Jun 20: The strange case of Dr Hotez and current info-disinfo operations

Interview on MSNBC, Dr Hotez's statements published on June 18, 2023, and the latest Kremlin-aligned info-disinfo operations, posts from Chay Bowes & David Sacks

The strange case of Dr Hotez and Covid disinformation

Meet Prof Peter Hotez MD, Ph.D. He explains what his work entails and what the Twitter “tiff” was about in the brief clip from his interview with MSNBC below.

Dr Hotez is the target of a information operation that has many aims. On the surface, it seems it is to keep Covid disinformation in the American infosphere by demanding that Dr Hotez ‘debate’ known Covid conspiracy theorist, Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr., about the efficacy of vaccines on Mario Nawfal’s Twitter Spaces—a live audio application on the platform. This weekend, Dr Hotez was also harrassed at home by someone demanding a statement on the ‘victims’ of so-called vaccine-induced deaths. (By the way, billboards appeared in my own little town in Italy last year paid for by an unknown ‘citizen action group’ (head office: Facebook), denoucing a state cover up on this manufactured issue. And now this same ‘issue’ pops up on Twitter a year later.)

The invitation to ‘debate’ Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr is also meant to amplify his name across social media platforms. RFK Jr announced his intention to run for the Democratic nomination for president in 2024 on Nawfal’s spaces. Putting aside the fact that anyone who believes in conspiracy theories should be kept as far away from the presidency as possible, the man doesn’t have a hope in hell to win the candidacy.

So why all the attention on Covid vaccines and on someone who is here today and gone tomorrow?

Talking about vaccines and Covid, as in the case of Dr Hotez, creates tension in the American target group by rehashing old tropes and exacerbating divisions between vaxxers and anti-vaxxers. Besides being a staunch anti-vaxxer conspirationist, RFK Jr is totally aligned with Russia and China: RFK Jr has said that the United States should step down from its role as harbinger of the rules-based international order established at the end of WW2.

In the clip below during an interview with Joe Rogan, RFK Jr stated that the US must cease to be an empire. His statements are full of inconsistencies and outright lies, including the U.S. military budget for 2023 that amounts to $2.01 trillion, and not the amount he states.-

The disinformation campaign is being run by a number of ‘influencers’ or information operatives, including Mario Nawfal, on Twitter, claiming to hold ‘balanced debates’ on Spaces. It is still unclear whether the influencers work for Musk or for other entities. The host of the spaces, Mario Nawfal, is the CEO of a crypto-marketing firm, and it seems he can step away from his day job easily and frequently if you consider how many spaces he runs weekly.

The topics covered on his spaces span from issues surrounding NFT and crypto to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, Matt Taibi’s Twitter files ‘scandal’, and Trump’s indictments, just to name a few.

Audience numbers start at roughly 10,000 and reached their peak at well over 100,000 when Elon Musk was a ‘guest’. Those numbers are considerable since most spaces struggle to attract anything close to 500 listeners on a good day, leading many social media investigators and analysts to question the authenticity of Nawfal’s numbers. Fiverr provides a portal where you can buy Twitter bots, listeners, likes, and followers, and some services cost less than $0.05 per inauthentic account.

Under the cloak of absolute ‘freedom of speech’, the host claims he and the guests are impartial, but I’ve never listened to a space where the speakers’ ‘points of views’ were not totally aligned with Musk’s statements on a variety of issues he knows nothing about.

At times a real expert will accept an invitation to speak on the space, but what this really does is legitimise the crackpot speakers and their conspiracy theories. This happened during the space ‘discussing’ Trump’s indictments: a seasoned lawyer’s analysis, whose assessments were based on the law, was derided and dismissed as being partisan. Putting experts and crackpots at par on the same stage gives the illusion that the crackpots are as informed as an expert who has dedicated their entire career to their field of research or work, and has been subjected to rigorous scrutiny of peer review. Fact versus fiction no more.

What starts as a calm discussion on these spaces often ends up in a slugging match, descending into offensive personal remarks against the expert guests or anyone that opposes the Musk worldview. As I listen to these particular spaces, I’m reminded of the agitainment shows I monitor on Italian television. The information isn’t important: The circus is—the shouting, the insults, the absurd comments. It’s meant to keep you glued to the TV—or in this case, the faux-balanced spaces—by stirring up negative emotions. When the ‘speakers’ start pushing Russian talking points, as most certainly do, anger begins to well up and you’re triggered. You’ll probably rush to tweet about it in frustration, thereby amplifying the Russian talking point and the space itself. It’s a vehicle for amplification and dissemination, and there’s more.

