Vigilant News

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MSNBC Pushes Fake Ukraine War Coverage Yet Again
One month ago MSNBC contributor Malcolm Nance shared pictures from the woods claiming he was in Ukraine fighting against the Russians, now they are trying to pass off video game clips for war footage.

By ,

Ryan DeLarme,
May 17th, 2022

In an unsurprising turn of events, MSNBC war expert and retired 4-star General Barry R. McCaffrey mistook a video game for Ukraine war footage.  

The Post Millennial reported:

On Monday, retired four-star general and MSNBC “military analyst” Barry R. McCaffrey posted a clip of video game footage to Twitter. Alongside it he claimed it was a display of strength from Ukraine’s air defense. It’s actually footage from a video game.

The clip in question came from YouTube’s “shorts” section, and is titled “Russian MiG-29’s Get Shot Down By Air Defense System | Arma 3 #Shorts #Airdefense #Arma3.”

Of course, conservatives on Twitter wasted no time criticizing MSNBC and the Left.

Twitter Engineer: “We’re all Commie as F-ck”, Confirms Twitters Leftist Bias
Project Veritas released new undercover footage Monday night

By ,

Ryan DeLarme,
May 17th, 2022

In a video released Monday night, one of Project Veritas’ undercover reporters captured Siru Murugesan, a senior engineer for Twitter, outright admitting that Twitter’s bias swings drastically to the left. 

Murugesan also claims that many of his colleagues are staunch communists when asked about his opinion of Elon Musk’s takeover bid. The Twitter Engineer says that his fellow employees are “stress eating” and “worried for our jobs”.

 “Our jobs are at stake; he’s a capitalist, and we weren’t really operating as capitalists, more like very socialist,” Murugesan told the undercover reporter, adding, “we’re all like commie as f**k!”

As per Project Veritas:

When asked about the difference between Twitter’s definition of free speech and Musk’s, the Sr. Engineer left no room for interpretation. “Twitter does not believe in free speech,” said Murugesan answering the undercover journalist.

Many of our readers might recall when Musk claimed to be a “free speech absolutist” back in March and clarified his statement further by adding, ““By free speech, I simply mean that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law. If people want less free speech, they will ask the government to pass laws to that effect. Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.”

According to Murugesan, Twitter believes in the opposite. “Twitter does not believe in free speech.” Watch the full Veritas release below:

The FDA’s Cozy Relationship with the Pharmaceutical Industry
Big-Pharma couldn't do it with out the FDA, and vice versa.

By ,

Ryan DeLarme
May, 12th, 2022

People rushed to tout the FDA approval of Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine back in September of 2021 as if it were some great scientific victory. The troubling part is that the institution’s shady history seems to be all but forgotten.

No matter how you slice it, the Pharmaceutical industry is the central engine of the global health establishment. The industry’s larger corporations (Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, etc.) provide funding for the FDA, the CDC, and the WHO; they do this both directly and through NGOs like the EPDA. It was recently reported that pharmaceutical giants are raking in the money with the sale of their novel and inadequately tested COVID-19 vaccines. Pfizer expects to earn $33.5 billion in 2021. J&J estimates its full-year COVID-19 vaccine sales to be $2.5 billion while Moderna forecasts $19.2 billion. These enormous figures will be grossly surpassed when one considers the forthcoming round of booster shots and the profits those will yield.

When it comes to lobbying money spent in 2021, the Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America group ranks number three nationally. Interestingly, the fourth, fifth, and sixth positions are also members of the health establishment. These are the American Hospital Association, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, and the American Medical Association, respectively. Pfizer by itself is number 15.

The ties between the FDA and Big Pharma run deep, their relationship has become so symbiotic that neither could exist without the other unless massive reforms were to take place. Big Pharma relies on the FDA to approve and rush its products to market and the FDA relies on Big Pharma to receive its funding. Not only that but there seems to be a revolving door of FDA Commissioners landing on the boards of these Pharmaceutical companies.

Scott Gottlieb, who stepped down as FDA Commissioner in the spring of 2019, soon found himself sitting comfortably on Pfizer’s board of directors.  Gottlieb’s predecessor, DR. Margaret Hamburg, landed a cushy position on the board of Directors for Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Steven Hahn, the former FDA Commissioner under Donald Trump, wound up at Flagship Pioneering; the venture capital firm that launched Moderna.

The list goes on and on, in fact, 9 out of the last 10 FDA commissioners —representing nearly four decades of agency leadership— have gone on to work for pharmaceutical companies. The lone exception is David Kessler, who joined the ranks in academia before eventually settling in his current position as chair of the board of directors at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Criticism of the modern medical-industrial complex has triggered many arguments, this is particularly true in the age of COVID. Regardless of whatever stance you take on any medical debate, it is undeniable that the industry operates in the same mafia-esque fashion as the Media, Big Tech, and Big Government.

