Everything in this series is documented. Every claim has a source. The truth is disturbing enough. The Paper Trail Series is a section on my Substack and exists on my website.
The truth is stranger, and harder to digest, than fiction.
I can’t help it if I was a well-informed child. I grew up surrounded by adults who enjoyed politics, history, and debates. Reading the newspaper from beginning to end was one of my favorite hobbies, too. Not that the news always handed the public the truth, but I liked to be in the know.
I did not expect to get in trouble for telling the truth. That was my first mistake. The assumption that truth and safety occupied the same space, that a raised hand and a respectful voice were sufficient armor for an inconvenient fact.
Third grade. Ms. Richardson’s classroom. We were doing a math lesson with paper money, the kind that comes in a Monopoly box, pastel colors and obviously pretend. For whatever reason, and decades later I am grateful for whatever reason it was, I raised my hand and waited to be called on.
When she called on me I said: “did you know that the money we get from the bank is just like Monopoly money? It isn’t worth anything. We don’t even have gold anymore!”
My name went on the blackboard. A checkmark beside it. I would miss recess.
I had never had my name on that board. My face burned the way only an eight year old’s face can burn — total, consuming, the awful humiliation of being made an example of in front of every person whose opinion matters to you. I sat with that burning through the rest of the lesson and through the walk to the door while my classmates filed out into the sunlight.
And then, sitting on the red clay hill watching my friends play, the embarrassment finished burning and left something harder behind.
I was ticked off. As much as an eight year old girl can be ticked off.
Because I had raised my hand. I had waited. I had been respectful. And what I said was true. Richard Nixon had taken the United States off the gold standard in 1971, before I was born. The dollar in my mother’s purse was backed by nothing but the government’s word and the public’s willingness to believe it. I had not invented this. I had learned it. And I had connected it to the bright pretend bills spread across my desk and said so out loud.
Ms. Richardson did not tell me I was wrong or why she put my name on the board. Perhaps it was that I interrupted the lesson. Or perhaps I was opening a can of worms that would become inconvenient to explain to my peers.
For the record, Ms. Richardson, wherever you may be: I was right.
I have never forgotten my name on that board, with a checkmark might I add. Because what happened in that classroom was not a teacher correcting a mistaken child. It was an institution encoding its first lesson, the one that comes before reading and arithmetic and everything else, the one that underlies all the others:
Some truths are not welcome.
Learn which ones. Keep the others to yourself.
I did not learn that lesson.
The truth has a way of insisting. It sits in you like a splinter, working its way out regardless of what you decide about it. And eventually you stop deciding and start writing.
What Ms. Richardson’s classroom taught me, what I did not understand until I was old enough and had the resources to trace the pattern backward across twenty-five centuries, is that the checkmark on the board is not a modern invention. It is not a product of political polarization or social media or the particular anxieties of our moment.
It is an ancient tool in the archive of human power.
And it has always worked exactly the same way.
They gave it a name in Rome.
In 443 BC, the Roman Republic created an official government position called the censor. The word itself, from the Latin censere, meaning to judge, tells you everything about what the office was designed to do. The censor conducted the census, managed public morality, and maintained the lists of citizens in good standing. He decided who belonged and who didn’t, what was acceptable and what wasn’t.
The Romans did not invent the impulse. They just gave it a title and a salary.
In 213 BC, the first emperor of a unified China, Qin Shi Huang, ordered the burning of every book in his kingdom. Every book, with the exception of works on agriculture, astronomy, medicine, and divination — knowledge that served the state. Everything else, the philosophy, the history, the poetry, the record of every dynasty that had come before his, went into the fire. Scholars who refused to comply, who hid texts or continued to teach from memory, were buried alive. The historical record suggests 460 of them.
The goal was precise and stated without apology: history would begin with the Qin dynasty. Everything before it would cease to exist. The past was not to be remembered. It was to be replaced.
He was not the last ruler to understand that controlling the past is the most efficient way to control the future.
In 399 BC, a philosopher named Socrates was brought before an Athenian jury on charges of corrupting the youth and acknowledging unorthodox divinities. He had spent his life asking questions in public in search of truth and wisdom. The jury found him guilty and the sentence was death. He drank the hemlock without apology and without recanting.
