Authored by Johann Eddebo via Off-Guardian.org,

Do you remember how the unconstitutional, pastel-authoritarian and totally batshit insane “Disinformation Governance Board” – with its Mary Poppins-cosplaying, Monty Python level of unintentional self-satirizing department head – was rolled out two years ago like a half-joke, half-beta-test of a version of the 1984 Ministry of Truth?

Well, kids, I wouldn’t really call this 4D chess or anything, but of course this was just bait. This parody and its rapid withdrawal reassures us that nothing of the sort could conceivably take place, while also seeding a visible, red-herring template for how we should expect heavy-handed, overt propaganda efforts to look in this day and age.

Meanwhile, there are currently massive efforts in the background and below the surface, all across the playing field, towards implementing big data and AI technology for not only the purposes of classical, increasingly obsolete propaganda or simple surveillance. No, this time, we’re exploring entirely novel methods of behavioural modification and narrative control intended to GET OUT AHEAD of the crystallization of discourses and even the formation of identities and worldviews.

They want to control the formation and reproduction of “social imaginaries”.

So the idea is to use massive data collection and AI pattern recognition to preemptively disrupt the formation of behaviourally significant narratives, discourses or patterns of information.

With these tools of “early diagnosis” of information that potentially could disrupt the power structure and its objectives, it then becomes possible to nip it in the bud incredibly early on, way before such information has even coalesced into something like coherent narratives or meaningful models for explanation or further (precarious) conclusions.

During the past two decades the commitment on the part of the US Department of Defense (DoD) to what Edwards (1996) has analyzed as a ‘closed world’ of containment and military dominance has taken on new life. The shift during the 1990s from a frame of superpower conflict to the so-called irregular warfare of counterinsurgency and counterterror operations aligned well with the building out of networked infrastructures. Yet the associated Revolution in Military Affairs has resulted less in the dissolution of the persistent ‘fog of war’ than in its intensification. Read as a lack of information integration, the intransigent disorders of warfighting underwrite ever expanding investments in what I will argue is a resilient fantasy of data-driven, comprehensive command and control. Building out systems of sensors, signal processing, data storage and transmission has proven more straightforward than the translation of data into what in military terms is named ‘actionable intelligence’. As the excess of data now threatens to destabilize the technopolitical imaginary of just-in-time information, artificial intelligence (AI) is advanced as the promissory solution to automating data analysis and reclosing the world.

Suchman, L. (2022). “Imaginaries of omniscience: Automating intelligence in the US Department of Defense.”. Social Studies of Science (Vol. 53, Issue 5, pp. 761–786). SAGE Publications.

The whole process would work something like this.

AI scours the massive amounts of data collected in real-time from social media and digital communications networks, including everything from cell phone transcripts to instant messaging applications (why do you think WhatsApp (now owned by Meta, formerly known as Facebook) allows you to call everyone in the world for free?).

You’ve then trained the algorithms to pick out “disruptive” patterns in the communications that precede the various sorts of developments you want to avoid, such as for some piece of information to go viral, but you would also want to identify potentially robust clusters of information that won’t necessarily go viral rapidly, but that have the capacity to generate strong and enduring narrative frameworks that over time could threaten the status quo. This would include such complex phenomena as religious and political reform movements, innovative counter-cultural approaches, or even artistic endeavours that could impact people’s meaning-making.

You then pick out key “influencers”, i.e. nodes or potential nodes in the patterns of communication, and the crucial and totally devious addition to run-of-the-mill approaches like shadow banning or other types of soft censorship that’s new to this stage of digital propaganda, is the proactive seeding of counter-narratives that can be done at this point.

So you gently and carefully “nudge” the potentially disruptive individuals in the preferred direction, to mold and shape the flows of information over which they have influence, with the end goal of actively shaping or blocking the crystallization of any viral formations or potentially robust narratives or new “social imaginaries”.

Full spectrum narrative dominance.

As reported by Lee Fang, one company that recently emerged, and which has its sights set on “keeping tabs” on online conversations and actively employing “countermeasures” at the behest of major corporations and Western governments, goes by the name of “Logically.AI”.

The business is even experimenting with natural language models, according to one corporate disclosure, “to generate effective counter speech outputs that can be leveraged to deliver novel solutions for content moderation and fact-checking.” In other words, artificial intelligence-powered bots that produce, in real-time, original arguments to dispute content labeled as misinformation.

Lee Fang. “Logically.AI of Britain and the Expanding Global Reach of Censorship”. RealClear Wire

Logically.AI is as spooky as they come, with their US headquarters in Arlington, VA., i.e. next door to the Pentagon and DARPA, and was allegedly founded at the tender age of 22 by this strangely untraceable ghost with the implausible name of “Lyric Jain”.

They’re really cozy with the major Silicon Valley players, including Microsoft, Google, and TikTok, while Facebook (“Meta”) uses them for “fact-checking” and rating posts and messages for suppression and downranking in all of their social media feeds. They’re also working closely with Western governments and aligned partners across the world, with an avowed role in psychological warfare to counter the influence of specifically Russia and China, as well as safeguarding Western states’ “election integrity” in the face of unwanted narratives.

Logically.AI is also the mainstream media’s little sweetheart, being adored by all the usual suspects, such as The Guardian, Washington Post, BBC &c, and has entered into formal partnerships with academic institutions all across the world.

All of this gives us a picture of their overall reach (and incredible rapid expansion, which in and of itself begs many questions) which serves to illustrate the astonishing potential for influence an operation of this sort can possess.

We can then see how the close partnership between state and corporate actors supply the intentions and goals for the use of these tools, as well as access to the enormous digital data banks and online platforms for discourse, their reach, precision, and foreign impact is amplified by the association with intelligence services, and the legacy media provides strategic force multipliers for the behaviourally significant narratives that you want to foster and reproduce.

And one really neat addition to the toolkit of contemporary digitized mass-surveillance-censorship & social engineering that’s also taken aboard here is the notion of “malinformation”, i.e. truthful or factual pieces of information, yet which foster undesirable narratives. In other words, just stuff that’s true that they don’t want you to know or think about. This sort of gives up the whole game. It’s not about truth or facts, of course, but about the control of socially significant narratives and nothing else.

It could be worth pointing out that countering such “malformation” through muddying the waters or composing contrarian narratives by definition is tantamount to the very definition of “misinformation” that these thought-policing entities subscribe to. Of course, it’s not a problem when our owners do it.

Anyhow, what would then the overall mode of operation look like?

Imagine that you or I express some unit of “malinformation” in our online interactions that gets picked up by one of these pattern-recognizing algorithms trained to detect potentially disruptive pieces of information. Let’s say that this particular statement, entirely truthful, gets tagged with the moderate risk of supporting a set of conclusions that could have a negative impact on one of the major pharmaceutical brands with close ties to the state-corporate power structure. Totally random example.