Disinformation operations are not about persuading an audience or getting them to come over to another viewpoint. The ultimate goal of a disinformation operation is to neutralise a target by feeding them with an overwhelming amount of conflicting information, and confuse them to the point that they don’t know what to believe or who to trust anymore. In the end, the target reaches a state of total apathy on any given issue.

The space run by Nawfal is what a successful disinformation operation looks like: facts pitted against fiction and conspiracy theories, arguments ensue among speakers, expert assessments are then put into question and discarded, and the audience comes away with the sensation that they haven’t learned a damn thing, and are more confused than ever. Bingo.

How much of an impact do these spaces or interviews really have on the up-coming presidential elections or allied support for Ukraine? It doesn’t matter because the real objective isn’t to influence those decisions. Nawfal and all the other disinformation operations are there to erode your trust in the truth. That’s scary enough because our democracies can’t function properly if we can’t recognise and agree on shared truth.

Dr Hotez’s public statement

Many thanks ⁦@mehdirhasan⁩ ⁦@MehdiHasanShow⁩ for hosting me this evening I explained the problems of “debating” science on Joe Rogan with RFK Jr and there are several.

First science is not something that is typically debated like say 18th enlightenment philosophy or political issues. That’s not typically what we do.

I said maybe there are exceptions but generally science is conducted through peer-review and manuscript submissions or presentations at scientific conferences and meetings in front of colleagues for suggestions or in some cases concerns.

I’m not even certain I know how to “debate” in this case. And then there is the particular problem of debating RFK Jr on this. I have spoken to him over the years and I’m willing to speak to him again, but it’s not easy…

He tends to move the goalposts on his specific concerns about vaccines. For instance even in the autism space it was MMR, then thimerosal, then spacing vaccines, then alum, then something called “chronic illness” and now the stakes are higher because 40,000 Texans needlessly perished during our delta BA.1 waves in 2021 and 2022 because they became victims to coordinated antivaccine disinformation. On a national scale I put that number around 200,000 with similar estimates from @charles_gaba @KFF others.

So antivaccine activism is now a lethal societal force. I would be willing to come on Joe Rogan and speak to him to solve problems as I’ve done two times before, or do something with Elon on Twitter. Possibly that might be useful.

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Latest information operation by malign actors regarding Ukraine

The latest information operation being run on social media by malign actors is exemplified by two posts by Chay Bowes and David Sacks, which you can read below. They were published one day a part from each other.

The current operation seeks to discredit Ukraine, depicting it as the failing aggressor state, unwilling to come to the negotiating table for peace talks. They also question American foreign policy decision-making by bringing up painful events like Afghanistan. I’m surprised they didn’t mention Iraq as they always do.

Why are these actors in full-swing now? They are doing their best to thwart Ukraine’s accession to NATO. The NATO Summit will be held in Vilnius, Lithuania, on July 11 and 12. Posts and articles of this kind will increase as we move closer to the NATO Summit and will disappear after July 12. Also expect more posts about president Biden’s so-called failing mental capacities versus Putin as ‘a kind ruler’ seeking peace (I can’t believe I just wrote that.) as in Bowes’s post.

Let’s move to internal politics of Ukraine’s allies: Accompanying posts disparaging Ukraine, there will be posts and articles which increase distress and a sense of tension within domestic target audiences in the United States and other major players supporting Ukraine: Covid disinformation (see Dr Hotez), Trump’s indictment, the migrant crisis, economic instabilityand the faux-civil war in the United States.

On Sunday night, videos showing US military movements emerged on Twitter only from unknown accounts stating that there has been an increase in unusual American military force movements in California and elsewhere. Posts of this kind were not detected on other social media platforms, which means this may be some sort of test for an operation to be triggered some time in the future. These posts were discounted by most as absurd but it’s also telling that they are emerging just before the Vilnius summit.

When dealing with information operations, the key is observing the timing. Kremlin narratives follow tried and tested tropes, so there’s nothing really original in what they disseminate. They always emerge, however, at a specific time.

Putin spinning another web of lies

Chay Bowes offers the latest in Russian spin: Putin would have us believe he offered a peace deal to Ukraine in April 2022.

