The disabled high risk are among the few people masking in public at all for health reasons. And many can’t even afford the best medical respiratory protection available.
I fret a bit about the communication problems I see happening regularly where people use terms thinking other people know what they’re talking about, and the truth is they’re not talking about the same things, and because of that, are sometimes unwittingly spreading misinformation or the exact opposite message than they’d ever intended.1 Sometimes this is because of deliberate PR and disinformation operations. You absolutely can’t assume other people know what you’re talking about if you’re using buzzwords or in-group lingo, because you may not realize the general understanding of those terms outside your bubble.
So it’s 2025 and I’ve seen some problematic cagey messaging that is entirely anti-mask, being parroted around about “medical masks” by people who claim to be promoting masking for medical reasons. This seems to be a recurring problem where people get tripped up accidentally repeating their own opposition’s framing and buzzwords. This type of disinformation happened with Lyme sufferers and it’s happening with Long Covid sufferers getting hijacked by anti-vax influence peddlers.2 I’ve seen lefties promoting right-wing Qanon era covid quack products.3 In this case the people repeating this anti-mask rhetoric seem to be confused about the definition of “medical mask” and that’s a big problem.
Using the term “medical masks” should be done in the context of recognizing that N95s are medical. Members of the general public and authorities and experts routinely say “medical masks” when they are referring to N95 respirator masks or any type of mask that might be worn for medical reasons or in a medical setting. The civil liberties legal organization ACLU of New York specifically categorized N95s, Kn95s, and surgical masks all under the umbrella of “medical masks” when describing how mask ban legislation in Nassau County didn’t differentiate between “medical masks” or costumes, burqas, or bandanas.4 The term “medical mask” has long been, and is widely used, to refer to masks that are used for health purposes, as opposed to Halloween costume masks, spa cosmetic masks, ski masks, or ICE agents wearing gaiters pulled up over their face to avoid being identified.
Many official government sources and medical experts on PPE describe surgical masks as examples of Personal Protective Equipment, even while explaining the differences between surgical masks and respirator masks and their design purposes.5 The FDA states explicitly: “N95 respirators and surgical masks are examples of personal protective equipment.”6 Goggles and face shields are also PPE7 even though they are not the most effective choices for preventing aerosol transmission of respiratory viruses; they are still considered PPE. End of. That’s what PPE means.
It should be obvious then that some randos can’t just take it upon themselves to redefine PPE as only a narrow type of mask for just one specific mode of virus transmission, and then actually do effective science communication based on that without muddying the waters. Many types of masks are forms of PPE and protect against various health hazards. Deet and leg gaiters are not effective against aerosol transmission of viruses or wildfire smoke, but you’re never going to convince me they’re not personal protective equipment, when they’re described as such by experts.8 I don’t want ticks and Lyme Disease either. And respiratory protection required for asbestos removal is even higher than for aerosol transmitted viruses, but the Trump administration wasn’t even transparent about if they’d adhered to those standards at the White House demolition,9 and OSHA has proposed rule changes to allow different types of respirators to be used than are currently authorized.10 Things can definitely always get worse.