What this ingenious AI propaganda system then does, is to automatically cordon off this statement by shadowbanning, downranking and other forms of concealment in the information flows. It also tags us with being a potentially disruptive agent, increasing scrutiny of our on- and offline activities. Of course, you can also effectively separate “disruptive agents” from each other by automatically demoting their posts in each others’ flows, no matter what the content, and through throwing up all sorts of obstacles for their online interaction. But these are old strategies.

What’s added on top of this is the seeding of counter-narratives, and the two obvious ways that this can be effected is by situating the relevant statement in a context of contrasting or discordant information so that both the “disruptive agent” and other recipients of the information get a clear message that this piece of information is both contested AND an off-key minority perspective fit for social ostracization.

This can be further supported by counterintuitively promoting the Facebook post or forum message in the flows of networks of singled-out users that have been identified as “loyalist” proponents of the preferred views (the volunteer thought police corps) so as to provoke their criticism and rejection of the message.

Another potential aspect of this proactive seeding of counter-narratives is to employ bots. Fictitious users, that through generative language models provide targeted responses to potentially disruptive pieces of information. Another interesting possibility is to generate fake, short messages by actual users in your social network to produce these targeted responses – messages which can’t be seen by themselves and so will generate no interaction, and which mimic their style and tenor.

You know, like they already do with deceased Facebook users, training the AI on the past post history to generate plausibly-sounding new ones. There’s a Black Mirror episode on the theme too.

So to sum up, we have these hugely connected organizations with tentacles throughout both legacy and digital media, closely associated with governments and military intelligence, which now proudly proclaim the application of AI towards an entirely new type of generative, responsive and predictive propaganda.

These operations will not only be capable of employing such legacy techniques of shadowbanning, mapping and surveillance with incredible efficiency through the synergistic connections with big data.

They also promise to control the very genesis of human narratives. The embryos of our collective thought patterns, disrupting their half-formed stages before they are able to crystallize into coherent frameworks that you and I could independently employ to navigate and make sense of the world.

And the brilliant thing is that most people won’t be able to connect the dots. If these systems work as intended, those sorts of potentially subversive higher-order rational activities will never find stable ground upon which to build.

Moreover, these more advanced forms of behavioural control and narrative and psychological manipulation are technically not censorship per se. Even if those structures and safeguards were not captured, this new form of predictive propaganda can’t be targeted by our traditional legal regimes, and are not caught in the web of our current constitutional mechanism or rights legislation. They sail right through that.

Human beings. We’re barely out of the trees. How do you and I fight back against something like this?

A friend wrote me an e-mail on the issue of how to organize, politically, socially, in our current situation. I’m still thinking about how to respond to that.

One thing is certain. The legacy models don’t work. They’re either recuperated or ill-suited to the new situation. The 19th century didn’t face a global behavioural modification regime perpetrated by an alliance of the entire global corporate media, the intelligence services, the advertising industry, most regional and national legislatures and government, the supranational governing institutions, and last but not least, the very technological structures themselves.

But the movements for revolution and reform that emerged about two centuries ago were equally isolated. They were also up against a compact global order that violently refused to acknowledge their legitimate needs and interests.

They had to find ways to work around that, and so do we.

*  *  *

Johan Eddebo is a philosopher and researcher based in Sweden, you can read more of his work through his Substack.

With Europe’s open borders and ‘green globalism’ resulting in a massive wave of populism, Germany’s top security czar said on Tuesday that she aims to make it easier to track the finances of so-called right-wing extremists,’ a catch-all phrase for ‘people who don’t agree with us’ who would be surveilled by bureaucrats that would undoubtedly abuse their new tools (see: Justin Trudeau).

Interior Minister Nancy Faeser’s proposals follow a report that said ‘extremists’ met to discuss the deportation of millions of immigrants. The group included members of Germany’s conservative AfD party, whose support has doubled since the 2021 German election, the Washington Post reports.

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency says the number of far-right extremists has been rising. In 2022, it reached 38,800, with 14,000 of them considered potentially violent. The agency’s head, Thomas Haldenwang, said the numbers are believed to have risen again last year.

Faeser said efforts to shut down extremists’ financing have been hampered because financial investigations are limited to “inciting and violence-oriented” movements. She suggested that the law be changed to make a group’s “threat potential” grounds for such investigations, and the proceedings should be faster and less bureaucratic.

“No one who donates to a right-wing extremist organization should be able to rely on remaining undiscovered,” said Frazer, adding that she’s actively working with regional authorities to prevent right-wing ‘extremists’ from entering or leaving the country.

“German right-wing extremists and foreign autocrats have one thing in common: They want to stoke rage and divide, above all through disinformation,” she said, pointing to fake accounts and AI-generated content as a problem.

Fraser said that the country’s “early recognition unit” – housed within the Interior Ministry, will start work “hopefully in a few months.”

AfD wins big in yet another election

On Sunday, after a Berlin court ordered repeat elections in select districts, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) nearly doubled its support vs. the 2021 election, ReMix reports.

On Sunday, 550,000 citizens were able to vote, amounting to a fifth of the city’s population in 455 districts, with the AfD scoring 12.6 percent of the vote. In 2021, their overall share was only 7 percent.

In one eastern district, Marzahn-Hellersdorf, the AfD received the most votes of any party, amounting to 33.1 percent of the vote. In 2021, the AfD managed only 18.5 percent of the vote in this district. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) received 21.5 percent of the vote in the same district, coming in second place.

Bundestagswahl – Teilwiederholung in Berlin • Der letzte, die #btw21 wiederholende Wahlbezirk ist ausgezählt.

Wahlbeteiligung: 50,6 % – zum Vergleich 2021: 76,7 %

🔗https://t.co/tpd8nlm6v0#Wahlwiederholung pic.twitter.com/7S7355cRiU

— Wahlrecht.de (@Wahlrecht_de) February 12, 2024

Meanwhile, a report published before the world’s largest security policy conference held in Munich showed that Russia is no longer the primary concern of G7 countries – it’s migration and terrorism.

The Munich Security Index 2024 conference report compiled a heat map of security risks based on a variety of survey questions. The map shows that in Germany, for example, migration as a result of war or climate change has the highest score in terms of risk based on the survey data, with it scoring 80 points, the highest score of any nation surveyed in the entire study. In addition, terrorism scored 74. –ReMix

So, the same thing that the ‘far-right extremists’ are concerned about?

Authored by Jeffrey D. Sachs via Common Dreams,

President Joe Biden is refusing to fold a losing hand as he bets with Ukrainian lives and US taxpayer money. Biden and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer propose to squander the lives of tens of thousands more Ukrainians and $61 billions of federal funds to keep Biden’s disastrous foreign policy failure hidden from view until after the November election.

The $61 billion will make no difference on the battlefield except to prolong the war, the tens of thousands of deaths, and the physical destruction of Ukraine. It will not “save” Ukraine. Ukraine’s security can only be achieved at the negotiating table, not by some fantasized military triumph over Russia.