What Socrates had done, in the language of every institution that has ever silenced an inconvenient voice, was this: he questioned the narrative in search of the truth.
In 8 AD, the Roman poet Ovid was banished from Rome by Emperor Augustus for writing poetry that undermined the emperor’s agenda of moral reform. Ovid’s offense was not that his poetry was false. His offense was that it was inconvenient. Augustus was building a Rome of restored virtue and traditional values. Ovid was writing about love in ways that complicated the project. He was exiled to a remote outpost on the Black Sea, where he spent the rest of his life writing letters home that were never answered.
He died in exile, still writing, never recanting. His books survived him by two thousand years and are available today on your phone for free.
In the first century AD, the Roman statesman and philosopher Seneca was exiled and his works banned by Emperor Nero. Seneca wrote of his situation with the precision of a man who understood exactly what had happened to him:
I am forbidden to enter Rome and to approach the emperor’s ear, for fear lest some truth escape my lips.
For fear lest some truth escape my lips.
He named it clearly and without drama, in a sentence that could have been written yesterday by any one of the doctors who lost hospital privileges in 2020 for questioning a ventilator protocol.
The tools change. The fear does not.
The tools of censorship changed over time, but the goal remained the same.
In 1559, Pope Paul IV established the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the Index of Prohibited Books. The Index told Catholics which books they were forbidden to read under pain of mortal sin. Its targets included works of science, philosophy, theology, and literature that the Church considered dangerous to faith and to order.
Galileo, Copernicus, Hobbes, Hume, John Milton, Daniel Defoe, and Voltaire were on it. Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables remained on it from 1864 until 1959 because the Church was wary of political revolution and the dangerous idea that liberty, equality, and civic brotherhood were worth fighting for.
The Index was enforced until 1966. Within the living memory of people reading these words right now.
In 1597, Queen Elizabeth I discovered that Shakespeare’s Richard II contained a scene in which a king was deposed from his throne. She ordered it removed from every copy of the play. It did not reappear in print until 1608, after she was dead. A sitting monarch had reached into a work of literature and removed the part she found inconvenient.
In 1933, the part that was found inconvenient was an entire category of human thought.
On the night of May 10, 1933, Nazi students and officials carried books into the public squares of Berlin and dozens of other German cities and set them on fire. Thousands of volumes, reduced to ash in public, by firelight, in front of crowds.
A German poet named Heinrich Heine had written in 1820, more than a hundred years before the fires: where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people too.
He was right. Within a decade the same regime that burned the books was burning the people.
Josef Stalin, with the full resources of the Soviet state, altered photographs to remove the faces of people who had fallen out of favor. Colleagues who had stood beside him in images that documented history were erased. Rome had called it damnatio memoriae — the damning of memory. Stalin called it necessary. The effect was the same: the past was adjusted to match the present’s requirements.
The photographs still exist, before and after, side by side in archives anyone can search today.
Each decade brought a new tool, a new justification, and a new category of inconvenient people whose voices needed managing or information controlled.
In 1956, the Federal Bureau of Investigation launched a program it called COINTELPRO, short for Counter Intelligence Program. Congressional investigations later found that COINTELPRO was responsible for at least 204 burglaries by FBI agents, the use of 1,300 informants, the theft of 12,600 documents, and more than 20,000 illegal actions against American citizens. Not foreign agents. American citizens. On American soil. By their own government.
The most documented target was Martin Luther King Jr.
In 1963, COINTELPRO director William C. Sullivan wrote a memo concluding that King was the most dangerous Negro in the future of this nation. He wrote that it may be unrealistic to limit their actions against King to legalistic proofs that would stand up in court or before Congressional Committees.
Read that sentence carefully. A senior FBI official wrote, in an internal government document, that the law and the Constitution were obstacles to what he intended to do to a man whose crime was organizing nonviolent protests for basic civil rights.
The Bureau wiretapped King’s phones. It bugged his hotel rooms. It harassed publications that wrote favorably about him. It attempted to provoke IRS investigations against him. It sent him a tape to prove he had participated in orgies with prostitutes.
And then it sent him a letter.
The letter, delivered in November 1964, was anonymous. It told King he was done and there was only one way out. It urged him to commit suicide before the tape was released to the media.
