effects, and interactions. The result of this is, of course, that patients have a greater likelihood of experiencing an adverse drug reaction (ADR). Estimates of patient deaths in hospitals caused by ADRs range from 100,000 to over 250,000 deaths annually in the U.S. alone.11

The scientific journals have been spiraling downward in tandem with the corporate takeover of the health sector. Over 20 years ago, the editor of The Lancet Richard Horton wrote that journals “have evolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry” in his New York Review of Books article titled "The Dawn of McScience".12

Editors from the other formerly-prestigious publishers raised similar alarms. Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, described the journal industry as "primarily a marketing machine", and Richard Smith, former editor of the BMJ, similarly stated that medical journals had become an extension of the marketing arm of pharmaceutical companies.

All this drastically diminishes the “knowledge pool” among medical professionals. There are still ethical researchers doing quality studies (if they can find funding outside of industry channels). But when it comes to getting “expert” advice on the latest drugs, patients, doctors, and caregivers are left to turn to “journal supplements”—special extra issues of the journal that focus attention on a single drug. These are entirely funded by a pharmaceutical company and most, if not all, of these articles are ghostwritten by the companies who manufactured the drug.

Whenever we encounter an “expert”, as a guest on our news programs, in the courtroom, or on government committees, we can never assume they are free from conflict of interest nor can we confidently rely on them having all the information needed to give expert analysis.

In 2002, faced with evidence that opioid prescribing had risen beyond levels that could be clinically warranted, the FDA convened an advisory committee meeting of 10 outside experts to determine if the very broad indication on opioid labels should be narrowed to prohibit marketing them for common pain conditions. Eight of the 10 experts had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies, including Purdue, and so the committee advised the FDA against narrowing the indication. An opportunity to reign in overprescribing early in the crisis was lost. Logical reasoning—the natural position—is repeatedly outvoted when the committees are stacked with the captured.

The United States and New Zealand are the only two countries that allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise for prescription drugs. Prescription drug ads now account for more than a third of all commercials shown on major networks’ evening news programs. Common sense and significant evidence suggests that this reliance on pharma revenue impacts news content.

Media analysts have indicated an "unspoken rule" in media organizations that discourages journalists from criticizing advertisers on segments adjacent to drug ads, which is likely then part of the strategy for the saturation. The dependency also leads to the suppression of investigative reports on drug risks or the societal cost of medication or a bias to focus on medicating symptoms rather than on prevention or lifestyle changes.

Last year, pharma advertisers spent nearly $6 billion on national TV drug advertising, up 16% from the previous year, with the biggest spending jumps in weight loss and mental health conditions. Usually up to 25% of the Big Pharma budget is on advertising. Meanwhile, the American people pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs and one in four Americans cannot afford the costs of the medicine their doctors prescribe.13

In just the first nine months of last year, Novo Nordisk spent nearly $500 million on U.S. advertising for its weight-loss drugs Wegovy and Ozempic. The company charges nearly $1,000 a month for Ozempic and $1,349 a month for Wegovy in this country (while the cost is around $59 in Germany and other countries).

My mom sees at least a dozen of these commercials per day on MSNBC. She has recently taken the persistent advice and did “ask her doctor about Wegovy”. She already takes a handful of other meds daily, so we can hope her physician knows precisely how this new GLP-1 will interact with all those.

Another trick used in clinical studies is to carefully select only the healthiest of participants for their trials, to minimize adverse effects. But considering how unhealthy our population is, with over half of Americans suffering from multiple chronic conditions, this is not exactly representative of who will be using these drugs. Recognizing this, there is an increasing demand for the use of results from real world evidence (RWE) in studies to increase the robustness of data regarding safety and effectiveness.14 (If my mom ends up on Wegovy, she will be contributing to that RWE, so we really hope it’s a positive data point—but we can’t yet say!)

In 2023, The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) updated its guidelines to treat the surge in childhood obesity by recommending the use of pharmacotherapy for children ages 8 and up, weight-loss drugs for children 12 and older, and consideration of surgery for those 13 and older with severe obesity. This is a shift from earlier “diet and exercise” approaches.

Prescriptions for GLP-1 medications have now surged by 700% among youth, with pediatric bariatric surgeries also rising.

What was not addressed by the AAP was any potential adverse effects of the pharmaceuticals and surgeries—that, for instance, the mortality rate for children undergoing weight loss-surgery is 1 in 500. Most parents would not consider this an insignificant risk. Or that one of the more cited studies on Wegovy published in the New England Journal of Medicine which found the drug helped teens reduce their body mass index (BMI), was funded (and “data interpreted”!) by Novo Nordisk.

What was also not addressed are the obesogens. These are environmental chemicals and food components that mimic hormones, disrupting metabolism to promote fat accumulation and increase obesity risk, regardless of diet or exercise.

We know all about the omission game in the industry playbook tactics. In the case of obesity, they discuss the problem and they offer their solution, but they skip over discussion of the cause of the metabolic disorder of obesity—and that it is an environmental disease. They neglect to consider how the massive changes in the U.S. food supply, brought on by the monopolistic takeover by Big Agrochemical, correlate exactly with the skyrocketing rates of obesity among children and adults alike.

It is a significant oversight for the AAP to ignore the nation’s school lunch program when crafting the new guidelines, which provides a significant amount of the calories U.S. schoolchildren eat weekly. Most American schoolchildren are fed plastic-wrapped, chemically-preserved, pesticide-laden food made in factories months or years earlier, which all have endocrine-disrupting obesogenic properties.

I tracked down the leading expert in the obesity sector—Dr. Lee Kaplan, the chief of obesity medicine at Dartmouth College’s medical school, who led the Obesity, Metabolism and Nutrition Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital.

At the 17:00m mark of this panel on obesity, Dr. Kaplan shows the chart of where obesity numbers were in the nineties, where they were expected to go down, and then how they instead kept going up and up into the current decade. He concludes it is clearly not a disease from over-eating or under-exercising, and so what is shows is “something else going on” and that is a “disruption of normal regulation that leads to obesity”. There is no mention of what those disrupters are or could be. He goes straight to the topic of treatments. And from there it is a pitch to use weight loss drugs to change the body’s physiology to regulate the disruption. As opposed to any change in the environmental factors which have produced the disruptive toxins that cause all the problems in the body.

A quick look into this leading expert on obesity shows that Novo Nordisk has paid Dr. Kaplan $1.4 million for consulting work and travel between 2013 and 2022.15

Those payments are part of a campaign to convince U.S. doctors to make Wegovy one of the most widely prescribed drugs in history, and to persuade skeptical insurers to pay for it—Novo spent at least $25.8 million over the past decade on U.S. medical professionals to promote its obesity drugs. Where have we seen this before???

By the end of the decade, weight loss pharmaceuticals alone are projected to create a $100 billion market. For perspective, that’s higher than the overly-lucrative pain management category. As we witness this latest drug “gold rush” for Big Pharma, how can the alarm bells not ring off the hook when it so perfectly mirrors the previously most-profitable opioid drug gold rush, the one we still live in the disastrous wake of?

Pharmaceuticals like the GLPs, as with opioids, stand to be another gateway to addiction masquerading as a solution. Rather than confronting the underlying problems contributing to weight gain, weight loss medications simply mask them. These medications are meant to be used forever, because once you stop them the weight and all the associated problems come back, so these are in reality life-long pharma “solutions” (their favorite kind!). Only a third of patients who started a weight loss drug were still taking it a year later, due to side effects or the prohibitive cost, so this may not be the answer all are hoping for to end the national epidemic.

This backwards thinking is similar to us chasing our tails trying to cure cancer from smoking but never daring to remove the Bad Company’s cancer-causing products from the environment. The problems still exists because we never did anything about the cause.

We can wait and see if the the pattern plays out the same with this current wave of new drugs. The research on them is limited (there are no long-term studies yet, as it was for Oxycontin in its formative years), until the real world evidence starts to accumulate and show itself. The continuation of our pattern would be this wait and see strategy.

And lo! Here is some of that RWE coming in. Please, please (asked twice!) read this recent article “Weight-loss drugs draw thousands of lawsuits alleging serious harm”, to see exactly where we are in the repeating timeline. Look at the statements by the drugmakers and you will easily recognize the fraudulent overused argument—that their “working closely with regulators” proves the drugs must be safe, when what we’ve seen is this has only proven the capture. Yes, the industry produced many studies to give the FDA. Yes, the FDA approved their drugs. Yes, the FDA wrote the warning labels. And yes, they all still “remain confident in the benefit-risk profile”. Just like they did in all the past instances of Bad Products. And now, as with all those, alter all this collaboration between the corporations and the regulatory agency, the injuries are piling up, the lawsuits are underway, because the injured did not feel properly warned about the type of harm they were risking.

Using the wisdom gleaned from our recent past experiences, we can easily agree with the conclusion that the FDA’s misconduct which produced the opioid epidemic is “one of the great mistakes of modern medicine”. And that the misconduct is a result of corporate capture—Big Pharma’s pressure on the agency to approve the drug, craft its label to their liking, stack the advisory committees to resist any reversals, and keep it on the market for years after all the evidence of addiction and death.

We should all also easily agree that until the great mistake of the regulatory capture is corrected, we will continue to get similar results.

Natural reason tells us that we should be able to trust in the authorities we have put in place to advocate for our good health. But once the evidence has piled up enough to prove that it is actually harmful to trust those administrators, our reasoning must then adjust to a new model of advocating for our own health.

To do this, each individual’s right to bodily autonomy without external pressure or interference must be respected. Once we’ve learned our lessons the hard way, we must be allowed to utilize the wisdom gleaned and do things differently. It is now our responsibility to overcome any pressure and interference which undermines our attempts to govern our own body and protect it from danger.

+ The Captured allow disease and death to escalate. =

If anyone needs more documentation of those lessons, or more wisdom to pass along to others:

The Guardian’s “How big pharma’s money—and its politicians—feed the US opioid crisis”

The Washington Post’s “The Drug Industry’s Triumph Over the DEA”.

“The Science for Profit Model—How and why corporations influence science and the use of science in policy and practice”

Secrets of the Medicine Cabinet: How Big Pharma’s Information Monopoly Influences Federal Public Health Regulations

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THE MATH:

If we don’t participate by thinking it through we remain unprotected for the next assault.

+ The powerful force of the PR campaign can disconnect us from our own survival instincts and our allegiance to Natural Law.

+ Their Pattern of deception and concealment of harm leads to addiction, disease and death.

+ We must understand and memorize Their Playbook.

+ We must use the wisdom gained from past mistakes.

+ Cognitive dissonance has led to errors in our reasoning.

+ We must defend ourselves against those we thought were defending us.

+ Until we disable the corrupt revolving door we have an active breach in our defense.

+ Our over-reliance on external systems undermines our ability to defend ourselves or others.

+ The genocide in Gaza has illuminated the Pattern & Playbook for all to see.

+ The tactic of using False Claims was effective on enough of the public to get us and keep us in Bad Wars for the past 70 years and counting.

+ The tactic of using False Claims was effective on enough of the public to get us to buy and use Bad Products that cause disease and death.

+ As the Watchdogs produce truth of the falsehoods, the opposition will bury and attack this evidence.

+ Bad Companies pledges to self-regulate obstruct actual protection of public welfare.

+ Bad Companies manufacture doubt and controversy to keep us from the Truth.

After the false claims of the first Playbook tactic have manufactured all the controversy to keep us in doubt about any issue, what follows is the army of captured entities who then swoop in to authenticate and further promote the false claims, by the power of the authority we have given to them.

It is very likely that the Bad Companies, on their own, without the support and cover from the captured, would have been shunned by now because of the damage to their reputations. Instead, the longevity of their dynasties and their continued success are propped up and carried forward by the third party validators (our government officials, regulators, judges and media moguls) like pallbearers in a funeral march.

The captured army has all the numbers and they hold the megaphone. This dominance can tip an undecided populace into consent and compliance and further marginalize the less powerful voices trying to uphold the actual truth.

In the same way the captured aid and abet the Bad Company, they also give the individual—us—support and cover to pass off responsibility for issues we don’t feel we have the capacity to deal with ourselves.

In 1961, as war criminal Adolf Eichmann was being tried for Nazi war crimes, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram devised a study in an attempt to explain the psychology of genocide. The experiments were intended to measure the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience.

The results of the experiments unexpectedly found that every participant would fully obey the instructions to administer electric shocks to other participants up to high level 300 volts, and 65% going all the way up to the maximum “Danger: Severe shock” at 450 volts.

The participants in Milgram’s experiment believe the authority will accept responsibility for what happens, so they don’t have to. We can consider if we similarly pass off important decision-making—for instance, of determining what is safe to eat or of supporting or opposing a genocide—to those who are positioned above us in the hierarchical organization of our system of government.

For Milgram’s experiment to work, the experimenter who gives the orders must be seen as a legitimate source of authority. In our relationship to the entities who govern our life, if we (implicitly or explicitly, consciously or unconsciously) deem them qualified to hold this power, this can detach us from our role as governor over what happens in our own life.

Therefore, if the authority is in place, regardless if their legitimacy is deserved or not, the authority can be (and many times has been) used as a tool to get others to accept harm, self-harm, or do harm to others.

Bernays said a century ago: “If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway”.

Understanding how our psychology displaces responsibility helps us grasp the seriousness of the even-greater problem when these authority figures are actually working for our enemy and against our best interests.

In all the campaigns we examine, from Gaza back to cigarettes, we can recognize who was evidently captured and how this affected the outcome of the campaign—the winners and losers.

It’s important to always keep in mind the subversion at play of what would naturally be a more humanistic and common sense approach to each situation, if the capture was not present. Our analysis must always compare what the people want or need to what the enemy and its army manifests for them.

The story of Capture by the Israel Lobby and the Military Industrial Complex goes like this:

The people want peace. Aside from the psychopaths and anyone who profits from the Military Industrial Complex, most people want peace. What might be an even more realistic framing is, the majority do not want their much-needed tax dollars spent on war.

What the enemy manifests is war, endless war. President Trump’s administration has (so far) bombed 8 countries, beating President Obama’s standing record of dropping 26,000 bombs in 7 countries.

The majority of the American people made it clear they supported a ceasefire in Gaza and the cessation of the United States’ financial support of that war. Because these views were coming not only from the majority of Democrats but also from burgeoning opposition inside the MAGA base, the leadership on both sides of the aisle who refused to meet those demands were outed in a much more identifiable way than ever before.

Through the lens of this issue, it’s been easy to see and accept how most of our politicians are under the influence of something other than an impassioned commitment to serve and protect the public welfare at home or innocent people anywhere.

The harm which resulted from this unpopular campaign is also clear. The Israeli government is accused of war crimes, including starvation as a method of warfare, by the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. When Netanyahu flew to the U.S. in September 2025, he had to alter his flight path out of fear of being arrested in European countries that signed on to the ICC’s statute1.

Yet—in America, the captured politicians still stuck to the false claim handed to them by the pro-Israel lobby who they keep allegiance to in exchange for campaign funding. (trackaipac.com)

Since October 7th, 2023 through today, these relentless claims continued—articulated here by Senate Foreign Relations Chair Jim Risch to the Senate on Day 591 of the war in Gaza: “This is the fault of a group of people. And that group of people is Hamas…I’ve heard them mention Israel several times. This is not Israel’s fault. I heard them mention us, the United States. This is not our fault.”

Decision-makers in the U.S. extend their deception beyond parroting Israel’s false claims, to speaking lies of their own, like denying responsibility for America’s participation. However, most everyone understands the fact that the U.S. supplies almost 70% of all Israel’s weapons imports, and in 2023 alone sent them 17.9 billion in military aid—so these deceptive statements now only serve to spotlight that these officials are speaking on behalf of their captors.

The captured can be recognized by the mantras:

Even though a full three-quarters of their party were demanding it, neither the DNC nor their Democratic leaders in Congress would oppose sending more military aid to Israel. Hakim Jeffries said in 2023 on CNN: “Israel is not conducting an ethnic cleansing campaign. Israel is not engaged in genocide” and never changed his stance, only repeated that we must stand with Israel due to our “shared values and shared interests”.2

In January 2024, President Biden’s Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, ignored the UN experts and the ICJ’s accusation of genocide as “meritless” and a distraction from our efforts in the region.3

Biden’s national security spokesperson John Kirby repeated the “meritless” denial. In this clip you can observe how no rational argument could penetrate the captured argument:

Ten months after these denials, ten months more of bombing, killing, and starvation, in October 2024, President Biden reaffirmed his support for Israel during a phone call with Netanyahu. The White House said in a statement, “The president affirmed his ironclad commitment to Israel’s security,” and said that Vice President Kamala Harris also joined the call. The administration also gave his approval of the Israeli offensive in Lebanon, which has killed more than 2,000 people and displaced over one million others.

And it continued on like this—our leadership’s denials + Israel’s siege on the Palestinian people—for another year. We all know the tragic story.

I am highlighting the Democrats here because in the 2020 campaign, 63 percent of Pro-Israel PAC contributions went to Democrats, half a million to over a million dollars per, in many cases.4 For many on the Left, on many issues, the dissonance can rear its head in certain perceptions that Dems are less captured, or in this case less controlled by Israel or the War Machine.

Those indebted to the powerful lobbies were consistently backed into the most ludicrous and despicable dark corners, trying to keep up the game of speaking to their constituents demands while avoiding condemnation of Israel.

Here’s a quick example to illustrate some of that crafty maneuvering:

A liberal record like Senator Amy Klobuchar’s can easily fall under the radar of scrutiny but the moves are important to watch, and remember.

As late as July of 2025, Klobuchar’s constituents were still accusing her of supporting a genocide as she had voted against both Bernie Sanders’ resolutions to ban the sale of arms to Israel, in November 2024 and again in April 2025. 150 protesters marched to her office, placing body bags outside her door.5 They were growing tired and angry with her pretense to care about the atrocities in Gaza while at the same time meeting with and posing next to Netanyahu, despite his arrest warrant (pictured here on July 11, 2025.)

(And we see you hiding back there, Cory Booker!)

Less than two weeks after her inclusion in this exclusive meeting and photo op with the accused war criminal, she gave the following speech:

So—did you notice what words were carefully left out of her speech: ISRAEL and GENOCIDE. Can you imagine how deliberately slippery you have to be to describe what she did without mentioning Israel—the source of the starvations she is crocodile-tearing up about? (As you can see in the Comments, most are not fooled and have not forgotten her stance before this late stage change of heart.)

A week after the speech she finally voted Yes to ban arms to Israel.

Maybe before Gaza this kind of hopscotch would work to confuse the public. Because now, at the end of almost two years of representing the people on this situation, after all the damage is done, Klobuchar can say “I told everyone it was unacceptable..I choked up publicly…I voted for an arms ban”. And for anyone not paying attention to every move, maybe she will now go forward with this new badge of courage.

Any of this may seem nit-picky. Yet in terms of the serious and direct consequences that result from politicians handcuffed by their capture like this—70,000 actual dead bodies and countless orphaned and limbless children—it is very much the real meat of the matter.

The shackling of American academia was perhaps the most overt display of Capture in all sectors.

The student protests which started at Columbia University in April of 2024 quickly turned into a nationwide showdown between students and administrators over pro-Palestine sentiment and the restrictions on free speech. In response, thousands of students were arrested, suspended, put on probation, blacklisted, and even expelled from colleges.

President Biden criticized much of the unrest across the country, saying “none of this is a peaceful protest.” And he vowed that it had not caused him to reconsider his policy in the Middle East.6

Despite the people’s right to free speech and assembly, things only got worse under the Trump administration. In lockstep with Israel’s need to quash any dissent against its campaign, Trump issued an executive order against U.S. universities which targeted antisemitism on campus and launched investigations at 60 schools.7

All the captured understand the relationship—if you go along with the agenda you get the money, if you oppose it you don’t. Trump’s withholding of billions of dollars in contracts and grants from the universities to pressure them to align with “his” agenda was just the most blatant illumination of the dynamic, but it is no different than how the game works elsewhere.

All the schools eventually complied with the demands. They would have to pay for damages from all the alleged anti-semitism and change their school policies to satisfy the pro-Israel agenda or their federal funding would be cut off. Universities settling these Title VI complaints with the Trump administration were coerced to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. This new de facto “hate speech code” labels all criticism of Israel as antisemitic. For example, you can compare American ICE agents behavior to Nazis, but it would be illegal to say that about Israeli actions in Gaza; you can call any other country a "racist endeavor", including our own (as we did all throughout 2020), but not Israel. (This letter from 104 human and civil rights organizations, including the ACLU, explains the dangers in the overly-broad definitions and their enforcement).

The Captured Media was equally conspicuous in their role as mouthpiece for false claims when it came to Gaza. The “authority” of Mainstream Media gives cover to the captured politicians and vice versa.

As with the excessive intervention on American college campuses, the current ideological takeover of the media landscape has put a huge spotlight on the overreach.

Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle Corporation and well-known Zionist, is widely considered to be one of the strongest supporters of Israel in the U.S. He is a major, long-term donor to organizations that support the Israeli military, with contributions totaling over $26 million to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF). Because he is one of the world’s wealthiest individuals, second only to Elon Musk, he is now on his way to becoming one of America’s most powerful media moguls.

Through his son David Ellison’s Skydance Media, the family has acquired the controlling stake in Paramount Global which includes Paramount Pictures, the CBS TV network and CBS News, Nickelodeon, BET, Comedy Central, Showtime, and MTV. They have a bid in to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, which would also add CNN and HBO to their portfolio. And you’ve probably heard, the Ellisons have, as of January, taken over TikTok U.S., securing control over the algorithm and user data.8

Israel has maintained a ban on independent, international journalists entering the Gaza Strip since the war began on October 7, which has obviously contributed to its control over media coverage of their actions there. This was a key part of Playbook tactic #1—to obscure the truth from the public.

Social media, most predominantly TikTok, was a rare and somewhat miraculous breach in Israel’s defensive line to protect all its false claims. The grassroots ad hoc pipeline of real stories and pictures from the Palestinians themselves allowed the world to understand more of the actual reality instead of relying on official reports from the Israeli Military alone.

The overzealous power move to completely seal up this watchdog pipeline in order to satisfy Israel only confirms to the world there is no limit and no check on the dominance of this lobby’s influence.

However, it is important to remember that it was the bias inherent in Mainstream Media to begin with that led audiences to brave “the fringes” of alternative media to find real journalism. Major television and newspaper content had been heavily skewing their coverage toward Israeli narratives in the first months of the war (as quantitative analysis proved). They were not showing the plight of the Gazans, and it was TikTok that leveled the playing field and shifted the tide. The gatekept version of the story MSM was presenting would likely not have produced the profound shift in opinion that managed to spread across the globe despite them.

By Spring of 2024, the legacy media headlines finally started to catch up. This piece from the New York Times: “Providing Both Bombs and Food, Biden Puts Himself in the Middle of Gaza’s War” were getting clear on the president’s stubborn loyalty.

Propublica gave the recap on the Biden Administration with their exposé: “A Year of Empty Threats and a “Smokescreen” Policy: How the State Department Let Israel Get Away With Horrors in Gaza” .

It was evident and documented that Biden had the power and the mandate of the people to pressure Israel to end its “retaliation” in Gaza. The majority pleaded for a ceasefire, but leadership only continued to veto this.

Yet, in the eulogy of his presidency, the liberal media still considered Biden’s legacy almost flawless.

Extolling Biden’s term in this light, while in the middle of the war he would not intervene on, is part of how those who control the narrative favor the falsehoods of the propaganda over the visible truth. This is the same extremely dangerous rewriting of reality by the same crowd who posthumously transformed a technical war criminal like Dick Cheney into a heroic symbol of resistance. It is by no means a stretch to say the Iraq War was Cheney’s brainchild. While President Biden never wavered in his support for Israel’s actions in Gaza and he successfully fought off the mounting resistance in his own base until he stepped down. If the reward for that level of fidelity to Israel gets the final stamp of “patriot”, “phenomenal president” and “selfless devotion” to the people of this country—we cannot imagine any subsequent administration feeling compelled to ever resist such servitude.

My favorite saying of last year, regarding Gaza, was the title from journalist Omar El Akkad’s award-winning book “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This”. This type of revisionist history may serve the rest of Congress in similar fashion, if say Senator Klobuchar ends up remembered as the one who cried on the senate floor over starving Palestinian babies, even though she, like most of her colleagues, has still not to this day been able to utter the word “genocide”.

Those who were watching the ball closely may remember who was on the wrong side of this piece of history and for how long, but if the captured have fulfilled their duty for the requisite amount of time—to stall and delay so the machine can run its course, transferring more power and territory and riches into the coffers of the captors—then the Pattern & Playbook succeed same as always and at the same rate. For as much as the people want peace, the enemy still manifests war after war, as if the manifestation is inevitable. Many might conclude it must be, since neither the voice of resistance nor phenomenal president nor heartfelt congressperson could stop it.

Since the “ceasefire” of October 11, 2025, Israel has killed at least 529 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 1,447. Just days ago, at least 32 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces during sustained airstrikes and artillery fire across the region. Women and children were as always included among the dead.

Today, February 3, 2026, the New York Times The Morning headline was: A Lifeline for Gaza, which covered the reopening of the Rafah crossing, which they described as an “obvious positive milestone”. What they left out of their reporting on the current situation in Gaza was any mention of the statistics above. They refer to the situation as “a fragile ceasefire”, but no explanation of why it is so fragile—because of all the death that keeps happening during it. How do you still define it as a ceasefire, in print, with no caveat, when you are aware of the hundreds killed and thousands wounded by the unceasing fire?? This is more of the amazing gymnastics of how to talk about Israel without talking about their worst crimes. This is done, consciously and tactically, to paint a slightly more acceptable version of the reality, which is in truth very unacceptable. It is “limited hangout” reporting—we told you something about the situation, just not everything. Which wouldn’t be bad journalism if the information wasn’t available, but it is. Drop Site News, who I will plug again, could somehow figure out how to cover this story of the Rafah reopening, while prefacing every article on the region with the number of Palestinians killed since the ceasefire (9 more killed last night), while clarifying that this milestone lifeline has allowed only five critical patients through. Again, we must recognize what is truth-seeking and truth-telling versus the NYT article which is spinning the truth, of the very same day, in characterizing the situation for its readers as “positive”, by omitting the death counts which make that characterization false. The devil is in the details (they leave out).

Last week, the Trump Administration bypassed Congress to rush $6 billion in arms sales to Israel. Democrats who decry their being sidestepped in this decision are the same ones who voted FOR more arms sales to Israel every time they were consulted. It’s all just a show and a transfer of blame up the chain of authority.

In case anyone thinks any of this sentiment is anti-Israel, let me clarify again, it is simply anti-war. We criticize them because they are the ones who are, and won’t stop, waging war. What the people continuously demand is peace in the Middle East. What the people of America desperately need is resources and attention to the problems we face here. What the elected leaders captured by the enemy work for instead is the exact inversion of that.

As I publish this, the world is in full spiral over the latest and largest Epstein file dump. All this news should not overshadow the essential examination of the war we are currently financing and again ignoring (I can’t yet call it an After Action Review, since the action has not ceased). On the contrary, all the information coming to light in each batch of files is the full exemplification of the capture tactic gone wild. Jeffrey Epstein was the ultimate captor. The entire world now understands clearly and undeniably the extent and the consequences of the enormous reach of his control and influence. The exposure of these relationships has not merely outed this vast network of players as soulless deviant criminals, but as soulless deviant criminals who by day are the drivers of the global elite agendas that rule our planet. Those agendas are the campaigns we focus on—the ones which cause all the enduring damage.

Those implicated are the biggest names in government, national intelligence, media, and Silicon Valley—Gates, Musk, Thiel, Lutnick, Trump, Clinton, the former prime minister of Israel Ehud Barak, and more—the individuals who gain profit and power off the continuation of the agendas. For decades they’ve worked tirelessly to cover the tracks of their dirty work by utilizing all the Playbook maneuvers, especially the capture of those who theoretically stand as the guardrails to stop a complete global takeover the likes of which we are experiencing.

As people pour over the evidence, the brazenness of all the debauchery is forcing confounding questions: Who allowed this to happen? Who protected all these men for so long? It’s obvious from all the communications that anyone who made it to billionaire elite status understood that if you wanted to have sex with underage girls, you could befriend Jeffrey Epstein. It was common knowledge. It means, everyone knew about it, and everyone covered it up. There were likely many individuals who were relying on someone somewhere, up the chain of authority, to do something about it. There were likely many individuals, captured by a system of corruption which fed them also, who didn’t rock the boat.

The real war is on, or so it seems. We can hope that the exposure signals that the jig is finally up for Them, some of them. But, as always, that all depends on Us. The watchdogs are succeeding to get out the information the people need to protect themselves. That crucial information is: here are the names of our opponents—the enemies of our human nature. While we strive to be Good, the enemy allows evil to flourish. We must have a sturdy layer of protection between us and them so that we do not—implicitly or explicitly, consciously or unconsciously—end up captured by the captured.

Remember the face of the participant in the Milgram experiment, as he looks in anguish to the man in the lab coat which he voluntarily granted authority to. Remember the repeated prompt that compels the participant to keep going—“the experiment requires you to continue…”

Are we granting any authority over our lives to anyone who does not deserve this all-important position? Are we looking to anyone beyond the highest authority—of God or conscience—when we flip a switch one way or the other? Is there any carelessness or thoughtlessness in our own actions—or lack of action—because we know the ones “in charge” will get the focus or blame? And do we ever, even when we know the authority makes such fatal mistakes, still defer to them, when in doubt.

I never put hope on the fantasy that the Bad Players of the system will be justly punished in this realm. I do have hope that the people can and will resist following their instructions any further.

+ The Captured allow evil to succeed. =

We are all in this together! I’m not the first to say it! See you next chapter….

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THE MATH:

If we don’t participate by thinking it through we remain unprotected for the next assault.

+ The powerful force of the PR campaign can disconnect us from our own survival instincts and our allegiance to Natural Law.

+ Their Pattern of deception and concealment of harm leads to addiction, disease and death.

+ We must understand and memorize Their Playbook.

+ We must use the wisdom gained from past mistakes.

+ Cognitive dissonance has led to errors in our reasoning.

+ We must defend ourselves against those we thought were defending us.

+ Until we disable the corrupt revolving door we have an active breach in our defense.

+ Our over-reliance on external systems undermines our ability to defend ourselves or others.

+ The genocide in Gaza has illuminated the Pattern & Playbook for all to see.

+ The tactic of using False Claims was effective on enough of the public to get us and keep us in Bad Wars for the past 70 years and counting.

+ The tactic of using False Claims was effective on enough of the public to get us to buy and use Bad Products that cause disease and death.

+ As the Watchdogs produce truth of the falsehoods, the opposition will bury and attack this evidence.

+ Bad Companies pledges to self-regulate obstruct actual protection of public welfare.

The internal 1969 Big Tobacco memo said it best: “Doubt is our product since it is the best way of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”1

The stories of our shared history, involving Bad Products and Bad Wars, confirm that the opposition’s strategy has worked effectively and that the results have been fatal. A very relevant question to ask ourselves is—where have any of these tactics worked to instill any or enough doubt in me, to where I was made less certain and less active in my own defense against the resulting harm?

By the 1940s and 1950s, as the epidemiological studies began to appear, cigarettes were recognized as the cause of the new lung cancer epidemic. Yet, despite lung cancer formerly being an extremely rare disease that physicians would only encounter “once in a lifetime”, in 1960 still only one-third of all US doctors believed that the case against cigarettes had been established.2 So, two-thirds of the opinion which matters most, to a public at risk, was still right where industry wanted them—wading in doubt.

Two months into the war in Gaza, half of Americans supported Israel’s false claim that the killing of civilians and cutting off food and supplies was only self-defense against a Hamas attack. Six months into the war, 42% of Americans were still wading in too much doubt to give an opinion. (This was just last year). That’s all the uncertainty about a situation the machine needs to keep running.

So, whenever we are feeling less than confident in our perception about any issue where there is harm to humans, what is also true (if corporate or military money is on the line anywhere) is that the opposition desperately needs you to feel uncertain and is spending millions of dollars daily to ensure that you don’t ever feel certain about the source of that harm. The strategy worked on doctors and citizens from cigarettes through opioids and is at work right now on the geopolitical and public health issues of today. There is no doubt that They are still utilizing a wealth of resources on the campaigns to confuse, there is no doubt that the tricks used are still highly effective at confusing the debate, and there has been little evidence to show where the Playbook has yet failed to work for them to achieve their goals.

The tactics only cease to work on us if we can recognize when they are present and where they are in play, can define and call them out, in order to avoid or counter each tactic, as it appears.