$61 billion is not nothing. This worse-than-useless outlay would exceed the combined budgets of the U.S. Department of Labor, Environmental Protection Agency, National Science Foundation, and the Women, Infant, and Children nutrition program.

Almost exactly 10 years ago this month, Biden did much to put Ukraine on the path to disaster. This is well known to those who have looked carefully at the facts but is kept hidden from view by the White House, the Senate Democrats, and the mainstream media that back Biden. I have previously provided a detailed chronology, with hyperlinks, here.

In 1990, President George H. W. Bush, Sr. and his German counterpart Chancellor Helmut Kohl promised Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand eastward if the Soviet Union accepted German reunification. When the Soviet Union disbanded in December 1991, with Russia as the successor state, American leaders decided to renege.

President Bill Clinton began NATO expansion over the vociferous opposition of top diplomats like George Kennan and the opposition of his own Secretary of Defense, William Perry. In 1997 Zbigniew Brzezinski upped the ante, with a plan for NATO to expand all the way to Ukraine. He famously wrote that without Ukraine, Russia would cease to be a great power.

Russian leaders have repeatedly made clear that NATO expansion to Ukraine is understandably the reddest of Russian redlines. In 2007, President Vladmir Putin stated that NATO enlargement to that date was a cheat on the 1990 promise, and that it must go no further. Despite these clear warnings, including by his own diplomats, George W. Bush Jr. committed in 2008 to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia in order to surround Russia in the Black Sea.

William Burns, now CIA director, and then the U.S. Ambassador to Russia, wrote a famous memo entitled “Nyet means Nyet,” explaining that Russia’s opposition to NATO enlargement was across Russia’s political spectrum. Most Ukrainians themselves were also firmly against the plan, favoring neutrality over NATO membership. The Ukrainian Rada declared Ukraine’s state sovereignty in 1990 on the basis of becoming “a permanently neutral state.” In 2009, the people of Ukraine elected Viktor Yanukovych, who ran on a platform of neutrality.

In early 2014, the U.S. decided to help bring down Yanukovych in a coup. This was standard U.S. deep-state operating procedure, one used on dozens of occasions around the world. The CIA, National Endowment for Democracy, USAID, and NGOs like the Open Society Foundation went to work in Ukraine. The point person was Victoria Nuland, who was first Richard Cheney’s principal deputy foreign policy advisor, then George Bush Jr.’s ambassador to NATO, then Hillary Clinton’s spokesperson, and by 2014 Assistant Secretary of State.

This time, the Russians caught the conspiracy on tape, in an intercepted call between Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt (now Assistant Secretary of State). Nuland explains to Pyatt that Vice President Joe Biden will help choose and cement the post-coup government. The 2014 Ukraine team, including Biden, Nuland, Jake Sullivan (then and now Biden’s national security advisor), Geoffrey Pyatt, and Antony Blinken (then the deputy national security advisor), remains the Ukraine team today.

It is a team of bunglers. They thought that Yanukovych’s overthrow would quickly usher in NATO expansion. Instead, ethnic Russians in Ukraine virulently rejected the Russophobic post-coup government that was installed by Nuland, and called for autonomy of the ethnically Russian regions. In a referendum, Crimea voted overwhelmingly to join Russia.

Obama, Biden, and their team armed the post-coup government to attack the ethnically Russian regions, thinking this would be the end of it. Yet the regions resisted. Ukraine and the breakaway regions signed the Minsk Agreements to bring an end to the fighting and give constitutional autonomy to the ethnically Russian Donbas. The Minsk II agreement was backed by the UN Security Council, but the U.S. privately agreed with the Ukrainian government that it was okay to ignore it.

In 2021, after 7 years of fighting and more than 14,000 deaths in the Donbas, Putin called on newly elected President Biden to stop NATO enlargement and engage in negotiations with Russia over mutual security arrangements. Biden rejected Putin’s call to end the gambit of NATO enlargement to Ukraine.

In February 2022, Putin launched the Special Military Operation (SMO) invasion to push Ukraine to the negotiating table. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky immediately called for negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality. Within a month, a framework agreement to end the fighting was reached between Ukraine and Russia, based on Ukraine’s neutrality and an end to NATO’s enlargement to Ukraine. Biden stepped in to stop the deal, with the U.S. informing Zelensky that the U.S. would not support neutrality.

Biden and team had still more failed tricks up their sleeve. They firmly believed that U.S. financial sanctions—freezing Russia’s assets and cutting it out of the SWIFT banking system—would cripple the Russian economy and cause Putin to relent. In fact, they expected that the ensuing economic crisis would topple him. Of course, nothing of the sort happened.

Then they expected that NATO weaponry would trounce Russia on the battlefield. That too did not happen. Then they expected that Ukraine’s “counter-offensive” in the summer of 2023, backed by Pentagon and CIA planners, would defeat Russia. Instead, Ukraine lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers dead and wounded—its military hardware destroyed.

The entire war, including the loss of Ukrainian territory, the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian casualties, and the utter waste of more than $100 billion of U.S. taxpayer money to date, could easily have been avoided.

Now, Biden and Schumer want to throw more Ukrainian lives and more tens of billions of dollars at this glaring failure. They want to do this in a rushed vote, without any Congressional let alone public oversight, without hearings, and without any strategy. The fact is they want to save Biden from the embarrassment of a decade of puerile and failed plotting, at least until the November election.

There remains one answer for Ukraine’s security: diplomacy and neutrality. That solution doesn’t cost lives or money. It was Ukraine’s choice before the 2014 coup and again in 2022 until stopped by Biden. It is the path that Biden and the Senate Democrats still refuse to take.

Authored by Amy Denney via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A naturally derived antibiotic that helps preserve food by killing any threatening pathogens has kept our food safe for decades.

The World Health Organization and even watchdog groups have classified this additive, called nisin, as safe. Nisin is a lantibiotic—a peptide-derived antimicrobial agent synthesized from its natural form—first discovered in 1928 and commonly used in products such as cheese, beer, processed meats, and dipping sauces.

Nisin is made when bovine milk or whey is fermented by strains of Lactococcus lactis that are concentrated and processed into small particles. In addition to being used as a food preservative, nisin can be found in beauty products, pharmaceuticals, and pet products.

However new research raises concern about whether nisin could be harmful to the human gut microbiome—the community of bacteria, viruses, fungi, and other microorganisms that work symbiotically to help with body functions like digestion and immune response.

Potency of Lantibiotics

A study published in ACS Chemical Biology examined human gut bacteria genomes to identify those that resemble nisin. Researchers then produced six lantibiotics, including four new ones, and tested them on microbes. While the researchers found that these new candidates kill pathogenic bacteria, they also discovered they have varying effects on commensal (favorable) microbes, too.