COINTELPRO was not fully exposed until 1971, when an activist group broke into an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania and stole classified documents that were sent to newspapers and members of Congress. The Senate’s Church Committee held hearings five years later. Congressional committees concluded that COINTELPRO operations exceeded statutory limits on FBI activity and violated constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and association.
As of January 2026, the COINTELPRO Full Disclosure Act has been introduced in Congress. The full record has still not been released to the public. Fifty years later.
COINTELPRO was the government silencing inconvenient voices. What the Church Committee uncovered next was something more sophisticated, and more disturbing.
The CIA was not merely suppressing the truth. It was manufacturing a replacement.
The Church Committee’s 1976 report confirmed that the CIA had maintained secret relationships with at least fifty American journalists. Carl Bernstein’s landmark 1977 Rolling Stone investigation expanded that number dramatically — more than 400 US press members had secretly carried out assignments for the CIA, including journalists at the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS, and Time magazine.
The Church Committee’s published findings stated directly: the CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets. Senator Church estimated the cost of this misinformation apparatus at $265 million per year to American taxpayers.
The declassified CIA Family Jewels documents confirmed what the Church Committee had uncovered. Memos showed discussions of specific journalists, editorial decisions influenced by agency preferences, and deliberate coordination between intelligence officials and media figures. These were not allegations. These were the agency’s own records.
In February 1976, CIA Director George H.W. Bush announced a new policy: effective immediately, the CIA will not enter into any paid or contract relationship with any full-time or part-time news correspondent accredited by any US news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station. He then added that the CIA would continue to welcome the voluntary, unpaid cooperation of journalists.
The paid relationships were over, but the welcome mat remained.
The censor had completed its evolution. It no longer needed to silence inconvenient voices. It had learned to replace them.
While the CIA was placing assets in American newsrooms, the United States Public Health Service was conducting a study in Macon County, Alabama.
In 1932, the USPHS — the federal agency that today houses the CDC, the FDA, the NIH, and the office of the Surgeon General — began the Tuskegee Syphilis Study as an experiment to understand the effects of untreated syphilis in black men. The study involved 600 black men in Macon County, Alabama. The study leaders did not tell the men the truth about the purposes, risks, or benefits of the study.
They told them they were being treated for bad blood. They were not being treated at all.
Although effective treatments to reduce the severity of the disease had existed since the 1920s, and penicillin for the treatment of syphilis was widespread as of 1945, the study investigators withheld treatment and continued to examine the untreated progression of the disease. More than 100 died as a result.
By the end of the study in 1972, only 74 of the test subjects were still alive. Of the original 399 men, 28 had died of syphilis, 100 died of related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children were born with congenital syphilis.
The study ran for forty years. It was not a secret within the medical establishment. It was an open secret: known, discussed, and protected from public disclosure by the institutional silence of the people who could have ended it.
Peter Buxtun was born in Prague in 1937. His family fled Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia and came to America in 1939. He grew up, attended the University of Oregon, served as a combat medic in the US Army, and eventually went to work as a venereal disease investigator for the United States Public Health Service in San Francisco.
In the early 1960s he walked into the coffee room of his clinic and overheard a colleague talking about a study in Alabama.
He later said: I didn’t want to believe it. This was the Public Health Service. We didn’t do things like that.
But they did. And Buxtun knew it immediately, because a man who held the history of the Nazis conducting medical experiments on prisoners in Germany recognized what he was hearing. He filed an official protest in 1966. He was summoned to Atlanta and chewed out by agency officials for his impertinence. He filed another protest in 1968. It was ignored. He left the Public Health Service, went to law school, and spent years unable to let it go.
In 1972 he gave documents to an Associated Press reporter. Those documents made their way to investigative journalist Jean Heller, who later said of the moment she read them: revulsion. I literally didn’t want the story to be true because I could not believe that that could go on in this country.
On July 25, 1972, the Washington Star published the expose. The following day it appeared on the front page of the New York Times. Congressional hearings followed. A class-action lawsuit produced a ten million dollar settlement. The study was shut down. Forty years after it began.
Peter Buxtun died on May 18, 2024, of Alzheimer’s disease in Rocklin, California. He was 86. The men he tried to save were long gone.
The institution that chewed him out for his impertinence still sets American public health policy.