Even healthcare providers often neglect minimal efforts to protect high risk patients these days from a variety of viral contagions we know continue to circulate, including covid and flu. Many more people than most realize are actually at high risk for and with covid.11 Just being over 50 is a risk condition with covid.12 But there have been very few healthcare mask requirements outside of proactive and progressive regions in winter,13 even though hospitals definitely noted the summer outbreaks of covid in 2025.14 It would be ideal if hospitals, many which are for-profit in the US, provided N95s to doctors, nurses, staff, and patients, but even during the height of pandemic covid surges when freezer truck morgues and overflow tents were present outside hospitals, and the N95 shortage had already passed, hospitals locked up N95s to keep them from nurses.15 Healthcare staff wearing surgical masks in care areas of healthcare would actually be a vast improvement for public safety and the prevention of nosocomial spread of viruses compared to the often zero respiratory equipment we see today. And things are actually set to go even further downhill in American healthcare with the dismantling of the CDC HICPAC committee in 2025 by the Trump administration,16 the committee that issued guidance to healthcare on stemming the spread of infectious disease in hospitals and other healthcare settings, and even took public input in the form of public comments from healthcare professionals and patients. This no longer exists, and we have gone backwards, as I myself had predicted in public comments I gave to the committee on November 14, 2024, where I described how much worse it can get.17
So at a time when people are not using any type of respiratory protection even in very high risk settings like healthcare, and air travel18 and other public transit. Places regularly acknowledged by people to be absolute petri dishes of germs, and are aware and blame the travel for having a lousy time catching “a bug”. Even so, very few people learn any lesson and so there’s not as many people masking even in such places these days. So in times like these it’s highly suspicious if people are specifically trying to disparage “medical masks” under a vague and confusing claim in the fine print that hey, they’re just saying respirator masks are better. People aren’t even masking at all, the risk of them wearing the wrong mask for purpose is nearly zero, and even if they did, why make that into a crisis given the reality of the situation?
Pitting the supposedly better against the good has long been an anti-masker & anti-vaxxer strategy, and of course when pressed or eventually they disparage or discount the better, and in the end it leads to a rhetoric strategy of dismissing ALL public health measures or mitigations in total as invalid. That’s the playbook. Covid contrarians and lockdown revisionists so often claim that mask mandates did “nothing” when that’s obviously not true just based on not only outcomes, but pure logistics that when everyone covers their mouths as a method of source control, it’s gotta reduce the amount of virus in the air, thereby reducing load exposure. And that anything that reduces exposure probably betters your odds at least a bit because of the way math works. Most people will consider that something rather than nothing, I know I feel that way.
The foundation of shitting on “medical masks” goes back to “those mask rules” and claiming they shouldn’t have happened. Often it involves “lockdown revisionism” where people overstate the actual restrictions that took place,19 the length of time they actually felt inconvenienced, and they often conveniently forget their own fears at the time that motivated them to caution. Plus some of the people complaining about “medical masks” are people who were pitching fits about being asked to cover their mouths while at the hospital cancer ward at the time thousands of people were dying every week from covid. When this comes up nowadays and someone mentions “those medical masks” (or paper masks, or cloth masks, or just masks) “were doing nothing back then” and I push the person on it, almost invariably they wind up attacking all masking including N95s or anything else, and also attacking the very idea of anyone masking for any reason, and even going into conspiracy theories about “lockdowns” and such.. They often call surgical masks “paper masks” just to undermine the idea of any mask at all, by making it sound like masks are made of something akin to paper towel or a sheet of loose leaf. And claiming “medical masks” don’t work is even more curious because though maybe an in-group of people, perhaps medical professionals, focused on virus protection, perhaps uses “medical masks” as shorthand for masks other than respirators, and they know what they’re talking about… Okay but those aren’t the people who need to be informed about respirators, are they? So even if everyone else wasn’t already calling all masks for health purposes by the term “medical masks”, and they are calling N95s medical masks, but even if they were not, why on earth would you use jargon in public anyway?
We’ve seen this type of tricky rhetoric from the anti-vaxxers that trips people up and has tricked many pro-vaccination people into believing or even repeating anti-vax talking points, often unwittingly. It’s happened to me too. And once I noticed it happening, I started noticing how often it happens. I’m continually coming across buzzwords and shorthand that I come to find nobody really agrees on what words mean!20
Sometimes these anti-maskers start with sympathy-seeking “anti-mandate” stance, but then progress to undermining mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, like the medical official who was claiming vaccines are the Antichrist,21 or with political influencers spinning conspiracy fictions claiming covid is not the threat at all but wrongly claiming the vaccines are.22 And we have seen how the rejection of all vaccines have gotten tied up with political agendas of the right-wing.23 And some of these people even outed themselves as being anti-vax across the board early in the pandemic yelling about even smallpox vaccination.24 Bad actors have done the same with masks, they ran ad campaigns saying mask requirements are bad,25 then they erroneously claimed mandates were actually useless.26 And now we see people mindlessly parroting nonsensical propaganda even to this day. Lots of those people pushing this rhetoric oppose all public health. They are against all vaccines, and they’re against all masks for medical purposes.