“Even though it might be very effective in preventing food contamination, it might also have a greater impact on our human gut microbes,” lead author Zhenrun “Jerry” Zhang, a postdoctoral scholar and director of the Duchossois Family Institute at the University of Chicago, said in a news release.

“This study is one of the first to show that gut commensals are susceptible to lantibiotics, and are sometimes more sensitive than pathogens. With the levels of lantibiotics currently present in food, it’s very probable that they might impact our gut health as well,” he said.

Each person has a unique microbiome and the balance of commensal microbes is what helps the body protect itself from pathogens, create important metabolites, and more. Food additives that kill commensals could be destroying the very community that is protecting our bodies from the pathogens in food, and leaving us worse off than if we’d simply eaten contaminated food, the news release pointed out.

The fact that an antimicrobial additive would kill beneficial microbes isn’t too surprising, Catherine Rall, a certified nutritionist who works with the women’s wellness company Happy V, told The Epoch Times in an email.

“This makes a certain amount of sense. Preservatives are designed to keep microbes from growing on our foods, and many of them aren’t too discriminating about which microbes they affect,” she said. ”I suspect that we’re going to find more and more preservatives with these kinds of effects as we learn more about our microbiomes.”

Slippery Slope of Bioengineering

A more sinister concern arises from the slippery slope of bioengineered food that’s becoming more commonplace, Robert Verkerk, founder and executive and science director of the nonprofit Alliance for Natural Health, told The Epoch Times.

These foods may have antimicrobial properties designed into them.

Bioengineered food is modified in a lab to alter genetic material in ways that cannot be found in nature or done by conventional breeding, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In some cases, disclosure of bioengineered ingredients on food labels is discretionary.

While this new study doesn’t mention bioengineered forms of nisin, Mr. Verkerk said that it’s the kind of research that lays the groundwork for the development of patented products. The Alliance for Natural Health is an international organization that promotes and protects natural, sustainable, and bio-compatible approaches to health optimization.

When a company identifies a microbe that may have a biological use, they can use technology to engineer it—sometimes drastically changing its properties—patent it, and potentially slip it into the food supply chain under the [U.S.] Food and Drug Administration’s “generally regarded as safe” (GRAS) umbrella, he explained.

Genetic engineering was popularized in the 2000s with the mass production of genetically modified organisms, now common in the food industry. The government has generally disregarded “little tweaks” of genome editing as long as an organism’s similar trait is being passed on, Mr. Verkerk said.

This business model that encourages patents, biotechnology, and exclusivity often results in products that bypass thorough safety testing. And while the original intent of nisin (also known as food additive E 234) was noble—it protects us from the rare but toxic Clostridium botulinum in food—new variants may easily be slipped into food without us knowing that it’s an engineered product.

“The minute a human starts to tweak the genome or these microbes, you basically start to play God and do things that could take years to find out,” Mr. Verkerk said. ”You shouldn’t be able to get these through the front door saying these are GRAS.”

Examining Labels

Nisin does have to be listed on food ingredient labels, with the exception being processed cheese that naturally contains the nisin-producing bacteria, Mr. Verkerk said.

The additive can also be found in food packaging materials, though it doesn’t have to be declared on labeling if there’s no risk of it leaching into food.

However, Mr. Verkerk said it would be hard to determine if nisin has been bioengineered because companies can claim the product’s manufacturing is proprietary.

Bioengineered forms of nisin have been around for decades—created to “enhance the efficacy and stability of nisin under different physiologic conditions, and to enhance its pharmacokinetic properties for a variety of biological applications,” according to a 2016 article in the Journal of Applied Microbiology.

Several variants of genetically modified nisin have been identified, the article said, adding that research on the different products’ applications can be anticipated. Nisin has also been studied for use in human disease and veterinary medicine with promising results.

“The continued unearthing of new natural variants from within human and animal gastrointestinal tracts has sparked interest in the potential application of nisin to influence the microbiome, given the growing recognition of the role the gastrointestinal microbiota plays in health and disease,” according to a 2023 article in FEMS Microbiology Reviews.

While it makes sense to use a natural variation of nisin—such as those derived from the human gut microbiome—as a food additive, Mr. Verkerk pointed out that even naturally occurring biological products aren’t guaranteed to be universally effective or safe.

Because each person’s microbiome with its trillions of microbes is unique in composition, Mr. Verkerk said there’s no way to predict the response without more research.

However, he added, it’s hard to be critical of the study, which is simply foundational research. He warns that such research is likely to lead to patented products that could be put into the market with possible harm.

“It [the study] seems to be very carefully done,” Mr. Verkerk said of the study. “It’s not close to an end product, but it’s part of a journey that would take us to an end product.”

Protecting Personal Health

In some ways, lantibiotics have escaped criticism because of their use in fermented foods—something that’s come to be associated with improved health. In nisin’s case, the bacteria is found in cow’s milk.

“It’s an easy sell in a lot of ways because everyone knows fermentation is good,” Mr. Verkerk said.

However, that doesn’t mean that the microbes being used are advantageous for human health. In some cases, they could be microbes that have not traditionally been part of the food supply—creating new preservatives foreign to human digestion that could ultimately lead to an increase in gastrointestinal issues, Mr. Verkerk said.

“The ramifications in terms of chronic disease and autoimmune disease are absolutely huge,” he said. “We’re just going to become more and more allergic and intolerant to the food we are eating.”

Mr. Verkerk recommends the following tips to help consumers protect themselves:

• Eat food you know and recognize.
• Avoid eating “bar-coded” food as much as possible.
• Try not to destroy your food in the way you cook and prepare it.
• Keep your diet as diverse and colorful as you can.

“That’s getting harder and harder for people to do,” he said.

Battery minerals are vital for the clean energy transition. They power cost-effective, on-demand energy systems and are at the core of decarbonizing transportation.

In the following graphic from Visual Capitalist’s Tessa Di Grandi, Sprott examines the growth in demand for battery metals, as well as potential supply constraints.

Exploring Mineral Growth to 2040

Demand for battery metals is set to skyrocket in the coming years. Let’s break down the expected growth between current usage and the projected demand in 2040, based on a Net Zero Emissions Scenario (NZE):

The raw materials that batteries use can differ depending on their chemical compositions. However, these metals are considered critical for EVs and energy storage.

For example, the cells in the average battery with a 60 kilowatt-hour (kWh) capacity—the same size that’s used in a Chevy Bolt—contained roughly 185 kilograms of minerals.

Supply Gap in 2030

The growing demand for these battery metals is raising concerns over supply. Predicted shortages are expected to emerge by or before 2030, according to Energy Transitions Commission:

The rising demand for key minerals, driven in part by the move to EVs, could result in a supply gap that provides a potential investment opportunity in mineral exploration and mining companies. Interested in learning more?

Authored by Denes Albert via ReMix News,

A lack of diversification has led to nearly all of Austria’s natural gas coming from just one source: Russia.