The reason the opposition needs to create an illusion of controversy is because there is likely already a natural consensus about the visible reality and the perceptions held by the public aren’t highly controversial. That inhaling smoke from tar would damage the lungs wasn’t hard to believe and the rising cases of lung cancer weren’t inherently illogical. For an entire century, the medical community had already concluded that opioids were too risky to prescribe because they were extremely addictive, so there was an existing general agreement that it was a danger to avoid. And no reasonable person was voluntarily disputing that bombing hospitals and refugee camps or blocking food from innocent children are clearly offensive acts. Any argument or debate on these issues would have to be manufactured and deliberately and carefully injected into the public dialog.

The Bad Companies know that their participation in the debate must remain hidden. The schemes invented by Big Tobacco’s PR firm understood that advertising ran the risk of exposing corporate self-interest. As Edward Bernays had demonstrated in the 1920s and 1930s, the best public relations work “left no fingerprints” and relied on scrupulous behind-the-scenes management of media.3

The trick is, Bad Companies hire their own debaters, but obscure the money trail between the parties. Bernays was the first to employ psychologists to issue reports that said his clients’ products were “good for you” and then present them as independent studies. In the 1940s, tobacco companies hired doctors and dentists to endorse their products in order to reduce public health concerns about smoking risks. In today’s news, more than 90% of physicians who endorsed a drug or medical device on X were paid by Big Pharma companies to do so.4

In the late 1980s Philip Morris developed a covert plan named the Whitecoat Project that involved funding apparently independent scientists to “resist and roll back smoking restrictions” and “restore social acceptability of smoking” and “sustain controversy”.

Scientists and groups funded by the food industry have inserted themselves into the debate on junk food to dispute whether the prevalence figures for obesity are correct, whether obesity actually causes disease, and whether foods like soft drinks cause harm. This study concludes that “The strongest current evidence is that reducing or eliminating SB (sugar-sweetened beverages) consumption would not have a large effect on the (body mass index) BMI distribution of children or adolescents.” With any studies offering conclusions like this which contradict more obvious or logical ones, you need to always scroll down to the bottom where they must disclose any conflicts of interest. For this study, it read: “The research center with which the authors are affiliated has received financial support from the Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo Inc that was unrelated to this project. MLS (one of the authors) later accepted a position with the American Beverage Association.”

Big Chemical also relied on several paid scientists, who helped 3M spin the data on the environmental impact of forever chemicals in the company’s favor, but these individuals never disclosed the millions of dollars of grant funding they received from the Bad Company. And then, these reassuring findings about their chemicals somehow made their way into the mainstream scientific literature.5

You can read this article in Scientific American detailing how Big Pharma undermines scientific objectivity through all the many ways it funnels large sums of money into the pockets of supposedly-independent medical researchers who are doing work that bears, directly or indirectly, on the drugs these firms are making and marketing. This current problem extends into the whole system—the granting institutions, the research labs, the journals, the professional societies, etc.

The heart of the public relations fake debate apparatus are the third party techniques: front groups, think tanks, lobby groups, and astroturfing.

The front group is a deceptive entity created by the Bad Company to promote their interests or engage in other activities while masking the true sponsor.

Of course the tobacco industry was the pioneer in using front groups to advance its cause. The Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC) was the first, carefully shaped by Hill & Knowlton in the 1950s to promote the industry’s viewpoint and attempt to control the scientific discourse about smoking and health.

The Center for Indoor Air Research was their fake research group created in the 1980s that worked successfully to extend the debate on second hand smoke, giving smokers more reasons not to cut back or quit, and persuading policymakers there was no need to implement smoking bans in public places. The Center was eventually shut down by the DOJ after being declared an industry creation set up to “fraudulently mislead the American Public” about the effects of secondhand smoke.

In 2017, there was the creation of The Foundation for a Smoke-Free World (FSFW). Reading how the “foundation” described itself—as “an independent, non-profit organization” that is “operated free from the control or influence of any third party” which “makes grants and supports medical, agricultural, and scientific research to end smoking and its health effects and to address the impact of reduced worldwide demand for tobacco,”6 you would never know that it was in fact a third party group funded by Philip Morris International to the tune of 1 billion USD. In 2021, FSFW’s former Director of Digital and Social Media blew the whistle on the coordinated activities with its funder, stating that the front organization only reinforced tobacco companies’ marketing themes, downplayed the health risks of e-cigarettes and promoted them through programs aimed at teens, including pushing vaping products as a supposedly “healthier” alternative to cigarettes.7

The American Dietetic Association (ADA), which in its own words is devoted to “improving the nation’s health,” promotes a series of Nutrition Fact Sheets. Industry sources pay $20,000 per fact sheet to the ADA, take part in writing the documents, and then the ADA promotes them through its journal and on its website. Some of these fact sheets are “What’s a Mom to Do: Healthy Eating Tips for Families” sponsored by Wendy’s; “Cocoa and Chocolate: Sweet News” sponsored by the Hershey Center for Health and Nutrition; “Adult Beverage Consumption: Making Responsible Drinking Choices” in connection with the Distilled Spirits Council; and “The Benefits of Chewing Gum” sponsored by the Wrigley Science Institute.

In 2011, Monsanto created the Genetic Literacy Project (GLP) as its key industry partner in the plan to discredit the IARC scientists’ report on glyphosate. The GLP’s political mission is clearly stated in its tax filings: to “prevent legislative overreach in genetic engineering,” and one of its top funders is Bayer. GLP, who claims it is the “most visited biotechnology focused web source in the world” posted a litany of articles about the IARC, several of them attacking the scientists as frauds and liars who are driven by profit and vanity.

Johnson & Johnson used their industry trade organization, the Cosmetic, Toiletry, and Fragrance Association, to influence global public health agencies to avoid regulation and defend themselves in their talc/asbestos lawsuits. In 1976, this association developed a specification for a new “product” called “cosmetic talc.” Through this specification, the association made up a distinction between “cosmetic talc” and “industrial talc” which created a regulatory loophole, even though both come from the same ores, containing asbestos, and were no different in terms of health risks.

In 1996, the same year Purdue Pharma launched OxyContin, the influential and supposedly-independent medical advocacy organization the American Pain Society (APS) introduced a new term and the concept that pain should be treated as the “fifth vital sign”. This enormous shift in diagnosing meant that during every doctor visit, as part of the routine check of the traditional four vital signs (temperature, blood pressure, heart rate and breathing), the physician would also be required to screen each patient for pain, regardless of their situation. This new component of doctor-patient evaluation came directly from the APS and changed the pain game for a very crucial twenty years. Doctors said the policy resulted in patients in effect writing their own prescriptions because medics faced disciplinary action, including ethics hearings, if they did not satisfy demands for pain relief (with opioids) even in cases where it endangered patients. The “Society” was forced to close in 2019 after numerous lawsuits and a US Senate report accused them of being a pawn of the pharmaceutical industry for its prominent role in fueling the opioid crisis.8

So—when it comes to creating the amount of doubt required for the people to either believe or fail to oppose the false claims, there is always going to be some very calculated triangulation. APS creating a new category for pain or J&J changing the definition of talc is the premeditated chess move which sets up the next one in their agenda. These are decades-long games the Bad Industries are playing. (I recommend this read on the “dark history of Bayer chemicals” to see how far back these programs go.) The move you see in front of you now (if you see it) has been preceded by many other structural moves, paving the way, inserting bridges and removing obstacles, to prime the environment for a smooth and stealth run to their intended finish line.

Each dishonest agenda has multitudes of third parties all doing their part to pave that path. Lobby groups and think tanks are crucial members of the team used to instill “bank-rolled denial” and sew the seeds of confusion across the field. Lobby groups pour millions into politicians’ campaigns to ensure they promote industry-friendly policies. When a corporation wants to obscure lobbying to government, they can instead fund think tanks which serve as a middle man, or launderer, within the agenda to influence policy and debate. Most think tanks do not disclose who funds them, so the link to the Bad Company can remain hidden.

(I’ve included at the end of this chapter a list of some great resources for uncovering front groups and the undisclosed financial relationships between corporations and public-facing associations.)

The shadowy network which spreads out from the front groups is made up of all the astroturf operations—the orchestrated public relations campaigns which appear to be led by grassroots groups when they are actually industry constructs.

The American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) is one of the most flagrant in the astroturfing game. Their name should always trigger a red flag since they literally campaign against every watchdog who push what they call “corporate conspiracy theories.” Almost 400 scientists have joined ACSH to “bring the message of sound science to consumers, via the media”^. A quick glance through their wikipedia will show you just how “sound” their scientific arguments are across all our favorite Bad Industries.

GMO Answers is a seemingly-scientific website billed as a forum where consumers can get straight answers from independent experts about GMOs and pesticides, while it is actually a marketing campaign funded by the pesticide industry.

Monsanto has led an array of “grassroots” attacks on any talk of regulation against their poisonous products. The “Freedom to Farm” campaign was a fake farmers’ movement against a glyphosate ban in Europe. While Monsanto’s name did not appear anywhere on Freedom to Farm materials, the operation was fully staffed and supported by PR firms working for the Bad Company. In addition to the campaign team, they had 56 “trained operatives” in the field recruiting farmers to oppose glyphosate restrictions.

The industry similarly concocts a “freedom for women” framing in the pesticide debate. A particularly perverse tool used in the corporate attack is the recruiting of women to go after “organic moms” and other concerned citizens who are trying to cut down on exposures of glyphosate and other poisons. Podcasts and books like Food Bullying, and front groups like The Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) aim to encourage women to ignore the “alarmist” concerns about chemicals in food.

In this Excel spreadsheet titled “Project Spruce: Carey Gillam Book,” you can get a good idea of how much astroturf effort Monsanto engages in, utilizing multiple front groups, just to to generate negative reviews of a single book—Gillam’s Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science9.

And, when California proposed an initiative in 2012 to label genetically modified foods, Monsanto and Dupont’s $45 million opposition campaign bombarded the state with misleading messages amplified by a wide range of seemingly independent third parties—universities, professors, and scientists that claimed expertise on matters of food, health, nutrition, and science—to successfully defeat the measure and block citizens from the right to know what is in the food they eat.

The result of all their obsessive efforts, all hidden behind the smoke screen of independent opinion, is that glyphosate is still not banned in Europe or here at home, despite all the real science from real scientists not on the company payroll.

The multiple flanks of their army—from the lobbying we know all about to the line-up of seemingly-trustworthy groups that slip under our radar—create an echo chamber of support for their products, building a consensus that just seems to “exist” in the public discourse. Without our own obsessive efforts to investigate each actor, trace every funding resource, or connect each name on the board of directors or journal publication to their Bad Industry, this loud and present argument against the actual truth about the harm can seem legitimate. Especially when the “science” we are given on an issue is written by the industry.

Ghostwriting is when Bad Companies employ uncredited authors to write manuscripts or articles that appear in peer-reviewed medical journals under the name of academic researchers. This practice goes beyond simple drafting of material; it provides an academic façade for research that has been designed by the corporation.

You can read the article entitled “The afterlife of a ghost-written paper: How corporate authorship shaped two decades of glyphosate safety discourse”, which illustrates the ruinous impact of a single ghost-written study by Monsanto to support claims of the safety of glyphosate. Despite later revelations of its ghostwritten nature in the Monsanto Papers, the paper has not been retracted and continues to be cited as if it were legitimate science.

Big Pharma companies in particular have constructed a vast and profitable ghostwriting industry, which carries immense risk for public health as the falsely-authored papers influence physicians to prescribe treatments that are more expensive, less effective, or high risk.

Merck’s Vioxx scandal exposed the fact that in 16 out of 20 of the drug’s clinical‐trial reports, Merck employees were listed as authors on manuscript drafts, but the published study in the journals listed an academic as the lead author. Merck also hired PR companies to write review articles, 50 of which listed only academic scientists as authors. These are ghost-written articles promoting a deadly drug which would eventually be pulled from the market due to 55,000 premature deaths and 100,000 heart attacks. As opposed to real articles from actually-independent scientists who would not have downplayed clinical trial results showing that Vioxx increased the risk of heart attack by 400 percent.

This story from the New York Times illustrates how pharmaceutical companies’ ghostwriting influenced US Congress during the 2009 Affordable Healthcare Act debate, where 22 Republicans and 20 Democrats cited pro‐biotech articles that were authored by lobbyists working for Genentech to support aspects of healthcare reform which benefitted the company, including writing certain specific provisions to be given to the FDA.

Ghostwriting has also been used to advance the cause of disease mongering, to create a fear or a “need” for drugs where there is none. This occurs as a result of pharmaceutical marketing creating indications specifically to increase prescriptions, such as “social anxiety disorder,” “pediatric bipolar disorder,” “premenstrual dysphoric disorder” and the like.10 Medical PR firms dream up a previously unrecognized “disease”, then manufacture new treatments for “sufferers” of these conditions and then ghostwrite manuscripts to sell the idea to prescribers. Because of this, patients are continuously prescribed medications where potential for harm outweighs the benefit, as the benefits were fabricated in the public relations offices. This Big Pharma practice markets disease for what are merely ordinary conditions of life, which has led to the disastrous overmedication of America. In 2009 the number of prescriptions dispensed was 3.95 billion, while in 2021 the number of prescriptions increased to 6.47 billion.11

We are all out here trying to survive. While any of the above can seem like a slew of statistics we don’t want to dwell on, it’s hard to think of anything more relevant to our survival than addressing the currently active attacks on our health and well-being. What is a more pressing threat than a carcinogenic pesticide that 97% of us have in our urine or the carcinogenic fluorocarbons that 99% of us have in our blood—at this very moment—which are proven (by non-industry funded science) to cause the long list of diseases our population is afflicted by? I personally have a long list of other issues that are important to me. But I’d need to attend to those after securing protection from poison in the food I eat and toxins in the water I use. How can we fight against or for anything else if our own body is being continually infiltrated by these most powerful enemies?

Because the Playbook is succeeding on all fronts, 81% of North Americans are still unaware of glyphosate, the world’s most used pesticide12. Only half of Americans have heard of PFAS, only 11% are aware that their community has been exposed to them and 97% still do not believe their drinking water has been impacted, when it has13. The games of deception our attackers play keep from us the truth we need to survive.

The question arises: how can we determine the truth from the lies, at this stage of the high-level disinformation game? Both the PR campaigners and the (truth-tellers) accuse the other of spreading fake news and using junk science. I’m not professing this discernment is an easy task, but I’d like to argue that it should be getting easier, if we understand The Pattern.

When the specific questions arise: Will vapes help me quit cigarettes like that prestigious-sounding “foundation” claimed? Do farmers need glyphosate to combat hunger like the altruistic-sounding “Freedom to Farm movement” claims? Is my child’s lack of focus pediatric bipolar disorder like the official-sounding “academy”suggests as opposed to all the misguided “nutrition” I’m feeding him?

Those might be genuine quandaries if we had no previous experience to draw from. But, if we are connecting the dots and learning from past mistakes, it should take more than the fancy titles of front groups to lead us astray from our logical reasoning on these issues.

There are limitless mysteries in our universe that we still don’t understand and have not come to definitive conclusions on, where we are forced to remain humble in our ignorance. But, when dealing with industries who have a long history of repetitive behavior already proven to be harmful or criminal, we can allow ourselves a bit more confidence in our comprehension of these matters. In 1986, when the surgeon general issued its report concluding that secondhand smoke caused disease, it only confirmed what people could intuitively ascertain with their own senses—if smoking is unhealthy for the smoker, it’s likely unhealthy for anyone else who breathes in their clouds of smoke. But the Pattern & Playbook somehow forced us to wipe the slate clean after the first conclusion and start the game all over, implementing the exact same litany of tactics used on the public to obscure the reality and instill doubt in the first round. And then we inconceivably wiped the slate clean again to introduce vapes this round.

Like in the hypothetical debate over how tall I am, it could present a similar conundrum of who to believe if there are many important and loud voices claiming to be certain, until you realize that you can discern by your own sense of sight that I am far more 5’8” than 10’. In our post-truth society, there will now always be different factions of people saying the opposite of the other which can lead us to the defeated resignation of “who can say?”. Yet, much of the time, we can say. Because by understanding the historical pattern and thinking through it, we still have “eyes to see”.

+ Bad Companies manufacture doubt and controversy to keep us from the Truth. =

RESOURCES:

• A great resource to suss out who is on the take and for how much is Open Payments, a website which collects and publishes information about financial relationships between Pharma companies (referred to as “reporting entities”) and certain health care providers (referred to as “covered recipients”).

• Open Secrets reveals which industry is giving money to which politicians at every level of government and educates on how this influences the policies they enact.

• A list of Professional Associations, Charities, and Industry Front Groups

• A list of front groups on the Bayer-Monsanto payroll

• Naomi Oreskes and Eric M Conway’s Merchants of Doubt

• David Stuckler and Karen Siegel’s Sick Societies: Responding to the global challenge of chronic disease

• Nicholas Freudenberg’s Lethal but Legal.

AND! — Here is an exciting update to show we are right over the target, this New York Times article from last week: A Study Is Retracted, Renewing Concerns About the Weedkiller Roundup. The Mainstream Media has (just) officially discovered, 25 years after publication, that the landmark research paper on the safety of glyphosate was ghostwritten by Monsanto. This, as cited above, was discovered by watchdogs long ago, but we can hope this momentum forces the EPA to reassess their unwavering approval of the herbicide.

AND! — Just a few days ago the watchdogs and truth-tellers had a big win against Bad agrochemical companies, removing that rider Bayer wanted from the congressional appropriations bill that would have given pesticide makers immunity from being sued for the disease and death they cause.

We are all in this together! I’m not the first to say it! See you next chapter….

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THE MATH:

If we don’t participate by thinking it through we remain unprotected for the next assault.

+ The powerful force of the PR campaign can disconnect us from our own survival instincts and our allegiance to Natural Law.

+ Their Pattern of deception and concealment of harm leads to addiction, disease and death.

+ We must understand and memorize Their Playbook.

+ We must use the wisdom gained from past mistakes.

+ Cognitive dissonance has led to errors in our reasoning.

+ We must defend ourselves against those we thought were defending us.

+ Until we disable the corrupt revolving door we have an active breach in our defense.

+ Our over-reliance on external systems undermines our ability to defend ourselves or others.

+ The genocide in Gaza has illuminated the Pattern & Playbook for all to see.

+ The tactic of using False Claims was effective on enough of the public to get us and keep us in Bad Wars for the past 70 years and counting.

+ The tactic of using False Claims was effective on enough of the public to get us to buy and use Bad Products that cause disease and death.

+ As the Watchdogs produce truth of the falsehoods, the opposition will bury and attack this evidence +

I almost could not summon the strength to write about this piece of Playbook strategy because the definition of self-regulation is just too ludicrous, given what we know and what we’ve seen:

Corporate self-regulation is when a company or industry voluntarily creates and enforces its own rules and standards, rather than waiting for government mandates. This can involve setting codes of conduct, monitoring compliance, and establishing best practices to address challenges, improve public image, and ensure ethical behavior. While sometimes viewed as an alternative to government oversight, self-regulation often works alongside it, providing a flexible way for industries to be responsive to new issues and stakeholder concerns.

Lolllll! Yet, it is not a joke, it’s 100% real and true and is our current system. As laughable as it is, conceptually, it is of course one of the major contributors to the gaping hole problem in our concept of personal defense and so we must understand the system fully in order to properly rebuild this structure ourselves.

There are certain elements of logic baked into our shared intelligence and one of those is you don’t let the fox guard the henhouse. If you do, it will be a massacre. We are living through that very massacre. After the last century of heartless Bad Companies creating products that harm and kill humans, our structure of security from all that still implausibly relies on their goodness. Yet, not once have they shown any evidence of the promised ethical behavior, or shown any concern for people or the planet.

For the past fifteen years, the government has allowed Boeing to conduct its own inspections related to the manufacturing and safety of its airplanes. During that time, government reports, experts, and whistleblowers have issued more than a dozen warnings that the self-inspection program has led to serious production and safety issues. During much of that period, federal regulators shifted an ever-larger amount of the plane-certification process over to Boeing, even as the plane manufacturer cut production corners and promised to focus on “removing layers that help us be faster.”

You’ll never guess—Boeing’s self-regulation failed. And you’ll never guess the reasons—the failure was due to a fatal combination of prioritizing profits over safety, inadequate oversight, and a corporate culture that ignored quality control issues. This led to critical flaws like the software on the 737 MAX being implemented without adequate pilot training or FAA knowledge, which led to two deadly crashes which killed 346 passengers.1 In the aftermath, ongoing quality lapses and whistleblowers’ accounts suggest that the self-inspection program continues to be deeply flawed.

This fantasy that a Bad Actor can exhibit self-control for the good of public welfare exists outside of the corporate arena as well. One of the most frustrating agonies of witnessing the starvation in Gaza, for instance, was the conundrum that the world’s major relief groups could not get food and essentials into the Gaza Strip to feed the hungry, when they had the experience and expertise to accomplish just that. This is because the responsibility had been given over to the fox itself—the Israeli military. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) was set up by Israel and the US to bypass the traditional aid system, promising to “feed civilians in desperate need”. Once in charge of the food distribution, they reduced the UN’s 400 distribution sites down to 4 sites. Three months after the GHF took over, a famine was declared in Gaza City. The reality we now know, affirmed by the UN and its partners, was that the system also channelled desperate people into unsafe militarized zones. According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, this self-policing mechanism led to the killing of over 2,000 Palestinians and the wounding of over 15,000 others while waiting for aid. A literal massacre. But what else would we expect from giving control over survival essentials to the very source of the region’s destruction?

Some other stories of corporate self-regulation somehow not succeeding:

The Enron scandal of the early 2000s highlighted a catastrophic weakness of corporate governance which allowed executives to engage in accounting fraud and conceal debts, creating false profits and misleading the public and employees. The energy giant’s board also waived ethics rules and ignored internal warnings, demonstrating that even a corporation’s highest internal checks can fail when driven by a desire to deceive.

You may remember Bernie Madoff, the American criminal financier who masterminded the largest known Ponzi scheme in history (and remarkably, the last American I can remember actually going to jail for any corporate crime, almost 20 years ago). A former board member of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), the self-regulatory organization that oversees brokers in the U.S., Madoff ran all his schemes under their watch. Part of the farce is that the industry likes to publicly pretend that they are very dogged by the scrutiny of their own industry’s oversight, by praising its strength and vigor. Madoff boasted, “in today’s regulatory environment, it’s virtually impossible to violate rules…and this is something that the public really doesn’t understand…It’s impossible for a violation to go undetected.” This claim was refuted by any honest assessor, including the industry whistleblower Harry Markopolos who tried to warn the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for decades (but was only dismissed), when he described the self-regulatory rules as “broken every day, every hour; and everybody knew about it and nobody seemed to care.”’

Same industry, different schemes were rampant in the previously discussed 2008 financial crisis, which was the result of the entire industry largely left to police itself. The result was a proliferation of risky and deceptive practices and a general disregard for the public interest. This failure of self-regulation contributed significantly to the worldwide market collapse and a quarter of American families losing at least 75% of their wealth.2

In the mid-2010s, it was revealed that Wells Fargo employees had been creating millions of fraudulent accounts without customer consent. For years, the company’s internal controls failed to stop the misconduct, which was deeply embedded in the company culture. It was only after a public outcry and external investigations that the company faced scrutiny, fines, and federal restrictions. But, in June 2025, the Federal Reserve lifted the restrictions which they say marks a turning point in the bank’s long effort to recover from one of the most damaging scandals in recent financial history. Fingers crossed they’ve had a complete change of “heart” and can now be trusted to self-regulate once more!

For the industries who affect our physical health, self-regulation means they have in-house scientists to do their in-house studies. Yet we know that Dupont, 3M, Monsanto, and a long list of Pharma companies chose to do some studies but chose not to do others suggested by these scientists, and did not publish or share the disturbing results from any of the studies proving adverse effects. And we can never know how many in-house problems exist beyond the ones we’ve found out about.

Because Dupont executives were allowed to do the cost-benefit analysis according to their profit-driven standards, they made a conscious and rational decision to pollute. They understood the pollution violated environmental rules and carried legal risk, as well as of course health risks, but they were weighing the potential benefit to shareholders against the potential costs of removing PFOAs—all related to the probability of being caught. Abatement (the removal of the toxic chemicals) was relatively cheap and could have prevented the ensuing health problems to people and legal and reputational damages to the company. But, DuPont chose to continue using PFOA—and in fact to use twice as much of it. Honestly, my rational brain still can’t compute their decision to sicken humans when they could have easily corrected but this article attempts to explain the corporate calculus for why the toxic polluting was somehow better for them.

For Monsanto, the reason the International Agency for Research on Cancer was finally able to declare that glyphosate products were probably carcinogenic is that it avoided data from industry-funded studies. In contrast, the EPA allows the Bad Company to submit their own unpublished research and so it can continue to conclude that glyphosate is safe for humans.

In just one of many Big Pharma’s examples, we can scratch our heads wondering how no authority could know about asbestos in baby powder for over 50 years. The answer is self-regulation. Proper scrutiny of the product was delayed all that time because Johnson & Johnson was submitting insufficient and biased company data. One independent test from outside regulation would have detected it.

It does continue to make one marvel in awe at how little our own government regulatory system affects all of this. When it came to the opioid crisis, by fall of 2000, the problem had “grown to epidemic proportions”. In November 2000, federal, state, and local law enforcement joined forces to try and tackle the problem. They issued a warning letter to Purdue in 2000 and then again in 2003 about their false claims regarding OxyContin. During this “warning” time, the number of prescriptions of OxyContin went from around 300,000 where it was in the late 90s to more than 14 million in 2001 and 2002. Purdue’s sales went from $44 million in 1996 to $3 billion in the years after they received these letters. The best FDA could do, evidently, was to ask the Bad Company to pretty please self-correct this issue resulting in all this addiction and death. It would not be until May 2007 that Purdue settled with the DOJ for some of their millions and it would be another 12 years until they stopped manufacturing the drug.

The food and beverage industry has used self-regulation for many years to “message” concern for public welfare and to position itself as part of the solution to high and rising prevalence of obesity and other diseases. They successfully avoid or delay adoption of evidence-based policies that could actually lead to greater public health benefit and instead implement initiatives that have consistently proven to be vague, lacking accountability, and ultimately produce negligible positive impact. It’s one big scam so that they can continue marketing junk food to children and sell calorie-dense foods in schools which is robbing future generations of their right to a happy, healthy life. Unhealthy diets are the leading cause of major noncommunicable diseases worldwide, including obesity, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes.

Many of the Bad Industries use an especially comical system in self-regulation called GRAS (“generally recognized as safe”) for adding chemicals to the food supply. This loophole lets companies add new, potentially harmful additives and other substances to our food without undergoing any FDA safety review. It is a voluntary notification system. Companies can self-declare their chemicals as safe and never even inform the FDA of their existence, nor make their data public. And even if a company chooses to voluntarily notify the agency, it can withdraw the submission for review if the FDA starts asking too many questions about the company’s safety data—shutting down the review! Pretty sweet.

More than 10,000 chemicals, some of which are potentially toxic, are allowed in cereal, snacks, meat, drinks and many other types of food sold in the U.S. Almost 99% of food chemicals introduced since 2000 were green-lighted for use by the Big Food and Big Chemical companies who sell them rather than properly reviewed by the FDA. Many of these widely used chemicals are associated with major health harms, including increased risk of cancer, developmental harm and hormone disruption.

Biotechnology developers like Monsanto-Bayer also used the GRAS trick, which they refer to as “voluntary consultation”, for all bioengineered seeds and new genetically modified foods. Instead of being required to undergo mandatory pre-market safety testing for each new product, the policy required only a consultation (as opposed to actual scientific review) with the FDA, if they felt like it. They’ve only felt like doing this one time in the last decade, but they’ve used GRAS for 756 new unknown chemicals added to the food supply since the year 2000.3

You can forward to 22:35m in this documentary The World According To Monsanto to hear FDA’s rationale that genetically engineered foods were not “materially different” from real food and therefore did not require special regulation, which quite deliberately ignores any potential risks of the new technology.

Our current HHS is finally taking on this ridiculousness and attempting to reform or perhaps permanently close the GRAS loophole, as well as creating some post-market review process for existing chemicals never before reviewed for safety. They will surely face a formidable Goliath as they go up against the Food + Chemical Bad Companies.

In the meantime, here are a few resources from one of the best food Watchdogs—Environmental Working Group:

https://www.ewg.org/foodscores/

https://www.ewg.org/consumer-guides/ewgs-dirty-dozen-guide-food-chemicals-top-12-avoid

Using similar methodology as in the tactic discussed in last chapter—the limited hangout—corporations will attempt to make a public relations show of regulating some of their behavior, in the hope of extending the potential for them to continue selling the rest of their harmful products. When real regulation in the form of an all-out ban is looming, many manufacturers will use the preemptive “signal” of self-regulation to try to thwart stricter government rules.

JUUL, known as the biggest culprit in the youth e-cigarette epidemic, halted in-store sales of some of its sweet and fruity flavors just before the FDA was finally proposing restrictions of flavored cigarettes. But, the vaping giant continued selling one of its most popular flavors with young people: mint. And if you think their self-regulation of mango and cucumber flavors was an effective safety measure for anyone, I’ll refer you to the article from this year entitled Disposable E-Cigarettes More Toxic Than Traditional Cigarettes which points to a new study highlighting more hidden risk in these products—hazardous levels of neurotoxic lead and carcinogenic nickel and antimony. The researchers stress the need for urgency in enforcement while “the ever-changing complexity of the industry makes it too complex to realistically police, and easy for brands to evade regulation” according to this NPR article on why it’s still so easy for teens to buy the deadly e-cigarettes, despite the FDA’s stern warning letters sent to 200 retailers selling them. I know you are as shocked as I am to learn that these warning letters have not turned out to be an effective measure to protect the children!

Regular cigarettes had its own version of this PR ruse called the “We Card” campaign, launched 30 years ago. When faced with legislation, regulation, or litigation that they knew would actually reduce smoking, they launched their own so-called youth prevention campaigns designed to give the appearance of effort and concern but without any real substance. The tobacco companies’ own documents reveal that these retailer ID checks were merely part of their ongoing efforts to convince policymakers not to enact any policies and programs that actually reduce smoking. The industry has never once been able to produce evidence that any of its self-regulatory measures prevent kids from smoking or helps smokers quit.

So now we bring our attention to the present, and the crucial near-future, as we currently traverse the wild west of self-regulation within the Artificial Intelligence industry.

President Trump revoked the previous Administration’s executive orders on AI, replacing them with a call to “remove barriers to American leadership in artificial intelligence.”

Among the current administration’s initial actions in deregulating this industry is a Regulatory Freeze which halts all new rule proposals until approved by newly appointed agency heads. And the most nonsensical, The 10-to-1 Deregulation Initiative, which says that for every new rule, regulation, or guidance an agency announces, the agency must also identify a minimum of 10 existing rules, regulations, or guidance to be repealed.

And the headline from this week, Trump says he’ll sign an executive order restricting states’ ability to regulate AI is the most unnerving move to date to remove any barrier of protection against all the novel and unstable technology. States have been previously showing significant, bipartisan pushback against federal attempts to preempt their authority to regulate AI and protect their citizens—because their constituents (that’s US) have been very vocal about the potential dangers.

Tech companies are increasingly crafting their own self-imposed ethical guidelines around the use of artificial intelligence. Do we believe the Silicon Valley oligarchs are going to use all this new technology responsibly? Here’s a few videos to hear from the most powerful of that tiny handful of AI CEOs, those with hands on the levers of our destiny:

Questions like, “Can this AI make weapons of mass destruction?” beget answers like “Right now we’re at the stage of figuring out—can these models help someone make one of those (biological weapons)?” The answer from Anthropic’s Dario Amodei was definitely not “NO”, it was instead a rationalization of the weaponization potential: “If the model can help make a biological weapon, that’s usually the same capabilities the model could use to help make vaccines.” So, it all balances out. And these couple of guys will do all that benefit-risk analysis within their private companies. The episode ends with the statement: “Congress hasn’t passed any legislation that would require AI developers to conduct safety testing. It’s largely up to the companies and their leaders to police themselves”.

And here is one of the most disturbing interviews I’ve ever watched, with the CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman, considering the incredible impact this young man now has over the future of civilization. When asked basic questions about the moral considerations built into ChatGPT, you just need to watch him answer because I cannot do justice to the weakness and thoughtlessness of his responses.

• (This interview has been watched by 2.4 million viewers, but I know some people get offended by the interviewer. I’m hoping we have evolved a little passed self-limiting content because of an individual personality. I’ve learned not to care as much about whose asking the questions, unless I discern they are being biased or deceptive, as I do that the questions get asked. Because in this case, these are the precise questions I want asked. And I’m extremely grateful they were because the answers were massively informative. By now you’ve probably guessed that I really value the importance of thoroughly understanding the opposition.)