It’s almost unimaginable that people ostensibly pro public health are still managing to confuse people with poor science communication. For years now people have misunderstood masks, respirator science, and mask recommendations all the time. People sometimes grossly misunderstand how masks work because of gaffed attempts to inform them. I have written about the ways people misunderstand masks in unfathomable and shocking ways, because of a mix of poor presentation to an audience with an entirely different perspective than the hotshot scientists and doctors doing the messaging on social media for example. These misunderstandings have absolutely put people needlessly at risk.27 And people who already understand how masks work are often shocked about how other people managed to misinterpret things.
It’s so obviously so easy to miscommunicate with all the misinformation on any politicized hot topic, and we’ve seen masks politicized for over 5 years now. So anyone in 2025 who’s harmonizing with the rhetoric of the anti-maskers should be dismissed as unserious and poor science communicators at best. In today’s info cocoon reality, you have to be very cautious that you are talking about the same thing when you use a term.28
Crapping on masks so broadly not only hurts the people who don’t know about the better options for virus purposes, it also hurts the people who do know about respirators and use them, by engendering more hostility toward masks by giving confirmation ammunition to hostile anti-maskers who continue to try to antagonize people with these supposedly scientific claims that they believe support the kooky idea that masks don’t work. Anyone interested in mask advocacy will say something such as that you can mask to protect yourself, and upgrade your mask to a respirator for the best protection. Someone advocating for masks shouldn’t go around shitting on masks in some coy way that confuses people.
But still I wonder, why do efforts that are ostensibly to promote masks for medical reasons wind up promoting anti-mask propaganda talking points? Or for example even anti-mask legislation presented as pro-mask legislation.29 It’s almost like there’s a lot of money sloshing around to sabotage public health advocacy and trip up people involved with erroneous information and imprecise communication. In fact, that’s been true from the get go of the pandemic30 and the industry has been known to play that game at a granular level.31 So I can’t rule anything out for explanations about why there are these bonkers level public messaging fails on public health all the damn time. It’s just too odd that people promoting masks so often wind up helping anti-mask agendas. It’s uncanny.
References:
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People are not even talking about the same things and this is dangerous. I don’t think most people realize that many times we think we’re talking about the same thing, but in fact, we’re not actually on the same page with the underlying premise or even basic facts. Chloe Humbert Feb 14, 2025 I feel compelled to keep pointing this out, because people have different ideas about topics and the way that meanings of things can work is that people can think they’re talking about the same thing and in fact not realize they’re not in agreement of actual premises or the facts involved. I think that partly it’s the way things work with the information space and media as it is and social media silos, but I think there are also forces out there who are able to manipulate the situation as well. Whatever the cause I think the only answer is to start speaking in specifics rather than shorthand or buzzwords or sound bites. We need to name specific things happening, and spell out what we mean, not just make off-hand comments and assume everyone’s on the same page, because I can guarantee you, not everyone is on the same page.
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ACLU of New York – Aug 14, 2024 Know Your Rights Your Rights to Wear a Mask in New York What types of face coverings does Nassau County’s mask ban prohibit? Nassau County’s mask ban language is vague and does not differentiate between medical masks like N95s, KN95s and surgical masks, and other types of masks or “facial coverings” including niqabs, burqas, wrapping a scarf or bandana around your face, and costume masks.
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Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety – Personal Protective Equipment Healthcare workers routinely use surgical masks as part of their personal protective equipment.
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FDA – N95 Respirators, Surgical Masks, Face Masks, and Barrier Face Coverings N95 respirators and surgical masks are examples of personal protective equipment that are used to protect the wearer from particles or from liquid contaminating the face.
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US FDA – Personal Protective Equipment EUAs Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) refers to protective clothing, helmets, gloves, face shields, goggles, respirators or other equipment designed to protect the wearer from injury or the spread of infection or illness.