Despite an unusually mild winter, Austria continues to feature nearly no gas diversification whatsoever. Austrian Energy Minister Leonore Gewessler, a Green Party politician, intends to take legal action against this development if necessary, and has announced a package of measures to reduce dependence on Russian natural gas.

It was a “big mistake with serious consequences,” said Gewessler about the gas supply contracts concluded with Russia in 2018, which run until 2040. She said that Austria had thus placed itself in a position of dependency that “a sovereign state cannot accept.”

What makes Gewessler so angry is the data from December 2023: According to this, 98 percent of all gas imports came from Russia.

“That is an all-time high since the beginning of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. This development proves that the players on the liberalized gas market are making too little effort to reduce our dependency,” said the green minister.

Another reason for this development is that a fixed purchase obligation (take-or-pay) was agreed in OMV’s supply contracts, according to Austrian newspaper Kurier. This means that payment must be made in any case, even if no Russian gas is purchased. As a result of these contracts, a higher proportion of Russian natural gas is being used while overall gas consumption is falling and import volumes remain the same. This is because gas consumption in Austria has fallen by a quarter, from 100.3 terawatt hours in 2021 to 75.6 terawatt hours in 2023.

Gewesler now wants to take legal action against the way these contracts are structured: On Monday, she announced a package of measures to reduce dependence on Russian natural gas, as the high level of this dependence poses “a major economic and security risk” for Austria.

“We are currently seeing a clear market failure. There is enough non-Russian natural gas, but the energy companies are not buying it. If the market fails, the state has to intervene. I am convinced of this: The time has come for a statutory diversification obligation. And I also appeal to all those responsible in parliament — let’s take the next step now,” she said.

Not all parties agree with this strategy, and the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), which is currently polling in first place, has argued that sanctions against Russia must be dropped in order to ensure Austria continues to receive cheap energy for its industrial sector.

Read more here…

Submitted by Donald Jeffries via “I Protest”,

Trust is a rare commodity in today’s world. Maybe it always has been. I remember trusting some older males who were relatives or neighbors, as a child. Then later as an adult, I’d hear from my sister and others about how these fine upstanding men had propositioned them, or touched them inappropriately.

Moral trust is one thing. We all fail to some degree on this count, because we are all sinners. My head will probably always be turned by a good-looking female. It’s just instinctive. I remember a great comedy skit with Richard Pryor, where he was sitting in a crowd with his wife/girlfriend, who was glaring at him, upset over him checking out other women. Then his head turns again, and he tells her, “Can’t you see how strong that shit is? I know you’re gonna be mad, but I still can’t stop it!” While it bothers me when I attend a wedding where the divorced bride’s children from her first marriage are ringbearers or flower girls (mumbling to myself, “I can’t stop thinking she said ‘I do’ to someone else just five years ago’), I understand human weakness. Judge not lest ye be judged.

It’s political trust that’s on my mind. If you listen to me Saturdays at 12 noon on “America Unplugged” with Billy Ray Valentine and Tony Arterburn, you may have heard our discussion this past Saturday on Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin. It was obvious by the comments in the chat, and later on YouTube, that most people disagreed with me. I was arguing that, whatever Carlson’s real motivations, I usually agree with what he’s saying over 90 percent of the time. Yes, I’m aware that his father was the head of Voice of America, and that he once tried to get into the CIA. That he scoffed at 9//1 “truthers” and other “conspiracy theorists.” Maybe his bow tie was too tight. Is he just playing the role of mainstream “skeptic?”

I’m not accustomed to being the least skeptical person in the room about anything. I was a born skeptic. A doubter of all official narratives. But if the alt media is just going to attribute all good reporting, and sensible commentary to a hidden agenda, then what is the point of even addressing any issue? Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Rand Paul, RFK, Jr., all compromised. And oddly, they draw the attention (and ire) of many of us trying to provide an alternative to our state controlled media, far more often than the Joy Reids, Sunny Hostins, and Joe Scarboroughs do. Tucker Carlson’s father ran the Voice of America. A pretty, young female intern was found dead in Scarborough’s congressional office in 2001. Isn’t that a bit more incriminating?

Then there is the guy Carlson was interviewing- Vladimir Putin. I don’t have to trust him to agree with his purported comments (and this is assuming they’re being translated accurately) about wanting peace with America. If he really did ban all GMO products, and put out an arrest warrant for any Rothschilds strolling into Russia, isn’t that something we’d all agree with? Maybe he has an agenda, too, but why do we focus so much more on him than say, Angela Merkel or David Cameron? Carlson was blasted from all sides for how he conducted the interview. What was he supposed to ask him? He put Putin on the record. At the very least, we got to see the Russian leader’s impressive knowledge of history. Compare that to our putrid politicians.

In my book Hidden History, I delved into the background of the 1960s counterculture movement. Timothy Leary, the LSD guru who urged the impressionable hippies not to trust anyone over thirty (when he was older than thirty himself), was later outed as working for the CIA. So was Gloria Steinem, the face of “women’s lib” in the sixties and seventies. Her magazine MS was financed by the CIA. Murdered Black Panther Fred Hampton had a bodyguard who was an undercover government operative. So did Malcolm X. The guy cradling Martin Luther King’s head in his hands on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel was an undercover CIA asset. I gave lots of other examples of how undercover plants worked inside the Black Panthers and the Ku Klux Klan.

More than a century ago, Lenin said that the best way to fight the opposition is to lead it. This has obviously been the case in America since at least the 1960s. I haven’t found any evidence, for instance, that the government infiltrated Huey Long’s Share our Wealth movement, or the America First Committee. But in my upcoming book The American Memory Hole, I’ll document the shocking extent to which American capitalism supported and financed the Bolshevik Revolution. There were plenty of spies during the War for Independence and the War Between the States. Things have never been exactly the way they seem.

But if we become too jaded, and don’t trust anyone or anything, then reform becomes impossible. Things can never get better, unless maybe lightning strikes you in a laboratory at midnight, and you develop invulnerable super powers. Then you could adjust the world to your liking. Assuming you have noble intentions, like Superman. Working together is often difficult. Distrust can permeate small businesses and youth sports leagues. People are suspicious of their spouses. They wonder about the motives of the heirs to whatever they have to leave to others. I’ve watched enough Investigation Discovery programs to know that the world is full of husbands, wives, and children who will murder their closest loved ones for a modest inheritance.

I have been told by several people that I can’t be sincere or legitimate, or else I wouldn’t be alive. Think about that; the only way for some people to believe you’re not co-opted is to become part of the Deep State Body Count. Once during an interview, someone in the comments noted that I was wearing a checked shirt, and there was a soccer ball paperweight in the background behind me. This, evidently, demonstrated that I was a high-ranking freemason. Miles Mathis, who has achieved some renown online for his “everything is fake” mantra, once wrote that both Dave McGowan (who was still alive at the time) and I were fake. He called us “ghosts.” Limited hangouts. Controlled opposition. When I emailed him and told him to check out my many video interviews, it didn’t phase him. By the way, he “doesn’t do interviews.”