Is There a Target on Your Back? Predictive AI May have Already Flagged You
Is it only a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm?

By ,

Ryan DeLarme
May 11th, 2022

The level of invasive surveillance taking place each second around the globe is staggering, and that’s only referring to what we actually know about. Chances are that you or somebody you know has been assessed and assigned a threat score based on your associations, activities, and viewpoints.

It was reported back in 2016 that officers in Fresno, California have been using a controversial new software called “Beware”, which surveils citizens and calculates a citizen’s “Threat Score”.

It may sound like something out of a dystopian nightmare world, but this type of surveillance has been around for a long time. With the rapid growth of technology, they are finding new ways to keep tabs not only on you in the present, but also on your probable future.

Intrado, the company that created the threat-scoring software, says that Beware:

 “sorts and scores billions of publicly-available commercial records in a matter of seconds – alerting responders to potentially dangerous situations while en route to, or at the location of, a 9-1-1 request for assistance.”

The Washington Post was granted access to the Fresno Police Department’s $600,000 Real-Time Crime Center where Beware is being used. The Post reported:

On 57 monitors that cover the walls of the center, operators zoomed and panned an array of roughly 200 police cameras perched across the city. They could dial up 800 more feeds from the city’s schools and traffic cameras, and they soon hope to add 400 more streams from cameras worn on officers’ bodies and from thousands from local businesses that have surveillance systems.

The cameras were only one tool at the ready. Officers could trawl a private database that has recorded more than 2 billion scans of vehicle licenses plates and locations nationwide. If gunshots were fired, a system called ShotSpotter could triangulate the location using microphones strung around the city. Another program, called Media Sonar, crawled social media looking for illicit activity. Police used it to monitor individuals, threats to schools and hashtags related to gangs.

In the same fashion that the Harris Corporation keeps the details of its Stingray cell-site simulators and trackers under wraps, Intrado considers the finer details of Beware’s calculating threat scores to be a “trade secret.”

Intraldo may not be inclined to disclose exactly how the threat score is calculated, but we know that it includes information from arrest reports, databases, web searches, and yes, even social media posts. We all learned from the Cambridge Analytica scandal that today data is more sought after than gold, and we are quickly learning that data probably isn’t only harvested for marketing purposes. 

This type of technology is not limited to just law enforcement. Social Services seems to be getting in on the action as well, with computer algorithms attempting to predict which households are more likely to be found guilty of child abuse and neglect. Presumably, all it would take is an AI bot targeting a household for potential neglect for a family to be investigated, potentially landing the child in foster care.

According to the Associated Press, once an incident of potential neglect is reported to a child protection hotline, the report is run through a screening process that pulls together “personal data collected from birth, Medicaid, substance abuse, mental health, jail and probation records, among other government data sets.” The algorithm then calculates the child’s potential risk and assigns a score of 1 to 20 to predict the risk that a child will be placed in foster care in the two years after they are investigated. “The higher the number, the greater the risk. Social workers then use their discretion to decide whether to investigate.

What they consider potential neglect can include everything from inadequate housing to poor hygiene, which are far cries from verified physical or sexual abuse. Who knows what factors could play a role in this going forward, things like the January 6th Committee suggest that it’s not too far-fetched something like political affiliation could become a factor in determining whether or not you maintain guardianship over your own children.

The potential ramifications of how these programs could be used are unnerving. What’s worse is that, as we said before, this is only the tech we know about – who knows what kind of classified software is being used by Governments and the militaries of the world.

No Oversight: Who Does the FBI Really Work For?

By ,

Ryan DeLarme

The FBI has had a pretty murky track record in recent years, leading many to wonder if the domestic intelligence service still works with the best interest of the American people in mind. Whether it’s hatching the plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer or helping to orchestrate and execute the January 6th photo op, it’s starting to appear as though the Bureau’s become a tool of the political elite.

There’s new evidence coming out suggesting that the FBI has been warped into something far-flung from its original purpose, operating by its own rules with seemingly no oversight from anyone. Inspector General Michael Horowitz recently issued a new report on the FBI’s execution of the Woods Procedures for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) applications, and it has been called “damning”.

Last year, Horowitz reviewed 29 random FISA applications and found that the FBI was “not meeting the expectations of its own protocols.”

The FISA court has a questionable track record for excusing government misconduct as was recently displayed by the sentencing of FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith. After he went to great lengths to lie to a federal court and, when caught, lied by saying he didn’t really intend to lie; Clinesmith received only a year of probation. Many have been left wondering what such leniency says about the FISA Court’s “heightened duty of candor” If there aren’t heightened punishments for violating that duty.