The problems with fast-tracking anything without adequate study and regulation are completely illuminated by Sam Altman’s “hmm, haven’t thought about that yet” vibe. He’s pondering and wrestling with, major, MAJOR questions of safety and morality and ethics, after the technology has been adopted and while it is being utilized by 700 million active users every day. Honestly bone-chilling to watch how casually he admits, “I don’t actually worry about us getting the big moral decisions wrong—but maybe we will get those decisions wrong too…”

It is very precarious—the “coulds” and “mights” and “perhaps” and “we can’t say yet” and “the trajectory could change and we’ll have to adapt to that” and my favorite from Amodei—”we are thinking hard about how to mitigate these models, than can design bioweapons, from engineering another Covid-style pandemic”. Thinking = in the process of = have not completed this process yet—when the product has already been released and is following its numerous trajectories.

One of those worse-case projections is already the basis for one of the current lawsuits against OpenAI. This most tragic trajectory is not a future hypothetical concern but the first but surely not the last actual real life fatality resulting from ChatGPT guidance.

Self-regulation is theoretically set up to empower industries to take ownership of their own standards and practices. That’s great, in theory. This does not work in the real world if the company is Bad.

There has always been a push from the Libertarian-minded for less government interference in our lives and in our capitalist system, from the Ayn Randian type of laissez-faire capitalists all the way to current progressive-Democrat “Abundance” types who are now formerly declaring that deregulation is required to achieve growth and innovation. And much of all this I can relate to, theoretically and philosophically, as a “release the creative energy of individuals” type gal. The pitch for industry self-regulation is always that it offers this “sensible” middle path that provides accountability without excessive government oversight.

But—because of the reality of our lived experience, we can’t afford to solely navigate by these hopeful ideals. We’ve been burned—many, many times. So, are we able to describe the new and improved oven mitt we now wear in this reality?

We may now be better able to point out which companies are Bad, like we’ve been able to do with Big Tobacco for decades, but I’ll reiterate this has not yet altered or limited any of the trajectories toward bad consequences. There are small arms of the watchdog family working tirelessly to get harmful products better regulated or removed from market, and many more of we the people are understanding the dangers and demanding more answers. But at present, both systems of government regulation and industry self-regulation are giving us only a false claim of protection.

Letting companies with multiple felonies or hundreds of thousands of criminal lawsuits govern their own oversight is ridiculous. Big Tobacco removing fruity flavored cigarettes but continuing to sell minty flavors is ridiculous. The Agrochemical argument that genetically modified laboratory food is “substantially equivalent” to natural food, asserting they have the same properties despite the DNA splicing, is ridiculous. Letting the future of humanity’s morality rest on the hunched shoulders of a sleep-deprived Sam Altman is ridiculous. It’s all so ridiculous that we can’t even deign to pay attention to it, like that dumb movie getting so much dumber that we just have to walk out of the theater.

Why waste our time watching such a weak plot so full of holes? They’re not even trying to spackle over them. The answer is because this plot we are watching, or not watching, is our actual existence. And those holes—those false claims—those lies—are causing tremendous damage. They don’t become less dangerous because their ridiculousness is obvious. If walking out of the theater fixed the holes, then that would be a wise move. But the plot continues, as will the damage, whether we feel it deserves our attention or not. We can laugh at it, we can roll our eyes at it, we can refuse to dumb ourselves down to treat it seriously—and we will still be technically fooled by it and most definitely harmed by it, because none of those actions address the problem.

The “everything is broken; we might as well give up” mindset is the underlying presupposition of our current personal defense strategy. If all we can do is throw up our arms in disgust—They continue their winning streak and our kids don’t have a chance. But, that’s not all we can do.

Going through all the years of all the tricks in the opposition’s long undefeated run may seem repetitive—(It is! My point!)—yet, tedious or not, it has to be the foundation for our defensive structure. We have to fully know and understand the moves of our adversaries before we can create countermoves. Knowing some of them but not all of them means They still achieve their goals despite us being keen to a few limited parts of their scheme. Just like playing any board game—you don’t just start moving pieces around before you’ve thoroughly read all the rules. The Bad Companies know the rules backwards and forwards, and how to break them, and how to keep us from reading them. We’ve got to acknowledge that the overload of stupidity is another tactic to keep us from reading and assimilating to the real rules of the game.

In the war in Gaza, for instance, up until very recently most casual observers perceived the dangers of the situation to be Hamas, a terrorist organization, and the Israeli military’s overly aggressive retaliation, as we could see the visible evidence of harm from both. But now, the perceived dangers also include the unrestrained power of the Israel Lobby over American decision-makers and influencers. What was once overlooked and ignored in the small print of the rules of that game, this perfectly-legal component of our government structure making their perfectly-legal moves across the board, is now something recognized by the People as a specific adversarial tactic, and the countermoves are finally materializing as a result.

And so, this is the aim of our examination—to widen the scope of our perception so we can build defense against every component of the weaponry used to kill people. As pedantic as it might seem to read about every last piece of the Playbook, we need to view each tactic just as treacherous as a sharp-toothed alligator swimming straight at us. Because each little part—like the pledge to self-regulate—is just as deadly.

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies is a very scary title of a best-selling book, making all the Best Books of the Year lists for 2025, that can help society to face what must be faced about the reality of our environment at present.

It’s a scary title because this truth is spells out is scary and we should be scared. A flock of ducks sitting on the water should be scared of a huge alligator swimming toward them. If the fear was removed they would just sit there defenseless and be eaten. The ducks don’t ever ignore their own fear, but humans do. Our species can choose not to pay attention to a threat heading toward them, because it’s so frightening.

There is an immediate threat to the children of this world, just like traffic in the street. We don’t pretend like it’s safe for our children to play in traffic because we are too afraid of them getting hurt in traffic. We caution them to fear speeding cars, because it’s a real danger that they must understand well.

It is wise for us all to wholly comprehend the dangers of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). There will be no second chance to learn a lesson the hard way from this over-reliance and under-regulation.

This video explains how the current AI “arms race” is creating a General AI system that modifies its own code—and how this would be the mother of all self-regulation catastrophes. Please watch and please join thousands of others in signing the Statement on Superintelligence :

I passed a billboard recently that said “1 in 10 kids vape—a conversation can help”. At first I was offended—now they’re just dumping all the responsibility on the parents?WTF is the FDA for if it still cannot regulate tobacco products? What was that giant Settlement Agreement for, forcing the industry to implement anti-smoking measures for youth, if they’re not enforcing any of it? But then, I had to turn that spotlight around and shine it in my own eyes. This campaign which I thought was the most offensive of all, was probably the most honest thus far.

Kids are vaping and Big Tobacco will not rest until they’ve addicted every last replacement smoker. Big Ag will not rest until there is no more natural food grown outside their control, free from their pesticides and laboratory manipulation. And, I may as well get it all in now and relay the news that Big Chemical has been adding forever chemicals to the pesticides sprayed on our food! So the final message is—BUYER BEWARE.

This means—No one is going to protect you and your family but you. This means—Shields up everyone! If everything is as clearly broken as it is, we the people must adapt and develop new systems to address the inadequacies. We surrendered control over our defenses because we trusted in their system, but now we know better.

What does your shield look like? And how does it safeguard you and your family from all this deception? Is there something you can do to protect yourself more?

We will complete the audit of all Playbook moves and thereupon conceive the most effective countermoves to combat theirs. By the end of this book, we will have the formulation of a new and improved strategy.

We can do a lot to change our side of The Pattern and yet it still won’t be enough for the warmongers to ever relinquish control of the killing machine that led to Gaza and to the next Gaza. It might only be enough to let us never again believe the claims from any so-called representative who votes to supply and fund the wars over the will of their constituents.

It might only be enough to add our voice to the push-back mandate against executive orders to deregulate the entire AI takeover.

It might only be enough to protect just one household from Bad Companies’ toxic products—our household.

It might only be enough to make sure all responsible adults recognize when a trick is in play, and can pass along that intelligence to the younger generations.

And though it might only be enough to protect just our bodies from sickness and just our minds from irrational thinking, this will make us far more fit for duty in the greater global fight for health and peace than anyone still listening to liars or robots and relying on them to survive and teach our children well.

+ Bad Companies pledges to self-regulate obstruct actual protection of public welfare. =

We are all in this together! I’m not the first to say it! See you next chapter….

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THE MATH:

If we don’t participate by thinking it through we remain unprotected for the next assault.

+ The powerful force of the PR campaign can disconnect us from our own survival instincts and our allegiance to Natural Law.

+ Their Pattern of deception and concealment of harm leads to addiction, disease and death.

+ We must understand and memorize Their Playbook.

+ We must use the wisdom gained from past mistakes.

+ Cognitive dissonance has led to errors in our reasoning.

+ We must defend ourselves against those we thought were defending us.

+ Until we disable the corrupt revolving door we have an active breach in our defense.

+ Our over-reliance on external systems undermines our ability to defend ourselves or others.

+ The genocide in Gaza has illuminated the Pattern & Playbook for all to see.

+ The tactic of using False Claims was effective on enough of the public to get us and keep us in Bad Wars for the past 70 years and counting.

+ The tactic of using False Claims was effective on enough of the public to get us to buy and use Bad Products that cause disease and death.

The whole sinister game begins when the Bad Company or War Machine introduces the False Claim to society and puts their mantras of lies on heavy rotation. The Watchdogs then spring into action to make their moves—providing documentation of the real narrative to the people who need it to make important decisions about their lives and to officials who need it to install effective regulations and protections against the dangers loosed in our communities.

As the Truth-tellers labor to do this, the Bad Companies continue to employ a barrage of tactics to combat the Watchdog enterprise and the information they bring forth. They will first do everything they can to ensure the evidence of harm never sees the light of day.

BURY THE SCIENCE —

If the Bad Companies or War Machine have control over crucial incriminating data, they will attempt to withhold it from the public. If the information gets smuggled out by the Watchdogs, they will have to suppress it, using an array of tactics.

We illustrated in the last chapter how each Bad Company withheld the scientific evidence proving the harmfulness of their products. Dupont and 3M buried the science on forever chemicals, Monsanto hid the evidence of the risks in its weed killing products. And numerous pharmaceutical companies have been convicted of concealing health problems and death caused by their drugs.

It’s not difficult to suppress evidence inside of a Bad Company. Once the truth is roaming outside the corporation, it takes extra measure to cover it up.

What we know is that the most powerful industries and the Military Industrial Complex have great influence over all the ways we receive information. There is some nuance between all the tactical methods of suppression—censoring, deplatforming, and omitting crucial information—but they all work toward obscuring the truth somewhere where the majority can’t or doesn’t see it.

In the most recent/current example, the war in Gaza, the evidence of harm was abundant, so their strategies would have to focus on how to limit access to the real narrative.

This situation was set up to be more concealed than any prior conflict, as Israel barred foreign journalists from entering the war zone. The right to gather and report news without government interference was seemingly surrendered without much of a fight by Mainstream Media (MSM) and so that element of Israel’s suppressing journalism was hardly the subject of their stories until after public opinion shifted. The blackout did abet the remarkable amount of news that MSM “left out” of the coverage and conversation.

Most of the news reports about the Gaza war from major newspapers noticeably favored the Israeli side of the story, exhibited consistent bias against the Palestinians and paid little attention to their daily suffering.1 I encourage a read of this short Intercept article which leaked how the New York Times was instructing journalists to restrict the use of the terms “genocide”, “ethnic cleansing”, and “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land, and to omit the words from their headlines.

The average critical thinker could deduce that if the Israeli military publicly vowed on Day 2 of the siege to cut off all food, electricity and supplies to the Gaza Strip, there would soon be people, innocent civilians and children, starving. But if that vow was not given much coverage, and if the major news outlets were relatively silent on the food insecurity of the entire population in the 681 days between that vow and when famine was officially declared, the average viewer could be led to think that there must not be a true emergency because they haven’t heard much about it on their news. Omission is an extremely powerful tool in our attention economy because we still psychologically or unconsciously believe that if something is a legitimate or important issue, surely it would be brought to our attention.

According to ResponsibleStagecraft.org, “Major US media, likewise, bear a share of responsibility for the hunger-related deaths in Gaza. The conditions of famine have been out in the open for well over a year, and yet it was considered barely newsworthy in US news media … The current headlines reveal that the coverage still largely diverts attention from Israeli (let alone US) responsibility … Imagine how different this all could have looked had they given it the attention it has warranted, and the accountability it has demanded, when alarms were first raised.”

This was the same pro-invasion narrative legacy news programs skewed to during the Iraq War twenty years earlier. A study of all network news stories in the run-up to 2003 shows that 80% of coverage favored the Bush administration’s pro-war position.2 This presented a biased narrative that favored the rationale for war and helped to convince Americans to believe what would soon be recognized as a hundreds and hundreds of lies.

Media bias is defined as choosing to report on some events but omit others, or leaving out key details about a story, or giving voice to one side of an argument but not the other, to influence public opinion. This behavior is on exhibit right now as the major news networks cover the Epstein emails saga. They have chosen to focus on half the story, and have omitted the other half, due to the same capture and bias that led them to ignore the Palestinian half of the story in Gaza. All mainstream coverage has completely excluded anything in the emails concerning Epstein’s interactions with Israel and his influence in the Middle East, of which there is a ton of information. This has been reported on by independent journalists only.

You can see all these stories on Drop Site News, an invaluable resource of real journalism in this time of so much bias and gatekeeping. From the cache of emails available to all intrepid reporters, they document how Jeffrey Epstein tried to raise funds for the development of Israeli cyberweapons; he facilitated efforts to open a backchannel between Israel and the Kremlin during the Syrian civil war; and continuously played the role of middleman and broker between Israeli prime ministers, Mossad, bankers like the Rothchilds, U.S. NSA and CIA directors, and a long list of his most influential elite “friends”. These are huge news stories, as American and Israeli national security policy decisions were clearly informed by all these back-channel negotiations, decisions which have continuously landed us in any of the military and paramilitary operations we are currently embroiled in.

Compare the last three months of Drop Site reporting on Epstein’s geopolitical maneuvering to what on 11/21/25 is considered by PBS News the “7 things to know about the Justice Department’s Epstein files” to fully digest the bulk of what MSM has chosen not to mention. Again, the independent journalist Watchdogs do not possess a crazy x-ray vision to see what other so-called journalists cannot. The only distinction is the freedom from capture and the courage to disclose what the Israel-United States syndicate wants buried.

Limiting information has a direct correlation to the public’s ignorance or grasp on major issues, often resulting in the situation we saw in 2024, where the number of Americans who said they didn’t know enough about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to form a strong opinion only grew. A key factor in their complacency was that many had been convinced this issue was too complex for the average citizen to comprehend, which keeps the majority in the simple and broad zone favored by the campaigners. This significant gap in understanding was enforced by Western media which never offered any adequate contextual examination of the conflict’s political history. I recommend a read of this case study which critically analyzes how Western legacy news media breached fundamental principles of journalistic ethics and professionalism in their reporting on the genocide in Gaza.

The more in-depth comprehension was visible to those who actively sought it—

But there are gatekeepers of the seeking part as well.

Social media platforms can do many things we can’t know about to their own search engines to manipulate the results we see and how much digging it takes to see them:

• use algorithms to limit the audience for certain content

• hiding or removing results

• making it appear as if a message is being widely distributed when it is not

• pushing results towards more prominent companies over smaller ones, or towards more mainstream ideas over independent ones

• altering autocomplete suggestions for sensitive topics

• de-indexing websites

• personalizing search results which leads to different results for different people even for the same query

• control of ranking

• deplatforming and outright banning of certain individuals, groups or content

Viewers tend to believe that products or information ranked higher (what shows up first) are better, or even “more true” based on their perceived position in search results. A high search ranking often leads to more clicks. There is a discouraging feeling we can all likely attest to once we are out in the boonies of page four or higher on a Google search, yet this is where pertinent intel can often be shoved out to, beyond our focus or our energy to dig, and shrouded in the stigma of a less-credible fringe area.

For the part of the population who does not receive the crucial information they need to form strong opinions—the knowledge found beyond the umbrella mantras—they will not yet believe in this part of the reality. When uninformed Americans first heard mention of Israel’s occupation in Palestine defined as an apartheid state, many were inclined to believe this was dubious anti-semitic rhetoric because they lacked the contextual history. When and if they ever hear about Jeffrey Epstein’s connections to Israel’s government officials including Mossad, down the line, they might be inclined to believe it some kind of fringe conspiracy theory because they never heard anyone speak about it during this time when legacy media is choosing not to cover it.

This “selective omission” is a form of censorship and can successfully bury truths long enough for the fraudulent campaign to form strong and lasting roots in the mind of the people. When the real facts comes out, down the line, including the fact that those were concealed or censored, these truths, corrections, or retractions will not appear in the bold font of the big headline. MSM rarely makes a lead story of how they were wrong or of how much they omitted. The truth won’t be announced as loudly as the false claims were. The truth will always struggle to catch up to the lies which have been carried far forward by the misguided consensus reality. And most people will miss the later headlines which admit to the opposite of what they first came to believe. The revelation will not be televised.

When the truth begins to leak out in spite of the gatekeeping, the opposition will often utilize a crafty trick called the “limited hangout”, created by intelligence agencies. This is the public relations tactic in which they admit to a lesser offense to distract from the real or full scandal and create an illusion of transparency:

• Partial truth disclosure: They release only a small, pre-packaged portion of the truth, presenting it as the complete admission. This evidence is carefully selected to be damaging enough to be believable, but not as damaging as exposing the full scope of the wrongdoing. The released information is designed to draw scrutiny away from more secret and damning information.

• Pollute the waters by mixing truth with discoverable falsehoods and misinformation: The hope is that once the public discovers these smaller inaccuracies, they will dismiss the entire package of information as false, including the damaging, truthful parts.

• Shifting the focus: The public and media become so preoccupied with the newly revealed, albeit less critical, information that they stop pursuing the more significant issues.

We could view the current Epstein media drop through the limited hangout lens, seeing the mass amount of airtime given to the sex abuse parts as a way to draw focus away from the parts which reveal the more serious implications of how our state and foreign affairs really work. The content which seems to be satiating most of the legacy news programs and the public is criminal and disturbing but it is content society has become accustomed to, unfortunately. The more earth-shattering epiphany would be the unveiling of the reality that this disturbing criminal seems to have had control and authority over the highest heads of state and world leaders.

Project Censored is a great resource to anyone curious about the latest omissions on content or context. Their mission is to expose and oppose news censorship and promote independent investigative journalism, media literacy, and critical thinking. They make an annual list of the top censored stories for each year.

If the opposition cannot successfully bury or control the flow of evidence using any or all of the above tactics, they will have to attack it, using any means necessary.

CRITICIZE THE “JUNK SCIENCE” —

• Accuse science/information of deception, calling it “junk science” or “bad science”.

• Insist that the science is uncertain by claiming scientists don’t know what is causing the issue, and that more research is needed.

• Using information in a misleading way; cherry-picking by using facts that are true but irrelevant.

• Insist that there are multiple potential causations, and that addressing just one of them will have minimal impact.

• Exaggerate the uncertainty inherent in any scientific endeavor to undermine the status of established scientific knowledge.

• Launch attacks against scientists who publish inconvenient findings through threats to their funding, careers, and reputations.

• Governments may informally pressure media companies to suppress content or individuals with disfavored views, a practice called “jawboning”.

In 1964, when the Surgeon General presented the scientific conclusions to Americans that cigarette smoking was the chief cause of lung cancer and that smokers were 70 percent more likely to die of a fatal heart attack, in a country where at least 42 percent of all adults were smokers—it was a deathblow to Big Tobacco. Instead of accepting defeat after decades of unparalleled industry success, they pioneered a multi-pronged operation to challenge and undermine the standards of scientific research which came to be known as the “Disinformation Playbook”. All these tactics to discredit science and create doubt would be adopted by all other Bad Industries, including Big Oil3 and Big Food4. By promoting the idea that the actual scientific findings which link their products to harmful outcomes are inconclusive or unreliable, is how corporate giants have been able to continue their lethal practices all this time.

These tactics were explicitly laid out as part of Big Tobacco’s own PR in their “A Frank Statement,” where they falsely claimed that the science associated with smoking is questionable, and that “many aspects of modern life are just as bad as smoking”.

Revealed in the The Monsanto Papers, were these very same strategies used by Big Agriculture to discredit the IARC and its scientific findings, criticizing how the agency classified glyphosate because it only considered if a substance can cause cancer under any circumstance. (But jsyk, there are many further studies that show they can and do cause cancer in humans, as well as adverse effects on reproduction and child development and organ toxicity.)

The Israeli Military has utilized many of these tactics, most recently when The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), known worldwide as the global expert body on food insecurity, confirmed famine in the Gaza Strip. Israel and other critics dismissed the findings as false and biased and attacked the science underlying the assessments, arguing that IPC changed the goalposts to make declaring a famine easier.

Israel’s government has a history of targeting media outlets it perceives as critical, notably shutting down Al Jazeera’s operations in the country in May 2024 and temporarily seizing Associated Press equipment. The Israeli government also tried to sanction its own country’s prominent left-leaning newspaper Haaretz. This type of jawboning and censoring anything deemed anti-Israel has had a huge impact on the flow of information vital to a society’s “right to know”.

Any scientist who publishes a study producing results which undermine one of the Bad Company’s false claims understands how malicious their retaliatory attacks can be, but nothing is as horrific as when truth-tellers are murdered in cold blood for attempting to expose harm, like the journalists in Gaza have been.

On September 1 of this year, more than 250 media outlets in over 50 countries around the world went silent for a day by not publishing news to condemn the crimes against Palestinian reporters perpetrated with impunity by the Israeli army, to call for the protection and emergency evacuation of Gaza’s journalists and demand that foreign press be given independent access to the Gaza Strip. You may have missed this global campaign as it was not honored or covered in our mainstream news.

In addition to attacking the science, the opposition can fabricate, falsify, or misrepresent scientific research to deceive the people.5

MANIPULATE THE DATA—

• Fabrication: Creating and reporting fake data or results that never occurred.

• Falsification: Manipulating research materials, equipment, or processes, or changing or omitting data to inaccurately represent the research record.

• Insufficient controls: Designing a study to deliberately avoid accounting for other factors that could influence the results.

• Inadequate blinding: Allowing participants or researchers to know which group is receiving a treatment, which can skew results due to the placebo effect or researcher bias.

• Inadequate randomization: Strategically sorting participants into groups rather than using a random process.

• Misuse of statistics: Presenting data in a misleading way to support a desired conclusion, often seen in news headlines and biased reports.

As opposed to the way science is normally done, Bad Companies, whose only concern is to keep selling product, work backwards. They begin with the desired conclusion and then twist the results to support that, using any of these tricks to hollow out the gold standard research protocol.

Like the majority of Big Pharma, Johnson & Johnson has been caught “faking the science” in numerous ways since 1971 to hide the truth of toxic asbestos in its talc. One crafty way to avoid detection was their choosing testing research methods with lesser sensitivity. There is also evidence proving J&J manipulated the findings of one of the tests sent to the FDA by just deleting the total asbestos content found in its baby powder product.6

One shining example of a misleading presentation was the way Purdue Pharma used one of its key statistical graphs to deceive doctors by distorting the reality. They claimed the “time-release” formula of Oxycontin prevented the sharp peaks and valleys in drug concentration that can trigger withdrawal symptoms and cravings. What viewers didn’t realize is that they plotted the data on a logarithmic scale instead of a linear one, so the peaks and valleys in the visuals shown were flattened and appeared far less dramatic. Cool trick!

There will always be those seekers and defenders of Truth who uncover it from wherever it has been buried and produce it to the public so they can be educated and protected. Additionally, any citizen can extend their efforts and reach beyond the limitations of the gatekeepers in this pursuit. The knowledge gained allows the individual to form strong and sturdy opinions so they may add their voice to the truth-telling side of the battle, and give much-needed support to the Watchdogs in the David vs Goliath fight which persists across time.

Knowing that the world we live in is filled with great harm only frightens and depresses the people. If the link between the harmful effects and those causing the harm is buried or corrupted, and we cannot zero in on the source in order to position our shields correctly, we can end up feeling very powerless.

We see the bad fruit all around but until we can trace that rot back to the root of the tree which produced it, even if we end up chopping off a branch here or even a big tree there, the roots keep producing more trees to bear more bad fruit.

When it’s just another cancer we are able to say “cancer is increasing”. 2024 broke the record for new cancer cases, exceeding 2 million. Today, young people under 50 are increasingly being diagnosed with over a dozen forms of serious cancer at an alarming rate. Forecasts predict cancer for this age group will increase by 30% globally by the end of this decade. The “experts” can still only offer as hypothesis “that there is an environmen­tal exposure—or multiple exposures” …And that the “exposures began in the 1960s or ’70s and have been continuously present since then.”7 This is much different and much less effective to our defense strategy than saying “These specific Bad Companies are giving you cancer”.

We can also say “overdoses are increasing”. There have been over a million overdoses from pharmaceutical products since the year 2000, and overdose remains the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18-44. These terrible results can make headlines all over the nation without any mention of the pharmaceutical industry. We can be made upset by the statistics, but still remain unclear of the cause toward which to direct our opposition. It is as if we said in the case of Gaza, that “civilian death is rising” or “famine is the leading cause of mortality”, but still did not understand exactly the reason for these tragedies.

It should be quite understandable to us, by now, that the sources of the most death and heartbreak in this time period are also the most censored topics in the press and online. While your Fox news will omit stories that paint Republicans in a bad light and your MSNBC will omit stories that paint Democrats in a bad light, all sides of the power structure which controls information will avoid stories that paint Big Business (the group they belong to) in a bad light.

The majority of products on the market rely on the appeal and effectiveness of what they create for their success and longevity. A Bad Company’s success, on the other hand, depends completely on the lack of public understanding of the health risks of its products. They are not competing against the rest of the market as much as they are competing against the truth. Our awareness of the real narrative is their greatest foe and that is what they war against.

+ As the Watchdogs produce truth of the falsehoods, the opposition will bury and attack this evidence. =

We are all in this together! I’m not the first to say it! See you next chapter….

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THE MATH:

If we don’t participate by thinking it through we remain unprotected for the next assault.

+ The powerful force of the PR campaign can disconnect us from our own survival instincts and our allegiance to Natural Law.

+ Their Pattern of deception and concealment of harm leads to addiction, disease and death.

+ We must understand and memorize Their Playbook.

+ We must use the wisdom gained from past mistakes.

+ Cognitive dissonance has led to errors in our reasoning.

+ We must defend ourselves against those we thought were defending us.

+ Until we disable the corrupt revolving door we have an active breach in our defense.

+ Our over-reliance on external systems undermines our ability to defend ourselves or others.

+ The genocide in Gaza has illuminated the Pattern & Playbook for all to see.

+ The tactic of using False Claims was effective on enough of the public to get us and keep us in Bad Wars for the past 70 years and counting.

+

Part of The Pattern is that the actual truth will eventually come out. It’s just a matter of time. The Bad Companies understand this. They’ve done this enough times to know that by the time the truth arrives they will have already achieved what they set out to do and the people will be too locked in to reverse any of the bad outcomes.

From the early 1900s, we believed the false claims from the cigarette companies, for a good 50+ years. The public had no tangible good reason to assume the companies would manufacture something which could harm or kill them.

As was clearly illuminated in all the major campaigns for war in our lifetime, the lies from the campaigners battled the truth from the Watchdogs for the public’s attention and sentiment. By what we can see with our eyes, know with our reason, and feel with our hearts, we as individuals make a choice to be one of the Watchdogs seeking and disseminating the truth, or a believer and supporter of this truth. If we do not choose either of these options, by default we will be aiding and abetting the deceptive campaign. The historical outcomes of our behavior show that if we are not noticeably withholding consent we are, for all intents and purposes, giving it.

Our relationship to bad campaigns offering Bad Products is precisely the same. When it comes to Big Tobacco, Big Chemical, Big Agriculture or Big Pharma, we can either support those who bring forth the truth about their wrongdoing—with our behavior of withholding consent, of boycotting from our lives products from companies proven corrupt and dangerous—or we give our consent (actively or passively) and play a part in the dynamic that keeps the products on the market where harm is extended and compounded.

In the long-standing contest between the deceivers and the truth-tellers, the former uses Playbook tactics to silence and smear the latter. So, in the case of wars or commercial products our government subsidizes and vouches for, the average citizen can regularly remain ignorant to news of the particular deception and harm. The extent of the public’s awareness of the dangers all depends on how successful the Watchdogs are at defending against the Playbook.

BIG TOBACCO:

Unaware of the mechanics behind a public relations campaign or possible dangers in using the product, the public of 75 years ago accepted everything they saw in their magazines and on their television as real and true, which led them to believe that smoking was a good and respectable thing to do. Advertisements showing respectable people smoking—celebrities, doctors, mothers, tough cowboys and fashionable women—convinced them smoking was great because all the great people were doing it. The population in the 1950s were new to the concept of commercial propaganda so they were unaccustomed to understanding or noticing it. They naturally assumed they were thinking for themselves when they opted in to using cigarettes.

The PR reality was challenged when the first Watchdog in the form of the US Surgeon General—the intended first line of defense, the government regulatory agency—published compelling peer-reviewed scientific evidence of the harms of smoking.

The Tobacco Industry countered by issuing a press release in 19541:

“It is an obligation of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee at this time to remind the public of these essential points:

1. There is no conclusive scientific proof of a link between smoking and cancer.

2. Medical research points to many possible causes of cancer…

3. The millions of people who derive pleasure and satisfaction from smoking can be reassured that every scientific means will be used to get all the facts as soon as possible.”

Big Tobacco would repeat these and other lies for the next 40 years until a Federal court forced them to publicly admit the truth.

In his book A Question of Intent2, former FDA commissioner, David Kessler wrote:

“Devised in the 1950s and ’60s, the tobacco industry’s strategy was embodied in a script written by the lawyers. Every tobacco company executive in the public eye was told to learn the script backwards and forwards, no deviation was allowed. The basic premise was simple—smoking had not been proved to cause cancer. Not proven, not proven, not proven—this would be stated insistently and repeatedly. Inject a thin wedge of doubt, create controversy, never deviate from the prepared line. It was a simple plan and it worked.”

It still works, for anyone who uses the Playbook Big Tobacco crafted. Most humans would not use a tool which deceives other humans so they get sick and die. But some do. And they will amass great power doing it.

The tools we use to oppose these beings are goodwill, kindness, and truth. Guided by these virtues, Watchdogs strive to clear the obstacles laid by the Playbook in order to serve humanity by informing and warning of the deception and harm.

Over the many decades, Big Tobacco repeated their mantras “We believe the products we make are not injurious to health.”

The Watchdogs brought forth the evidence that the products were injurious. Due to the courage of whistleblowers and tenacity of litigators, millions of pages of internal tobacco documents came to light which laid out their strategy and documented its implementation. It was also revealed that the industry themselves had evidence of the dangers but kept it secret.

A British American Tobacco subsidiary wrote in 1963: “Nicotine is addictive. We are, then, in the business of selling nicotine, an addictive drug.”3

It would be fifteen years before the National Institute of Drug Abuse officially confirmed to the public that nicotine is addictive.

So, this is the False Claim game played by the Bad Companies and the War Machine—truth battling lies. Many years and decades go by as the “debate” runs its course and before the public can be fully informed. A reminder of the Big Tobacco stakes—at least 8 million people die every year from using their products.

BIG CHEMICAL:

In the many decades since DuPont began manufacturing Teflon in 1945, the company has been considered one of the most respected in the United States. Before the lawsuits against them began to force the issue, the public had no clear (clearly visible) reason to mistrust their business practices or products. And even to this day, the truth about forever chemicals and the devastation they cause is only getting support from a small minority of the population.

The fluorochemical products invented by 3M were manufactured by a relatively small number of major chemical companies who sold these base chemicals to thousands of manufacturers who incorporated the substances into a broad range of goods which led to mass market saturation of products containing forever chemicals. They were marketed as “the solution for your problems.” The Big Chemical scientists published academic papers on their unusual properties and applications which have “become an integral part of the machinery that runs today’s economy…”4

While neither the public nor the FDA had any clue about the toxicity of these chemicals for half a century, a few individual Watchdogs would fight to get out the truth.

Over a 20 year legal battle against DuPont, lawyer Robert Bilott exposed that the Bad Company knew for decades that PFOA was escaping its plant, leaching into nearby drinking water, accumulating in the blood of its workers, and harming animals tested in its own labs.

Another tenacious Attorney General, Lori Swanson, sued 3M on behalf of the people of Minnesota. The information brought forth through discovery disclosed that as early as the 1960s, 3M had been conducting in-house studies of the fluorochemicals on rats and monkeys with alarming results (in one all the monkeys died, in another, they developed lesions on their spleen, lymph nodes, and bone marrow—organs central in maintaining the body’s immune defenses), leaving the scientists to definitively conclude “a possible human health problem” and an urgent need to study the longterm safety on humans.