If I wanted to be cynical, I could name countless high-profile figures in alternative media that I am suspicious about. My spidey sense goes off whenever some character, who has no more charisma or knowledge (and often less) than the rest of us doing anti-establishment podcasts and writing anti-establishment blogs do, attracts a million followers on YouTube. You know who they are. They aren’t entertaining, and provide nothing different than untold numbers of us do. But I don’t just condemn then all with a blanket generalization. Maybe some of them are more interesting than I give them credit for. I’ve never been noted for liking things that become popular. Chicken wings. Gourmet cupcakes. Michael Jackson. “Friends.” “Casablanca.” The mullet. The Rock. The list is endless. I know my tastes are usually different from the masses.

But in our world of often justified hyper paranoia, there should be room for redemption. Why, for instance, do Christians accept that a really bad man named Saul could be converted to St. Paul on the road to Damascus? Is it impossible to imagine that Tucker Carlson could really have been influenced by those he spoke to the past few years, and now honestly believes the government killed JFK, and that Building 7 is significant? Was it only Saul who could be redeemed? Pat Buchanan underwent a similar transformation in the early nineties, when he saw how our trade policies had devastated blue-collar workers in New Hampshire. But no one suspects that he was insincere, or compromised. Is it because Carlson has become much bigger? On the surface, they both seem to have identically transitioned from conservative to populist.

It’s odd that I distrust all institutions, all authority, and yet can still perhaps naively trust individuals. You’d think my affinity for the world’s foremost cynic, Ambrose Bierce, would prevent that. I’ve been burned many times because of this. Women I adored. Men I admired. I did stop lending money to people a very long time ago. That lesson was pretty clear. Like millions of others, I was suckered into voting for Trump in 2016. So I took a chance on the remote possibility that he was sincere to at least some degree. Would it have been better to have voted for Hillary Clinton, the Queen of Corruption? What difference does it make, if they’re not even counting the votes?

I’ve experienced this kind of widespread distrust in the JFK assassination research community. The fractionalization is worse than ever. The few who are trusted are the typical milquetoast, neocon types I have admonished for years. The same huge egos and difficult personalities we see in JFK research dominate other conspiratorial realms, like 9/11 truth. We see them everywhere in the alt media, lording their number of followers and subscribers over lesser mortals like the quarterback and the prom queen do in high school hierarchies. I’ve remarked before on how most of them are harder to communicate with than some genuine show business celebrities. For the record, my publicist was able to get ahold of Tucker Carlson’s producer.

JFK researchers spend an inordinate amount of time trying to discredit conspiracy friendly witnesses. They literally ignore the laughable witnesses whose fanciful and inconsistent testimony was used by the authorities to buttress the official nonsense. Recently, some of them have launched an assault on the late Fletcher Prouty, the individual Oliver Stone based his “Mr. X” character (played by Donald Sutherland) on in JFK. They resent Alex Jones or Tucker Carlson stating publicly that there was a conspiracy, because they despise them personally and hate their politics. They don’t have the same vitriol for the Stephen Colberts and Jimmy Kimmels, who scoff at all “conspiracy theories.” Well, except for “Russiagate.”

But in the alt media, as in society at large, Donald Trump is often the dividing line. Are you fer or agin his overblown personality? Because I belong to the smallest minority group in the world- the Trump Agnostics- I am inevitably caught in the crossfire. I came up with the Trumpenstein Project to explain both my perspective and what I believe was a genuine political psyop of epic proportions. But I still get called a “Trumpster” or a victim of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Trump exemplifies the problem with the alt media, because most of those who are “awake” to any appreciable degree, were or perhaps still are ardent Trump supporters.

Whenever I watch a video or read something I find compelling, I often try to contact the person who was in the video or doing the writing. These are people unknown to the public, and frequently unknown to most in the alt media. They never respond to me. I don’t see them being interviewed elsewhere, so maybe they’re like Miles Mathis, above doing interviews. At least with the likes of me. And, of course, I wonder why these people aren’t shadow banned like me. They’re being allowed to grow a big following. But I don’t reflexively jump to the conclusion that this means they’re all being sponsored by intelligence agencies. Hired to control the “conspiracy” discourse, as Obama’s aide Cass Sustein proposed.

I take people at face value, until proven otherwise. Roger Stone, for example, wrote the Foreword to my most successful book, Hidden History. I cringe at some of the things he says now. But he loved the book, and wrote a glowing Foreword. Whenever he’s mentioned me (which is very, very infrequently), he says complimentary things. Vivek Ramaswamy, suspected by many in the alt media of being the Republicans’ version of Barack Obama, was seen with my book Hidden History on the shelf behind him, while he interviewed Alex Jones. So he may be a disinfo agent, but I didn’t send him my book. What is he doing reading such subversive material? I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t like him just because of that.

Maybe Tucker Carlson is good friends with Don Lemon and Hunter Biden. But he certainly raked them over the coals on his Fox News show. Donald Trump was friends with the Clintons. As Terry Reed (another guy I’d love to interview- amazed he’s still alive- but can’t find contact info) revealed in his book Compromised, seemingly sworn enemies Bill Clinton and Oliver North worked for the same team in Arkansas, when all those drugs were being funneled through Mena Airport. George W. Bush seems to be as fond of Michelle Obama as he was of gay prostitute/fake reporter Jeff Gannon, who visited the White House hundreds of times, including overnight stays. An alleged Mossad operative produced JFK and other Oliver Stone films.

Perhaps no one is above board. Are we all hiding something? I’ve probably revealed too much of myself here on Substack. But I’m an open book. There aren’t any terrible skeletons in my closet. But I’ve had some relatives who worked for the CIA. I live in the same county where their Langley headquarters are. And the Agency’s library was one of the first to order my book Hidden History. So does that make me suspect? As I’ve said, the address of my childhood home was 3333. Hmm. Combined with the checked shirt, and soccer ball paperweight, we might have something there. One of my father’s hot cousins did marry Rutherford B. Hayes III. Maybe Miles Mathis will read this and conclude that I am a Jew, like seemingly everyone else.

I will form an alliance with anyone, if they profess to be working towards something good. I’ll be able to determine pretty quickly if they have a nefarious agenda. I was able to ferret out that conspiracy whereby young, half clothed women friend or follow old guys like me. I never even took them up on their offer to send me pictures. Rob Reiner, for example, is a typically “Woke” leftist. But he’s doing good work on the JFK assassination. If he ever lowered himself to my level, I’d be happy to work with him on that common cause. Julian Assange believes the 9/11 fairy tale. But that doesn’t detract from the great work Wikileaks did, or make him any less of a political prisoner. Rosie O’Donnell is even more “Woke” than Reiner, but she was publicly telling the truth about 9/11, and got essentially “cancelled” because of it.