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Press Release: WHITE HOUSE EAST WING DEMOLITION RAISES ALARMS OVER TRANSPARENCY OF ASBESTOS PROTECTIONS AND WORKER SAFETY October 23, 2025 ADAO Letter to President Trump — Formal Demand for Disclosure of All Environmental and Worker-Safety Documentation Related to the East Wing Demolition The demolition, which began on Monday, is part of a privately funded initiative commissioned by Donald Trump to build a ballroom and has sparked growing concern over potential asbestos exposure risks to workers, staff, and visitors. ADAO is calling for the administration to immediately release full information on its compliance with all required environmental safety measures during the ongoing demolition and reaffirm its commitment to prevention, accountability, and the protection of public health in all federal construction projects. “Every building of this age must undergo full asbestos inspection and abatement before any demolition begins. The White House should be the national model for transparency, compliance, and worker safety, not an exception to the rules,” said Linda Reinstein, President and Co-Founder of ADAO. “We lose 40,000 Americans every year to asbestos-related diseases. If the People’s House cannot follow OSHA and EPA regulations, how can we expect private industry to do so? Prevention and transparency save lives.”
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Asbestos – Posted by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration on Jul 1, 2025 Proposed rule; request for comments. SUMMARY: This proposed rule revises some substance-specific respirator requirements to allow different types of respirators to be used under OSHA’s Asbestos standards and better aligns these standards with OSHA’s Respiratory Protection standard.
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More people are “high risk” than anyone seems to realize, but this information is in fact available from the CDC. Dec 7th, 2024 The CDC has a list of “Underlying Medical Conditions Associated with Higher Risk for Severe COVID-19” that includes just being unvaccinated at any age or “not being up to date on COVID-19 vaccinations” – and less than half of Americans got last year’s updated vaccine, so most people have this risk condition!! Just being over 50 is a risk condition, and anxiety disorders were found to be strongly associated with death from covid.
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CDC – COVID – Underlying Conditions and the Higher Risk for Severe COVID-19 Health Care Providers February 6, 2025 Age remains the strongest risk factor for severe COVID-19 outcomes, with risk of severe outcomes increasing markedly with increasing age. Based on data from the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) at NCHS (Risk for COVID-19 Infection, Hospitalization, and Death By Age Group), compared with ages 18–29 years, the risk of death is 25 times higher in those ages 50–64 years, 60 times higher in those ages 65–74 years, 140 times higher in those ages 75–84 years, and 340 times higher in those ages 85+ years. Notably, these data include all deaths in the United States that occurred throughout the pandemic, from February 2020 to July 1, 2022, including deaths among unvaccinated individuals.
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San Francisco Chronicle – Mask mandates return in parts of the Bay Area as virus season nears By Aidin Vaziri, Staff Write Oct 7, 2025 Mask requirements are returning to health care settings across parts of the Bay Area, as local health officials brace for the annual surge in respiratory illnesses — including COVID-19, influenza and RSV — that typically arrives with colder weather. Starting Nov. 1, several counties — including Contra Costa, Santa Clara, Sonoma, Napa, San Mateo and Santa Cruz — will again require health care workers, and in some cases patients and visitors, to wear masks in patient care areas through the winter and early spring. Officials say the seasonal measure is aimed at protecting vulnerable patients and preventing outbreaks that could strain hospitals.
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AP News – Hospitals still ration medical N95 masks as stockpiles swell. By JASON DEAREN, JULIET LINDERMAN and MARTHA MENDOZA. February 16, 2021 Internal government emails obtained by The Associated Press show there were deliberate decisions to withhold vital information about new mask manufacturers and availability. Exclusive trade data and interviews with manufacturers, hospital procurement officials and frontline medical workers reveal a communication breakdown — not an actual shortage — that is depriving doctors, nurses, paramedics and other people risking exposure to COVID-19 of first-rate protection. Before the pandemic, medical providers followed manufacturer and government guidelines that called for N95s to be discarded after each use, largely to protect doctors and nurses from catching infectious diseases themselves. As N95s ran short, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention modified those guidelines to allow for extended use and reuse only if supplies are “depleted,” a term left undefined. Hospitals have responded in a variety of ways, the AP has found. Some are back to pre-COVID-19, one-use-per-patient N95 protocols, but most are doling out one mask a day or fewer to each employee. Many hospital procurement officers say they are relying on CDC guidelines for depleted supplies, even if their own stockpiles are robust.