But, because the chemical companies chose not to do these safety studies on humans, and chose to bury the animal studies, Dupont and 3M could still deceptively repeat the “Not harmful / has not been proven” mantra. This is a favorite trick of the deceivers—a lack of evidence proves the accusation of harm false. It only becomes true when someone smuggles the evidence out from the shadows and into the light.

These Watchdog legal teams were able to get their hands on minutes from the 1979 3M meeting to prove that eight staff members were shown the catastrophic conclusions from their in-house studies and officially decided that the toxicity “does not constitute a substantial risk and should not be reported [to the EPA] at this time.”

You can watch the 3M executives and scientists admitting to the cover-up and willful delay in this video made by the local news in Minnesota (local news often ends up the more responsible journalistic watchdog compared to captured mainstream media). The news story condenses the jaw-dropping level of deception which is only now coming out, 50 years after the fact.

It would take Kris Hansen, a 3M scientist to turn whistleblower, to bring forward her discovery that the Bad Company’s signature chemical product was in the blood of almost every American.

Another 22-year veteran of DuPont, Glen Evers, blew the whistle that DuPont failed to tell the FDA of internal studies showing that the poisonous chemical coating comes off food wrapping in greater concentrations than thought when the FDA first approved its use.

And yet, after the Watchdogs blew their whistles, litigated, won the lawsuits, and put into the public record the evidence of how environmentally hazardous these products are, Dupont still in recent years scores very high on environmental and corporate governance metrics, including being named one of the 100 Best Corporate Citizens. And its fraudulent mantra, that “protecting the people and the planet is a core pillar” of its strategy, remains the bold header on its website.

Even as they pay out the settlements for causing the catastrophic damage, 3M and DuPont still will not admit liability and maintain that their products were safely made and used.

But, the truth according to environmental chemistry studies from Harvard University and elsewhere, is that the forever chemicals are “reducing public health on an incredibly large scale”. This immense flood of toxicity causing widespread disease has still only amounted to limited public knowledge on the subject, due to the effectiveness of the Playbook tactics currently in play.

BIG AGRICULTURE:

Since 1974, consumers believed the false claims from Monsanto that the herbicide RoundUp was “safer than table salt” and “practically non-toxic” and “environmentally friendly”. The product has been widely used in our yards and saturated commercial farming ever since. The company had to eventually drop these slogans after being taken to court in 1996 for false and misleading advertising.

Even though Monsanto’s internal studies submitted to the EPA in 1981 provided ample evidence that glyphosate caused cancer and other health problems, the key documents were classified as ‘trade secrets’ and never published.5

35 years later, The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) officially concluded that there is “sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity” based on laboratory studies.

The story of the retaliation against the IARC from the Bad Company was told by award-winning journalism in The French newspaper Le Monde, who published an investigative series known as the “Monsanto Papers,” reporting on the all-out “effort to destroy the United Nations’ cancer agency by any means possible” in order to protect its blockbuster product. This assault which far surpassed in intensity and maliciousness any Big Tobacco strong-arming must be read to be believed.

The public, unless they read the French article or the book of the same name The Monsanto Papers: Deadly Secrets, Corporate Corruption, and One Man’s Search for Justice, would have no way of knowing about the lawsuit and the dangers of RoundUp.

At the time of this commercial in 2022, a collaboration between three environmental Watchdogs were publishing the actual truth in a report called Merchants of Poison.

(* Since publishing this chapter, the internet has taken down all recent RoundUp commercials from youtube so the above link now reroutes to the shopping page for all the RoundUp products. Not sure why…:)

However, our EPA still sides with Monsanto (now Bayer AG) that there are no risks of concern to human health with glyphosate and it is unlikely to be a human carcinogen. So, the “debate” continues…

Despite the EPA still parroting the company’s false claims, hundreds of thousands of judges have forced Bayer to pay settlements to the victims whose Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma was proven in court to be caused by their use of RoundUp. At the heart of their defense, Bayer’s legal teams repeatedly point to the regulatory agencies’ conclusions that glyphosate is not a cancer risk. But the lawyers for the plaintiffs presented Monsanto’s internal emails which show that those same regulators were being manipulated or fooled by the company’s pressure.

Globally, the number of new cases of Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma (NHL) rose significantly from 255,667 in 1990 to 604,554 in 2021, an enormous spike.

During the successful RoundUp campaign and subsequent market domination, the Bad Companies of Big Agriculture created a commercial farming revolution built on the use of glyphosate and with the introduction of their RoundUp Ready (GMO) crops.

The false claims here are that global adoption of their pesticides is vital to fighting world hunger and of course that they are completely safe.

In 2015, a peer-reviewed statement in the journal Environmental Sciences Europe, signed by 300 scientists, physicians and scholars, asserts there is no scientific consensus on the safety of GMOs. They say the claim of scientific consensus on GMOs frequently repeated in the media is “an artificial construct that has been falsely perpetuated.”

This method to prove GMOs are safe, utilizes the common and extremely unscrupulous umbrella mantra of “the science is settled”, that a consensus about the safety has already been reached and there is no need to discuss or study the subject any further. This, ironically, is the opposite of how science works.

In 2017, the UN published a report stating that the claim that pesticides are essential to feed the global population is a myth, and officially accused the agro-industry giants of “systematic denial of harms” and “aggressive, unethical marketing tactics”.

The report also confirmed the magnitude of the damage inflicted by these chemicals: “Chronic exposure to pesticides has been linked to cancer, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, hormone disruption, developmental disorders and sterility.”

To create their manufactured revolution in how humans grow food, Monsanto went beyond just marketing to creating a nefarious system where they had oppressive control over private farming business and practices, forcing farmers to use only their patented seeds and pay the company royalties for them.6

In May 2003, the Watchdog Center for Food Safety released a report called Monsanto vs U.S. Farmers which found that farmers had become subject to harassment, investigation, and prosecution by Monsanto over supposed infringement of its seed patents and technology. The result has been a total assault on the foundations of farming traditions that have endured for centuries in this country and millennia around the world, including one of the oldest, the right to save and replant crop seed.

Monsanto built a department of 75 employees and set aside an annual budget of $10 million for the sole purpose of investigating and prosecuting farmers for patent infringement to keep them enslaved to the glyphosate pesticides and GMO crops. The Bad Company still persists with the justification that their products are the only way to feed the world.

Yet in 2015, The Rodale Institute’s 30-year Farming Systems Trial (FST) demonstrated that organic farming systems are more profitable, require less energy, and build more soil health compared to conventional systems. Key findings include organic systems outperforming conventional ones in drought years, producing comparable average yields over time, and producing 40% fewer greenhouse gases.

BIG PHARMA:

The false claim trajectory from Big Pharma companies can follow a slightly different path than other products as they first must deceive the medical community who will then be used as a proxy to sell the product to the population. It is a still-present and distressing enigma for Americans to ponder how opioids became so fatally overprescribed when they were previously understood to be addictive, that development of tolerance results in dose escalation, and that dependence would make quitting difficult. The mystery is only answered with the harsh fact that the prescribing physicians believed a Bad Company’s false claim, for over a decade.

Purdue Pharma used their great wealth, power and influence on its marketing campaigns that claimed that their new painkiller Oxycontin was safe. They spent up to $200 million a year on this. Stating in audiotapes, brochures, videotapes, literature and its website, they claimed that “the risk of addiction was less than one percent.” More than 5000 physicians, pharmacists, and nurses attended all-expenses-paid symposiums, where they were recruited and trained for Purdue’s national speaker bureau, to influence doctors’ prescribing.

If a Bad Company can get enough people to parrot their false claim, a lie can become a “consensus”.

This campaign’s lies minimized the risks and exaggerated the benefits of their drug, and opioid prescribing surged. This doubled the rate of opioid-related deaths in the U.S. from 1999 to 2010.7.

I honestly can’t say where the Watchdogs were in those first years of Oxycontin. Communities everywhere were seeing the devastation with their own eyes. The doctors prescribing the pills and the pharmacists handing them out to longer and longer lines of worse and worse-looking citizens must have seen it with their own eyes. Hepatitis C cases were skyrocketing. Methadone clinics were being overrun with people trying to get off the drugs.

But eventually, in 2007, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Purdue who pled guilty to misleading the public about OxyContin’s risk of addiction and agreed to pay $600 million. Three top executives were charged with a felony and sentenced to community service.

A year after this trial, Carol Panara, who would become a whistleblower, joined Purdue Pharma as a sales representative. As doctors were now finally showing concern about addiction, she was trained to address this by suggesting patients could be experiencing “pseudoaddiction.” It’s a fun/not-fun read to see how they introduced another new fraudulent claim to wriggle past the now-exposed one, that suggested patients might only appear to be addicted, when in fact they’re just in pain.

Pleading guilty to felonies did not stop Purdue from selling Oxycontin but it did cut into their profits some. So they hired one of the biggest global consulting firms McKinsey and Company to help revive their sales. McKinsey advised Purdue on how to “turbocharge” the sales pipeline for OxyContin by intensifying marketing to High Value Prescribers, included prescribers who were writing opioid prescriptions for uses that were unsafe, ineffective, and medically unnecessary. For both Purdue and McKinsey, this was a financial success.

And so the Bad Company continued to fuel the opioid crisis for another 12 years between their first court case and the last one in 2019 which led Purdue to file for bankruptcy, after being forced to pay as much as $12 billion over time. A report from 2017 estimated that 130 people were dying every day in the U.S. from opioid-related overdoses, and that number has only increased ever since.

This is just the most famous case of how the Big Pharma False Claim game works. Bad Company releases a bad drug, illegally markets it as safe and effective, buries the evidence of harm, the patients suffer the bad outcomes, usually death. If there is a Watchdog to draw attention to the harm there may be a settlement where the company pays a small percentage of their annual profits and then they continue on selling other products for more profit.

This DOJ press conference was about the 2013 settlement with Johnson & Johnson for illegally marketing the antipsychotic drug Risperdal for unapproved uses in children and the elderly.

In 2022, J&J settled a lawsuit for $5 billion for its contribution to the opioid epidemic. Like the rest, the company was accused of downplaying the risk of addiction when manufacturing, marketing, and supplying various opioid drugs.

J&J is still currently litigating and settling tens of thousands of lawsuits over its baby powder, found to contain cancer-causing asbestos, which the company was aware of since 1971.

Before Purdue, pharma company Merck held the (dis)honor for the highest settlement paid, $6.85 billion, over its arthritis drug Vioxx causing heart attacks and strokes . The scandal also revealed that the drug’s manufacturer manipulated clinical trials and downplayed the drug’s risks to doctors and the public. Merck was also found to have attempted to discredit and silence doctors who were critical of Vioxx with a nefarious “hitlist”.

In 2000, American Home Products Corp. agreed to pay $3.75 billion after evidence showing its weight loss drug combo “fen-phen” caused heart valve damage and a fatal lung condition. The company was accused of withholding information that would have warned Fen Phen users of the risks involved so they could continue to sell their popular diet drug.

In 2012, GlaxoSmithKline settled a $3 billion deal, pleading guilty to off-label marketing (pushing the anti-depressent Wellbutrin for uses not approved by the FDA and promoting another Paxil for use in children despite no evidence of efficacy); and for failing to report safety data to the FDA for its diabetes drug Avandia; and for paying kickbacks to doctors to encourage them to prescribe its drugs.

GSK just last year had to pay another $2.2 billion to settle lawsuits for its heartburn drug Zantac causing cancer. Despite this settlement charge, GSK’s profit grew by 5% that quarter, driven by robust sales in its oncology products (cancer treatments).

Drugmaker Eli Lilly paid a $1.42 billion settlement in 2009, for pushing Zyprexa for off-label uses in children and elderly dementia patients and sought to coerce physicians to use the drug as primary care despite its label.

AstraZeneca has been involved in several settlements, most notably a $520 million settlement in 2010 to resolve allegations of illegally marketing the antipsychotic drug Seroquel for unapproved uses. More recently, the company reached a $425 million settlement in 2023 to resolve more product liability claims related to its Nexium and Prilosec medications.

In 2009, Pfizer paid out $894 million to those who suffered heart attacks and strokes, due to fraud in the promotion of its drugs Bextra and Celebrex which concealed the risks.

You can search on “all Pfizer settlement history” to see the long list of the many other crimes and pay offs from this company, as it would take up too much room to list them all here. In fact, you can search on any pharmaceutical company for a list of lawsuits to see where they have run the False Claim game to the detriment of society.

All these legal issues and fees (and all those heart problems, strokes, overdoses and cancers) were just momentary set backs to the companies’ success and profits. In all cases, except for the bankrupted Purdue, the corporate stocks have shown stability and continued to rise post-settlements. And many of the Big Pharma giants, like Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and AstraZeneca, have recently made very sweet deals with our U.S. government for guaranteed extended profits.

So, the products were created and they were sold to us. Unsuspecting us. The process started off just fine. We were smoking our cigarettes, using our plastic products, drinking our water supply. We were spraying our weeds, eating our genetically modified food, eating the food wrapped in chemical packaging. We were going to the doctor when we needed relief from pain and taking the prescribed pills for all our other ailments.

But—the products contained a hidden harm. And the Bad Companies did not disclose this to us, instead they covered it up. There is no law or oath that can stop them from doing it all again.

This is the Pattern, and this is our system. It is truth vs deception—which will we believe? It is truth-tellers vs deceivers—who will we believe?

And, how much damage will be done while we wrestle with these questions.

I truly appreciate anyone taking the time to face this piece of our reality. Our new strategies absolutely depend upon the examination. We can only produce different outcomes if we look closely at the methods used on us, from a century ago to the very present, which have produced terrible outcomes. We need to fully understand each part of the methodology and remember it. We may never figure out how to stop them from deceiving, but let’s really try hard to figure out what exactly it is that still allows us to be tricked by their deceit.

+ The tactic of using False Claims was effective on enough of the public to get us to buy and use Bad Products that cause disease and death. =

We are all in this together! I’m not the first to say it! See you next chapter….

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THE MATH:

If we don’t participate by thinking it through we remain unprotected for the next assault.

+ The powerful force of the PR campaign can disconnect us from our own survival instincts and our allegiance to Natural Law.

+ Their Pattern of deception and concealment of harm leads to addiction, disease and death.

+ We must understand and memorize Their Playbook.

+ We must use the wisdom gained from past mistakes.

+ Cognitive dissonance has led to errors in our reasoning.

+ We must defend ourselves against those we thought were defending us.

+ Until we disable the corrupt revolving door we have an active breach in our defense.

+ Our over-reliance on external systems undermines our ability to defend ourselves or others.

+ The genocide in Gaza has illuminated the Pattern & Playbook for all to see.

+

Understanding patterns is how science predicts future outcomes. Without adequate knowledge (or memory) of The Pattern we’ve been examining, we might treat every inciting incident separate from that, and then The Playbook can have its way with us.

It wasn’t shocking or reprehensible that in October of 2023 most Americans felt more empathy than suspicion towards Israel’s argument that they should defend themselves. But, pattern recognition does not bother with feelings or rationalizations for them. The only concern is whether or not the patterns are present. The emotions and sympathies are what the campaign uses to engineer consent so those can be seen as more a red flag than a justification.

Like in the Bad Boyfriend relationship, when you find yourself in the middle of some circular head games where accusations of lies are defended by endless Bad Arguments and gaslighting—is when he has you where he wants you. He doesn’t have to be right, he has you, there in his orbit, as opposed to out the door and moving in the opposite direction. With a Bad Boyfriend or a Bad Campaign, we don’t want to get lost in the weeds of that warfare. In both situations, the adversary knows our vulnerabilities so we want to avoid that kind of hand to hand combat and bypass the extended exchange all together. He/They lied before, so that’s all we need to know to not take a seat and hand over the mic as a captive audience.

For any modern war campaign, we can be tempted to insist that we weren’t fooled. We knew how it would end up. We were never “for” this war; we did not consent. This position, however, still does not verify we were invulnerable to tactics of the Pattern & Playbook. As emphasized, awareness of the lie is only the first step. A suitable defense would also have to assure that not a single component of the vast Playbook methodology dumbed down, delayed, or defanged our natural moral instincts to defend the truth.

We humbly admit that The Pattern, in this most recent and current Gaza campaign, did in fact cycle through precisely as it has in all other previous campaigns and each Playbook tactic was and is still being employed, creating the same result—too much death and suffering.

The war in Gaza could not happen without the United States’ support; the war could have been stopped by the United States retracting support. At any time.

Zeteo

'It's Not Going To Be Forgotten': Former Biden Official on Biden's Historic Failure To Get a Gaza Ceasefire

Long-time Middle East peace negotiator Robert Malley – who has worked under Democratic presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden – is all too familiar with the fragility of failed peace agreements between Israel and Palestine…

Listen now

8 months ago · 384 likes · 45 comments · Team Zeteo

As we know, war is not a new product we choose to buy without fully understanding what’s at risk, but a threatening situation we are coerced to buy into even though we do fully understand what’s at risk.

Because war is an extremely old and overused “product”, the public relations strategies are set in place before the first bullet or bomb draws criticism and opposition. The War Machine propagandists are armed and ready with Playbook tactic #1:

The False Claim

Using incredible wealth, power, and reputation, the PR machine launches a fraudulent counter campaign, which follows a script that emphasizes their personal responsibility, criticizes and/or buries the “junk” science that found harms associated with their actions, and makes pledges to self-regulate. Above all, the campaign will produce constant doubt by offering a manufactured version of the truth which competes with the reality.

I can tell you I’m ten feet tall. There I said it. So now I’m ten feet tall. You can measure me with a ruler and try to prove I’m really 5’8”, but I’ll deny it. And I can gather more people on my side, my friends, who will agree that I’m 10 feet tall and in fact they created their own ruler that somehow measures me at 10’. If you try to tell others I’m 5’8” I’ll call you a name (maybe a height-denier I don’t know) and accuse you of lying. You can shout all over town that I’m 5’8” and but I’ll still say I’m 10’ and I don’t even have to shout because I’ll get it repeated all over TV and radio, as my friends own the stations. So, now it’s a full blown debate. Is she 10’ or 5’8”?? There are measurements to show both. Let’s let the public fight it out…

Tactic #1 introduces the deceitful argument. Even though it’s not true, can even very easily be proven false, it is now present and so now there is a “debate”. The plain truth is now “debatable”, technically. The irony is that for society’s most important arguments there is rarely any actual well-organized public debate, anymore. Few media outlets allow for this, outside of the programs who co-opt this medium only to dehumanize it into unwatchable shouting matches just to keep it at its lowest form. So this is not the kind of Socratic dialectic with verifiable data and reasoning to get to resolution. Instead we get the ongoing “fog of debate” which we can exist in for years or even decades.

Without opportunity or a space for public discourse, an elite few can control, i.e. subvert, the processes of collaboration and consensus, just as the fathers of propaganda intended. Edward Bernays’ belief that the masses were an irrational mob that must be controlled by psychological techniques was not seen by them as undermining democracy. On the contrary, they believed they were creating conditions for democracy’s survival by keeping that process to themselves.

In Socrates’ day, it was the Ancient Agora of Athens which served as a forum for public discussion and participation fundamental to the development of democracy. Such a forum would be vital to its preservation here today. But this space for us has been reduced and degraded to the Twittersphere, and we all know how well that’s working for citizens to reach consensus.

The disappearance of this staple of a high-functioning society gutted our ability to talk to each other, to think things through together. And without that, we can start to resemble the irrational mob of those projections. The consequence of this is the division which has been sewn in our nation, after this literal elimination of our common ground. Keeping us isolated in our separate silos is part of protecting any false claim from ever squaring off with the troublesome logical conclusions produced by a community who uses the socratic methods of critical thinking.

False claim is the capitalist legalese for outright lie. The campaign begins with a PR-crafted rationale to be “for” the product/idea and puts that on blast until the foundational catch phrase or slogan becomes a mantra. Outright lies spoken more emphatically can win out over truth muttered tentatively.

After October 7th, Israel’s claim was that their military actions were necessary as self-defense and to dismantle Hamas’ military so it could not launch attacks in the future. There was no deception in that argument. The fraudulent counter campaign which would take over from there was: After October 7th, anything they do, no matter how immoral or criminal, is justified by this claim, forever.

As with all false claims, the strategy of the public relations team is to make the initial slogan simple and broad and continuously repeat it louder and louder to drown out any other information as it comes in. “Israel has a right to defend itself” is the emphatic claim, which is valid, as it is for all nations. Every answer given from representatives from both parties, to every question regarding America’s support for the invasion, began with that mantra. The indisputableness of the statement is used as a monolith to prevent any deeper examination, reevaluation or debate on any piece of the rationale. Without sufficient clarification and deliberation, it became an “umbrella mantra” that the most heinous atrocity could hide under.

Simple and broad is a trap. With complex issues, as most societal issues are, exploring nuance is the only way to reach full understanding and navigate through the traps. This is why the ancient Greeks spent hours, days, as long as it took, walking and talking in the Agora with their peers, to work through the layers of complexity by applying all the accumulated knowledge and wisdom from multiple perspectives. All parts of the Playbook rely on us to remain simple and broad and adverse to digging deeper or collaborating with others in this effort. If we stick to the large fonts of the headlines on the first page, we will miss a lot of crucial details beyond the margins.

Big Tobacco’s umbrella mantra, stated everywhere including even under oath by all of its CEOs to Congress in 1994—that “nicotine is not addictive”—was criminal deception that led to widespread fatalities.

Monsanto/Bayer’s umbrella mantra, avowed in 192,000 courtrooms—that its Roundup herbicide is “safe and non-toxic”—its rebuttal to the mountain of evidence showing otherwise, was criminal deception that led to widespread fatalities.

The umbrella mantra of Purdue Pharma reps, assured over and over into the ears of their physician clients, who then repeated those promises to their patients—that “the risk of addiction to OxyContin is less than 1%”—was called the most criminally deceptive claim of all (at that time) as it led to the deadliest public health crisis the nation has ever faced and has not yet been able to recover from.

In Gaza, the mantra Israel and the majority of the United States leadership cited again and again, what they claimed was only a nation exercising its lawful “right to defend itself” is a criminal deception of what the majority of the rest of the world claims is an unlawful genocide.

With war campaigns, the fear event gets the public emotional enough to opt in to the campaign. The false claims and Bad Arguments fuel the momentum to support the campaign. The Watchdogs struggle to catch up to this momentum and prove the claims false. By the time they do, it will be too late.

For the VIETNAM WAR the fear event was the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, used to create the false claim that we must use military force against the North Vietnamese in order to to protect international waters and remain safe from encroaching communism.

The U.S. government continued to present a fictitious narrative of our military progress in Vietnam to justify continued involvement, they lied about the role of our military, and the justifications for its expansion.

Key ideological deceptions involved the misuse of the “domino theory,” which claimed if Vietnam fell to communism, all of Southeast Asia would follow, posing an enormous threat to our safety in the United States. (Bad Arguments: Slippery Slope, Appeal to Fear Fallacy).

The biggest part of the Watchdog coalition against this war, as we know, was The People. The youth of America—defying their parents, vilified, arrested, beaten, even shot and killed—filled the streets and held continuous anti-war strikes on hundreds of college campuses which led President Nixon to cancel plans for a massive escalation of the war.

Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg leaked The Pentagon Papers to the press which exposed the Johnson administration’s systematic lying to the public and to Congress about our involvement in the Vietnam War.

The information brought forth by Watchdogs eventually turned public sentiment against the war.

The deceit would later be proven: Evidence would show that one of the two attacks in the Gulf of Tonkin incident which incited the war never took place. Government leaders relied on the wrongly interpreted National Security Agency data to conclude that the attack was real.

The deceit and harm would eventually be the subject of award-winning documentaries and movies:

The Most Dangerous Man in America

The Post

The Fog of War

All these truths were brought to light by the truth-tellers, but not fully accepted or understood until after the damage was done in Vietnam:

Millions of deaths, environmental devastation from chemical warfare, and lasting health and psychological damage to veterans and civilians. An estimated two million North and South Vietnamese civilians were killed during the war, an estimated 300,000 more in Laos and Cambodia. Millions of Vietnamese were also internally displaced, creating a humanitarian crisis.

And—we did not accomplish the campaign’s intended goals. The U.S. did not stop communism in the region; the war ended with a unified, communist Vietnam. Instead we fueled economic instability and profound social and political distrust in the United States.

For the IRAQ WAR the fear event was of course 9/11. Even though Iraq was not behind this attack, the emotions from it could still be used to gather consent for war, somewhere.

The false claims to persuade the public were that Iraqi president Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and that the Iraqi government had ties to al-Qaeda. Together, these two things posed an unacceptable threat to American security. Dick Cheney’s slogan that we would be “greeted as liberators” was added justification for the invasion.

Repeating the lies told by the Bush/Cheney administration and media, Secretary of State Colin Powell perjured himself to the UN Security Council: “The facts and Iraq’s behavior show that Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction...Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”

Key ideological deceptions of the neoconservative foreign policy agenda falsely asserted the necessity of regime change in hostile states, and that the promotion of democracy would ensure American hegemony and global stability. (Bad Arguments: Appeal to Fear, Appeal to Authority).

This conflict had a tragic shortage of Watchdogs which allowed the violence to be sustained for eight years. It ignited the ambiguous “War on Terror” launched by the NeoCons which has only spread and continued as it was designed to have no end points.

However, whistleblower Chelsea Manning disclosed information ultimately published by The New York Times and others which proved undisclosed civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, and U.S. attempts to cover up the CIA torture program.

Whistleblower Edward Snowden’s leaks exposed the U.S. National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs, that our government and its allies were monitoring the communications of millions of ordinary citizens and foreign officials, sparking the ongoing global debate over privacy, security, and government overreach.

The information brought forth by Watchdogs eventually turned public sentiment against the war, even though this disapproval would not end the conflict.

The deceit would later be proven: evidence would show that there were no weapons of mass destruction or active ties to Osama bin Laden. It would be affirmed that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and the U.S. government had a flawed strategy rooted in poor incentives and dubious analysis. And, The Torture Report would show the CIA was illegally torturing detainees at Guantánamo Bay without Department of Justice approval.

The deceit and harm would eventually be the subject of award-winning documentaries and movies:

No End in Sight

The Report

Snowden

All these truths were brought to light by the truth-tellers, but not fully accepted or understood until after the damage was done in Iraq and Afghanistan:

The death toll estimates range from approximately 150,000 to over 1 million, including military personnel and civilians. Total long-term costs are estimated at $7 trillion and counting. The war destroyed state institutions, military, economic, and social foundations, and public infrastructure like the health and electricity grid. Millions of Iraqis were displaced.

And—we did not accomplish the campaign’s intended goals. The U.S. did not replace the hostile regime with a stable, democratic government and transform Iraq into a prosperous state. Instead the war shifted the regional balance of power, leading to the strengthening of Iran’s influence and to the rise of extremist groups such as ISIS. We were seen not as liberators, but as violent, torturing invaders.

For the War in Gaza the fear event was the October 7th massacre.

Israel and its American allies presented many false claims to persuade the public, such as: all the IDF’s military action was self-defense, their priority was to free the hostages, they only attack Hamas and not the Palestinian people, they are doing all they can to get aid to the Palestinians but Hamas is stealing it, Hamas and not the IDF is shooting the innocents when they try to get the aid, Israel is not killing journalists, there is no starvation, there is no famine, there is no genocide.

The ideological deceptions are many and complex pertaining to Israel, as much of the unconditional support is defended as a moral duty in the long wake of the Holocaust, even when it means enabling war crimes. Israel’s wars and occupation have become a shared ideological mission for western civilization, regardless of the cost for each sovereign nation. (Bad Arguments: False Dilemma—“You’re either with us or against us”. Appeal to Tradition—“we’ve always done it this way.”)

A global coalition of Watchdogs were activated to verify and sound the alarm about the atrocities in Gaza. In April 2024, more than 250 humanitarian and human rights organizations called to stop arms transfers to Israel and Palestinian armed groups, and for an immediate ceasefire. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a UN-backed global hunger watchdog and a group of international experts formally declared a famine in Gaza.

In July 2024, the largest body of independent experts in the UN Human Rights system (the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council) declared that Israel’s intentional and targeted starvation campaign against the Palestinian people is a form of genocidal violence and has resulted in famine across all of Gaza. They called upon the international community to prioritize the delivery of humanitarian aid by any means necessary, to end Israel’s siege, and establish a ceasefire.

In November 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Galant.

The journalism arm of the Watchdog body which had been deteriorating for decades due to widespread capture was resuscitated by the rise of Palestinian citizen journalists, who have used social media platforms to document the war in real-time, effectively bypassing the traditional media landscape. Gazan journalists had significant success in reaching western audiences to reveal the actual reality of this conflict. More than 270 journalists have been killed by the IDF doing this.

As in all campaigns, it is the People who play the most critical role of holding institutions accountable. The anti-Zionist college protests raised and sustained public awareness and remained vocal through an onslaught of crackdown against them led by both the Biden and Trump administrations. The resistance is active worldwide and within Israel also, including the families of the hostages and former Israeli army and intelligence chiefs have also expressed opposition to the expanded operations.

The Watchdogs are what turned public sentiment against the war in Gaza, even though this disapproval has not yet ended the conflict or been able to impel a sustained ceasefire.

The deceit would later be proven: Israel’s military actions in Gaza have exceeded the scope of self-defense and in so doing violate international law. The families of the hostages attest to their Israeli government’s dubious claims that the priority is to free the hostages. Over 70,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, 83% were civilians. Israel did block life-saving aid to Gaza, Hamas was not stealing it. The IDF, and not Hamas, was shooting the innocents when they try to get the aid. Israel has killed more journalists than any other conflict on record. Israel has caused a famine. Israel has committed genocide.

Israelis and the world have come to realize that this war is more about keeping Netanyahu’s governing coalition together and shielding him from legal issues than about achieving security goals. In our country, we have come to understand that this war is more about appeasing the War Machine and a shadowy syndicate’s geopolitical agenda than any worthwhile goals for our own nation’s protection or provision.

We can expect all this deceit to eventually be the subject of award-winning documentaries and movies in a few years…

All these truths were brought to light by the truth-tellers, but not fully accepted or understood until the damage was done, or as the damage continues:

The Israeli invasion in Gaza has resulted in unprecedented human suffering and infrastructure destruction. An average of 92 Palestinians were killed each day before the “ceasefire”, and there have been at least 241 deaths after it. Assessments from international bodies describe the catastrophic damage as “on a scale never before seen”. Here at home, our government has spent between $31 and $33 billion dollars in military aid to Israel in just two years, as America’s economic situation nose-dives. U.S. support for Israel has led to a global perception of our complicity in a genocide, particularly in the Arab world, damaging U.S. foreign policy standing and leaving us less safe.

Israel and its allies did not accomplish the campaign’s intended goal of making Israel safe or dismantling Hamas. They have not established a new governance structure, but instead expanded its control over Gaza and sown chaos by not developing plans for postwar stabilization.

The Pattern is consistent. In all the above wars, the costs outweighed the benefits. In all of the above, the predicted benefits never even came to be and the costs continue to this day. All of the above include brazen lying to the American people and breaking international law.

We can witness the current moves towards regime change or war in Venezuela and see where things are falling into place. Perhaps the U.S. blowing up Venezuelan “drug boats” are the intended fear events to get the public feeling vulnerable. I do pray there will not be a bigger, deadlier fear event on the horizon.

Whatever happens with this or the next war campaign, we can lay good odds that it will cycle precisely like all of the above situations. The powers that (shouldn’t) be will lie outright and publicly deny what they know to be true in order to achieve their goals, which are clearly not the intended goals they will sell to us. As the results confirm from the Pattern so far, the actual purpose of the war will be to get millions and billions of our taxpayer dollars into the pockets of each individual architect who campaigned for it.

And the Watchdogs will also persist. These people do not have supernatural abilities to see what others cannot, or extraordinary investigatory skills to uncover what others cannot—because the truth they seek to bring forth is usually not well hidden and in fact often in plain sight and spoken aloud in plain english. They do have courage and tenacity. Perhaps in these times, these can be considered extraordinary attributes. Yet they are still inborn qualities of human nature available to all.

While traditional watchdogs, such as the media and government oversight offices, play important parts, the collective power of an informed, engaged, and vigilant public can have the greatest impact in maintaining transparency and preventing corruption.