There are tiers to the alternative media. You can choose to believe or not believe that I am in the legitimate tier, where honest voices struggle to get a larger platform. The one where shadow bans are common. I would be shocked if anyone I associate with regularly in the alt media wasn’t in the legitimate tier, too. Tucker Carlson would be in the top tier of this world, alongside Alex Jones and now Elon Musk. All suspect because of their backgrounds, or in Jones’s case due to his refusal to focus attention on the power that Zionism wields in this country, and stubborn support of Trumpenstein. Harrison Smith told me, however, that Jones never pressures him about what he can and can’t say, and indeed Smith is a very ardent anti-Zionist.

I believe that the information is what’s important, not the personality. I don’t care where truth comes from; if it awakens people to the corruption, tyranny, and injustice all around us, then it’s a good thing. Let’s say hypothetically that someone I usually find to be odious, Bill Maher, held up one of my books on television and said, “This is a great book! Read it!” Would I reject that kind of endorsement, because I’ve found Maher to be so offensive so much of the time? Now, of course, Maher is about as likely to do that as Joe Biden is to come out tomorrow and declare that he’s being controlled by the Illuminati. Or that Hillary Clinton will be struck with a sudden pang of guilt and demand to be put in public stocks and pilloried.

Just as the JFK assassination research community will ultimately never threaten that particular official lie because of its continuous dysfunction, the conspiracy analysis media in general, the alt media, will never overtake the state controlled mainstream media because of all the infighting, distrust, and accusations. We have to be able to talk with the Tucker Carlsons and Elon Musks, along with the Flat Earthers and Holocaust skeptics. I can respect all views, unless they advocate murder or extreme violence. The common goal should be for us to make the sleeping Americans realize that there is a vast conspiracy afoot to deny us all our civil liberties, and cover up the multitude of official crimes committed by the conspirators.

Tucker Carlson responded to all the vitriol directed at him by stating, “I’m not defending Russia. I’m defending my own country. A weak central government in [Russia] with the world’s largest nuclear stockpile is insane. You’re a freaking nutcase. If you desire that, and we are run by nutcases, the president and that poisonous moron to Victoria Nuland.” Sounds reasonable to me. Just about every other mainstream journalist in America 2.0 despises free speech, hates anything virtuous or traditional, and is overtly anti-White. They cheer on political prosecutions and denial of true process. They shill for every discredited government narrative from JFK to the 2020 election. They demonize dissent. Carlson doesn’t do any of that. What is he being paid to promote? That the government killed JFK? That January 6 was a false flag?

I will continue to believe in some things. It certainly seems hopeless, but we have to live our lives as if there is hope. Frank Capra left his impact on me. I still think the Kennedys were heroic figures. We need heroes. Crusaders for liberty and justice. If a politician speaks up for peace, even if they may be betrothed to Israel like all the others, I support them. How could I not? I always support peace. If we micro analyze potential motives, we will probably always find something to question. If you stay committed to the truth, then eventually the disinfo agents will sort themselves out. No one is perfect. I’ve yet to find anyone that I agree with about everything. Well, maybe Huey Long. Just because QAnon was an obvious psyop, that doesn’t mean that there couldn’t someday possibly be some real white hats.

To say that the alt media eats its own is a massive understatement. Too many seem almost to instantly reject anyone who agrees with them. Kind of like Groucho Marx refusing to join any group that would have him for a member. I’m flattered when someone agrees with me, so I simply don’t get this line of thinking. If what they’re saying sounds too good to be true, it probably is, to paraphrase the old chestnut. As I’ve said, I have my own suspicions about many big names in the alt media, but I’d be happy to appear on any of their shows. I’d be courteous and respectful, and I wouldn’t alter my comments. My views are going to be the same, whether I’m ranting on “I Protest,” or being interviewed by Rachel Maddow. Again, it’s the information, stupid.

If accepting people at face value (until proven otherwise) loses me supporters, so be it. I obviously know the names of the high profile swamp creatures, and accept their lifetimes of crime and corruption at face value. If Barack Obama suddenly started singing the praises of Huey Long, I would recognize a psyop. And would understand instantly that there was an obvious nefarious agenda behind it. Tucker Carlson hasn’t demonstrated that he’s a swamp creature, with a record of crimes and perhaps a Body Count behind him. I focus on the obvious villains, both in politics and the kept press. But like JFK noted in his timeless American University “peace” speech, I recognize that people with views I abhor can still love their children.

Mark Lane was my mentor. I patterned my own civil libertarianism after his. He was a Jew. And he later became not only the counsel for the “anti-Semitic” Liberty Lobby, but best friends with the man who headed it, Willis Carto. So does that mean Lane wasn’t a real Jew? Or that Carto wasn’t a legitimate historical revisionist and critic of Israel? Because they were such strange bedfellows, were they both government operatives? I’ve heard from many who suspect Lane was working for the government. Wasn’t he Jim Jones’ attorney? How did he escape the Kool-Aid? Most people are impressed that I was with his Citizens Committee of Inquiry as a teenager, but some snort that I must be a government agent, too.

Ultimately, it all comes down to good versus evil. God versus Satan. I don’t know how many of those supporting a Satanic agenda are actually Satanists. But some are. They flash those unnatural hand signals like someone is ordering them to. But some Satanists probably don’t walk the walk any more than many Christians. That’s why I keep talking about Frank Capra’s film Meet John Doe. People realizing their neighbor is a pretty good person. People coming together for the most basic common purpose; to be good neighbors and try to follow the Golden Rule. I still think national John Doe Clubs could work. But I still have a lot of naive idealism alongside the populism.

It’s good to be skeptical. No one is more skeptical than I am. But we shouldn’t turn away a potential comrade (not to sound like a commie), exclusively because of his background, or what he once said or did. Or because he doesn’t focus on Israel. Or because he doesn’t talk about all the conspiracies we do. Just as in the general business world, or on ridiculous “reality” shows like Big Brother, we can form alliances that are favorable in some sense. To push truths like Oswald being a patsy, or 9/11 being an inside job, or COVID being a giant psyop. To support free speech. The way they do in Congress when they want to push through some awful legislation. I don’t normally quote Rodney King, but can’t we all just get along, people?

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Authored by Peter Berkowitz via RealClear Wire,

For decades, American colleges and universities have desperately needed reform. The urgency of the moment may create openings to mitigate the damage and restore the basic elements of liberal education.

Over the last few months, turmoil on campus has provoked outrage among wealthy donors, members of Congress, parents of college and college-bound students, and no small number of ordinary citizens. The sympathy exhibited by students and faculty for Hamas’ barbaric Oct. 7 attacks on Israelis, mostly civilians, along with the vacillating and mealy-mouthed response of many elite university administrators to students’ championing jihadist genocide threw into sharp relief how badly higher education has lost its way.