Now consider what happened in 2020 when a COVID vaccine was developed and health authorities expressed frustration that black Americans were hesitant to receive it. The hesitancy was labeled a misinformation problem. It was studied, analyzed, and managed as a public health communication failure.
It was not a misinformation problem. It was a memory.
The same government that had told 600 black men in Alabama they were being treated when they were being observed — that had withheld a known cure while men died, while wives were infected, while children were born into the consequence of institutional deception — was now asking those same communities to trust its assurances about a new medical intervention developed in record time.
The Event 201 recommendation called for flooding media with fast, accurate, and consistent information and suppressing counter messages. It did not call for acknowledging that the institution delivering those messages had spent forty years lying to the people it was now asking to comply.
That omission isn’t an oversight. It’s the mechanism.
In 1971, the same year COINTELPRO was exposed, a defense analyst named Daniel Ellsberg leaked a classified 47-volume Pentagon study to the New York Times. The study, commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, documented what four successive presidential administrations had actually known and done in Vietnam, and how systematically they had lied about it to Congress and to the American people.
The Nixon administration obtained a court order forcing the Times to stop publishing. It was the first time in American history that the federal government had used prior restraint to stop a newspaper from printing the news. The Washington Post began publishing the same documents. The government sued them too. Within two weeks, fifteen newspapers were publishing portions of the Pentagon Papers and the government was suing all of them.
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of the press.
The administration then charged Ellsberg under the Espionage Act — not for passing information to a foreign enemy, but for informing the American public about their own government’s conduct. It was the first time a source for a journalist had been charged under that law. The charges were eventually dismissed after it emerged that the Nixon White House had ordered the burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in an attempt to find damaging personal information. The same people who burglarized the psychiatrist’s office later burglarized the Watergate complex. The president of the United States resigned.
One act of suppression. One chain of consequences.
In 1977, the 95th Congress opened hearings into the CIA’s top secret mind control research program, code named MK Ultra. The program had run for decades. Its existence was not in dispute. When a survivor attempted to testify before the Congressional Permanent Select Committees on Intelligence Oversight in 1995, the National Security Act was invoked to censor that testimony. The official record was closed. The testimony was published as a book instead because the official channels had been deliberately shut.
In the months before March 2003, a body of intelligence assessments was presented to the American public as settled fact. Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. The evidence was solid. The case was beyond dispute.
What was not presented to the public: the International Atomic Energy Agency had already delivered a judgment, a full month before the invasion, that the aluminum tube claims at the center of the nuclear argument were incorrect. A document cited as evidence of Iraqi deception was later revealed to be plagiarized from a graduate student’s dissertation describing Iraq’s weapons programs in 1990 — not 2003. Senate Intelligence Committee investigators later confirmed that senior officials had cherry-picked raw intelligence to support a political position that had already been decided.
The United States invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003.
No weapons of mass destruction were found.
David Kay, the man appointed to lead the postwar weapons search, testified before the United States Senate on January 29, 2004: we were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself here.
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2004 report confirmed that analysts had overstated the certainty of their conclusions and that the intelligence had been shaped to fit a conclusion that preceded it.
Hundreds of thousands of people died on the basis of information that the record shows was managed, shaped, and presented without the inconvenient parts. A full installment on 9/11 and on January 6 will be published at a later date not yet determined. Each deserves their own piece.
In 2021, the primary system the United States government uses to track adverse events following vaccination — the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, known as VAERS — began receiving reports of myocarditis following COVID-19 mRNA vaccination. The numbers were not ambiguous. Peer-reviewed research confirmed that in 2021 there was a dramatic increase in myocarditis reports linked to the COVID-19 vaccine, far higher than reports from all other vaccines combined over the previous thirty years. The signal was strongest in young males.
The response wasn’t an investigation. The response was discrediting. Studies analyzing VAERS data were dismissed as unreliable. Physicians who raised concerns publicly found themselves facing the same professional consequences that had greeted doctors who questioned ventilator protocols in 2020. The data existed. It was inconvenient. And it was managed.
In September 2016, federal investigators discovered a laptop belonging to former congressman Anthony Weiner containing hundreds of thousands of emails connected to the closed investigation of Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information. Among the files was a folder labeled life insurance.