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The Disbanding of HICPAC is Part of a Larger, Dangerous Pattern of Undermining Health Protections. The Trump administration cuts a trusted source of infection prevention guidance. By Global Biodefense Staff May 7, 2025 These actions are not just about cost-cutting. They represent a calculated rejection of expert advice, biomedical science, and public accountability in favor of political expediency and bureaucratic “streamlining.” The long-term costs—in lives, trust, and national preparedness—are incalculable. How This Affects You: The Human Cost of Dismantling HICPAC While HICPAC may seem like a distant, technical advisory body, its absence has direct consequences for everyday Americans — especially the most vulnerable.
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Public comment to CDC HICPAC committee November 2024 Infection control in healthcare. Chloe Humbert Nov 15, 2024 Going forward is a choice. In an article in the Journal of Infectious Diseases & Preventive Medicine there’s a description of what happened back then. “In medieval times, hospitals were hazardous places, Epidemic infections killed large numbers of hospital patients during this period. Hospital infection and death rates were high. When a sick person entered a hospital, his or her property was disposed of, and in some regions, a requiem mass was held, as if he or she had already died.” Going backward is a choice. We know better now. We use surgical gloves, autoclaves, disinfectants, checklists and yes, respirator masks exist. But big healthcare corporations don’t wanna pay for that, they lock up PPE, force nurses to work without sick leave at hospitals, and make patients beg for reasonable accommodation.
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CIDRAP International air travel—especially packed flights—fueled flu, COVID-19 spread during pandemic, researchers say Mary Van Beusekom, MS October 29, 2025 A new study in The Journal of Infectious Diseases links higher intercontinental airline passenger flight volumes to both influenza activity and COVID-19 case and death rates, suggesting that short-term travel restrictions and in-flight interventions could slow disease transmission when coupled with public health measures. Flights from Asia played a larger role in disease spread, the study found. University of Hong Kong researchers analyzed monthly global passenger numbers and surveillance data on flu and COVID-19 in 78 countries and US states from January 2019 to July 2024. Then they used a modeling framework to assess the relationship between flight volumes and disease activity while adjusting for differences in country-level public health efforts. “Air travel plays a crucial role in infectious disease spread, creating unprecedented pathways for pathogens to cross global boundaries within hours,” the authors wrote. “The confined environment of aircraft cabins creates ideal conditions for respiratory disease transmission.”
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COVID-19 lockdown revisionism Blake Murdoch, Timothy Caulfield CMAJ Apr 2023, 195 (15) E552-E554; DOI: 10.1503/cmaj.221543 The term “lockdown” has become a powerful and perverted word in the infodemic about democracies’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdown, as used in public discourse, has expanded to include any public health measure, even if it places little to no restriction on social mobility or interaction. For example, a working literature review and meta-analysis on the effects of lockdowns on COVID-19 mortality misleadingly defined lockdowns as “the imposition of at least 1 compulsory non-pharmaceutical intervention.”1 This working paper therefore conflated mandatory isolation for people with confirmed infections and masking policies with heavy-handed limitations on freedom of movement, and since it gained viral fame, it has helped fuel calls for “no more lockdowns.” This working paper has been highly critiqued and is less convincing than comparative assessments of health measures, like the Oxford Stringency Index.2,3 Here, we discuss the spread of misinformation on lockdowns and other public health measures, which we refer to as “lock-down revisionism,” and how this phenomenon has damaged trust in public health initiatives designed to keep people safer.