Before we can fully harness this collective power, we would need to make 1000% sure we can call a lie a lie, a hoax a hoax, a crime a crime, a criminal a criminal, and can make our decisions according to the actual reality and not in any way according to the artificial one. The crucial decisions being—who do we define as our enemy, who is causing the most harm to the people, to what or whom do we give or withhold consent. What we know of The Pattern should empower us to make these determinations from the very first false claim. Because what the history confirms is that once we’re in, we’re in, and it’ll be decades before we’re out. The wisdom gained ought to be—we should not get in.

If any one of these conflicts resulted in peace and democracy in the region, that would be a break in the pattern. But we lost all these wars—lost those soldiers and civilians who died, lost the sanity and souls of those who didn’t, lost the trust of the world that our nation would stand for morality and justice.

We cannot undo this. As I repeat, what we can do is ensure our thinking about these wars, more specifically the campaigns for war, matures from irrational to rational. We can either think of these conflicts as terrible mistakes or as deliberate assaults launched from the enemies of peace within our government. It’s much harder to build a suitable defense against mistakes.

As obvious and redundant as any argument against war might seem, the exactitude of the repetition illustrated above forces us to admit that public sentiment is still malleable and susceptible to the Playbook tactics no matter how many cycles its been through.

The methodical strategies of public relations and the engineering of consent were designed to intercede at all the points where an individual would naturally react with disapproval or resistance. The Gaza PR campaign executed by Israel + United States used these methods well to manipulate opinion and momentum in their favor and crush dissent, to ultimately deter constructive oppositional action on our part.

The tactics tamper with our reasoning, our processing, and our recall, which all serves to debilitate the logical development from getting burned to never touching the flame again. The historical amnesia—which allows one generation’s Vietnam War to be followed by the next generation’s Iraq War, or cigarettes to be followed by vapes—is not natural. It is the result of successful attempts to impair our cognition and distort our memory so that we cannot effectively use them in our protection against the next campaign.

As I go to publish this chapter, Dick Cheney has died. Reading the New York Times eulogizing headline “For Dick Cheney, a Journey From Champion of War to Voice of Resistance” or any of the other mainstream media articles about his life, these descriptors of “champion” and “resistance” paint a very different picture than “liar” or “criminal”. If you read these articles, or the tweets from our respected leaders, there is no mention of lies and crimes, or the horrific damage they caused; there was no mention of the wealth and power illicitly gained by the conflict of interest in his revolving between Haliburton and the Vice Presidency. Reading these documents of how his contributions to our country will be logged into American history, which inform how his persona and actions will live in the memory we all rely upon to develop the wisdom we use to survive, we might feel more inclined to give our admiration or respect to his legacy than to build a better shield against the deceit and corruption his life was empowered by. By this whitewashing of our recent past, the lines get permanently blurred between the actual and the artificial realities.

At this present moment, our country is committed in focus and precious resources toward three different external military conflicts on three different continents. As the public squares off against these, or any other campaign for bad wars or bad products, our analysis here attempts to determine where we are on the arduous path between recognition of impending harm and active resistance to it. We must bear witness as the crafters of this particular never-ending campaign get the last word on Dick Cheney, considered so sinister a symbol of evil and death that he was nicknamed Darth Vader. This collective memory has been manipulated before our very eyes this week. One of the most powerful masterminds and profiteers of the Military Industrial Complex, whom the people fighting against war and violence opposed for three decades, gets his legacy rewritten with the ironic yet emphatic final slogan: “Voice of Resistance”.

The Neo Cons of this world and their War Machine do not stop, they do not rest, they do not ebb back the other way, they do not change pattern. While we catch our breath from the last battle, tend to our wounds, bury our dead, write the analysis and make the movies—they are well into their preparation for the next round. There is nothing so threatening to human life than the Global War on Terror (GWOT) team on the hunt for its next meal ticket.

An individual citizen cannot successfully defend against a Global War on Terror campaign. But any one of us can become so conscious of the campaign tactics that we never find ourselves on the opposite side of the truth for any amount of precious time.

+ The tactic of using False Claims was effective on enough of the public to get us and keep us in Bad Wars for the past 70 years and counting. =

We are all in this together! I’m not the first to say it! See you next chapter….

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THE MATH:

If we don’t participate by thinking it through we remain unprotected for the next assault.

+ The powerful force of the PR campaign can disconnect us from our own survival instincts and our allegiance to Natural Law.

+ Their Pattern of deception and concealment of harm leads to addiction, disease and death.

+ We must understand and memorize Their Playbook.

+ We must use the wisdom gained from past mistakes.

+ Cognitive dissonance has led to errors in our reasoning.

+ We must defend ourselves against those we thought were defending us.

+ Until we disable the corrupt revolving door we have an active breach in our defense.

+ Our over-reliance on external systems undermines our ability to protect ourselves or others.

+

There may be no more tragic episode of our lifetime than what has happened/is happening in Gaza. I pray there won’t be. It will likely be the defining issue of our era, and the ultimate litmus test of integrity. We are obligated to treat it with the serious attention it requires.

The paradox though, for most, is that our attention had been worn down by the heartbreak and frustration of watching helplessly these last two years, to the point where we could no longer stomach looking. This is of course no irony, but a well-designed execution of strategy achieving its intended result. It is by design that we’ve become too emotionally exhausted to hold up the spotlight. In order to save our spiritual and mental health, we gave up on the news. We could not justify the torture it was to just sit and stare when it seems we have no power to stop anything.

In every office building or fancy apartment complex there is a security guard who has to keep eyes on the security camera footage, watching out for anyone trying to commit crimes on the premises. If someone can get the guard to turn away from the footage, then the criminals can infiltrate the building with ease and commit any crime they want against the inhabitants.

If the people step back from their role as witness, we get more of what we are getting —unchecked madness. And the dark lords will pat themselves on the back. The criminals not only snuck past the security guards, they blinded them so they would never witness or testify to any future crime.

As we have shown with those we’ve put into lookout positions, whether it be the regulator contracted to block any harmful products from Bad Companies or the elected officials we assumed would block any policy which supports a genocide, they have failed at the tasks they were assigned. Because of ineptitude or cowardice or greed or another coercive element of their capture, they are no more useful than a blind security guard. If thinking rationally, we conclude that they cannot and therefore should not be relied upon anymore. What this means, is that we are for now in the lookout position, like it or not. It’s us or no one. It’s our eyes or blindness. So if we are thinking compassionately, and yes courageously, we have to keep watch.

Yet this will not mean merely watching what streams on our phones, like a TikTok or a show, without any connection to its creation. Watching without doing doesn’t make sense here and that’s why many of us could not sustain it.

Our analysis here today is not that. We are not just reading over the timeline of events to confirm the horribleness of it. We are not passively reliving trauma like a masochist. We are learning from it. We are learning how to never be in this position again, for this long. They will keep their same position—but ours can shift. Up until now, our position has been to watch and hope, that next year we won’t be watching an all-to-similar story of cruelty and injustice, perhaps in a different region, with a different evil-doer or CEO calling the shots. But their pattern will be exactly the same. And their tactics will be exactly the same.

When we take the spotlight off of THEM—the psychopathic nature we can barely fathom; when we take the spotlight off of IT—the suffering we eventually turn away from; when we redirect the spotlight onto US, and keep it there through every step of the Playbook examination—we can see where to correct the way we react to their tactics and where we can change our pattern.

In spite of how difficult this might be, summoning the temerity and focus to dig deeper into such a dark period—this is the absolute worst time to turn off the light.

For the first time in history, more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis.

For the first time in my lifetime, most everyone I know has heard of AIPAC. The shadowy mechanics of how our leaders can allow crimes against humanity to continue without doing everything in their power to protect the people are being exposed.

This enormously significant shift in public opinion is the result of a majority of the people recognizing the deception of the Israeli PR game and that manipulation no longer working on them. What we’ve seen and what we believe to be the truth has overcome the lies of this campaign.

BUT— this did not happen in late 2023, this happened in late 2025. And it took a genocide to get us here.

We undertake the essential requirement of an “After Action Review”, which is not a shaming exercise. All productive teams perform this AAR to better prepare for the next endeavor. Even successful ventures or winners of races do this to see if there may still be some improvement of efficiency or some tweak to shave seconds off their time.

The seeds of future bad fruits have already been planted, so when the first sprouts of that propaganda appear, we want to nip them in the bud much earlier than after tens of thousands of innocent lives lost. We would have to know precisely what and where to nip.

I assume that no reader here needs any more information to convince them of the tragedy in Gaza. As I keep saying, this is not an analysis of the tragedy, but of our reaction to it. However correct we feel about our 2025 position against Israel’s military action or U.S. foreign policy which supports that, are we able to identify where our 2023 position was any different, quieter, less confident or less active? This difference is what we want to home in on. There are of course understandable progressions from the heat of a moment like after October 7th to the more nuanced perspective we may hold now, and we always want our position to be flexible as situations evolve. Yet there is also valuable self-discovery for us in examining what exactly was going on internally during the progression, especially if it was a slow one. As we think through it, we don’t want to skip over the personal evaluation just because we have now caught up to the more rational position. Or because we feel a temporary relief during a ceasefire. Else we risk repeating the cycle at the same belated pace next time.

When we finally escape from a bad relationship or any harmful episode in life, once we catch our breath and feel at peace again, there is often great reluctance to then voluntarily dive back in to thinking over all the unsettling memories of what went so wrong. The “just put it behind you” method is super appealing! Unfortunately, it’s also the #1 obstacle to learning the lesson so it doesn’t happen again. For sure we want to put “them” behind us, but if we don’t have complete awareness of how they were able to manipulate us, another one of them might easily access whatever vulnerabilities allowed the last one in.

Many perceive the catastrophe in Gaza as a tipping point. Or, as addicts put it, a bottom. Not for the criminal agenda of the deceivers, that will press on. But for any remaining blindness in us that obscures that very real criminality and any rationalizations that restrict our ability to guard against it. If this moment is as pivotal as it seems, we may be more motivated and capable than ever to change elements in our behavior in order to capitalize on the numbers we now have on the side of sound judgment and peace. But, it will take great vigilance not squander this momentum.

When you’ve been very diligent with dieting and exercise and have finally lost those 20 pounds you’ve struggled so long to shed, you don’t celebrate that by eating a box of donuts. You keep going. You stay disciplined. You lean in and add even more healthy components to your lifestyle. You take advantage of that wind at your sails, not take for granted that it will just keep blowing this way.

One of the themes we drive home here is that hindsight is 20/20 and always much too late, if you are the victim of that period of doubt and dissonance where not enough people were seeing things clearly. I truly believe we have the capacity to shorten this period and think clearly from the jump, once we address the obstacles of manipulation that impede that process.

As we know, Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza in response to the Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage. Israel’s retaliation was expected, justified and supported by the majority of Americans and almost unanimously by leadership in Washington.

At the same time, the PR campaign for military action was launched. It began with this claim: Israel is only defending itself, they are only attacking Hamas and not the Palestinian people.

And these claims were believed, initially, by those who were watching the dominant presented reality, the horrors committed by Hamas. For the majority, it was not difficult to wholeheartedly support Israel’s need to defend itself after this barbarousness.

While not many are vociferously “pro-War” outside of extreme war hawks, the masses can often treat each new campaign as a blank slate when it follows a cataclysmic fear event. We don’t have to be pro-War to be made legitimately afraid of an enemy we feel the need to be protected from, like the Communist North Vietnamese, or Saddam Hussein in Iraq or Islamic Terrorists in Gaza or Iran. Or even, as of this week, narcoterrorists of Venezuela.

Unlike some new product that hasn’t existed previously, like the Wearables example perhaps, with war we have a built-in apprehension because we’ve seen and studied so much of the damage. We’ve likely watched many movies on the ravages of war in our day. So, it does depend on successful appeals to emotional fallacy to get us stirred up by our fears or our sympathy enough to override that wisdom in order to support another new military action.

The events of October 7th were most definitely an incitement of fear and emotions.

A week after the attack, a CNN Poll indicated a high degree of sympathy for Israelis. 50% of Americans viewed Israel’s military response as “fully justified,” with another 20% calling it “partially justified”.1

Despite how many or most felt then, we know where that public sentiment eventually got to—today American’s disapproval of the military action has reached 60%.2

This is the same evolution of all previous wars, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and now Gaza. Support wanes as the truth of innocent lives lost and destroyed becomes visible. (Key word: visible). Given this perfectly repeating sequence, it should not be difficult, even in the early emotional weeks, to predict where we will end up.

Regardless of the specifics which might make any fear-inducing event feel unique or unprecedented, and regardless of how those singularities make us personally feel a unique or unprecedented amount of real fear, we don’t ever need to treat a public relations campaign for war as anything novel or distinct. The Pattern & Playbook utilized by the War Machine will not be distinguishable from the previous one.

I will repeat the Pattern in the context of a war campaign:

1. War Machine presents a war they need us to buy into. We don’t yet want it or need it and it may not be good for us.

2. War Machine uses their powerful Public Relations departments to convince us to buy into their war.

3. Once War Machine gets initial market share they must continue to sell more war, must expand their war territory, their profit line must go up.

4. The war contains a hidden harm. War Machine does not disclose this to the public, instead attempts to cover it up.

5. The citizenry have questions and concerns about the war. Relying on watchdog tools like government officials, whistleblowers, litigation, quality journalism, and the public’s activism, there is exposure of the deception and harm.

6. War Machine then utilizes a Playbook of tactics to deny the harm, avoid accountability, protect their war business, and keep war going where harm is extended and compounded.

Most all reading this can now easily concede the actual reality—that Israel presented false claims, the captured in our media and government parroted and propped up those claims, and this resulted in tragedy.

Consistent with the Pattern, it would be the Watchdogs who exposed what the deceivers were trying to bury in order for their version of reality to reign supreme.

These mere mortals, the Watchdogs, shepherd the evidence through endless assaults for the sake of truth. For the sake of the people’s right to know. Right to know is a human right enshrined in law defined as the right for people to “participate in an informed way in decisions that affect them, while also holding governments and others accountable.”3 This access to information is an essential foundation to generate, share, and make available to all members of society knowledge that may be used to improve the human condition. Knowledge is light and ignorance is darkness.

The deceptive campaigns of Bad Companies or the War Machine hide the crucial knowledge we need to make decisions behind their fraudulent versions of reality. Watchdogs are the ones who visibly fight the false narrative. And because of their visibility, this is the group which the campaigners will need to target and crush.

Despite the self-defense narrative delivered by Israel, our government officials and mainstream media, the Watchdogs worked to report out the stories and pictures of the actual reality—the IDF’s offensive strategies against the Palestinian people:

After October 7th, Israel immediately ordered over 1 million residents of Gaza City to evacuate and move south, launched a large-scale ground invasion of Gaza, as well as airstrikes on a refugee camp, killing dozens of civilians. About 90% of Gaza’s some 2.1 million residents were displaced, with most facing unsanitary, overcrowded conditions and a lack of basic services.

The Israeli government imposed a widespread blockade on aid, commercial imports, and basic service provision. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant characterized it on October 9 as a “complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” These initial months of deprivation laid the groundwork for the crisis of organized famine that followed.

In that first month of October 2023, the World Food Program warned of Gaza’s dwindling food supply. In December, it reported that more than half of Gaza’s population was “starving”, fewer than one in ten were eating every day, and 48% were suffering “extreme hunger”.

In December 2023, the organization Human Rights Watch found that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war by deliberately denying access to food and water.

In January 2024, UN experts accused Israel of “destroying Gaza’s food system and using food as a weapon against the Palestinian people”.

By only the second week of Israel’s “defense”, more than 800 scholars and practitioners of international law, conflict studies, and genocide studies signed a public statement “to sound the alarm about the possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”

And, in early 2024, a case was brought before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) by South Africa who accused Israel of genocide in the Gaza Strip.

In this competition for the public’s attention and opinion, the polling numbers after these initial months show the American people somewhere in between the two presented versions of reality.

Americans were still sympathizing more with Israel (37%) than with the Palestinians (14%). And, 60% still said the United States should support Israel’s militarily until the remaining hostages taken by Hamas were returned (43% of Democrats).

But, by March of 2024, overall approval of Israeli action in Gaza dropped to 36%. And on the question of whether the military action is justified or not justified, both those numbers dropped (27% and 29%, respectively). But—the biggest growth in 2024 was in the group of Americans who said they did not know enough to give an answer. (42%).

What this shows us is that the Playbook is working. Israel and our congresspersons and much of our media say one thing, the Palestinians and the Watchdog groups say something else. The news of the violence and destruction is seeping through despite the gatekeeping by the captured, and so approval for the campaign is waning, yet the majority still feel the need to keep funding the source of the violence and destruction.

This is the confused result when the crucial knowledge needed to make decisions is manipulated and/or hidden from the people. The continuing argument over who deserves our sympathy, what is the correct strategy, all in a post-truth world where we trust less and less, means an adequate amount of doubt is sewn. A little doubt can go a long way. It only has to ensure the public feels a bit tentative on an issue instead of forcefully activated.

In order to further their agenda and subdue the resistance, the Playbook tactics the campaigners used worked as they always do to stifle dissent. Those who opposed Israel’s strategies of retaliation were hit with a massively powerful smear campaign. When the captured arms of our government used coercion to further weaponize the suppression of any criticism, the dissenters faced very serious consequences. All this was extremely apparent to the rest of the nation and made it unappealing, or even unsafe, for others to show any publicly-observable disapproval.

All this is exactly how it goes, how it’s been going, for the campaigns launched by the Bad Companies we’ve focused on. In the cases of Big Tobacco, Big Chemical, Big Agriculture and Big Pharma, currently, the Watchdogs are doing their utmost to sound the alarm and deliver the truth from the shadows into the light. In these situations, currently, the Playbook tactics are still overwhelming the Watchdogs and succeeding. The actual realities of most of the bad products we are contending with in our world, which cause so much harm and death, still have not come to the level of transparency necessary for any kind of tipping point.

FYI and FWIW, here are some of the Watchdog groups fighting the false narratives of Bad Companies at present:

https://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/

https://usrtk.org/

https://foe.org/

https://www.ewg.org/research/many-fast-food-wrappers-still-coated-pfcs-kin-carcinogenic-teflon-chemical

https://www.gmfreecymru.org.uk/ (this is of course a global fight)

These groups work tirelessly to report the evidence of harm out to us, yet in these cases not enough of the public is receiving. The truth of what is happening behind the captured curtain is still being sufficiently buried so it remains out of visibility. Unfortunately for us here, it seems we would need the crystal-clear visuals the caliber of what we see in Gaza to rally the kind of outcry necessary for change.

With the product of war, the direct causation of harm is (can be) much more obvious and unequivocal. However, that all depends on the coverage and how much debate is allowed or heard. Biased coverage and limited or quashed debate = less exposure of harm = more harm.

The Vietnam War, for instance, unlike in previous wars, was the first “television war.” Uncensored reporting brought the conflict’s unfiltered and brutal reality into every American living room. This visibility created a “credibility gap” between optimistic government reports and the grim scenes broadcast on the nightly news, which directly correlated to the anti-war sentiment that would eventually force America to pull out.

In contrast, there is a widely supported argument that a lack of critical coverage of the Iraq War and its immense human cost undermined potential opposition. Instead of challenging official narratives, much of the U.S. mainstream media acted as a conduit for the Bush administration’s pro-war stance, contributing to public misconceptions that took years to correct. In this war, the captured media downplayed or underreported Iraqi civilian casualties, (some estimates place between 100,000 and 650,000 under)4 and the PTSD of our veterans was notoriously ignored and neglected.

We will call the war in Gaza the first “TikTok” war as the abuses there did achieve that crucial level of visibility, due to the images being displayed on over a billion phones every day.

Despite what the war campaign, the mainstream media and government representatives were saying, the “watchers” grew into a consolidated global majority of truth-telling and utilized all the tools available to Watchdogs. They took their claims to the International Court of Justice, as the courts are often the only path to judgment on these opposing versions of truth. The independent journalists risked and lost their lives to get this truth out to us. As continuous as Israel and its accomplices affirmed “We are not targeting civilians, there is no famine, this is all self-defense, etc”, the evidence of the actual reality was smuggled out and disseminated to the people to confront the deception.

As we’ve shown in the Pattern, the exposure of the harm doesn’t immediately lead to an end to the harm, it immediately leads to the activation of the Playbook which serves to allow continuation of the harm. In all the other Bad Company examples we’ve referenced, the actual reality has been repeatedly beaten back down and shrouded in enough doubt, dissonance or distaste to be effectively marginalized.

The crucial difference in this current state of the game we are in, is that the smear tactics used on the Watchdogs and any of us who agreed with their criticism, which had worked for decades whenever they were needed, stopped working like they used to. Either from overuse and overreach or from buckling under the weight of the unfiltered honesty of the raw footage, or the combination of both, the negative accusations of the smear were no longer discrediting the truth as it poured in.

Although the campaign accused the dissenters of being antisemitic and putting our Jewish countrymen in danger by their criticism of the war, the Watchdogs remained steadfast. It began to come down to scrupulous principals and tough choices—is it worse to be considered anti-semitic or to be silent on a genocide? When the former used to have extreme power of persuasion, the greater need to protect innocent lives from being lost and destroyed began to take precedence.

Once the premise of the smear—that if you opposed this military action you were directing hatred or prejudice toward all Jews—was rejected, the accusations started to lose their sting. And the more and more desperate the smears were that came after this, the more strong-arming the coercive enforcement became, the more the manipulative tactics were illuminated to more and more of the population. It was finally becoming clear enough to see that the vitriol directed at the dissenters was merely another weapon of their corrupt campaign and less an actual attempt to protect society from a degenerate group we should all fear and vilify.

And this is a major paradigm shift.

The breakthrough here was not the sudden revelation of the existence of tactics like capture and the smear campaign and coercion. We haven’t been completely ignorant of those, but we also haven’t had any major victories over them. The development was that it became very evident that their existence was directly enabling the continuation of injury and death. These components within our own system of democracy were part of the weaponry of this war. And more people began to name and define these tactics as components of the assault which they must oppose.

Once these lynchpins of the Playbook were weakened, the entire campaign began to falter and the Watchdogs could more effectively rally in opposition. Whether the opposition will vanquish the enemy remains to be seen, but this is not our focus, not yet. It can’t be. We don’t get to contemplate our offensive strategies until we’ve improved our defensive ones. Any sports fan will tell you that it is good defense which creates good offense.

This shift, however temporal, has taken the form of a new bandwagon rolling through Washington. In addition to the new RejectAIPAC coalition, a US congressman, a centrist Democrat and strong supporter of Israel, has returned his AIPAC donations. More and more congresspersons are pledging not to take AIPAC money during the 2026 midterms, which means they are all considering what is now being called a litmus test for many voters. These are irrefutable signs that what was once the predominant, if not only way to win an election, is now a political liability.

All this does move the needle, and the sights of our aim, closer to the kill shot we’ve been discussing. When previously hardly anyone in government or media bothered with the topic of campaign finance reform, now at least the subject of those campaign finances is front and center, and some politicians are voluntarily reforming. For the vast majority, this is not because they are questioning their morals. But because they are hearing audibly and seeing visibly our questioning of them. When we the people did not have our eyes on the disturbing outcomes of capture, in this case what taking AIPAC money meant, they could hide all that corruption behind closed doors. Now that we see, and have said that we see, they now feel the pressure.

I’m not suggesting anyone be foolish enough to pin all hopes onto this first break in our pattern. On the contrary, I believe this is the time to double-down on the examination of the rest of the P&P, to make double-sure we know how the tricks did work on us until they didn’t (if they didn’t), to see where they still work on us in other issues, and keep investigating how we can seal up the breaches and/or create the new and improved defensive armor we need to get past them.

The rising cancers, heart conditions, chronic disease and addictions in our country that continue to compromise our quality of life and lower our life expectancy year after year, in numbers greater than the death count in Gaza—have a cause. There is specific weaponry behind these fatalities. The shadowy mechanics of the Bad Companies are in play, same as always, and they are still working well.

It’s wise to take advantage of this current high resolution illustration of all the tricks, traps and snares used in the Gaza campaign and burn these into our memory while it’s very fresh and clear. Because we can deduce from our history that these perceptions can naturally, and by design, fade away like chalk on a sidewalk.

The most solid and unchanging part of the Pattern we’ve been locked into for decades, or millennia even, is that our opponents do not rest. And wherever we do, is where they race ahead of us. We see how much damage they can do with their lead time, in the period when we are still wrestling with our dissonance and battling each part of the Playbook. We need to catch up, and then keep pace. We need to recognize and oppose the tactics when they are launched at us next, regardless of the circumstances. And, we need to accomplish this IN. REAL. TIME.

+ The genocide in Gaza has illuminated the Pattern & Playbook for all to see =

We are all in this together! I’m not the first to say it! See you next chapter….

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THE MATH:

If we don’t participate by thinking it through we remain unprotected for the next assault.

+ The powerful force of the PR campaign can disconnect us from our own survival instincts and our allegiance to Natural Law.

+ Their Pattern of deception and concealment of harm leads to addiction, disease and death.

+ We must understand and memorize Their Playbook.

+ We must use the wisdom gained from past mistakes.

+ Cognitive dissonance has led to errors in our reasoning.

+ We must defend ourselves against those we thought were defending us.

+ Until we disable the corrupt revolving door we have an active breach in our defense.

+

There have been many societal changes since the time when we ran the snake oil salesman out of town after his product sickened the community. As the marketplace grew beyond what private citizens could keep watch over, we had to assign certain members of the village to keep a lookout for swindlers. We entrusted them to let us know about anything fishy we should be aware of. We created middle men between us and any commercial threat.

Because we were no longer in the lookout position, we did not notice when those in it got overtaken and captured. And once the lookouts were in place, many began to stop looking out for themselves.

This new arm of the commonwealth was a reasonable and necessary insertion because, as the “father of Liberalism” John Locke put it: “in an ideal, anarchic state of nature, various problems arise that would make life more insecure than under the protection of a minimal state.” But, when we handed over this responsibility to the middle men, it seems much of the citizenry, over time, have relinquished certain duties still essential to protect ourselves and the children.

We entrusted the entirety of our physical and environmental health to susceptible mortal humans and did not insulate them well enough from the corrupting tendencies of the tricksters they were tasked to oversee. Once they fell under the influence of the swindlers, they stopped letting us know about anything fishy, and the majority of the people stopped asking. Since all the analyses of fishiness happened behind closed doors, we remained unaware of the corruption which existed there, and we did not have a clear view of the dangers being scrutinized or what was at stake. So, in terms of what was allowed into society, the lookout position became the decision-maker position. And once that authority was in place, we began to stop deciding things for ourselves.

Once a product was in the market, we could not see by looking at it which potential risks had been investigated and what those arguments were. All the pertinent information we would need to make our own decisions was absorbed into the end result—it had made it into the marketplace.

The difference, now that the middle men had decision-making authority, was that when someone got sick from the snake oil, they had to go back through the middle men for validation, because now no one outside of that position could run the salesman out of town. And the middle men who vouched for the salesman, staked their reputation on him, and most importantly got rewarded financially from him, were less and less willing to validate this claim of injury and less and less likely to want the salesman to stop selling.

The public trust in government has been decreasing alongside the same timeline that the Bad Companies have been utilizing and honing their Playbook to deceive the people. When the National Election Study began asking about trust in government in 1958, about three-quarters of Americans trusted the federal government to “do the right thing almost always or most of the time”. In recent years, this number has dropped below 20%.1

Trust in government hit its all time low at a shocking 16% in 2023, following the years we were most advised (and often compelled) to trust the experts. As we understand by now (we better!), these deeply conflicted trends will result in a ton of debilitating dissonance.

I’ve included a clip of Dr. Rangan Chatterjee on the Jay Shetty Podcast discussing the subject of reliance. He submits (at around the 20:40 minute mark) that we’ve been posing to ourselves the wrong question of: “which expert should I trust” instead of “why do I no longer trust myself”? As he explains in the first chapter of his new book2, we’ve outsourced our inner expertise to the external experts. And then, like any underused muscle, the trust in self begins to atrophy.

There are many of us who might not be able to find our way through much of the geography surrounding us or even call members of our own family if our phones lost service. I think I have two phone numbers memorized. (I just tested myself — it’s only one). The number of teenagers who have even received their drivers license has dropped around 20 percentage points in the last two decades. Less than half of them can drive so if their phones crash they’re really out of luck to get anywhere.

The problem with depending so entirely on the external devices is that we are helpless to control any aspect of those. If my cell service stops, there is nothing I can do to prevent that, there’s nothing I can do to turn it back on. I’m just stuck. If I was relying on my own memory or navigational skills, like I did for the first half of my life, I would still be able to make the important call from somewhere and plot the directions to the next town and drive myself to it.

The idea is to take advantage of the new innovations and tools that make our life easier or improved, but not let those completely replace the skills we still need to possess and hone. If the “why do I no longer trust myself” question of our generation morphs into an “I never learned how to trust myself” resignation for the Gen Z’s and onward, we are passing on a terrible torch to them and can only predict a continuous de-evolution.

We are fortunate to have so much access to new sources of expertise and so many new modernization technologies to do for us what we used to do for ourselves.

An animal in the wild does not ignore all the external aspects of its environment, it takes them all in. But it relies on its own instincts to evaluate those and decide its next move. The animal is hyper aware of itself and so hyper reliant on itself. There is no other entity in its world that it can outsource this analysis and insight to. The animal survives by its own vigilance alone.

The outside information and knowledge available to us can be vital intel. We use it to support our decision-making, but we have to evaluate it. Not all offers are good or necessary or verified just because they have made it to market. Yet more and more in today’s high-tech world we are breezing past the evaluation obligation.

All new man-made offerings come with the hope and claim that they will improve our lives or solve a problem. In the many instances we have discussed relating to Bad Companies, the most pervasive “improvements” or “solutions” have resulted in the highest death counts for Americans. If there has been any wisdom gleaned from these fatal situations, society still doesn’t have many examples to show where it has been using that to adjust its behavior.

Most of us today are currently feeling amazed and unnerved by the adoption and fast-tracking of the AI chatbots. For this chapter on reliance, I was tempted just to write: “self-determination vs chat-GPT = amirite?” and leave it at that. It’s not difficult for anyone to predict how an over-reliance on AI can lead to a decrease in human engagement, creativity, and emotional intelligence. At this very early stage, the data are already out on the resulting decline in critical thinking skills with increased AI dependence.3

The rise of artificially intelligent companionship is a whole other unprecedented phenomenon. The real fear that our children would never again feel the need to read a book or write their own essays is now quickly being replaced by the fear that they might also never find a better, more dependable “friend” than the one they’ve “personalized” out of this new technology. A survey published this year found that one in five students report that they or someone they know has had a romantic relationship with AI.

You can probably by now guess the familiar period of pre-regulation we are currently in with these new chatbot companions: “Comprehensive regulations for AI companion chatbots are emerging at the state and federal levels…Given the speed of AI development, legal and ethical frameworks are still in flux, but several key principles have been established or are under consideration…”

And the latest and most unsettling advances on this subject is that ChatGPT will soon allow pornography for its users! I will direct you to this BBC article which cites some of the obvious points: “critics say OpenAI’s decision to allow erotica on the platform shows the need for more regulation at the federal and state levels.” And, “No company has ever had the kind of adoption that OpenAI saw with ChatGPT…They needed to continue to push along that exponential growth curve, achieving market domination as much as they can.” Porn oughta do it!

Beyond these omniscient simulated-human conversationalists (and God knows what else they are simulating), we are right now living through an explosion in the wearable sensor market. In some aspects, these go even further beyond what artificial intelligence can know of our desires and curiosities, to what it can know of our actual biology.

Let’s briefly focus on this specific new market as a practice example to illustrate how a weakened self-reliance might engage with any new product or technology or proposed agenda.

First thing to remember is that, as of now, we are choosing to buy these devices, or not. It’s not like Wearables are a powerful force of nature we are unable to resist, they’re just a new thing hitting the market. And like a lot of new things, they could be harmless, and they obviously could have some benefits or they wouldn’t be a new thing at all. But the starting position should not be: Ok I’ll opt in and then see what happens. The starting position should be the question of whether or not we’re going to opt in. And that requires some requisite evaluation, in order to answer the question, prior to the action of opting in.

In the evaluation process we gather information on our side, the defensive questioning side. Part of that process is imagining what all the Bad Companies of the world might also get out of our consenting to the product, on their offensive assault side, knowing what we know about Them.

Individuals having access to their own biometrics is interesting and surely useful in a number of ways. But before we get too excited about any flashy new object or trend, we are obligated to take out our handy risk-benefit calculator. (By calculator I mean analyses—in case you are immediately searching Amazon for a bluetooth risk-benefit calculator to strap on on top of your fit bit!). This is the process where we compare the possible benefits and risks associated with a particular action, decision, or intervention to determine whether the potential good outweighs the potential harm. This evaluation part should prompt us to extend our thinking beyond the desire created by the flash, to ask ourselves: what else is happening? What else could happen? This inquiry and assessment comes before we decide our next move, not after we have strapped it onto our body.

