Before the COVID lockdowns, social media companies had started contracting with new third-parties organizations called fact-checkers to assist in “content creation.” Getting a pass meant the post or story was amplified but getting dinged for inaccuracy meant that the post would be throttled or deleted.
For a while we believed it but certain revelations changed that. We came to realize that the posts labeled false were typically contrary to regime narratives. And a close look at the supposed refutation revealed that many points were very much in dispute. The companies developed a talent for seeming to reveal something false that was actually still debatable and interesting to consider. In most cases, what was declared false was still under consideration.
As time went on, the attempts to censor became more brazen and obvious. Then the Twitter files and other FOIAs generated proof of what many suspected all along. These entities were funded either directly or indirectly by government or by other dark-money sources as quid pro quos for other relationships they had cultivated with interested parties.
In other words, they were not some independent, science-based entities at all but rather hit squads with a hard political agenda. What was actually happening here was a form of censorship laundering. Government wants to censor but cannot so it turns to the social-media company to do the dirty work. To make this hand-in-glove racket less obvious, the companies would outsource to a fact-checking organization, making the lines of control even more blurry.
Sometime within the last several months, the whole racket seems to have unraveled. I rarely see the fact-checks cited at all. Or maybe they are cited ironically: what is declared false came to be seen as a badge of honor, a confirmation of core truth. That might seem crazy but these are the times in which we live. Nothing is as it seems.
At any one time, Brownstone and The Epoch Times deal with a range of ongoing fact-checks, some of which result in a hit piece but others just go away for no apparent reason. I’m coming to realize that the harassing emails themselves serve a purpose. They are designed to scare publishers and chill free speech. Risk-averse managers might be inclined not to run with a story rather than be put through the ringer and deal with possible reputation hits.
It’s all become ridiculously predictable.
Three days ago, a data maven who writes for Brownstone revealed a first look at some numbers he had been crunching over the CDC’s listing of COVID as cause of death. He initially sent the results to a private email list and I suggested we go with what he had discovered as an initial look.
He had death certificates from Missouri and Massachusetts and was able to cross-check them with the same once they got into the hands of the CDC. He found thousands of instances in which COVID was not listed as cause of death in the coroner’s report but it was added directly by the CDC. The scale of the problem is vast. The implications of this are rather ominous. We’ve been relying on CDC data for three-plus years to understand the scope of COVID’s mortality.
“The worst pandemic in 100 years,” they kept saying, and that might be true. But obviously the claim is highly contingent on correctly marking the cause-of-death codes. What Aaron Hertzberg found is that the CDC was changing the code to inflate the numbers. By how much it is hard to say but based on the data so far, this is a very serious problem with awesome implications for how we understand what happened to us.
The immediate question concerns the decision-making at the CDC. We know that Deborah Birx, coronavirus task force coordinator, said from the podium that they would mark every death with COVID as being from COVID. That was in the spring of 2020 and had already set off alarm bells. Changing the cause of death to COVID from something else is next-level crazy.
Under whose authority did the CDC act? Birx was not in charge of the CDC. Indeed, her power and status was always unclear. No question that she came to the White House by recommendation of Matthew Pottinger of the National Security Council. Also we know for certain that from March 13, 2020, onward, the NSC was the lead agency with the CDC reduced to operations. If the CDC had faced some formal order to mark COVID as cause of death regardless of what state certificates said, no one has ever seen such an order.
The implications of all of this are rather ominous. And keep in mind that this discovery was not made by a whistleblower or a specialist in this field but an obsessive data maven from the citizen world who has a passion to get to the truth. If he is right, the documentation here implies a level of treachery that even I had not considered.
I saw two reactions to the article once published. The most common reaction was that this is nothing new. Everyone knew this was happening the whole time. We saw the death numbers go up and up from COVID and equally down for every other cause. It was pretty clear that there was something fishy going on. So some people said that there is nothing surprising here. The CDC is capable of any degree of malfeasance.
The other reaction was flat-out denial and accusing Brownstone and the author of simply making things up. Indeed, many people were outraged that we could or would ever suggest that the CDC was anything other than truth-telling.
Watching all of this unfold, I began awaiting the arrival of the inevitable intimidating emails from fact-check organizations. Sure enough, they did arrive. They came to the author, to other scholars, to me personally, and everyone else. It was a true blitzkrieg. Maybe there was a time when I would have stopped my day and become defensive and answered them all, getting more data from the author and so on, and then worrying about the fallout. But this is not my first rodeo. At this point, it was easy to brush off all this drama as completely manufactured and fake. That’s exactly what I did.
To be sure, if the author made mistakes, they should be corrected. I’m sure the author would be the first to do so. This kind of research is lonely and he would welcome others to join in his efforts. That’s how science works: a community shares data and strives to get closer to the truth. But that’s not what fact-checks are about. They start with the presumption that they know the truth and you do not, and then schoolmarm you to the point that you admit them to be correct.
Here’s what I’ve concluded. Fact-check false really means: likely true but not what you are allowed to believe.
A final footnote here. A major claim of the fact-checkers for more than three years is that it is a conspiracy theory and false that the Wuhan lab conducted gain-of-function research and that the virus was a result of that research and a likely leak. Fauci dismissed this for a very long time, and fact-checkers frequently cited him and said the claim was false.
As a result of the Republican takeover of Congress, we’ve gained more access to the fullness of what was going on in those days. A committee has released an unredacted email dated Feb. 1, 2020, in which Fauci says that Wuhan was engaged in gain-of-function and that this virus might be the result.
At this point, it’s reasonable to assume that nearly every official source on the virus was wrong or lying for years now. You probably know this. In any case, my intuition here is that we are only at the beginning of discovery of the fullness of the duplicity. The stakes are very high: American liberty suffered a grave blow during the COVID response. If the reason wasn’t the virus, what was it then?
Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.