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Don’t fail to communicate. Don’t Wait For Everybody – Episode 017 Chloe Humbert Feb 10, 2025 So then the presenter at the town hall said, she said, We want progressive policies. And I’m going to keep using the word progressive because, quote, we are not crazy lefty people. I was just stunned because I’m just like, well, who are the crazy lefty people? Are you going to explain that? No, no. Just left that out there hanging. So the crazy lefty people… If you just say that, then, you know, I don’t know who you’re talking about. You could be talking about never Trumpers and you could be talking about tankies. I have no way to know. Like, I don’t know. I have to assume you might mean me. Now, I consider myself a garden variety progressive, but… you know, I have no idea. Maybe she thinks I’m the crazy lefty people and I don’t belong there. So needless to say, I’ve never gone back to that organization.
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Holy hell! Florida Surgeon General goes “Antichrist” on COVID vaccines Frank Cerabino Palm Beach Post Jan 11, 2024 The Florida doctor didn’t only say that he thought COVID-19 vaccines weren’t a good idea medically. He said they were the work of the Devil. Seriously. Ladapo called COVID vaccines ‘the Antichrist of all products” and said that they were showing “disrespect” to the human genome, “and that is our connection to God.” This is groundbreaking quackery. We’ve left the world of fringe, discredited medicine here, and entered the world of fringe, dirt-road theology. The idea that COVID-19 vaccines are the work of the Devil isn’t something Ladapo just dreamed up on Bannon’s show. While the leaders of mainstream Christianity have urged their followers to get vaccinated, a small contingent of Christian anti-vaxxers have used the Bible to make a ridiculous argument against getting inoculated. They claim the vaccine is “the mark of the beast,” as prophesied in the Bible’s Book of Revelation.
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Lab Leak Truthers are Pandemic Deniers. The false internal logic of being mad about a lab leak, but being cool with spreading the virus. Chloe Humbert Oct 14, 2024 The bottom line is, for the diehard lab leak truthers, it’s not spreading covid that kills people, they believe wrongly the vaccines are killing people, and that “lockdowns” harmed people — and that’s how they square it where it makes sense for lab leak truthers to think it’s ok to spread the virus. So when these pundits or the followers of this stuff say that covid has been “weaponized” many of us may assume that is a tacit recognizing that covid is deadly, but that’s not necessarily the case.
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Confronting the evolution and expansion of anti-vaccine activism in the USA in the COVID-19 era Carpiano, Richard M et al. The Lancet, Volume 401, Issue 10380, 967 – 970 These efforts contributed to COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and expanded the movement, with early indications suggesting that this hesitancy could now also be increasing hesitancy that existed pre-pandemic towards other vaccines. It is important to understand the implications of this recent evolution of anti-vaccine activism on vaccination uptake and the promotion of sound public health strategies.
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Pierre Kory, MD MPA @PierreKory 8:53 PM · Dec 24, 2022 Hotez & the WHO are doubling down, trying to bury the fact that, from the smallpox vaccine myth to the polio vaccine myth to now, it is actually “pro-vaccine activism” that is the major killing force globally. Immense data supports my conclusion.
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Anti-mask Woke-washing. The moral distortion of social justice. Chloe Humbert Aug 31, 2023 State Government Leadership Foundation openly bragged on social media about an advertising campaign that specifically targeted liberals to persuade them of the lie that masks supposedly do more harm than good.
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Yale Insights – No, That New Study Doesn’t Show that Masks Are Useless. Jason Abaluck Professor of Economics March 08, 2023 Now, my point is not that the Cochrane Review shows that the effect is at least 50%. My point is, there is very little information about the impacts of actually wearing masks in the Cochrane Review. Now, you might say, “Wait a minute, if it’s impossible to get people to wear masks, doesn’t that mean community mask-wearing is futile?” But of course, plenty of people do wear masks! In some locations in the U.S., city- and state-level mandates in 2020 achieved over 90% compliance. Airlines had consistently high use while mandates were in place. And of course, mask use was nearly universal in East Asia. The issue isn’t that no one wore masks, but that the studies in the Cochrane Review compare control groups with intervention groups where people were likely not much more likely to wear masks.