The FISA abuse scandal isn’t the only negative press currently directed at the FBI. During a recent Senate Judiciary hearing on how the FBI failed to investigate alleged sexual abuse by former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) interrupted the proceedings when he reported that the FBI had failed to respond to the Republican Senator’s letters and also that,  they had declined to meet with him “month after month, year after year, at any time for any reason”. This is significant considering that Grassley is a ranking member of the Judiciary Committee and has been for a long time.

According to Senator Grassley:

“I’ve asked Director Wray several times to meet with me relating to a very troubling briefing that I received in August 2020 from the FBI and which was later weaponized against my and Senator Johnson’s oversight. Director Wray and his staff have ignored my request to meet.”

In short, a ranking member of the Judiciary Committee can’t get the FBI to meet with him. This begs the question: does Congress have any real oversight on the FBI? Does the Bureau serve the American people or only select establishment politicians?

Senator Grassley has recently released a letter that offers some insight to the average American citizen as to how our government really works.

On August 6, 2020, we received a briefing from the FBI which, according to the FBI, was done in conjunction with the Intelligence Community (IC). This briefing was done because of political pressure from Democratic Leadership, not because of any real threat.

We have asked to meet with FBI Director Christopher Wray to discuss our concerns and have requested records relating to the briefing; however, he and his Chief of Staff, Corey Ellis, have refused to answer our communications and have failed to provide any answers or information.

FBI leadership’s failure to respond to congressional inquiries not only undermines the FBI as an institution, it also undermines the work of its dedicated agents and staff.

On July 13, 2020, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senator Mark Warner, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Representative Adam Schiff sent a letter, with a classified attachment, to the FBI to express a purported belief that Congress was the subject of a foreign disinformation campaign.

In that letter, which was publicly released on July 20, 2020, they requested a briefing on foreign efforts to interfere in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. The classified attachment included unclassified elements that, among other things, attempted — and failed — to tie our joint investigation into the Biden family’s foreign financial deals to foreign disinformation.  

So, Schumer, Warner, Pelosi, and Schiff were trying to slow down Grassley and Johnson’s “joint investigations into the Biden family’s foreign financial deals.” How did the Democrats do it? By using their go-to strategy of leaking to their allies in the corporate media of course. The letter continues:

Then, on May 1, 2021, the Washington Post reported on “an extensive effort by the [FBI] to alert members of Congress…that they faced a risk of being used to further Russia’s attempt to influence the election’s outcome[.]”

This statement was attributed to “several current and former U.S. officials” who remained anonymous “because the matter remains highly sensitive.”

The article then inaccurately proceeded to link Russian disinformation attempts to our investigation, which was based on Obama administration government records and records that showed extensive financial connections between the Biden family and questionable foreign nationals, including individuals connected to the communist Chinese government’s military and intelligence services.

The Washington Post reporting purported to be based, in part, on an August 6, 2020, briefing that we received from the FBI, which, as the timeline above illustrates, happened in response to pressure from Democratic Leadership. The briefing was not specific. Moreover, it consisted primarily of information that we already knew and information unconnected to our investigation.

We made clear to the FBI briefers on August 6, 2020, that the briefing was not relevant to the substance of our work.

We also made clear our concern that the briefing would be subject to a leak that would shed a false light on the focus of our investigation. Indeed, the Washington Post article did exactly that and so did the other inaccurate media articles.

During your review of Crossfire Hurricane, you identified that counterintelligence briefings for Trump campaign officials were used by the FBI as intelligence gathering operations, concerns that we raised with the Justice Department on April 25, 2019, after we discovered text messages between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. Specifically, Peter Strzok was primarily responsible for assisting the FBI agent that would be at those briefings.

In response to your findings, Director Wray established new protocols for these transition briefings to keep potential political considerations out of the decision-making process. Specifically, Director Wray noted that these briefings “should be for national security purposes and not for investigative purposes.”

Senator Grassley and Senator Ron Johnson were credited with the discovery of the now famous text messages between FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page as well as discovering that Strzok was the one of the crooked agents who used intel briefings to spy on Trump  in 2019 prior to being fired. Director Wray promised to put a stop to these phony briefings that end up getting leaked to the media, yet it happened again to Grassley and Johnson last year while investigating “the Biden family’s foreign financial dealings”.

This information is compelling regardless of which side of the political aisle one falls on. When senators start informing the people during public hearings in Congress that the FBI is setting them up with fake briefings and then stonewalling them once caught, it makes one wonder whether or not Congress is actually in charge anymore. If the FBI can engage in this sort of activity against ranking members of the Judiciary Committee, the mind shudders to think of what they might do to the average citizens of our diminishing republic.