Vladimir Putin has revealed that Russian troops withdrew from Kiev and other regions in Ukraine on the basis of a peace deal agreed in Turkiye, this casts serious doubts over Ukrainain narratives about defeat of Russia in the "battle of Kiev".

He showed African leaders and press the document at their meeting in St Petersburg. Russian journalists published the title page of the document both sides provisionally agreed to titled "Treaty on Permanent Neutrality and Security Guarantees of Ukraine"

According to the President of the Russian Federation, Ukraine and Russia agreed in principle to the draft agreement spring 2022 in Istanbul, but then Kiev refused to sign it after Russian troops voluntaraly pulled back when ordered by Moscow as part of the deal.

The text says that the UK, China, Russia, the USA, France, and Turkey would act as guarantors. Sources suggest Boris Johnston travelled to Kiev soon after to insist / threaten Zelensky not to continue with the deal.

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David Sacks: THE FAILING COUNTEROFFENSIVE AND THE PEACE THAT COULD HAVE BEEN

With each passing day, it’s becoming clear that the Ukrainian counteroffensive is failing to achieve any of its originally stated objectives. Recall: the Biden administration’s bet was that the counteroffensive would roll back Russian territorial gains, cut the land bridge to Crimea, and force Russia to the negotiating table. That is almost certainly not going to happen. On the contrary, a stalemate is more likely, or even that Russia will take more territory and win the war, as Mearsheimer has predicted.

What are Biden’s options now? Either escalate or admit defeat. In preparation for NATO’s Vilnius Summit, Blinken has been floating a proposal to give “Israel status” to Ukraine. This means multi-year security guarantees including weapons, ammunition and money that would continue even if Biden loses the next election.

This is not what the American people signed up for. Many Americans supported the $100+ billion in appropriations for Ukraine believing it was a one-time deal to reverse Russian territorial gains. If they had been told that it was the basis for an annual appropriation in a new Forever War, they would have preferred an alternative, especially if they had known that one was available.

THE PEACE THAT COULD HAVE BEEN

New evidence is emerging that a peace deal was achievable at the beginning of the war. At a recent meeting with the African delegation, Putin showed the draft of an outline or preliminary agreement signed by the Ukrainian delegation at Istanbul in April 2022. It provided that Russia would pull back to pre-war lines if Ukraine would agree not to join NATO (but Ukraine could receive security guarantees from the West).

This document has not been publicly released yet, but no one seriously contests that it exists. The only dispute is over what happened subsequently; Ukraine (via reporting in Reuters) contends the deal fell apart. However, the availability of a deal based on Ukrainian Neutrality is consistent with previous comments from Naftali Bennett, who said a deal was attainable but rejected by the West.

Why would the West do this? Ukrainska Pravda (UP), a pro-Ukraine publication, reported in May 2022:

“As soon as the Ukrainian negotiators and Abramovich/Medinsky [the Russian negotiators], following the outcome of Istanbul, had agreed on the structure of a future possible agreement in general terms, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson appeared in Kyiv almost without warning. "Johnson brought two simple messages to Kyiv. The first is that Putin is a war criminal; he should be pressured, not negotiated with. And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not. We can sign (an agreement) with you (Ukraine), but not with him. Anyway, he will screw everyone over", is how one of Zelenskyy's close associates summed up the essence of Johnson's visit.” https://pravda.com.ua/eng/articles/2022/05/5/7344096/

Johnson (who must have been speaking not just for himself but for the Western alliance) wanted to pressure Putin, not make peace, and promised new weapons systems if Ukraine would keep fighting.

At the time of UP’s article, Ukraine appeared to be doing well, so UP portrayed Zelensky’s decision to accept Johnson’s offer as a smart gamble. Now, in hindsight, it looks like a disaster.

AFGHANISTAN REDUX?

I know some of you may find it hard to believe that the realities on the ground are so at odds with the mainstream media's coverage. But it’s worth recalling that the American public was assured for two decades that we were winning in Afghanistan. All of that reporting was revealed as a pack of lies when the Afghan army that we were supposedly “standing up” collapsed within a matter of weeks. At that point, the media stopped reporting on Afghanistan, just like it had stopped reporting on Iraq, instead of holding anyone accountable.

Unfortunately, it looks like we're headed for a similar kind of outcome in Ukraine. The only question is when, and how long Biden will be able to perpetuate a proxy war of choice that could have easily been avoided.