Even without extensive research, our own natural instincts and inborn logic could predict, if we gave ourselves the chance to think through it, what some of the “unintended” consequences, i.e. risks, i.e. harms, from these new wearable products might be:

• Modification and perversions of behavior— Individuals may become addicted to monitoring their health data, potentially leading to anxiety or obsessive behaviors. When we ask our device how we slept instead of feeling that ourself, when we check our phone to see if we're stressed instead of noticing our breath, etc, we are outsourcing our valuable embodied consciousness to algorithmic interpretation. Once we are reliant on our watch to tell us about our physicality, we might never trust our own gut again.

• Potential health risks— Wearables have multiple transmitters and receivers using Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and cellular, operating on several different radio bands, that continuously emit radiofrequency (RF) radiation. What do we know (or not know) about the health risks of cumulative exposures in direct contact with the body for long periods of time?

• Creation of big data sets, their use and misuse— In the paradigm of our era where data is more valuable than gold, after the existing algorithm models have extracted all that they can to exploit our consumer preferences, there is one holy grail of far greater value which the biotech bros of Silicon Valley are panning for—the under our skin data. Once they get their hands and their surveillance under there, what they can do with that information to make themselves more powerful and profitable is the stuff of waking nightmares.

• Privacy and security issues— literally the most sensitive and personal medical information collected without adequate knowledge or control, to be potentially shared, breached and stolen, surveilled, accessed and used by government or law enforcement or bad corporations or God knows who.

  And finally, we should definitely consider:

• Unanticipated challenges facing regulatory bodies—because we have discussed how challenged they are! Yet they are the only ones currently responsible for regulating both the safety and security of wearable devices and associated apps which interpret all the acquired data. It was only last chapter where we scoured over the gaping holes in that system and the consequential fatalities.

These Wearables currently reside in as uncharted as a commercial territory can get, in terms of unknown risks we don’t yet fully understand. All these new technologies require the establishment of new norms and regulations which we are nowhere near creating, or even know to ask for. According the the AMA, “The regulatory landscape for wearables is complex and evolving, with different rules applying to different types of devices and their intended uses”… Sounds about right, nonsense-wise!

We should now be able to recognize that familiar corporate sweet spot. What follows the introduction of a new technology or potentially harmful product is this same extended period of our gullibility and ignorance and their lack of oversight and regulation. Wearables are just classified as interesting watches for now, so if we are relying on any part of the external system to think any of this through or study any of the unintended consequences as they spring up—we would once again be bitten by the serpent of foolishness that has us trusting and depending on untrustworthy, unreliable agencies and authorities.

It is not logical or wise to make the decision to opt in to something when we do not yet have the necessary information to answer these type of questions posed here. Once we have fulfilled our obligation of evaluation, then we can make any decision we like. We can even accept the potential of harm and decide to opt in anyway because we’ve concluded the benefits outweigh those risks. As long as we can sensibly articulate how we came to that conclusion, first and foremost to our own self.

P.S— I just did a quick round of research to come up with some answers to those type of questions on the wearables subject (super interesting and alarming btw!):

https://en.unesco.org/inclusivepolicylab/analytics/data-privacy-and-internet-things

https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/09/06/140459/for-safetys-sake-we-must-slow-innovation-in-internet-connected-things/

chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://epic.org/wp-content/uploads/privacy/ftc/EPIC-FTC-IoT-Cmts.pdf

When a new campaign is launched, we have a pretty solid history to reflect on to help us identify where the dangers might be hiding, especially coming from a Bad Company.

The forest is full of a wide variety of mushrooms. Some are edible, some are hallucinatory, some are poisonous. We don’t determine which is which by eating them all. We examine from a distance, we assess and classify using the knowledge our civilization has accumulated over the years, learning the hard way in some instances. But once we have that knowledge, we don’t have to keep learning the hard way.

We have relied on the external Them to determine which things coming into our environment are bad, but that reliance has failed us many times. We also rely on an external Them to determine what is called good in our environment, and we get burned there too.

While our reliance on artificial intelligence is in its infant stage, we have a long history of relinquishing our independent thinking to old-fashioned human collective intelligence. But to depend on the whims of a mercurial society for direction can leave you flip-flopping from politically correct signal to signal and often with egg on your face if you accidentally flopped when the real virtue was to flip.

In the heated early weeks of the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, you may remember #BlackoutTuesday. It began as an initiative introduced by two black women in the music industry to post a black tile on Instagram, representing a blackout of business for a day to reflect on how white people in their industry exploit and make money off black talent. But the campaign quickly snowballed into a worldwide opportunity to display solidarity. Tuesday morning saw Instagram feeds flooded with black tiles, in a frenzy of memetic contagion.

Problems and backlash quickly arose, which would become a familiar sequence in a continuous cautionary tale about the potential downfall of relying on social media to tell you how to be virtuous. The first issue was that many people posting their black tiles were using the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter which ended up drowning out crucial information and documentation of the injustice. Those searching for resources and protest updates only found a frustrating row of black screens.

The second problem was that widespread posting of a “silent” black square without further action was immediately criticized as a performative allyship that did not translate into meaningful change. Call-outs of hypocrisy then flooded the earlier flood. (When even the Washington Redskins’ instagram displayed a black tile to represent their taking the time to think long and hard about what they might possibly do to curb the exploitation of people of color—the joke of the whole debacle had become fully apparent). By the end of the day, many of the posts had been deleted.

No one wants to end up on the wrong side of history. Not even in the short history of a single day, where the impulse to parrot others to avoid any accusation of complacency toward the current issue led many to act impulsively before really thinking things through. Which then only led to a different and worse accusation of shallow conduct.

Rash urgency doesn’t automatically amount to advocacy and goodness; pausing to evaluate doesn’t automatically amount to discouragement and disregard. Outside of actual emergencies when there is not a moment to spare, it is usually wisest to spare the moments to think deeply.

Landing on the wrong side of longterm geopolitical events bears far more serious condemnation (theoretically, ideally) when bad decisions can lead to the most terrible humanitarian crises.

In all instances, from commercial products to social or political alliances, we can be led to make bad personal choices when we outsource the major responsibilities of looking out for ourselves, evaluating the claims we are offered, and resisting what we know by our natural instincts to be dangerous or in our hearts to be wrong. It’s not only AI use which creates an "accountability gap" that can lead to harm, exploitation, and a societal erosion of individual moral agency. There is a great deal in our own behavior, our pattern of passivity, that has led to more of an “accountability ocean” which separates us from the reason and ethics we must rely on to make better decisions.

The Public Relations campaigners have mastered the manipulation of our consumer preferences and the engineering of our consent. There is very little evidence to show where we have overcome this. Due to the ceaseless, unobstructed execution of their Playbook and the efficacy of all that trickery, we may not perceive or be ready to admit to all the elements that weakened our resistance and have made us more susceptible to the tricks and more reliant on the tricksters. There is ample evidence to show that the consequences of this gap in our perception and accountability are getting more and more desperate.

So now, we would need to glean the wisdom from that part. Beyond the acceptance that industry or government historically deceives, gaslights, and harms us for the sake of their power and profit, we must accept the fact that, despite our awareness of this, we have not noticeably pulled back any of our reliance upon these entities or agencies.

This period of reliance we still reside in concerning the Bad products we’ve discussed leaves us tolerantly waiting in the fog for the science or an established authority to announce the official warnings that might activate our opposition.

We see the numbers of chronic diseases in our children spike catastrophically and we wait for officialdom to declare an emergency.

We can personally attest to the increased prevalence of neurodevelopmental disorders (from ADHD to Autism) in the younger generations and we wait for leadership to thoroughly investigate this while it’s still taboo to even consider the potential environmental causes.

We witness these young humans in the prime of their life enter the “continuum of care”, supported by pharmaceuticals and little else, and we wait for some miracle to save them.

We rush to get the new app, the new technology, the new bio hack, for fear of falling behind, and hand over the rights to our privacy and our sovereign bodies in order to compete in that race—a race someone else decided we must win even though it runs in the opposite direction from authentic wellness or our own ethics.

We have all been bystanders to a technical and provable genocide in Gaza and we still wait for the agreed-upon official confirmation by a body with legal authority, while still only 20 of our U.S. congresspersons have allowed themselves to say the word out loud.

Those muscles of our self-reliance have been weakened and our inner expertise has been muted. That is no accident. It is due to all the ways the opposition’s strategy has worked to maneuver us from active participants to passive consumers. Once disconnected from our reason and from our intuitive deference to a higher law, we can remain like a ship without a sail until we reconnect with it again. But repeated exercise of the muscles used to recognize and resist what is out of alignment, so we can then return to relying on a more solid and sustainable morality, can restore our strength and integrity.

When it comes to harmful products and unjust wars, what we’ve learned the hard way is that we are too reliant on those who have been captured by the enemy. They now protect the interest of the corporation or war machine over that of the people, so there is not a lot of benefit in the reliance, and even greater risk as the set up impairs our ability to protect ourselves or others.

We don’t have to keep learning the hard way.

Today’s most consequential example of the lack of a functioning defense we have against The Pattern is the crisis in Gaza. We’ve watched on the sidelines with our jaws dropped in horror and eyes full of tears, waiting for the representatives we rely on to find the compassion and sanity to vote against the most blatant and visible villain of our era. It has never been more imperative to examine the very raw period of the past two years through the lens of the Pattern & Playbook—where we’ve again been forced to tolerantly wait in the fog for an established authority to announce the official warnings to activate any opposition.

In the next chapter we can take a calm and clear look back at this latest and most tragic campaign with the recognition, wisdom, and accountability necessary to compel the shifts that can only come from changes we make on our side of the Pattern.

+ Our over-reliance on external systems undermines our ability to protect ourselves or others. =

We are all in this together! I’m not the first to say it! See you next chapter….

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THE MATH:

If we don’t participate by thinking it through we remain unprotected for the next assault.

+ The powerful force of the PR campaign can disconnect us from our own survival instincts and our allegiance to Natural Law.

+ The opposition’s Pattern of deception and our Pattern of passivity leads to death and disease and addiction.

+ We must understand and memorize the opposition’s Playbook.

+ We must use the wisdom gained from past mistakes.

+ Cognitive dissonance has led to errors in our reasoning.

+ We must defend ourselves against those we thought were defending us.

+

“I’m not the enemy!!!”

“Then who are you?!!”

-from Michael Clayton

The definition of a traitor is someone who betrays a trust, loyalty, or obligation, especially by acting against their own country, group, or cause. This betrayal often involves harmful actions like aiding enemies or undermining the group they were once associated with. Traitors violate the trust placed in them by others, often by acting against the best interests of those who trusted them, engaging in actions that cause damage to the group they have betrayed.

In national intelligence agencies they are called double agents; in the mafia they are called rats. In the U.S. government, the above described behavior will get you a very high-paying job in the private industry you switched allegiances to while you were a public servant of the American people.

The Capture tactic works with politicians via campaign finance on the front end and chances for payoffs on the back end (through somehow-legal stock market investment wins and other lucrative opportunities after leaving office). The lawmakers’ corporate-friendly moves are less conspicuous than those tasked with the actual product market approval, as they can just vote with the pack in Congress on policy that favors big business. Yet the negative consequences for public health from this behavior are massive.

In the case of the regulators, the capture is secured with the implicit or explicit promise of a fat salary in a job or with consulting work within the Bad Company after leaving the government job, if the regulators can make the company’s market approval processes swift and painless. Sometimes the regulators start off in the industry they will soon be in charge of regulating, unbelievably.

The revolving door is not conspiracy or an open question; it is a real thing, currently perfectly legal, which everyone knows about. Yet, it is literally the precise source of the breach which makes harmful products that cause cancer, strokes, heart attacks, illness, addiction, etc, a ubiquitous part of our lives in this country.

Beyond just Bad product-makers, the phenomenon extends also to Bad systems-makers. The practice is what led to the global financial crisis of 2008 and The Great Recession, where private sector incentives permeated all bodies of government to undermine the public's welfare. It is a terrible yet preventable defect in the system which the Establishment, and undeniably the public also, accepts as just the way it is.

We can argue which is the bigger crisis—the leadership who fully understands the ramifications of the revolving door between government and corporations or the people who don’t understand that reality well enough. I will argue that the leadership who fully understands will not do a thing about it, obviously, until they are forced by the will of the people, once the people finally fully understand that this is the kill shot. Because of course, the conflicts of interest which poison the whole system aren’t inevitable or irreversible. Bernie Sanders can tell you in two minutes why the priority should be first to get big money out of the political process, despite its still being barely discussed in the media or in congress.

The revolving door swings both ways, back and forth. Those who start out working in the corporate sector and then transition to government for a period, pave the way for their industry to profit into the future, and then the individual can return back there to recoup. These actions are referred to as “bureaucratic capital”. It can be a relatively brief exodus, this double agent duty, and is often just a standard pathway to promotion within a Bad Company.

It’s not like when a person enters the government sector they suddenly cut off all ties and communication with the “family” they came from. How tough do we think they will be during regulations, sitting across the table from their former colleagues or boss? Knowing that boss will be the top prospect of employer after leaving this job? Similarly, when government workers leave their posts for the private sector, they don’t necessarily abandon their insider connections or their insights about what’s going on behind the scenes in Washington. They are hired for their special knowledge of the system, including any loopholes they might know about. It’s ridiculous to hope that the conflicts don’t affect decisions and outcomes.

Professional lobbyists directly influence legislators as well as regulatory agencies and judges, all completely within the law. It’s a face-to-face practice so the main assets for success are contacts and access. The lobby industry is very attractive for ex-government officials as there are hundreds of millions of dollars on the table in the form of projects and contracts, public and private.

We can hardly imagine government any other way…

Looking back to the early 1990s, Dick Cheney and his company Halliburton represent some of the worst and most brazen displays of conflict of interest and corruption at the highest office. As Secretary of Defense, Cheney gave contracts to Halliburton (multinational corporation in the business of oil fields, pipelines, and chemicals) to rebuild facilities in Kuwait that had been destroyed in the first Persian Gulf war. Then the company was awarded a huge contract by our Army Corps of Engineers (with no competing bids) for doing “military logistics” (formerly performed by…our military). This part of the company business escalated rapidly and in ten years revenues exceeded $2.5 billion. Then, Cheney is made CEO of Halliburton (thank you Dick!), where he reigns for 5 years, clearing a $20 million dollar annual salary, after taxes. In 2000, he comes back to the government sector as Vice President of the United States, scoring a severance package from Halliburton on his way “out” bigger than anyone there has ever seen (some say as high as $62 million in stocks and stock options). A few years into his role as VP, after the Iraq War is underway based on lies he helped fabricate and disseminate, Halliburton is given a contract (again without competitive bidding) to restore the Iraqi oil sector, one of the biggest military logistics contracts in history. And on and on, you get the grotesque gist.

A whopping 80% of U.S. four-star military retirees are employed in the for-profit defense industry.1 War hawks are hawks not because they are obsessed with battles, but because they stand to make millions off the wars they promote on the back end of their lifetime.

The revolving door of the financial sector has delivered even more disastrous results to Americans, as its prevalence weakened the oversight and regulation of big banks, which is widely cited as one of the main causes of the 2008 financial crisis which wrecked our economy. This crisis was preceded by the Wall Street corporate sector entering more and more into cooperation with federal regulators agencies.

If you never fully grasped that catastrophe as it was happening, there is a 2011 report from a Senate subcommittee investigation entitled Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse, where they uncovered that "the crisis was not a natural disaster, but the result of high risk, complex financial products, undisclosed conflicts of interest; and the failure of regulators, the credit rating agencies, and the market itself to rein in the excesses of Wall Street.” It was 639 pages of evidence proving the “too-big-to-fail” banking institutions deceived their clients and the public, and they were aided and abetted by complaisant government regulators and agencies riddled with conflicts of interest.

The more entertaining refresher:

To zero back in on our favorite Bad Companies, a perfectly illustrative example from the Big Ag sector, to map how a regulatory agency abandons its responsibility to protect the public, is the Michel Taylor story:

The first Bush administration wanted the FDA to promote (as opposed to regulate!) biotechnology, so it created a new position within the agency—“Deputy Commissioner for Policy”—specifically for Monsanto’s lead attorney, Michael Taylor. It is under his charge that the biotech/GMO regulation policies were developed. After which he returned to Monsanto to be the Bad Company’s vice president for the next 11 very profitable years as the biotech industry took off, unhindered by regulations. And then, under the Obama administration, he was put back into the FDA as the “U.S. Food Safety Czar”. Food safety took a nosedive; chronic disease spiked.

This is the back and forth action which continues regularly across industry and within all government branches, fanning out like a flame all the way down. Over 300 former congressional and White House staff members have moved on to work in biotech firms as lobbyists.

This movement is perhaps no more widespread than in the world of Big Pharma.

FDA staffers play a pivotal role in pharmaceutical drug approvals, choosing what evidence to present to the agency's advisory panels and influencing or making approval decisions. After they wield this influence, they are free to move on to jobs in the pharmaceutical industry.

Science magazine wrote about the problem in a 2018 article: FDA's revolving door: Companies often hire agency staffers who managed their successful drug reviews—Job changes raise conflict of interest questions. The article discloses findings that 11 of 16 FDA medical examiners who worked on 28 drug approvals and then left the agency are now employed by or consult for the companies they recently regulated.

This conflict had also been addressed in research published by BMJ medical journal, which found that 27% of the FDA employees who approved cancer and hematology drugs from 2001 through 2010 went on to work or consult for pharmaceutical companies they previously regulated.2

Corruption happens when powerful people leverage and abuse their positions for personal gain. It isn’t an amorphous, abstract element of the system, it’s actual people. Individuals who are willing to put profit, theirs, over people, us. They have lost the fight of resistance against the dark seduction to prioritize money and power over goodwill toward their fellow man. Traitors demonstrate a lack of faithfulness to their original group, switching support to an opposing side or cause. Or maybe they were never on our side, who can say.

Patrizia Cavazzoni, who led the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research from 2021-2025, very important, pivotal years of overseeing a large portion of the agency’s drug review work, joined Pfizer as its next chief medical officer, in February of this year. Before becoming a US drug regulator, she worked at Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and Sanofi…and now she has returned again.3

Nine out of the last ten FDA commissioners (the big boss position) have gone on to work for major pharmaceutical companies shortly after leaving public office. Within the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex, officials routinely rotate between government agencies, global NGOs, and Big Pharma. Individuals advancing personal careers is not the target of our focus. What we zero in on is the grim and proven fact that the continuous rotation deepens the conflicted entanglements that lead to the biased decisions and lax enforcement of harmful products that end up causing an enormous amount of disease and death in America.

Robert Califf was appointed to lead the FDA by the Obama administration in 2016. He was formerly founding director of the Duke Clinical Research Institute, whose budget is 50-60% funded by the pharmaceutical industry, and he was a paid consultant for Merck, Johnson & Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, and Eli Lilly. Biden renominated Califf to head the Food and Drug Administration in 2021, despite criticism of his pharmaceutical ties. After leaving the FDA, he became head of strategy and policy for Verily Life Sciences, Google’s pharmaceutical branch.4

Scott Gottlieb, a venture capitalist investment banker turned doctor, was Donald Trump’s 2017 pick to lead the FDA. He had decades-long ties to an absurdly long list of pharmaceutical companies, disclosed financial relationships with over 25 entities, many of them giants in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries.5 In just the one year before he became FDA commissioner, he pocketed approximately $3 million in speaking, consulting and retainer fees from the various pharma coffers.6 He is one of the strongest advocates for the loosening of FDA regulations and speeding up the drug approval process. In 2019, he resigned from the government post to join Pfizer’s board of directors, a few months before the Pandemic began, a position he still holds. Despite his conflicts of interests, he is often the go-to pundit mainstream media relies on for pharma talking points and public health guidance on their news programs.

On display in this linked interview is how he speaks for both the FDA and for Pfizer, all in one sitting, so in this case he is asked for advice due to his conflicts of interests.

Gottlieb was replaced at the FDA with Stephen Hahn. After a two-year stint, Hahn left in 2021 to join the venture firm that launched Moderna, six months after he authorized Moderna’s vaccine.7

One of the most well-known cases of the revolving door between the FDA and Big Pharma, because it was dramatized in two popular streaming miniseries, is the Curtis Wright story. He was the FDA director who oversaw evaluation for pain medication, the one who infamously approved OxyContin. A year later he took a position with a hefty compensation package at Purdue Pharma. It is hard to think of another industry favor which produced more dire consequences than this—the green-lighting of a drug so harmful and addictive that could produce a tragedy as destructive as the opioid epidemic.

Over the past 20 years, several other FDA staff involved in opioid approvals also left that agency to work for opioid makers. Last January, the head of the FDA’s analgesic division retired from government work to start her own consulting business, which promises to help drug makers “successfully and efficiently bring your products to market” using her more than 30 years of experience at the FDA.8 I bet you learn about a lot of loopholes in that time!

The regulatory state is considered the Fourth branch of government. Doors spin round and round across the entire body, into each department that is tasked with protecting every part of human activity. Way too often, the worst Bad Company players from whatever industry that particular agency is supposed to regulate, is who will likely be managing this part of the “protection”.

Scott Pruitt served as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under Trump’s first term. He came with a long history of challenging environmental regulations, was at the forefront of lawsuits against the EPA on carbon emissions and water pollution, and received lots of financial support from the fossil fuel industry. He was a part of a 2014 NYTimes investigation revealing a "secretive alliance" between energy firms and Republican attorneys general, working together to push back against the regulatory agenda on environmental issues.9 Another NYTimes article from four years later followed up on his progress once he was in charge of the EPA: How Rollbacks at Scott Pruitt’s E.P.A. Are a Boon to Oil and Gas.

After Pruitt resigned in 2018, he was replaced at the EPA by Andrew Wheeler. Wheeler was a coal industry lobbyist representing coal producer Murray Energy for the decade prior to his appointment to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.

Ajit Pai was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from 2017 to 2021. He was a former in-house lawyer for Verizon and a proponent of repealing net neutrality. During his tenure at the FCC he voted to reverse the decision to regulate the internet and played a significant role in the initial implementation of 5G, removing many perceived regulatory hurdles. He is now the president and CEO of CTIA, a trade association representing the US wireless communications industry.

And, the saddest of ironies, is this corruption on display at the Federal Trade Commission, whose entire job is to protect consumers from deceptive, unfair, and fraudulent business practices. More than 75 percent of both Democrat and Republican FTC officials had either served corporate interests before coming to the agency, or quickly moved on to doing so at the end of their term, according to a report by Public Citizen, which examines the depth of the problem over two decades. I highly recommend a quick read of this article to see all the way the conflicts affect us and our children, complete with “Table 1: Corporate revolving door conflicts of six FTC chairs”.

These actual people should be rooted out of the system. They should be convicted of their crimes, once we can legally call what they do a criminal offense. When their continuous “mistakes” have fatalities in the hundreds of thousands, they need to be tried for something. At the very least, fired. But “fired” today would only mean a jump to, or back to, the industry who benefitted from all those mistakes. In this part of the market, which runs on these twisted incentives, there will be no convictions, only rewards.

These people aren’t anomalies or rare bad apples. They are major players from the corporate oligarchy cycling through a reliable pattern towards incredible power and profit, by way of holding continuous positions as decision-makers inside our government at the agencies assigned to protect the public, from them. This is how they build the wealthiest and most powerful corporate empires. Because there is nothing to stop them. Because they break all the rules of ethics. This is why they are Bad. They damage the health of our society and the entire free market system, creating an illegitimate environment where whomever can afford to hire the most revolvers wins. As I’ve said, the capture of our would-be defenders, the lookouts and guards, is not just one of a hundred similar problems. It is a very gigantic and terrible problem that, if abolished, would eliminate a hundred smaller terrible problems with it.

That pattern of letting industry insiders make key decisions for society led to decades of deregulation, which loosened restrictions on financial institutions, which created the “too-big-to-fail” banks who deceived their clients and the public, and brought about the worst economic crisis in nearly 80 years. It engulfed the entire global financial system, brought Wall Street's giants to their knees, and triggered the Great Recession. And no person involved in the corruption has ever been held accountable.

That pattern of letting industry insiders make key decisions for society led to decades of deregulation which loosened restrictions at the EPA, FDA, FCC, FTC, SEC, CDC, OSHA and most all regulatory agencies, allowing for increased risk-taking and lax protections of our soil, food, and water, of pharmaceutical drugs, of the internet. The poisoning of our environment on earth and online has yet to be attended to and no person involved in the corruption has ever been held accountable.

We just moved on from all of this…into the 2020s.

And at present, we have been witnessing the same pattern of letting Military Industry insiders make key decisions for our country and the world through our captured policy-makers. The loosening of restrictions against Israel’s war machine and its external influence on our government, which can only be defined as the removing of all restrictions, is articulated here in this letter from 328 US lawmakers in 2021, calling on Washington to continue aid to Israel without conditions or reduction. These members of congress claim that putting conditions on the money concerning the treatment of people and children in the region would be “irresponsible”. (* I’ve just noticed they’ve removed this letter from the internet since I started writing this! So we can #onlyforget the truth entailed in their letter.)

The astronomical level of possession the Israel Lobby has had over our elected leaders for decades, both Democrat and Republican, is finally getting attention, after the two years of starvation, ethnic cleansing, and mass civilian deaths this possession has sanctioned. Here is a current list of the small group of 13 congresspersons rejecting AIPAC dark money and its agenda (with two non-POC!). I pray, and do predict, that this list will grow larger.

This may be the wake up call society needs to finally end any delusions that Capture is not our most major concern. These same pervasive conflicts of interests we see playing out to block any resistance against a genocide have influenced life-and-death decisions made about the population’s health and safety here in our country for our entire lives. Therefore, our knowledge and acceptance of this piece of the Pattern & Playbook must be one of the most important factors in our own decision-making processes.

We have to train our focus even beyond who is to blame for what we’ve already suffered and all that degradation. The crucial thing to understand about this protective regulatory arm of our “defense” is that the arm isn’t just weak—it’s not there. The institutions created to shield people from physical harm, according to the results, instead shield deceitful industry from economic harm. And our congressmen elected to serve as the voice of the people instead serve as the voice of corporate interests and/or a foreign government.

All can be rebuilt, but not without this full-throated acknowledgment first. With our eyes wide open we can clearly see the gaping hole in the defensive line. We may finally be there, eyes open and staying open, but it’s hard to say. As disastrous as everything this chapter has illuminated is, and as tired and obvious it might sound to point out government corruption and failure, what would be even worse is if the people knew all about the gaping hole but still casually stroll past it in various activities of daily life as if it’s not there, and fail to warn the children about the danger of it.

If we were able to make key corrections—arrest anyone who approved a drug that later injured or killed a great many humans or fire everyone whose recklessness wiped out half your retirement savings, the way you would me if my workplace decisions lost billions of dollars or killed thousands of people—there might be a negative consequence to committing ruinous acts of corruption, instead of the reward of financial compensation.

Will we go back and vote out any congressperson who as late as October 2025 had still not endorsed the “Block the Bombs Act”, which before this current ceasefire was the only available offering of legislation seeking to halt military aid to Israel and prevent our further complicity in their human rights violations and war crimes?

Or, could we somehow be persuaded to move on from this last malicious situation and “get back out there” without sufficient scanning back over the plot holes?

Alligators are dangerous. Alligators are a danger inherent in nature. We cannot undo their nature to make them less dangerous, we can only take means to keep them out of our environment.

Deadly products and wars are dangerous. There are dangerous creatures inherent in our society who approve the deadly products and wars. We cannot undo their present nature to make them less dangerous, we can only take means to keep them out of our own personal environment.

+ Until we disable the corrupt revolving door we have an active breach in our defense. =

Bonus Supplement for the Readers:

This is a very important and suspenseful corporate takeover saga going down right now as I write this chapter (BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is trying to acquire Minnesota’s utility company—that’s electricity & power & water—public works folks!) which is all coming down to a final approval by one tiny board of state regulators—just 5 individuals. Have they been captured? Will they protect the people or will the Bad Company succeed at one of the largest infrastructure takeovers of all time??

The answer came down after I finished writing this:

https://prospect.org/environment/blackrock-minnesota-utility-private-equity/

https://www.levernews.com/this-is-how-wall-street-could-buy-your-power-company/

We are all in this together! I’m not the first to say it! See you next chapter….

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THE MATH:

If we don’t participate by thinking it through we remain unprotected for the next assault.

+ The powerful force of the PR campaign can disconnect us from our own survival instincts and our allegiance to Natural Law.

+ Their Pattern of deception and concealment of harm leads to addiction, disease and death.

+ We must understand and memorize Their Playbook.

+ We must use the wisdom gained from past mistakes.

+ Cognitive dissonance has led to errors in our reasoning.

Anyone can sell you a boat and claim it has no leaks. In the middle of your crossing, when water starts pooling in and you begin to sink, is when the unavoidable certainty of the situation takes precedence over any false claims, wishful thinking, or misguided trust.

We learned a hard lesson about trusting Big Tobacco’s claims, but this was only one aspect of the lesson. Because we were incomplete in diagnosing the full scope of the opposition we face when it comes to these dangers, we did not vanquish them in any sufficient way.

In the case of the Tobacco Industry, we can say there is a reliable consensus of understanding regarding their first tactic of the False Claim. Most everyone knows they lied—and that they are liars. The Bad Company can still try to assert “our products don’t cause cancer”, but the evidence from the independent science and from what our own experience showed us eventually and logically connected the cause to effect and their statements no longer hold weight. This industry is not considered trustworthy anymore by the majority. In normal circumstances, without Playbook interference and manipulation, this should be where the story ends. Making false claims worked, until their deceit and its treacherous consequences made us stop believing them. The swindler should have been run out of town via the power and influence of our consumer sovereignty.

The linchpin of the Playbook is #2: Capture. All the Bad strategy depends upon it and falls apart without it. Corporations’ ability to influence government agencies and lawmakers, judges and media outlets, in their favor, overrides the public’s recognition of their deceit and trickery. They can make the false claim, we can spot it as false, and then the captured entities who have authority over our environment can force us to accept it or exist with it regardless of our feelings about it. The Capture is the scaffolding which holds up the lie where otherwise it would crumble.

We must acknowledge that cigarettes and vapes, Teflon and other fluorocarbon products and packaging, RoundUp, RoundUp Ready GMO Crops, and Oxycontin, to name only the most egregious, all came to market through current legal business channels of approval and regulation. In the year 2025, Big Tobacco now has more products for sale at every market, not less, not none. PFOAs still have not been phased out and RoundUp is right now on the shelves at your Home Depot1. We must accept the reality that no factor or no person, within those industries, within our government, or anywhere within the system of consumer capitalism in a free democracy, successfully blocked these toxins from entering our environment and our bodies. The combined death count per year from all this is likely near a million Americans or more, year after year. Cigarettes are still the #1 cause of preventable death. PREVENTABLE.

Our policymakers and regulators lived through the same timeline of corporate malfeasance that we did, with better knowledge than any of us on the tragic statistics of disease and death and billions of dollars lost. Their salaries paid with taxpayer money, they had the resources and the mandate to analyze the observable data, glean the requisite wisdom from the catastrophic missteps of their past, and come up with some kind of updated and improved game plan for blocking anything produced by the same industry who previously lied to them, and stopping those companies from introducing new dangers to the population.

Thus, bigger than the problem of our trusting a claim from a Bad Company who clearly puts profit over people, is our trusting of those we assumed put the health of the nation over Bad Companies. The sole duty of these agencies and officials is to protect the public interest with effective oversight over these powerful industries. They have not. Year after year, they allow harmful products through the gate. Year after year, they fail to remove products after the harm has become evident. Year after year, they lead us into danger with the illusion of safety that does not bear out in the real world. These are danger zones we would never have set foot in using our own insight and discernment. The external attachment to our decision-making process is what is faulty. Logically speaking, which is the bigger threat to the credulous: a swamp where there are likely alligators or a swamp where there are likely alligators with a sign that says “swimming safe for the public”.

Corruption like this isn’t just a form of anomalous abhorrent behavior; it’s how business gets done in our country. Certain practices related to lobbying and campaign finance that other countries would consider illegal are, in the U.S., not only permitted but now constitutionally protected.

Being forced to live with Bad products, or also unjust wars, naturally breaks down our defenses against them and sets us up to rationalize their existence or minimize our perceptions of their harm. Like the doctors in cigarette ads, government approval is the “third-party validation” so precious to any campaign. It bolsters the corporations’ claims and gives the public enough assurance to resolve our dissonance without having to exert the direct action to oppose it ourselves. We are encouraged to believe that the fact a product has made it onto the shelves is in and of itself a guarantee of safety. But the deadly products we’ve mentioned upends this belief. We then build upon the false premise that if something is bad, wrong, or dangerous, some part of the regulatory apparatus or media advocacy would have said something, done something. This poor reasoning might enable us to do what we desire to do, which is to relax and put our shield down.