Notwithstanding the recent intensification of interest, clear and constant signs of decay have been apparent since the 1990s. The decline can be traced back beyond the politicization of teaching and scholarship stemming from the upheavals of the 1960s to at least the mid-century subordination of the university curriculum and scholarly research to the imperatives of progressive politics.

The tenuring of the 1960s generation in the late 1980s and the population of the faculty ranks with their students and their students’ students over the last 40 years, however, has accelerated the deterioration.

Our colleges and universities have been policing speech. They have been curtailing due process, particularly concerning allegations of sexual misconduct. They have been relaxing to the point of eliminating core curriculum requirements. And they have been packing course offerings, particularly in the humanities, with classes aimed at indoctrinating students in leftist articles of faith: The one and only prism for viewing moral and political life is the distinction between oppressor and oppressed, chief among oppressors on the global scene is the United States, and chief among oppressors within the United States are white people.

Responsible higher education reform must consider the depth and breadth of the dysfunction. And the remedies must accord with the governing aim of liberal education, which is to cultivate citizens who understand the principles that undergird, and who can contribute to the maintenance of, free and democratic political institutions.

Now may be just the time for concerted action. It is already being led by the one campus minority that campus authorities permit faculty and students to revile.

“Conservatives have an extraordinary opportunity to reform higher education,” husband-and-wife team Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey write in “Follow the Left’s Example to Reform Higher Ed,” which appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal. “Universities face a perfect storm of falling enrollments, souring public opinion and political scrutiny. They need friends. Prudent administrators should be eager to work with those whose opinions they might previously have ignored.”

Senior fellows at the American Enterprise Institute and research fellows at the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute, the Storeys urge conservatives to take a page from the left’s playbook and “think academically.” Professors on the left, the Storeys observe, “create new disciplines” such as women’s studies to address topics “overlooked by existing modes of inquiry.” These new disciplines give rise to new “ways of thinking” which, in turn, give birth to and are eventually supported by academic associations, professional journals, dedicated funders, and freshly minted students.

Those on the right, advise the Storeys, should follow suit: “To make enduring change in the academy, conservatives must identify important areas that aren’t getting attention and create programs to study them.”

The Storeys offer encouraging news on that front. Conservative reform has commenced, mainly in the neglected area of civic education. With Arizona State University’s School of Economic Thought and Leadership (SCETL) – launched by the Arizona legislature in 2016 and, until recently, led by founding director Paul Carrese – as a model, public-university initiatives in Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Utah, North Carolina, and Ohio are well underway.

The Storeys call the model informing these programs “Civic Thought.” It encompasses the wide range of issues with which responsible citizens must grapple – “everything from war to education.” Establishing such programs requires partnerships among “trustees, donors and policymakers.” They must cooperate to identify and hire scholars with learning in the humanities and social sciences and with the administrative skills to design curricula, recruit faculty, and create and maintain communities devoted to learning and scholarship.

The ambitious, multi-arena reform contemplated by the Storeys – I take part in a small way as a member of the Academic Advisory Board at the University of Florida’s Hamilton Center – has great potential. By re-grounding higher education in the principles of individual freedom, reasoned inquiry, and self-government, civic thought programs can put our colleges and universities in the service of – rather than in opposition to – the public interest.

At the same time, salutary higher education reform must dodge several temptations and pitfalls. The Storeys rightly advise conservatives to learn from the left’s success in working within the academy. However, conservative reformers must also recognize and repudiate the left’s abuses of academic institutions, which have fueled the progressive takeover of university curriculum and administration and degraded higher education.

First, conservatives should reject the left’s conceit – common in women’s studies, African American studies, and many of the other fashionable “studies” – that neglected topics require the creation of new methods of inquiry and new modes of thinking. Down that path lie pretentious jargon, obfuscatory discourse, and the erection of barriers to criticism and accountability. Nothing more is necessary for the flourishing of civic thought than the conscientious application of the traditional forms of inquiry in the humanities, the best of contemporary social science, and the experimentation and rigor of the natural sciences to the challenges of freedom and democracy.

Second, conservatives should reject the left’s penchant for affirmative action. Notwithstanding that they are often a small and despised minority on campus, conservatives should not seek to make or receive appointments based on political beliefs or party attachments. To inquire into the voting preferences of candidates for faculty positions is antithetical to the university’s mission. Faculty hiring must concentrate on scholarly accomplishment, classroom excellence, and curricular need. As it happens, programs in civic thought will attract a disproportionate number of conservatives to their faculty. That’s because these days conservatives are disproportionately drawn to the topics at the heart of civic thought and essential to the formation of well-educated citizens: political philosophy; political economy; jurisprudence; foreign affairs and national security; religion; and constitutional, diplomatic, and military history.

Third, conservatives should reject the left’s conviction that higher education’s aim is to prepare students to change the world. Understanding the world comes first, particularly for teachers and students. University programs in civic thought should not seek to mold conservative political activists to counter the progressive political activists that many African American studies, women’s studies, and the like endeavor to produce. Rather, programs in civic thought should strive to form more thoughtful citizens, whether of the left, center, or right.

Fourth, conservatives should reject the left’s compartmentalization of the curriculum. While short-term advantage may be derived from emulating the left’s leveraging of academic proclivities and protocols to create new disciplines, civic thought should not seek status as a separate field of study like literature, political science, physics, much less like women’s studies, African American studies, and the like. Instead, civic thought should bring to bear on the myriad challenges of citizenship in a free society – including the status of minorities, the role of women, and changing sexual mores – the wisdom that is gleaned from, and the toleration and humility that are developed by, study of history, languages, literature, the principles of politics and economics, and the leading opinions about ethics and faith. Such intellectual exploration begins close to home with one’s nation, broadens into a study of one’s civilization, and eventually encompasses other peoples, nations, and civilizations. Civic thought must be grounded in liberal education.

Fifth, conservatives should reject the left’s politicization of teaching and learning. Conservatives should not conceive of civic thought programs as conservative, at least in the narrow partisan sense of furthering a right-wing political agenda. Civic thought programs should be conservative in the larger sense – devoted to preserving the treasures of Western civilization and other civilizations and transmitting them to the next generation. Such preservation and transmission, it must be emphasized, can only be accomplished by those who have learned to weigh the evidence, seek out and grasp the truth in contending opinions, and craft persuasive arguments. Conservatives should emphasize that civic thought programs are the best means in the present circumstances for restoring a traditional liberal education, one which serves the public interest by forming young men and women capable of exercising their rights effectively and preserving and improving free and democratic institutions.

The extent of the disrepair of U.S. colleges and universities and the urgency of the moment necessitate the recovery of the traditional principles of liberal education to guide the long, arduous work of higher education reform.

Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. From 2019 to 2021, he served as director of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. State Department. His writings are posted at PeterBerkowitz.com and he can be followed on Twitter @BerkowitzPeter.