In November 2016, FBI Headquarters blocked the Clinton Foundation investigative team from accessing the laptop’s contents. Deputy Director Andrew McCabe recommended the material be routed to a different team. Senate Judiciary Committee records later confirmed that after the investigation was reopened in 2017, prosecutors were provided with documents that omitted information about FBI and DOJ leadership’s interference.
The life insurance folder has never been publicly disclosed as of the date of this article.
On October 18, 2019, fifteen people gathered in a luxury hotel in Manhattan and recommended that governments partner with social media companies to flood media with fast, accurate, and consistent information — and that counter messages be suppressed including through the use of technology.
They called the counter messages misinformation.
They published the recommendation in January 2020.
By spring of that year, posts were being removed. Accounts were being suspended. Doctors were losing privileges. A Nobel Prize winner’s concerns about PCR methodology were dismissed without engagement. A laboratory origin hypothesis supported by credentialed scientists was labeled a conspiracy theory and quietly deleted from platforms used by billions of people.
The bonfire was still burning. It had just moved indoors.
Ms. Richardson put my name on the board in third grade because I said something true that complicated the lesson she was trying to teach. She did not tell me I was wrong. She could not tell me I was wrong. She simply made clear that the truth I had offered was not welcome in that room.
Qin Shi Huang burned the books because they complicated the dynasty he was trying to build. He did not argue with Confucius. He buried the people who taught him.
The scale is different. The mechanism is identical.
Some truths are not welcome here.
That lesson has been taught in every language, in every century, by every institution that has ever held enough power to enforce it. It has been taught with hemlock and exile and bonfires and blacklists and anonymous letters urging men to kill themselves and cherry-picked intelligence that sent soldiers to die and checkmarks on blackboards and the quiet removal of posts from platforms in the middle of the night.
It has never, in twenty-five centuries of trying, permanently worked.
Socrates is still being read. Galileo’s observations still govern our understanding of the solar system. Les Misérables is still in print. The burned books were rebuilt from memory by the scholars who survived. The altered photographs exist in archives beside the originals. The Pentagon Papers are in every university library. The laboratory origin hypothesis is now an active area of scientific inquiry acknowledged by the FBI, the Department of Energy, and the Senate. The COINTELPRO files are being demanded in Congress fifty years after the program ended.
And a third grade girl who missed recess for telling the truth is sitting down to write it all out again.
The truth has a way of insisting.
The paper trail continues.
Sources
1. Livy, History of Rome. On the office of censor, 443 BC. Translated J.C. Yardley. Harvard University Press.
2. Dirk Rohmann, “Book Burning as Conflict Management in the Roman Empire (213 BC-200 CE).” Ancient Society 43 (2013).
3. Frederick H. Cramer, “Book Burning and Censorship in Ancient Rome.” Journal of the History of Ideas 6.2 (1945): 157-196.
4. Plato, Apology. On the trial and death of Socrates, 399 BC. Primary source.
5. Ovid, Tristia. Letters from exile, 8 AD. Primary source.
6. Seneca, Letters from a Stoic. Trans. R.M. Basore. Primary source.
7. Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Pope Paul IV, 1559. Last issued 1948, abolished 1966.
8. Catholic Church records: Index Librorum Prohibitorum entries for Galileo, Copernicus, Hobbes, Hume, Milton, Defoe, Voltaire, Hugo.
9. Shakespeare, Richard II. First folio documentation of the deposition scene removal by order of Queen Elizabeth I, 1597.
10. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Documentation of Nazi book burnings, May 10, 1933. ushmm.org
11. Heinrich Heine, Almansor: A Tragedy (1820). Original publication of the book-burning prophecy.
12. David King, The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia. Metropolitan Books, 1997.
13. Executive Order 11615, President Richard M. Nixon, August 15, 1971: Suspension of convertibility of the dollar to gold.
14. FBI COINTELPRO Records. Vault.FBI.gov. Released under FOIA. vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro
15. U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (Church Committee). Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans. Senate Report No. 94-755, Book II. 1976.
16. FBI-King Suicide Letter. Discovered during Church Committee hearings, 1975. National Archives and Records Administration.
17. Sullivan, William C. Internal FBI Memo on Martin Luther King Jr., 1963. Declassified and published in Church Committee records.