In the 1970s, Ford manufactured a car called the Pinto, its first subcompact automobile. This product had a harmful component. It turned out to have an unsafe fuel tank placement in the back so if there was a rear-end collision it could burst into flames. Because the negative effect of the bad component was fiery injury or death and investigators could quickly point to the position of the fuel tank as the cause, it resulted in a company recall of the car.

The Samsung Note S7, a phablet that launched in 2016, was initially well received. However, a problem with the battery software resulted in the phones catching fire on several occasions, including once on an airplane, which had to be evacuated. Soon, the Department of Transportation made it illegal to bring a Note 7 on a commercial flight. There was an immediate recall and the company had to eventually scrap the product all together.

Similarly, if a food product immediately makes people very ill after they eat it, the product is tested and quickly pulled from the shelves because of the discovered E.coli or whatever bacteria is resulting in food poisoning.

These are situations where the quick and direct adverse effect from a product will be quickly and directly blamed on the producer. In these examples, the companies themselves recalled the product at (close to) the first sign of harm. This is why I don’t refer to Ford, Samsung or your local grocer as Bad Companies.

The Bad Companies we are following take advantage of the years it takes for the negative results to develop from their creations and they use every trick in the Playbook to keep the causation obscured. They know the product should be recalled but let us keep buying it and using it, and hope we will never link the damage back to them. Basically, if the product catches fire in your pocket, it will exit the market. If the product gives you cancer, it will likely stay in the market…forever.

This is the very stretched-out period we are stuck in, still, with Big Tobacco and its latest products all the way to new pharmaceuticals with pending long-term safety data. This is also the excruciating paralysis we remained in for two years as the War Machine had its way with the people of Gaza. Even though there is appropriate skepticism toward any of these campaigns, much of the population still waits for the science or some authority to make the official pronouncement on risk of harm, while we continue to get sicker by the day, while Americans die every day of preventable disease and addiction, while innocent civilians get massacred on foreign soil.

Our defense has stalled at Playbook tactic #1, where the claim that something is safe or in our best interests is still being debated against the increasing amount of evidence which shows the product or agenda is harmful to humans, yet we are still stopped short of any reversal. Currently, on all these issues, the only officials whose decisions matter are still siding with the company claim.

So now, we narrow our focus beyond the easily recognizable lie or liar and onto the entities who make our recognition irrelevant. This is now the more precise location we need to defend ourselves against. And it may take some very focused energy and deep thinking to create an improved type of shield that will adequately protect us from the dangers created by the faulty shield we thought was already in place.

To paint a picture of our current position, I will tell the story which answers last chapter’s question: How is it, in the century-long relationship between Big Tobacco and our government bodies who regulate their products, that we end up with a new generation addicted and sickened by their latest batch of commercial offerings?

As mentioned, a Federal District Court found the major cigarette manufacturers guilty of lying to the American public about the deadly effects of cigarettes and secondhand smoke, and guilty of marketing to children, in 2006. Their punishment was an order to make “corrective statements” to inform the public about the deceptive practices and the true dangers of smoking. The Tobacco Companies did not do this, for 11 years. Instead, in this time, they introduced e-cigarettes, or electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS), to the public.

ENDS products were astonishingly not regulated by the FDA from 2007 to 2019. In August of 2018, they got a warning label: “This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical". That ought to protect our kids from a deadly product, right?

Today, in 2025, they are still not "FDA approved" for safety. However, the FDA on their website, if you ever go to it, does “emphasize that all tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, are inherently harmful and potentially addictive.” (Just for kicks, go search the AI Overview answer for: Do e-cigarettes have FDA approval for safety? — It’s comical.)

In this period of no regulation, the Bad Companies even increased the nicotine concentration while they were rolling free out there. I mean, might as well! The average nicotine concentration in e-cigarettes sold in U.S. retailers more than doubled from 2013 to 20182.

The industry found guilty of marketing to children in 2006, marketed e-cigarettes to third graders a decade later. JUUL programs, for example, targeted children as young as 8 years old by funding summer camps, visiting schools and paying community and church groups to distribute their materials3. I mean, why not, who’s gonna stop them?

To attract the younger demographic, the Bad Companies created flavored nicotine products, resembling kids’ favorite candy and desserts, to mask the harshness of tobacco and make it easier for young people to start using and become addicted.

By the end of this ungoverned, unrestrained spree, in 2018, 3.6 million kids were vaping, representing a 78% increase in just one year, with more than two-thirds choosing flavored products. By 2022, Over 73% of students who use social media specifically reported seeing e-cigarette–related marketing content in their feeds.

Adults warn children about dangers in the environment, like getting hit by a car so that they don’t play carelessly in the street or cross without looking both ways. And the new generation learns how to be wise about that issue. The difference between that and these commercial dangers is they don’t have a counter campaign telling them on every screen that playing in traffic is fun and cool and and even adults do it. And they don’t have government workers paid by the taxes of their parents sending faster and faster cars down their street year after year.

The outrageous disregard for the public’s health and the innocent lives of children—the ones they call the “replacement generation”, the source of new tobacco users who will eventually replace the ones who die— are examples to prove and drive home the truth of the matter, at present. Not facts from the faraway past when we did not know any better, but from the last few years, when we should have. The Bad Companies behave worse than ever; the resistance against them works worse than ever. More nicotine, more marketing to children, now with candy flavors and colors. WORSE.

So — How???

What happened was—in 2008 when the FDA tried to regulate e-cigarettes on the grounds that they were unapproved medical devices designed to deliver the drug nicotine, the Big Tobacco legal teams sought an injunction against the FDA on the grounds that the agency was causing them immediate and irreversible economic harm. And…they won! A clearly captured District Court judge issued a restraining order against the FDA to prevent this “irreparable” damage to the cigarette industry. The Federal and Appeals courts almost always rule in favor of Big Industry.

The capture we speak of has never been effectively addressed, has only spread further and become worse, and is so pervasive now that no corner of our government is exempt from its reach. In the case of ENDS products, the agency trying to regulate was blocked by the courts, impeded by the White House, and repeatedly warned to back off by members of Congress. Yet, The FDA still stands as the only real barrier between harmful products and the people.

If you want to read more on this particular saga for yourself, I recommend this read for the most concise mind-bending breakdown. Or the 2019 New York Times article “E-Cigarettes Went Unchecked in 10 Years of FDA Inaction.”

And, to restate that it is the same sweet deal for all Bad Companies, you can see the same saga, different names, different harm, written about only a few months later in the 2019 New York Times article “As Tens of Thousands Died, F.D.A. Failed to Police Opioids”. The FDA has yet to admit it did anything wrong in its oversight of OxyContin and other opioids. It has only doubled down on deflecting blame, so unfortunately for us no element of their practice has been changed.

We can watch the documentaries or read the articles about toxic products which are currently dangerously under-regulated, yet we are still stopped short of any decision-maker who matters officially disclosing the harm, even after hundreds of thousands of lawsuits awarding damages for the harm. Cancer-causing pesticides and food packaging, ultra processed and hyper-palatable foods that lead to obesity and disease, all these things we ingest daily that are proven to degrade our health, are still according to today’s FDA and the rest of captured officialdom, declared “safe for the public”.

One out of every 2 U.S. deaths under 65 years is likely preventable. PREVENTABLE. These deaths are not a reflection of our individual choices—it’s something else.4

I don’t believe we are extremely shocked anymore when we hear news like this. What is shocking, is that despite the available knowledge about the failures of our chosen guards and lookouts, the population still solely relies on them.

+ We must defend ourselves against those we thought were defending us. =

We are all in this together! I’m not the first to say it! See you next chapter….

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THE MATH:

If we don’t participate by thinking it through we remain unprotected for the next assault.

+ The powerful force of the PR campaign can disconnect us from our own survival instincts and our allegiance to Natural Law.

+ Their Pattern of deception and concealment of harm leads to addiction, disease and death.

+ We must understand and memorize Their Playbook.

+ We must use the wisdom gained from past mistakes.

+

A logical fallacy is an error in reasoning that invalidates an argument by using faulty logic or irrelevant points, often to deceive or persuade someone.

In keeping with the general theme here, I’ll call them Bad Arguments (link to a full list). An argument can be “won”, or at least win someone over, using logical fallacies instead of valid, reasoned arguments or truthful statements. But who cares how many arguments are won if we never get to solutions?

We have suffered much illogical reasoning in our lifetime, not only from others but also from ourselves. Fallacies can quickly discredit opposing viewpoints in lieu of true debate. They can also work to discredit our own views of our environment or experiences, when we use them to wriggle around truths we are not prepared to deal with. When confronted with things in our world that produce negative feelings, we will often subconsciously figure out a way to change our perceptions of that part of our world in order to recover our peace of mind. This is a rewriting of reality we do for ourselves to generate less-stressful conclusions. However, the rewriting usually means breaking with logic in some way and so can also generate a byproduct of cognitive dissonance. The bad argument we made to ourselves served to get us past the temporary discomfort, but because the rewriting didn’t actually affect the source of the negative feeling, it never solved the external conflict, in fact it created some inner conflict.

Each time we replace one of these bits of poor reasoning with a bit of good logic, it is like applying a soothing salve to an injury instead of only covering it up with a bandaid. It is restorative and healing and will prevent enduring scars.

At the first signs of anxiety about the negative health effects of smoking, the tobacco industry reassured consumers that their product was safe by making advertisements that featured pictures of physicians or testimonials claiming that physicians endorsed their brand. Because medical doctors were seen as trustworthy and deserving of respect, the inclusion of them into ads gave the impression that cigarettes did not pose a large health risk and lent the tobacco companies a manufactured credibility.

People who valued health now had a conflict between that value and the behavior of smoking—it created a dissonance in those who used the product. In order to relieve the discomfort, to achieve “consonance”, they had to either change their action (quit the product), change their thoughts (believe the product was safe), or change their perception of the action (rationalize or justify why continuing use of the product was okay). The cigarette ads with doctors helped consumers change their thoughts and perceptions a bit so they didn’t have to quit.

It will be helpful to unpack some more elements of cognitive dissonance. (I scooped a lot of these descriptors and examples directly from helpguide.org1).

Signs of cognitive dissonance:

• Feeling uncomfortable before making a decision

• Feeling guilty about past decisions

• Feeling shame or embarrassment about a decision

• Justifying or rationalizing a decision or action

• Doing something out of social pressure, not true interest or belief

Examples: You had too much to drink one night, even though you pride yourself on your healthy habits. Then, you felt a mix of anxiety and self-disgust the next morning. To cope with this disconnect between your beliefs and your actions, you may have promised yourself that you’d avoid alcohol for the next week. Or, perhaps you told a lie, then felt a knot of guilt or shame in your gut. The coping here might be to rationalize that your lie was somehow necessary.

Causes of cognitive dissonance:

• Inconsistent beliefs and behaviors. For example, you believe that you need to reduce the amount of sugar in your diet. However, you habitually buy and eat donuts after work.

• Decision-making processes. You might need to make a choice between two appealing or unappealing options. For example, you’re torn on whether to buy an ethically sourced product or save money on a cheaper alternative.

• Social pressures and expectations. Like when you’re with a certain group of friends and you feel compelled to laugh at offensive jokes that you would otherwise find distasteful.

• Moral or ethical dilemmas. A political candidate supports legislation that you believe is morally just. However, you also think the politician is corrupt.

• Addiction. You know smoking is bad for your health, but you keep doing it anyway. You may have uncomfortable feelings about the bad habit, but you find ways to justify the behavior so you can keep smoking, like weight loss.

• Unavoidable factors. For example, having to do something you disagree with at work.

These inconsistencies in our thoughts and actions trigger emotions like anger, irritation, anxiety, guilt and regret. They can lead to an overall apprehension around decision-making.

How we resolve the dissonance :

• People may change their behaviors, beliefs, or attitudes to reduce the discomfort.

• People may justify or rationalize the conflicting information.

• People may ignore the conflicting information.

• People may deny conflicting evidence.

• People may trivialize the inconsistencies.

• People may use defense mechanisms, such as avoidance.

• Effort justification. If you invest a lot of time, energy, or resources into something, you’ll be more inclined to believe it was a worthwhile effort. For example, if you spend a lot of money on a new car, you might come up with reasons to justify why it was worth the price tag, and ignore or deny any flaws. Note that self-justification isn’t the same as lying. It’s about persuading yourself that you’ve done the right thing. You attempt to minimize any mistakes or bad decisions.

• Belief disconfirmation. When confronted with evidence that contradicts your deeply held beliefs, you might be inclined to simply double down. You might deny the truth or come up with rationalizations to avoid abandoning your views. For example, if you find out that your close friend has been bullying their coworker, you might look for reasons to blame the victim—“She is actually pretty obnoxious!”

• Selective exposure. This concept implies that you’re more likely to seek out information that confirms what you already believe, and tune out information that contradicts your beliefs. For instance, if you believe a celebrity is a bad person, you’ll likely pay more attention to news stories that cover them unfavorably.

Personally, I was always in some dissonance from the genetically modified food issue. I had seen documentaries on the subject (GMO/OMG was one I really related to as a parent), so I knew about the shady history of Monsanto, but I couldn’t always afford buying all organic at the grocery store. So very subconsciously, I designed some sneaky tricks of my own to resolve the uncomfortable inner conflict.

My go-to move would be what I call the “what about all the plastic” argument. Whenever I was confronted with criticism against eating non-organic, I would attempt to swallow all that up in a diatribe on the trillions of pieces of plastic polluting our oceans…the marine species extinction, the health problems for humans and animals, the destruction of our ecosystems. I’d rant just long enough to fatigue and depress my audience and skillfully avoid the specific issue they were hoping to address. I was using a Bad Argument (this particular logical fallacy is called a red herring) as a way to mislead or distract from a relevant question. With the state of the world as it is, we could do this all day, dissipating and obscuring any problem into all the others so nothing gets accomplished with any of them.

Instead of choosing the direct action to quit the GMO products, I justified why consuming them was okay by giving an argument for the futility of the direct action: with so many other unhealthy factors in the environment, taking any action toward one issue won’t solve the rest—so why bother wasting my precious energy opposing this one.

This argument implies that taking any action towards quitting one bad product won’t do anything about the other bad products, so it won’t improve health outcomes overall. But this is actually not true, and it doesn’t logically explain why we should take no action at all towards anything. We wouldn’t take zero action to remove a black widow from our bed just because there is a scorpion in our kitchen.

Consider the recent study’s finding that switching to an organic diet for just six days reduced levels of glyphosate by an average of over 70% in both adults and children. Taking that action would not remove any plastic out of the ocean but it would clean up my own ecosystem. And an even more important factor than improving the physical might be the clean up of the mental issues, as the action resolves the dissonance in a much healthier and more productive way than rationalization. My values are against the GMO food, I stop putting stuff into my body that conflicts with my values, removing the conflict improves my mental health and clarity, and taking the direct action gains me esteem and confidence toward my next move, to resolve the dissonance on more issues. So, changing my action stands to do considerably more toward overall improvement than merely changing my perception of the non-action.

Another one of the more common defense mechanisms I would use when discussing any of this is the “no duh” argument. The response that everyone knows all this already, you’re just preaching to the choir. This could likely have been your initial thought when I first started talking about Big Tobacco, for instance! Does anyone really need to tell you that this industry is terrible for getting the world hooked on cigarettes and causing all this cancer? The feeling is that this examination isn’t necessary because it’s old or obvious news.

I think a crucial error, and one of our biggest obstacles, is that we can subconsciously mistake our having awareness of a problem for having dealt with the problem. Any of the methods listed above are used to resolve the dissonance instead of the problem.

The “no duh/we don’t need to belabor this topic anymore” argument only works from a post-Playbook position after the tricks of the industry campaign no longer work on us. Note—not some utopian vision of a world without Bad Companies, just one where we’ve learned our lessons, defined the enemy correctly, and now shield ourselves more competently from the danger coming at us from that specific source.

In the case of tobacco products, if we do know all of this already—that Big Tobacco is a Bad Company that sells cancerous products and they’ve used deception and trickery to continue doing this—and their success solely depends on us consenting to use any of their products, how to we suppose this industry’s most recent market overview boasts that they have “delivered exceptionally strong performance with record quarterly net revenues and earnings per share”?2 These “unexpectedly robust financial results” are produced by us, the ones who know all about the dangers and the death.

Looking through the causes of cognitive dissonance we can easily assign addiction to this situation, as the poor souls who can’t quit still buy cigarettes. But, 40% of the industry’s revenue now comes from the sales of new smokeless products, and studies found that half of current smokeless tobacco users were never smokers. So that’s a brand new batch of nicotine addicts consenting long after society learned all it needed to know about the harm inflicted by these companies. In the ten years from 2011 to 2021, adult e-cigarette users went from 7 million to 82 million. Philip Morris International saw smokeless sales increase 21% from just a year ago.

How can it be that a whole new generation is falling victim to the same ruthless campaigns using the same false claims the cigarette companies have been peddling for 75 years? What kind of crazy magick does it take to fool the people into trusting another cigarette with a new name, from the same industry, containing highly-addictive nicotine, formaldehyde, and a slew of new untested chemicals? A recent study detected more than 500 chemicals in vaping cartridges, and most were categorized as carcinogens3. How were all these companies able to recover from the scientific proof that they have already manufactured products that kill people?

In 2006, a Federal District Court found the major cigarette manufacturers guilty of violating civil provisions of RICO and guilty of lying to the American public about the deadly effects of cigarettes and secondhand smoke. The nearly 1,700-page ruling found that: “Over the course of more than 50 years, Defendants lied, misrepresented, and deceived the American public, including smokers and the young people they avidly sought as ‘replacement smokers,’ about the devastating health effects of smoking and environmental tobacco smoke, they suppressed research, they destroyed documents, they manipulated the use of nicotine so as to increase and perpetuate addiction, they distorted the truth about low tar and light cigarettes so as to discourage smokers from quitting, and they abused the legal system to achieve their goal—to make money with little, if any, regard for individual illness and suffering, soaring health costs, or the integrity of the legal system.”

The following year, in 2007, e-cigarettes entered the market.

By 2019 more than a quarter of high schoolers vaped (27.5%), double the amount from two years prior.4 These increases only slowed after that summer’s full-blown vaping catastrophe. Headlines nationwide described the mysterious new lung disease killing kids: “CDC says 47 deaths and 2,290 illnesses now linked to vaping”. New lung disease—total mystery!

When you search on the health risks of vaping, right now, you get: “While the long-term effects of vaping are still being studied, there is growing evidence suggesting that vaping can increase the risk of lung cancer” and “Long term research is needed: it may take decades to fully understand the risks associated with vaping and lung cancer.” Zyn pouches also currently rest in the same “safety unknown” category.

This is the sought-after corporate sweet spot, the decades before we “fully understand” the risks. The company line is: We might give you deadly disease from the e-juice ingredients, but it’s a different deadly disease. You’re going to have to start from zero and go through that whole gamut to prove the link, and we’ll throw our whole playbook at you as you attempt this feat, while we spend $22 million dollars a day to promote and advertise our new nicotine products, including ads on the Cartoon Network.

My whole big darn point is—if we know so much, don’t we already fully understand the risk in trusting anything from the companies who brought us “cancer sticks”? Is it really going to take us decades and another generation of humans ruined by addiction and disease to understand this basic survival instinct type logic?

We suffered the bad experience—the decades being lied to by tobacco companies. We went through the processing—all the analyses and headlines, the studies, the lawsuits, the documentaries and the movies, watching fellow humans die of cancer. And we did glean wisdom from that. The people had become wise to the dangers of cigarettes but not wise enough to the dangers of the Pattern & Playbook, and so we have not yet been able to protect future generations from the assault that we (some of us) survived.

So, we must conclude that we did get something wrong somewhere in the calculations between recognition and resistance. Therefore we must go back and find the error. Because pressing on before we find and address that error means we’re just adding more integers to an equation we already know cannot logically produce the right answer.

If as a society our best defense against one of the biggest killers of Americans is approving vapes for American children to continue that crime forevermore, then we have not, as a society, thought through the problem very well. And so we have no business moving one more step toward anything else until we see what went wrong with that response, so that we can correct it.

Recognition is the first key step, but it is not a defensive strategy. Locating where the arrows are coming from doesn’t automatically create the shield of protection against them.

We continue here to face things squarely in order to rewrite reality back into alignment with logic and reason. This might initially feel like a disturbance of our peace of mind, but overcoming these patterns of poor reasoning to ensure our thinking and behavior is attached to valid, rational arguments based on the actual circumstances we face will enable us to avoid the longterm dissonance which has been handicapping us.

This is not us choosing to examine one of a hundred undesirable things we wish we could change about our world. This is a pinpointing of the source from which most all undesirable things are authorized. Those that launch these campaigns would like us to feel like we are drowning in a sea of inescapable, uncontrollable chaos, so that in our dissonant state we never train our focus on the very specific agents of chaos we should be contesting.

I think of course we do understand the risk in trusting any claim from a known Bad Company. And if it were up to only our basic survival type instincts we would not have “evolved” from recognizing the deadly implications of smoking to trusting a new innovation of the cigarette with the letter ‘e’ in front of it. We would have crafted a proper shield of defense against a racket this transparent.

The problem is that we do not craft our own shields. So, the error must be in who we have trusted this craftsmanship to.

+ Cognitive dissonance has led to errors in our reasoning =

We are all in this together! I’m not the first to say it! See you next chapter….

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Logical fallacies are flawed arguments that appear valid but contain errors in reasoning. Some common examples:

Ad Hominem: Attacking a person’s character or background instead of addressing their argument. For example, “You can’t trust his opinion on climate change because he’s a politician”.

Tu Quoque: Another form of Ad Hominem, in which a person’s behavior or past beliefs are called into question to discredit their current argument. Also called Appeal to Hypocrisy, the fallacy that someone being a hypocrite automatically discredits the argument at hand. For example, “Doctors say smoking causes lung cancer, but doctors smoke all the time.”

Red Herring: Diverting attention from the main issue by introducing irrelevant information. For example, A politician accused of misconduct might deflect by talking about a recent bill they passed that has nothing to do with the scandal.

Irrelevant Conclusion: Describes a conclusion that is irrelevant to the premises allegedly supporting it. For example, “Fire can’t be dangerous to humans because it keeps us warm in the winter.”

Straw Man: Misrepresenting someone’s argument to make it easier to attack. For example, “My opponent wants to abolish all taxes, but I don’t think that’s a good idea”.

Begging the Question: A logical fallacy in which the validity of the conclusion is buried in the premise of the argument. It is a premise restating the conclusion without supporting the conclusion. For example, “I’m the boss (conclusion) because I get to make the final decision on everything (premise).” ( It doesn’t actually explain why the boss gets to make those decisions.)

False Dilemma: Presenting only two options when more exist, forcing a choice between them. For example, “You’re either with us or against us”.

False Analogy: Also known as Weak Analogy, drawing a comparison between two things that are not similar in the relevant aspects. For example, “Because surgeons use X-rays during operations, students should be allowed to use their textbooks during exams.”

Hasty Generalization: Drawing a conclusion based on a small or unrepresentative sample. For example, “I met two rude people from that city, so everyone there must be rude”.

Slippery Slope: Arguing that a small action will inevitably lead to a series of negative consequences. For example, “If we legalize marijuana, then everyone will start using heroin”.

Guilt by Association Fallacy: Where a negative trait of one person is assumed to apply to another due to their connection. This fallacy can be used to unfairly discredit someone or their arguments, even if the association is not indicative of their own guilt or wrongdoing. For example, “John supports a new tax policy, and John is friends with a known criminal. Therefore, John must be a criminal as well.”

Bandwagon Fallacy: Arguing that something is true or good because many people believe it or do it. Also called Argument to Popularity, which is simply peer pressure, not sound logic. For example, “Everyone is buying this product, so it must be good”.

Causal Fallacy: Incorrectly concluding the cause of an event. For example, “I wore this shirt and we won the game, so wearing this shirt causes us to win.”

Genetic Fallacy: Focusing on the source or history of an argument instead on the argument itself. For example, rejecting a religious belief because it was taught by your hypocritical parent. This happens because people often confuse:

* Reasons with causes

* Psychological with logical explanations

* The sources with the content of arguments

Argument from Incredulity: This occurs when you argue that something can’t be true solely because it’s difficult to imagine, hard to understand, or else doesn’t conform to your particular worldview. For example, “Your argument doesn’t align with my spiritual or political beliefs. Therefore, it’s wrong.”

Appeal to Authority: Claiming something is true simply because an authority figure said it, without considering the context or expertise. For example, “This medicine works because my doctor told me so”.

Appeal to Tradition: Rather than interrogate the logic behind a certain action, the argument assumes the action is logically sound because it’s been done for a certain amount of time. The fallacy says “we’ve always done it this way.”

Appeal to Consequences: argues that a premise is correct or incorrect based on whether the outcome is positive or negative. In other words, if a certain hypothesis leads to an undesirable consequence, the hypothesis “must” be wrong; if the consequence is positive, it “must” be right. For example, “It’s impossible to spend all your money gambling because then you couldn’t afford to eat.”

Appeal to Emotion Fallacy: a type of informal fallacy that occurs when someone attempts to manipulate the emotions of an audience to win an argument, often in the absence of factual evidence or logical reasoning. While pathos (the use of emotion in rhetoric) can be a powerful tool, it becomes a fallacy when it’s used instead of logic and evidence to support a claim:

Appeal to Fear: “If we don’t pass this bill, our economy will collapse!”

Appeal to Pity: “You wouldn’t want to see these children suffer, would you?”

Appeal to Ignorance: Claiming something is true because it hasn’t been proven false. In other words, the fallacy is that the absence of counterevidence means there is no counterevidence.

Appeal to Flattery: “You’re such a smart and capable person, I know you’ll agree with me.”

Appeal to Ridicule: “People who believe that are just plain stupid.”

Aaand, The Fallacy Fallacy occurs when you assume that an argument is incorrect just because it contains a logical fallacy!

BEWARE !!

THE MATH:

If we don’t participate by thinking it through we remain unprotected for the next assault.

+ The powerful force of the PR campaign can disconnect us from our own survival instincts and our allegiance to Natural Law.

+ Their Pattern of deception and concealment of harm leads to addiction, disease and death.

+ We must understand and memorize Their Playbook.

+

Most of us feel like there’s been an escalation of deceit and treachery in this lifetime, that we’ve entered into a noticeably darker period. Apt students of history might argue against any singularity in our current era. That position being that the lies we’ve been told are in fact the same old lies told throughout antiquity and the liars are of a common lineage. At least the patterns we’ve laid out are similar enough to track. The motivations to deceive may range from selfishness and greed to a spiritual evil, but those suffering the consequences can’t usually afford to dwell upon those distinctions.

A common yet core piece of wisdom, the saying “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me”, is as much as we need to contemplate initially. If we embrace that reflection with any humility, it is impossible to deny where the shame rests now. I repeat—the Bad Companies have not modified any of their behavior yet. They have not repented, they have not been jailed, and few have ever acknowledged their crimes.

George W. Bush symbolically misremembered the shame-on-me quote yet concluded “you can’t get fooled again” in a speech he ironically gave six months before starting the Iraq War based on lies about non-existent weapons of mass destruction. The proven fact which could stand as the motto of our modern society is: “You can get fooled again, and again, and again.” Unless...what? Precisely what needs to happen to alter this pattern, which has not yet happened? The question sounds simplistic, but it obviously has not been addressed sufficiently.

If we only got fooled once, in one fraudulent campaign or one reckless war of choice, then we could assign the share of shame to the deceivers. But since these Bad Actors have never for one minute of one day stopped trying to fool us, instead filled our world with an unceasing succession of lies, masterfully manipulated our minds with so little push back—we can hardly blame them for continuing such a winning strategy. The zero attempts to change any component of their formula can only suggest their full confidence that any opposition to their agendas is inconsequential. They see us as fools, their sustenance relies on our foolishness, and we have to live with this label until we as a people can show where and how we are no longer duped by century-old tricks. I’m not saying that when this happens they won’t up their game and switch strategies. I’m saying first and foremost and at the very least we have to stop getting played in the exact same way.

If you get played in a personal relationship, once you discover your partner is lying to you, the only sensical and healthy reaction is to call out the lie, express how it hurt you and refuse to participate in a relationship based on deceit. If the partner admits the deceit, acknowledges the harm, and asks to be forgiven, you can then decide whether or not to believe them, grant a second chance, or walk away. Forgiveness is the ultimate expression of love and the key to humanity’s evolution. Personally, I’m a big fan. But if there is no acknowledgement, no apology, but instead more lies and psychological tactics to manipulate you to endure more suffering—including making you feel wrong for not believing their lies—this is a gaslight and an advancement into a different realm of willful depravity.

This is a relationship, let’s refer to it as “Bad Boyfriend”, where your own perception of events and your feelings about them don’t count for anything. Your only recourse in this situation is to turn your back completely and get the hell away. If you can’t get away, if you are forced to continuously legitimize their lies and live in their version of reality, you will eventually break with your own sense of truth and fairness and will be driven into some psychosis.

It should be technically easier to get the hell away from a Bad Company who lies to you, by just declining to buy their product. When you try to decline the Bad Boyfriend’s “product”—himself, with the false claim that he would make your life better—he pulls out his own sinister playbook of fighting dirty: minimizing and trivializing your feelings, making you feel like you’re overreacting, boldly insisting that your facts are wrong, making you seem like the crazy one for having any of this perspective… The only way for him to sustain the relationship and continue to satisfy his needs would be to obscure the existence of his antisocial flaws, deny it, then go full gaslight to the bitter end.

In this Bad Boyfriend reference, I’m describing a true blue gaslighting psychopath. (I just found out the term psychopath is considered stigmatizing. Umm...yeah it is! Not sure why we should try to avoid assigning stigma to psychopaths, but there’s so much I still don’t understand about this world and its labels!) It is now referred to only as antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). This being the mental health condition characterized by a persistent pattern of disregard for social norms, laws, and the rights and feelings of others. ASPDs are motivated by personal gain—for power, the desire or need to be in control; for money, the desire for personal financial gain; for social status, the desire to be well-regarded by others. All this stems from a sense of entitlement—to act out any way they choose in order to meet these gains. Exploiting others and playing all kinds of psychological, financial, or political games is the way they get through life.

You won’t know they have this disorder until they lie to you, and even then you still won’t know enough, if it’s your first encounter with this type. If they misrepresent themselves or hide some major information from you, or blatantly lie, you’ll likely be hurt and angry and react in the same way you have in seemingly similar situations. It’s not until you realize that this person didn’t just lie about something—they are a liar—that you get firm and attempt to break it off. This is where the real games begin. This is where you see how incomparably different this person, Bad Boyfriend, is from the others, and most specifically how different he is from you. You’ve lied before. You’ve probably stolen something before. You’ve hurt another person in a variety of ways. We’re all sinners. You proceed through life under the assumption, however subliminal, that you are dealing with other persons like yourself, imperfect but at least playing by the same rules. But Bad Boyfriend isn’t functioning within the same system. His system is the lying. He has no other means to get what he wants; he can’t get what he wants without lying. Because you don’t possess these antisocial traits, you can hardly fathom them, much less instinctively recognize them in another human. It’s that foreign. Until you know.

Breaking up with Bad Boyfriend might be emotionally harder and more confrontational on the front end, but the payoff on the back end is that he’s finally out of your life and now you have a chance to heal. With the Bad Company, sometimes you have to wait for everyone else to be convinced this guy sucks before you’re able to get them out of your life. And if this can’t happen, or if it takes forever for it to happen, the abused society gets driven further and further into psychosis and the necessary healing gets detrimentally delayed.

If we were dealt a lasting trauma by a partner or parent, we might be eternally struggling to feel at peace or to have any success in our life after that experience. These wounds, which entrenched themselves into our own psyche and personality, block us from the essential healing. We shove the thoughts of this painful chapter down into the darkness of our unconscious where it festers instead of being disinfected in the light.

In a mature civilization, we understand that we must eventually face these wounds, get that therapy, do that work. We make the brave decision to “take power back” from those who abused us, to overcome our avoidance, any of the coping mechanisms that postpone the intimidating endeavor of dealing with it. We finally take a long enough look at the injustice and call it what it is—BAD. Regardless of the complicated emotions, the extenuating circumstances, even the empathy we might feel for the motivations, we define it properly and stop all the bypassing. We do this so we don’t find ourselves in abusive situations over and over throughout our life because we fail to recognize and evade them. We face the truth about what happened, so that we now have a clear picture, as traumatic as it is, so we can call it out when it comes at us next.