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Upgrade Your Masking Chart, Explained – N95s are better, universal masking is better – and no, masks do not have a destruct sequence countdown, so whatever the time period, you’re at lower risk if wearing one than without. Chloe Humbert Dec 04, 2023 People mistakenly believe that if the chart says wearing a particular mask for 5 hours with an infectious person is effective, they think if they have to be in the room with someone who’s potentially infectious for 6 hours, they may as well not wear the mask at all at any point during the first 5 hours, because they’re going to get sick anyway in the 6th or 7th hour. A person asked someone how long would a fitted N95 one-way masking situation prevent covid spread and referred to the mask chart infographic that led them to believe that with one-way masking, if they have to be in the room for 16 hours they may as well not bother masking at all. The reason they were asking this is to find out if it was true with the current strains because the mask charts were from the year before — they just took it as a given that it’s not worth it to mask at all if they have to mask for more than 5 hours. This was never true with any strains because this isn’t how it works and it’s a misunderstanding inherent to the mask chart. The mask will keep working so long as it’s kept on consistently. It’s just that the longer someone is in a potential exposure situation, the more likely something can go wrong, or virus particles might make it past the mask, to the point where it infects the person. Someone incorrectly asserted on social media that the mask chart “proves” that school mask mandates were “utterly useless”, because almost all the kids wore cloth masks which only protected them for 26 minutes and the school day is 6-½ hours long. This is not how it works.
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The Home Front podcast – Fascism, Modern Masculinity, and TikTok with Jonathan Buchwalter Feb 6, 2025 “For the Putin regime the state controlled media will actively contradict itself in the same broadcast and you will get um for example I was listening to a podcast uh where an expert on Russian propaganda was being interviewed and they described a plane crash where the plane crash was real and the dates and times presented were real but all of the news coverage is speculation about what happened where the facts of the issue beyond the absolute concrete facts like day and time they changed throughout the day where the same broadcasters would run different versions of events such that when you leave the the screen and you go and interact with people in the world you’re both only vaguely talking about the same event and this prevents the Russian population from really engaging with reality at all that they don’t know anything about what is happening around them because any version of it is not doctored or made glorious or made defamed instead it’s just bullshit. Just this constant stream of well that was wrong and now it’s this and that was wrong and now it’s this you don’t know what truth is and in the end state whether it’s the American South or not in Germany or modern Russia is a passive population is a group of people who will take what they’re given without complaint.”
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The Lever: How The Koch Network Hijacked The War On COVID, Dec 22, 2021 – Walker Bragman & Alex Kotch One sector in particular that took a big hit was the fossil fuel industry. Oil demand fell sharply in 2020, placing the global economy on uncertain footing. Before long, business-aligned groups — particularly those connected to fossil fuels — began targeting the public health measures threatening their bottom lines. Chief among them were groups tied to billionaire Charles Koch, owner of Koch Industries, the largest privately held fossil fuel company in the world. The war on public health measures began on March 20, 2020, when Americans For Prosperity (AFP), the right-wing nonprofit founded by Charles and David Koch, issued a press release calling on states to remain open.
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The Intercept – After Spying on Standing Rock, TigerSwan Shopped Anti-Protest “Counterinsurgency” to Other Oil Companies. More than 50,000 pages of documents were recently made public after the company behind the Dakota Access pipeline lost a court case to keep them secret. b y Alleen Brown, Naveena Sadasivam, April 13 2023 The released documents provide startling new details about how TigerSwan used social media monitoring, aerial surveillance, radio eavesdropping, undercover personnel, and subscription-based records databases to build watchlists and dossiers on Indigenous activists and environmental organizations. At times, the pipeline security company shared this information with law enforcement officials. In other cases, WhatsApp chats and emails confirm TigerSwan used what it gathered to follow pipeline opponents in their cars and develop propaganda campaigns online. The documents contain records of TigerSwan attempting to help Energy Transfer build a legal case against pipeline opponents, known as water protectors, using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, a law that was passed to prosecute the mob.