18. Federal court findings: COINTELPRO responsible for 204 burglaries, 1,300 informants, 12,600 stolen documents, 20,000 illegal actions. Cited in Church Committee Report, 1976.
19. Congresswoman Summer Lee. Press Release: COINTELPRO Full Disclosure Act introduced January 22, 2026. summerlee.house.gov
20. U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations (Church Committee). Final Report, Book I: Foreign and Military Intelligence. April 1976. U.S. Government Publishing Office.
21. Bernstein, Carl. “The CIA and the Media.” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977.
22. CIA Family Jewels Documents. Declassified and released June 2007. Available at CIA.gov reading room.
23. CIA Director George H.W. Bush. Public statement on new journalist relationship policy, February 1976.
24. United States Public Health Service, Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, 1932-1972. National Archives and Records Administration.
25. Buxtun, Peter. Official protest letter to Chief of Venereal Disease Branch, CDC, 1966. Documented in Reverby, Susan. Tuskegee’s Truths: Rethinking the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
26. Associated Press, Jean Heller. “Syphilis Victims in U.S. Study Went Untreated for 40 Years.” July 25, 1972. Washington Star; reprinted New York Times July 26, 1972.
27. NAACP v. United States. $10 million out-of-court settlement, 1974.
28. President William J. Clinton. Formal apology to Tuskegee study survivors. White House ceremony, May 16, 1997.
29. Peter Buxtun obituary. Died May 18, 2024, Rocklin, California. Alzheimer’s disease. Age 86. Reported by AP, NPR, Washington Post, July 2024.
30. Ellsberg, Daniel. Pentagon Papers leaked to New York Times, June 13, 1971. National Security Archive, George Washington University. nsarchive.gwu.edu
31. New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971). U.S. Supreme Court, decided June 30, 1971.
32. U.S. Department of Justice. Charges against Daniel Ellsberg under Espionage Act of 1917, 1971. Dismissed May 1973.
33. Freedom of the Press Foundation: The Pentagon Papers documentation. freedom.press
34. U.S. Senate, 95th Congress. Hearings on CIA MK Ultra program, August 3, 1977. Congressional Record.
35. National Security Act of 1947, invoked to suppress congressional testimony, 1995. Documented in O’Brien, Cathy and Phillips, Mark. TRANCE Formation of America. Reality Marketing, 1995.
36. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Report on Pre-War Intelligence Assessments on Iraq. Released July 9, 2004.
37. International Atomic Energy Agency. Interim judgment on aluminum tube claims, February 2003.
38. Kay, David. Testimony before the U.S. Senate, January 29, 2004: “We were almost all wrong.”
39. Arms Control Association. Intelligence and Arms Control Experts Analyze Powell’s UN Speech. February 2004. armscontrol.org
40. Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, World Economic Forum, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: Event 201 Joint Statement, January 17, 2020. centerforhealthsecurity.org
41. Event 201 Recommendation 7: Communications. Published October 18, 2019. centerforhealthsecurity.org
42. Facebook policy change announcement, May 2021: Removal of policy prohibiting posts suggesting COVID-19 was man-made.
43. Office of the Director of National Intelligence: Declassified COVID-19 Origins Assessment, 2023.
44. U.S. Senate report on COVID-19 origins, October 2022: Laboratory leak as most likely origin.
45. FBI Director Christopher Wray, public statement on COVID-19 origin assessment, February 2023.
46. U.S. Department of Energy assessment: COVID-19 most likely originated from laboratory leak, February 2023.
47. Peer-reviewed findings: myocarditis reports in 2021 exceeded all other vaccines combined over previous 30 years. Journal of Evidence-Based Medicine, 2024. onlinelibrary.wiley.com
48. Lai et al. “Risk of myocarditis after three doses of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines in the United States, 2020-2022.” Journal of Evidence-Based Medicine, 2024.
49. CDC MMWR: Reports of myocarditis after COVID-19 vaccination, particularly among young male vaccine recipients, April 2021. cdc.gov
50. U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York. Search warrant for Anthony Weiner laptop, September 26, 2016.
51. Senate Judiciary Committee. New Records Reveal DOJ’s Yearslong Efforts to Shut Down Investigation into Clinton Foundation. judiciary.senate.gov
52. U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Senator Ron Johnson letter to DOJ regarding Weiner laptop investigation. hsgac.senate.gov