Our society got rolled over on a lot of products from Bad Companies and warmongers, because the truth was kept from us. And once there was disclosure, they tried to rewrite the reality of what we were experiencing. We got addicted to cigarettes long before we knew of the resulting death and disease; we used all the Dupont products with fluorocarbons long before we understood the dangers of “forever chemicals”; we sprayed Monsanto’s Round Up on all the food and switched everything to their GMO crops long before we knew the harm of glyphosate and the damage to our ecosystems and biodiversity; we allowed Purdue Pharma to decimate our population with OxyContin because we believed their false claims for far too long; and we were persuaded into feeling a moral obligation to support foreign allies despite their immoral and deadly actions.

If the Bad Boyfriend caused this much havoc in your life—death and disease!—you would have kicked him to the curb. He would then have utilized his playbook to convince you that breaking up was not the answer, that it was actually the least favorable thing you could do. There could be threats of wreckage far worse if you don’t comply with his arguments. The hardships of leaving would be worse than staying. He would try very very hard to woo you back, presenting different suggestions for ways that you could improve or change to make things work, and offer many more arguments that leaving him makes you a bad person. Any of these ploys can actually work on you because you’ve been gaslit so now you doubt your instincts and even likely blame yourself instead of him, at least partially because you did technically go along with a lot of the craziness. But eventually you will reach your limit, gather your strength, or your circle of friends and family will come to your aid, and you will finally get this menace out of your life. And once free, you emerge from the dark fog of their turbulent manipulated reality, and the truth of what you actually went through comes rushing in. Not always a good rush!

He’s probably already out there again spewing falsehoods to another unsuspecting girl, but at least you are free. At least the dishonesty has ceased. Though as mentioned, the psychological effects and regret will linger.

The Playbook is a successive gaslight, whether from Bad Boyfriend or Bad Company or War Machine. Through a methodical strategy of offensive strikes, the victim’s perceptions are confused and impaired. If the victim can be made to feel unsure about what they are seeing, they will lack the confidence to defend the truth as they see it.

It is a heartbreaker to realize that there are victimizers like this in our midst, in any scenario. The reality that some psycho (sorry, some anti-social disordered person) could take advantage of your love and generosity, and the reality that some corporate evil-doer (sorry, titan of industry) only puts profit over people, and the reality that warmongers (sorry, defenders of democracy) continue sending or dropping bombs on innocent civilians—breaks your heart.

But this also reveals some very positive information. It tells you that your heart still works. It’s broken but it’s alive—it’s broken because it’s alive. It is still feeling things, you are still connected to it. It feels a kinship to the people of the world, and so feels their pain. You recognize what is bad yet you are still rooting for love and justice. And because of this you wish you could do something about the darkness. But you don’t know how to affect all the suffering and injustice you see and that is giving you great anxiety. What you want is to do something for the GREATER GOOD. And what this proclaims to the world and to your own self is that you still possess a vital ingredient necessary to activation—a true living heart united with Natural Law!

It has been proving extremely exhausting to navigate such an imperfect fallen world. You get hurt and you want to hide and safeguard your heart from getting broken again. But this realm is about relationships, so we’ve got to keep on living and striving. We can’t let the broken ones break us. To not give up on the world completely, and not live in a perpetual state of fear or resentment, we re-enter, we get back out there. To do this, we often subconsciously tell ourselves the wrongdoing against us was just an isolated situation, one bad apple, and we convince ourself it’s safe to go back out.

But—is it safe? Is it suddenly safe just because we‘ve moved on and put this last malicious relationship behind us? No, the world is not safe. There are Bad Boyfriends and Bad Companies and War Hawks. They exist, they really truly do. The only positive that comes from a bad experience with one is the wisdom gleaned. And that’s what makes you safer. Not just a thicker skin to endure the punishment more competently, but more the evolutionary aspect where we learn from our experience, adapt and grow smarter and stronger from it. With our keener eyes and a new insight about these types of liars, their snares and traps, we are better prepared to survive the reality of our environment. After we’ve been burned we don’t just grab the pot on the stove with our bare hand anymore. We now check first to see if the burner is on and if it is we use a protective mitt to touch the pot.

There has also been a counter-development in our evolutionary adaptation—the ability to use our reason to rationalize the heat of the flame that burns us. Using psychological or semantic maneuvers we might say to ourselves: “Yes it’s hot, but it needs to be hot because we need the water to boil”. Or, “It’s actually less hot if you compare it to molten lava”. Or, “The whole damn world is heating up and I’m expected to wear this mitt everywhere I go???”

We might succeed at the rationalization exercise, but the flame will still burn us just the same. We can add any nuance we like to describing “hot flame” but it won’t change its fundamental reality. We can only protect ourselves from the actual reality, once we accept what that is, and not any lesser, kinder version of burning heat.

+ We must use the wisdom gained from past mistakes =

We are all in this together! I’m not the first to say it! See you next chapter….

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THE MATH:

If we don’t participate by thinking it through we remain unprotected for the next assault.

+ The powerful force of the PR campaign can disconnect us from our own survival instincts and our allegiance to Natural Law.

+ Their Pattern of deception and concealment of harm leads to addiction, disease and death.

+

In the investigation of Bad Companies who put humans at great risk, we know Who they are and we know What they’ve done. Good things uplift society and aid its evolution and progress; bad things degrade society’s health and personality and thwart its evolution. Tobacco products, forever chemicals, glyphosate, genetically modified farming, and our increasing dependency on pharmaceutical drugs are degrading our life, while the industries responsible for this de-evolution only continue to amass more wealth and power. They’ve done this, they do this, using the PR campaign Playbook—that’s the How. (The Why we will have to leave for another book.)

If you will permit me to lay it out in an orderly fashion, you’ll find it isn’t physically difficult to see, since the patterns are loud and clear and the tricks used are identical and repetitive. Yet often, for an array of complex psychological reasons, it is still mentally and emotionally difficult to open your eyes to the whole picture, enough to see what it all means, to you.

To remind, this is less a historical analyses of evil corporations and more an honest examination of our relationship to them. While we need to look objectively and fully digest each component of the damage inflicted, the more important factor for US to analyze is the undeniable consent we’ve given to it. This is the part of the dynamic we can change.

The basic tenet of their approach, the manipulation of the system, centers on that notion from Bernays that if the current cultural environment was not favorable to the product, a shrewd and creative PR scheme could change the culture to fit the product. In our lifetime, there have been some standout examples of this manipulation, from the aforementioned industry giants, all following this same Pattern & Playbook to the letter. For every bit of data which plainly exposed the dangers of their products, the Bad Companies had counter moves to eke out more sales and more customers and outplay the watchdogs. In every instance, the Bad Company had a smooth and profitable run with the product before the truth somehow miraculously got leaked out to the public. This is when they turned to their bag of tricks which is:

THE PLAYBOOK

1. THE FALSE CLAIM:

Using incredible wealth, power, and reputation, the Bad Company launches a fraudulent counter campaign, which follows a script that emphasizes their personal responsibility, criticizes and/or buries the “junk” science that found harms associated with their product, makes pledges to self-regulate, etc. Above all, the campaign will produce constant doubt by offering a manufactured version of the truth which competes with the reality.

2. CAPTURE:

This is the process where the Bad Company exerts undue and undemocratic influence on government agencies, lawmakers, regulators, the judiciary, and the media, leading to policies and narratives that favor their interests.

Regulatory capture is the situation where the regulators charged with serving the public interest fall beholden to private-sector interests. Its main feature, the “Revolving Door”, is the all-to-common movement of employees from the corporate sector into management of the public agencies who regulate their “former” industry, and vice versa, back and forth.

Political capture is where private industry uses lobbying, political donations, and public relations campaigns to influence the decision-making apparatus of the state, resulting in laws and policies that primarily benefit corporations, potentially at the expense of the public. Using massive resources they pressure legislatures and policy makers to draft legislation which will provide greater opportunities for corporations, or stifle government action, or remove regulation of corporate activities.

Court capture is the process by which judicial decisions are repeatedly directed toward the interests of certain political or corporate actors, undermining the principle of equal justice under law. Powerful groups actively aim to shape judicial outcomes in their favor with financial incentives, appoint judges who align with their ideology, or undermine the legitimacy of courts that challenge their actions. The lack of independence and impartiality weakens the rule of law, subverts democracy, and jeopardizes the protection of individual rights and freedoms.

Academia and Research capture is the increasing involvement of corporate money financing academic institutions, affording wealthy companies opportunities to influence which studies get funded and which do not, which results get published and which are suppressed, and even the research agenda itself—how the purpose of the study is defined and how the questions are framed. This seizure of the research agenda has given any industry the potential to affect policymaking by influencing the type of evidence that is available and the kinds of public health solutions considered. Despite the right to publish being a mainstay of academic freedom, university research contracts often include clauses that give the funder the final say on whether the research can be published, and there is little institutional oversight.

Wealthy corporations can even capture a whole field of study by creating their own “research agencies” and “institutes”, where their paid scientists deliver research that shows their product in a favorable light and/or instills doubt on any unfavorable data.

Media capture is massive conglomerates controlling a myriad of media sources such as TV channels, news networks, publishing houses and film studios, which gains them significant influence over news content and entertainment through their ownership and advertising revenue. Control over mass media has become concentrated into the hands of just a few corporations, which has limited the diversity of voices and perspectives, reduced risk-taking in journalism, and put a focus on sensationalism over public interest. Because the people consume such a high volume of media content in a day, the potential power wielded by one single corporation who controls the majority of content can be tyrannical. Big corporations can easily sway public opinion by manipulating the media and spreading dominant narratives about progress and development in one area, while delegitimizing the struggles of affected groups and communities that stand up against corporate interests.

3. SMEAR CAMPAIGN:

This is the intentional, carefully crafted effort to undermine the reputation, credibility, and character of any individual or group who is attempting to expose the harm of the corporation’s product or practices. These campaigns often employ tactics like spreading rumors, distortions, half-truths, or outright lies, to discredit the target and discourage people from believing in them or supporting their cause. They will attack a target’s character in lieu of addressing any actual arguments. Industry will spare no expense to ruin the reputations or careers or lives of the truth-tellers. The 116^th Congress created The Office of the Whistleblower OMBUDS to protect and prepare any of those brave persons from the smearing and harassment which will likely come: “You could be forced out of your chosen career field, subjected to public smear campaigns, and undergo severe psychological trauma.” Even if the facts behind a smear campaign are later proven false, the damage to the target’s reputation can be significant and long-lasting and the public can often cling to their first opinions, however manipulated or untrue.

The smear campaign extends to not only those uncovering the wrongdoing but also to those who believe any of the information which has come to light. Their public relations strategists build a narrative characterizing this group as something extremely negative and undesirable, often to be perceived as a danger to society, and will create a new pejorative phrase to define and condemn them.

4. LAWFARE:

This is how corporations strategically use legal proceedings to intimidate or hinder any opposition to their product or profit, mostly to outspend and exhaust them. Strategic lawsuits against public participation (known ironically as SLAPP) are lawsuits intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition.

5. SLEIGHT OF HAND TRICKS:

These are all the multitudes of deceptive tactics used by Bad Companies to mislead the public, manipulate perception and deflect from their negative actions. There are countless methods of distraction, to pull consumer focus to some false positive image of themselves they have created, through virtue signaling public relation stunts, or to shift blame to another issue, another company or scapegoated individuals. They often introduce another product, a “safer” version, which is not safe and creates another new problem. After disclosure of corporate malfeasance, there is often a huge PR rebranding campaign, or a merger that moves the business to a new company name, or even a complete shift of their practices to another industry.

6. COERCION:

Coercion includes not only force but also acts of manipulation and persuasion. A Bad Company is well versed on the manipulation and persuasion methods but will need the collaboration of government in order to successfully force consumers to use a product. Government lawmakers, by means of the laws and regulations they write, require or compel the public to abide. Perceived coercion, the feeling of being coerced or pressured regardless of whether actual coercion occurred, is just as forceful yet requires no actual law. It is about the individual’s subjective experience and perception of pressure.

7. DELAY:

If and when the Bad Company can no longer keep up the fraud, when the public has come to see through all or most of their tricks, the corporation can still employ a barrage of delaying tactics to keep selling some more product, somewhere. They can bury opposition with time consuming legal paperwork, with an array of strategy to prolong the fight (even actually just outliving people), drawing out criminal cases with appeal after appeal. Delay strategies also include outrunning their negative headlines by moving into faraway markets, stalling for time in other countries, harming those populations until their reputation catches up with them.

SO— that’s a lot of trickery! Because the Pattern & Playbook are only that, a tired game of smoke and mirrors, we as consumers, as human beings, have more than enough intelligence to evolve beyond this obstruction. In the same simple way we have always adapted our behavior to our environment—we learned not to touch the hot stove after the first time we burned our hand—we can avoid the Bad Company’s traps when we spot them. The trick for us then, is to spot them.

+ We must understand and memorize Their Playbook =

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THE MATH:

If we don’t participate by thinking it through we remain unprotected for the next assault.

+ The powerful force of the PR campaign can disconnect us from our own survival instincts and our allegiance to Natural Law.

+

Allow me to present to you the handiwork of the opposition during our lifetime—dots connected, methods exposed. Not to drop something on you that you are helpless to correct and so it’s only going to give more anxiety and depression to focus on it, but instead to show that there are tools still available, within our reach, and very crucial to the correction. As exciting and precious as unopened gifts still sitting under the Christmas tree in January, we haven’t fully received all that we’ve been given. And I can prove that they haven’t been opened.

Although we can at times feel inconsequential to the greater darker picture, there is always a choice for us to make, even if we can’t always see where it is. We choose the route we take in this life. Our goal is to pursue the way forward and upward. To do this we must go through their lies. The alternative is to stay frozen in our tracks, deer in the headlights style, and we know what can happen there.

I recently read a blurb in the NYTimes Saturday section about the “It’s a lot” feeling, referring to the quantity of information, the state of overwhelm which results, and that people are “opting out” of news altogether. I admit, I’ve succumbed to this approach in the past myself, prioritizing the need to protect my mental health. This method is not an unreasonable one, considering the airplane emergency logic that says you need to breathe from your own oxygen mask before helping your child with theirs. What can we do for anyone, or for our society, if we’re too spun out to function? But, it is our opponents who benefit the most from the apathy that comes from this overwhelm. The lack of agency we feel against all the news turns into a passive nihilism which serves to keep us inactive. This inactivity doesn’t mean there isn’t a choice being made, it means something else is making the choice for us.

If we really do accept the idea that nothing gets changed until it’s faced, then not facing facts can only be a limited short term strategy. The more effective way to protect your mental health, to protect anything or anyone, is not to build a life upon the avoidance of reality because it’s a lot, but instead to think matters through and get to cognitive closure. I understand there isn’t enough time in the day to do that with every issue from every headline. That is the purpose of this book here, to train our focus on the persistent and recurring pieces which illuminate a particular overall signature. It’s not so much the individual we need to concentrate on, or even the individual news story, but more the repeated malicious behavior. The players involved come and go and the news stories will never cease. What needs to be addressed is the concentrated and collaborative effort to keep us from seeing their actions clearly so They can continue this behavior without consequence.

What most all of us share is the desire to live a healthy life, in peace, and build a better future for the children who follow us. If our goal is to achieve these things, and our fight is to preserve these things, then the enemy we fight would be those who compromise those goals, those who make our lives less healthy, less peaceful, and the future less stable. Who is that enemy? When we answer this question incorrectly it exposes a crucial misdiagnosis of the most serious problems we face and explains the ongoing failure to solve them.

Let us reduce what is “a lot” down to plain brass tacks. Across all sectors of big industry, the following dynamic repeats in a clear PATTERN:

1. Bad Company creates a product they need us to buy. We don’t yet want it or need it and it may not be good for us.

2. Bad Company uses their powerful Sales & Marketing and Public Relations departments to convince us to buy their product.

3. Once Bad Company gets initial market share they must continue to sell more, must expand their market, their profit line must go up.

4. The product contains a hidden harm. Bad Company does not disclose this to the public, instead attempts to cover it up.

5. The citizenry have questions and concerns about the product. Relying on watchdog tools like government regulatory agencies, whistleblowers, litigation, quality journalism, and the public’s activism, there is exposure of the deception and harm.

6. Bad Company then utilizes a Playbook of tactics to deny the harm, avoid accountability, protect their business, and keep product on the market where harm is extended and compounded.

Note: THE PATTERN IS ALSO EVIDENT AND WORKS THE SAME WHEN THE COMPANY IS THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX AND THE PRODUCT IS WAR.

This Pattern is not inherent in a capitalist system, it is an aberration in it. What seems to have happened, because of some very crafty tricks of persuasion, is instead of businesses adapting to our consumer preferences, we have allowed them to operate however they choose and we have adapted ourselves to whatever they have produced, even if it kills us. The people have handed over the power of their precious consumer sovereignty to the producers.

As a rocky road map from past to present, we focus here on the producers of the products which have caused the most harm and pose the greatest threats to American health and livelihood. If we were to define our enemies by those who have caused the most death on our soil, then these Bad Companies are our greatest enemies.

So, fair warning, in this chapter we are going to go through these sagas, which from the avoidant perspective would be categorized as “a lot”. The point to keep hold of throughout is that this is about you. This is your saga. These are the opponents launching an unceasing barrage of arrows at you and your loved ones. This is the data of their offensive strategy we need in order to craft our better defensive strategy. If I were to tell you that a fire arrow was aimed at the roof over your head right now and we’ve determined where it is launching from, would you find this information too uninteresting or too depressing to listen to? I honestly don’t feel I’m being hyperbolic to claim that the roof is on fire. But I promise I’ll go quick.

BIG TOBACCO

In 1952, an article published in Reader's Digest (then the country's leading source of medical information) titled “Cancer by the Carton,” cited results of animal studies that found tobacco tar was carcinogenic and highlighted the risk of developing lung cancer. They described the debate over the role of cigarettes in causing lung cancer as a medical controversy largely kept from public notice.

A year later, the CEOs of all the major tobacco companies met secretly in New York City. Their purpose was to counter the damage from these studies linking their product to cancer. Sales had plummeted for two years after the article came out.

And a year after that, working with the public relations giant Hill & Knowlton, the industry created “A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers” and paid to have it published in 448 newspapers. To give the industry a touch of humanity, the statement included the signatures of the nation's top tobacco executives and assured Americans that “we accept an interest in people's health as a basic responsibility, paramount to every other consideration in our business.” Furthermore, they promised that “we always have and always will cooperate closely with those whose task it is to safeguard the public's health”. This was the first step in a calculated campaign to mislead Americans about the catastrophic effects of smoking and to avoid any public policy that might damage their sales, a campaign which never ended. Industry documents show the repeated duplicity of its executives for over 75 years.1

Since the “Frank Statement,” approximately 30 million Americans have died from smoking, and millions more have suffered from debilitating diseases ranging from emphysema to heart disease. Smoking is still the number one preventable cause of death in the U.S., killing over 490,000 people per year, and it costs the U.S. economy over $600 billion in direct health care costs and lost productivity every year.

I recommend a rewatch of the film The Insider about Big Tobacco whistleblower Jeffrey Wygant who broke the story on 60 Minutes about the cigarette company’s intentionally manipulating its tobacco blend with chemicals such as ammonia to increase the addictive effect of nicotine.

It is extremely important to understand that Big Tobacco also transitioned into Big
Food, and brought all their sinister strategy with them. After facing declining sales in the tobacco market due to increased regulation, Bad cigarette Companies like Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds gained control of a significant portion of the U.S. food supply. They acquired major food companies such as Kraft, General Foods, and Nabisco, which marks a dominant shift in the industry, in the rise of processed foods and in the rise in obesity and related health problems. Often using similar marketing and product development techniques from their cigarette days, they created "hyper-palatable" foods that are highly addictive and contribute to overconsumption and unhealthy eating behaviors. Those related health problems of high body mass index and high blood sugar are plaguing our nation, especially our children, and directly contribute to the #1 killer of Americans today.

BIG CHEMICAL

In 1945, DuPont began manufacturing Teflon, a product best known for its use in non-stick cookware, but also widely used in a variety of other consumer products, including waterproof clothing and furniture, food packaging, self-cleaning ovens, airplanes and cars.

In 1948, the company 3M acquired the patent for a process of creating compounds out of fluorine. Manhattan Project scientists, several of whom landed at 3M after the war ended, had already used fluorine to separate the uranium used for the atomic bomb. DuPont purchased this toxic, man-made chemical called PFOA to be used in the production of Teflon.

3M would continue to sell PFOA to DuPont for more than four decades. Starting in the early 1950s, the company also made PFOS, a closely related compound that wound up in hundreds of products and in firefighting foam that they provided exclusively to the U.S. military. The company refers to it as C8; we now refer to them as “forever chemicals” because they don't break down in the environment. 3M’s fluorochemicals helped the company expand into a behemoth worth more than $120 billion.

The toxicity of the forever chemicals was kept from the Environmental Protection Agency until the late 1990s, and went largely unregulated until the early 2000s. PFOA is a greenhouse gas and has adverse effects on health, including being a probable carcinogen. It is also a suspected hormone disrupter, with its effects made worse by the fact that it lingers in the body and in the environment. In 1973, DuPont’s own investigations found “no safe level of exposure to PFAS in food packaging”. The company’s internal experiments on rats and monkeys concluded that PFOA and PFOS “should be regarded as toxic” and described the finding as suggestive of “a possible human health problem.” This is all according to minutes from Dupont’s own meeting in 1975.2

3M found the presence of the toxic chemicals in human blood of its employees but kept this bad news from leaking out to the public. For decades, evidence emerged that tumors in exposed lab animals were related to PFOA exposure, that the levels of the chemicals in 3M workers’ blood kept rising over time, and their cancer rates were much higher than the general population. But all of these environmental and health consequences remained secret.

PFAS have been linked to birth defects, cancer, obesity and diabetes. Americans have been exposed to the chemicals by direct contact and from polluted ground and surface water and soil, and through their food where the chemicals seep into from the packaging. Potential liabilities associated with the chemicals, both environmental cleanup and ongoing healthcare costs, have been estimated in the tens of billions of dollars. Both 3M and DuPont were well aware of the health hazards but continued to expose their employees and dump the toxic waste into local waterways, where it made its way into public drinking water and subsequently sickened thousands of people, ultimately killing many of them. PFOA has been found in the blood of 97% of the U.S. population, including newborns.

I suggest a watch or a rewatch of the film Dark Waters if you want to get the entertaining Dupont Chemical refresher.

Also, links below to some major headlines from just this month about 3M's disinformation campaign and PFAS pollution being "one of the greatest threats" to humankind. The news of the harm trickles out to us, 50 years after Dupont first began discussing these threats internally.

9/08/25 - Investigation pulls back curtain on decades-old deceit campaign led by multibillion-dollar company: 'It knew they contained toxic substances'

9/12/25 - Chemical giant dragged to court over shocking scandal in public drinking water: 'Exposed to real and ongoing harm'

BIG AGRICULTURE

In the 1960s, the companies Bayer and Monsanto produced Agent Orange to be used in the Vietnam War. It was used to clear forest cover and crops, but the spray also predictably landed on Vietnamese citizens and U.S. soldiers. Some 18 million gallons of the highly toxic herbicide were sprayed in Vietnam during a nine year period in the war. The country blames the chemical for birth defects in 150,000 children. Dioxin, the chemical in Agent Orange, is now one of the leading causes of claims for disability among Vietnam War era veterans.

After the war ended, these companies created a new application for their product. In 1971, Monsanto patented Glyphosate as an antibiotic and a few years later introduced RoundUp, a weed killer that became the first billion-dollar herbicide, the most widely used agricultural chemical in the world.

In 1996, Monsanto began to sell genetically modified seeds to farmers—soybean, corn, cotton, and canola. Called Roundup Ready GMO crops, they were designed to be tolerant to the effects of RoundUp, meaning that farmers could treat their entire fields with the herbicide without the risk of losing their crops to the chemical mixture. The impact of the huge increase in pesticide use over the last 40 years has wreaked havoc on biodiversity, on our insect, bee, and bird population. It has impacted the health of the soil and the microorganisms in the soil that are necessary to grow nutritious crops. Many of these pesticides have been shown to not only cause cancer but also neurodevelopmental harm.

Glyphosate is an antibiotic against beneficial organisms, which we rely on in our gastrointestinal track or in the environment to supply us with minerals and the aromatic amino acids that we cannot produce ourselves. Researchers Samsel & Seneff have now produced six studies through 2024 entitled: “Glyphosate, pathways to modern diseases” proposing that the ingredient in RoundUp is the most important causal factor in many 21st century diseases.3 Research shows it is a key contributor to obesity as well as other health problems like Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, infertility, depression, rheumatoid arthritis, celiac disease, diabetes, food allergies, heart disease, antibiotic-resistant infections, asthma, autism, inflammatory bowel disease, and cancer. The GMO crops also contribute to the rise of new allergens. As anyone in my age group can attest, we lived a life pre-genetic modification never hearing the words gluten-free, and now the majority of us are allergic and gluten intolerant, etc. The genetic engineering disrupts natural ecosystems and also potentially leads to the decline of native plant and animal species.

According to the CDC, 81% of the U.S. population had detectable levels of glyphosate in their urine, and these levels were nearly 87% f or children aged 6 to 18.4

In 2018, Bayer merged with Monsanto Company, thus acquiring RoundUp and its entire product line along with it. You will discover that these Bad Companies are highly consolidated; the largest seed companies are also in the pesticide business, and vice versa. A tsunami of mega-mergers in the last eight years accelerated this trend. By 2020, just four firms—Syngenta Group, Bayer, Corteva, and BASF—controlled 60-70% of the global pesticides market and 50-60% of the global seed market. Bayer (Monsanto), Corteva (Dupont), and Syngenta own 95% of the patents in the United States for GM corn, 78% of the patents for GM soybeans, and 93% of the patents for GM canola issued between 1976 and 2021.5 This is an absolutely dominating monopoly.

Three quarters of all our food now comes from just twelve plant varieties and just five animal species, as our agricultural biodiversity has been reduced by 75% since 1900. Yet, biodiversity is the basis of human’s food security.

Bayer has faced approximately 180,000 lawsuits alleging that glyphosate in its product caused cancer, so far reaching settlement agreements in nearly 114,000 of those cases. In only the latest one, from March 2025, the state of Georgia found the company guilty in RoundUp causing the plaintiff’s cancer, ordering them to pay $2.1 billion to the individual. The week prior though, Georgia’s state lawmakers passed a bill heavily lobbied by Bayer that would protect the company and all pesticide manufacturers from being legally liable for any harm in the future.6

• Update— As I am writing this, Big Ag is successfully lobbying the federal government for this same forever unaccountability. The legislation, written by the agrochemical giants, is hidden in a provision of a bill that has already passed through the Appropriations Committee in the House, and is headed for a vote there, followed by the Senate. There is a broad coalition trying their best to stop this from going any further.

There are many excellent documentaries about Big Agrochemical available online if you want to familiarize yourself with what they’ve been doing, for so long. I suggest starting with Seeds of Death on GMO and on Into The Weeds on Glyphosate.

BIG PHARMA

In the 1800s and early 1900s doctors prescribed various opioid tinctures and syrups. But by the late 20th century, physicians understood the dangers the drug posed—addiction, misuse and death. The medical profession of our era had been very reluctant to prescribe opioids for routine pain.

In 1996, Purdue Pharma introduced OxyContin, which was the drug oxycodone with a tablet coating. Oxycodone was much stronger than other opioids but the company assured doctors that this drug was different, due to the time release factor the coating innovation offered. The marketing campaign suggested the product was a less abusable drug, one that doctors could prescribe for moderate pain, in addition to severe pain. Doctors began writing prescriptions for painkillers more liberally, for wisdom tooth pain, backaches, sciatica, and a whole variety of conditions classified as non-cancer-related pain. From 1999 to 2014, sales of legal opioids quadrupled. In 2012 alone, clinicians wrote prescriptions for 259 million bottles of narcotic painkillers—one for every adult in the country, according to the CDC. Since the year 2000, the annual number of overdose deaths in the U.S. has multiplied six times over, rising from 17,500 to over 107,000 people in 2023.7

In the United States, opioid use disorder (OUD) and opioid overdose were once rare. But over the past 25 years, the number of Americans suffering from OUD increased exponentially and in parallel with the unprecedented increase in opioid prescribing. Today, OUD is insanely common and opioid overdose is the leading cause of injury death. The “pill mill industry” that fueled these addictions and deaths and destruction of families was made up of our own pharmacists and primary care doctors. They had been heavily marketed to by Purdue, where risks of the product were minimized and benefits were exaggerated. Assured that the drug was safe, those medical professionals rarely warned patients of its potential for dependence, or worse.

When doctors, along with anyone with eyes open, could no longer ignore the epidemic of opioid addiction gripping our nation, they tried to correct by cutting off their patients from OxyContin. Those who had become hooked on the drug were forced to buy painkillers from street dealers and when they started to run out of money they turned to the cheaper alternatives of heroin and then fentanyl. I don’t have to tell you where we’re at with that consequent problem today.

And, you’re probably already familiar with the popular miniseries on this subject: Dopesick or Painkiller.

So, this is a brief summary of offenses by Bad Companies which have most directly contributed to fatalities in our country. These companies were able to subdue all our natural survival instincts and evade every system of protection we currently rely on to keep us from the harm. Facts.

U.S. life expectancy has been in steady decline for the last 12 years. We have one of the lowest life expectancies among high-income countries; Americans die earlier at all wealth levels compared to their European counterparts. An epidemic of chronic illness has taken hold, I’m sure you’ve heard, with rates of heart disease, diabetes, liver disease, and obesity skyrocketing and impacting younger populations. The latest numbers from the CDC, published in April 2025, show 76.4% of U.S. adults had at least one chronic condition in 2023, and 40% have two or more!8 And America has the highest maternal mortality rate among the 14 richest industrialized countries. Something is terribly wrong.

The top three leading causes of death in the United States are heart disease, cancer and unintentional injuries. Those unintentional injuries are the leading cause of death for Americans under 44 years of age, and the majority of those deaths are overdose.9 Those numbers have spiked even more since 2020, up 80% since 2019. Opioid drug overdoses represent 78% of all overdoses.10

Prescription drug use has been increasing in the U.S. nearly every year since 2000—a huge jump from the preceding decades. 61% of Americans are currently taking at least one prescription medication, and more than a quarter of us are taking four or more. We are not getting healthier in body or in spirit from the drugs. The suicide rate has increased by over 30% over the past 20 years.

I know that looking at the litany of grim statistics can be disheartening. (That’s why I packed them all into one post! I promise we will soon get to focusing more about you and me.) However, there is a real difference between doom-scrolling or complaining about all that is screwed up in our world and fully educating ourselves on the methods in the madness, so that we can escape from the Pattern that gets us so screwed.

When we don’t have our sights set on the primary sources of injury—the Bad Companies—they move swiftly to accumulate more power under our radar, with transfers of wealth and massive corporate consolidation like what has happened with those handful of agrochemical companies controlling now most of the food production market.

If we were to train our focus in concordance with who is actually killing the most humans, then we would be watching these companies as closely as we watch, say, a Jeffrey Epstein or any other individual who is dominating the headlines at the moment. Can you imagine if instead of a corporation it was just one guy that had been found guilty in over 100K lawsuits of causing death or had wiped out 2 million of our workforce with addiction and overdose, yet still went on to be one of the richest and most powerful free men in the world?

We have to ask ourselves why our relationship with these companies is so different from the other villains we rally around and why we continue to consent to so much of their product. How is that any different from us, say, accepting an invitation to Epstein’s island? Ironically, it appears that the more common and widespread the villainy, the less we attempt to protect ourselves from it. Is there any more insanely unanswered question than: If cigarettes only cause disease and death—how are these companies still legally allowed to sell them? Imagine if my small business was proven to cause cancer and death all over town but no one shut me down!

It gets a little mind-boggling. We are going to dig into this boggling of our minds. It comes down to not only an engineering of consent but an engineered reliance on external systems to tell us what is dangerous and what is safe, what are the greatest threats we face, what we should or shouldn’t worry about, which deadly man-made products we are just going to have to get used to. If we keep pressing on without examination using our own logical reasoning, we are prime targets for the next line up of monopolistic manipulations (which currently take the form of media mergers upon media mergers or the domination of Palantir). We are pretty far down the road of no government push-back against these Frankensteins, but still in the baby steps phase of we as individuals pulling back the blank check we’ve been handing over to them.

Many of these deaths and the chronic diseases that shorten our lives are preventable through lifestyle choices, early detection, and management of risk factors. We need better management of our risk factors.

+ Their Pattern of deception and concealment of harm leads to addiction, disease and death. =

We are all in this together! I’m not the first to say it! See you next chapter….

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