TRUST THE SCIENCE!!!!

……….. except for biology, productive family units, the weather, and anything else that bucks their narrative.

Stop spewing anal drivel.

Post proof, or STFU

Years of data prove that everyone who has died consumed water earlier in the day.

We've been putting up with this guy's shit for too long. This is a site for atheists and agnostics, not a site for the marginally sane.

I fail to understand why you seem so beleagured.......surely the huge mounds of dead people and the 24/7/365 hordes of bulldozers burying them around the world would easily convince everybody by now?

Wait, there are no humongous piles of dead? Anywhere?

So maybe STFU???

Liz Gunn is the leader of the New Zealand Loyal Party.

Here’s the results for the New Zealand Loyal Party in the recent elections:

Total number of votes cast nationally: 26,036

Nationwide percentage of votes cast for the party: 1.16%

Voter reaction to her policies tells you everything you need to know about her.

The idiot is strong in this one

I’ve had 6 Covid shots and have never had Covid or any adverse reactions to the shots.

I know that the two articles that I have posted below will not convince you, but you have been falling for too many conspiracy theories.

[thespinoff.co.nz] This is a link about the "investigative reporter" (aka conpiracy theorist) who originated the story you posted.

How conspiracy theorist Liz Gunn took the Baby W story global

Two parents had a disagreement with surgeons at a children’s hospital. A fortnight later, their public advocate likened their child to Jesus Christ in an interview with the world’s most famous conspiracy theorist. How did a debate around a blood transfusion in New Zealand become a cause célèbre in online conspiracy circles? One figure looms large. Charlie Mitchell investigates.

This story was first published on Stuff.

American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was appalled. “Mad scientists” on the other side of the world, he said, were conducting Nazi-style experiments on a baby.

“Let’s bring Liz Gunn in here,” Jones growled.

“Give us your expert view on this.”

The case of Baby W*, whose heart surgery was delayed because his parents demanded vaccine-free blood, has featured prominently in New Zealand’s mainstream media, but the first to report the case – and the person who became the parents’ most unrelenting, vociferous advocate – was Liz Gunn.

Gunn is a journalist best known for quitting her job on TV1’s Breakfast show live on air in 2001.

She disappeared from public view before reemerging in 2021 with a video stating her opposition to Covid-19 vaccine mandates, which she likened to rape. She has since become a prominent figure in New Zealand’s online conspiracy theory community.

The Baby W situation has been reported globally in mainstream media outlets, from the Daily Mail to Fox News. But it has taken on a particular urgency in the informal network of conspiracy-theory-driven news shows, of which Jones and Infowars are the apex predator.

During the interview with Jones, Gunn made clear her view that this was not just a private dispute between two parents and a hospital.

“Many, many Kiwis – thousands, I’d say millions – are waking up in horror, even those who have been asleep and going along with the lies of this prime minister,” she said, a day after the High Court ruled in favour of the hospital.

“This beautiful little boy – remember there was one other baby, Alex, who was born at Christmas-time and changed the world – is this another one of those?”

How did the case spread so far, so quickly? And would this situation have occurred without Gunn’s aggressive advocacy?

A review of many hours of footage – much of which was generated by Gunn herself – shows how a private dispute became a public circus in online conspiracy groups, and ended with two parents, claiming to be prisoners in a children’s hospital, having their child taken from them in the night.

An impasse
In late November, Liz Gunn was told by a friend about an unfolding situation at Starship Hospital.

Steve Oliver runs an MMA gym that drew repeated fines for violating Covid-19 restrictions. He is friends with Baby W’s father, and reached out to Gunn on his behalf to draw attention to the family’s predicament.

The story was perfectly suited to Gunn. Unlike the low-fi Counterspin Media, Gunn specialises in well-produced, longer-form interviews that heavily feature Gunn herself. Think of Oprah Winfrey, reaching across a table to comfort an emotional guest.

She regularly reports on issues involving children and vaccines, and – coincidentally – has previously recounted her own near-death experience during heart surgery.

In the first of what would be many interviews about Baby W, Gunn is in the hospital room with the family, cradling the baby’s twin brother (who has no medical issues).

The parents are frustrated, but don’t appear to be angry; they portray it as an unfortunate impasse, not an ideological battle with life-or-death stakes. The baby’s mother, at one point, says: “I still have high regard for those doctors. They are brilliant at what they do,” to which the father agrees.

During the interview, it is revealed that Gunn – who had only just met the family – had already attended a private meeting between the family and hospital staff, where she acted as their advocate.

In her recounting of the meeting, Gunn was “firm and clear”: she told an “arrogant and disinterested” hospital staff about the dangers of vaccination and insisted hospital staff would be personally liable if something went wrong.

This was not how the hospital staff saw it.

One surgeon in the meeting later said it was “hijacked by the parents’ support person who proceeded to pressurise the specialists with her theory about conspiracies in New Zealand and even said that deaths in infants getting transfusions were occurring in Starship Hospital,” according to the High Court judgement.

This behaviour caused the medical staff to leave the meeting after several minutes, the judgement said.

Later in the interview, Gunn said her strategy was to “go nuclear” on the story, imploring viewers to contact mainstream media outlets to report on the case.

“Please, New Zealand, take pity on our family here… They [the hospital] will crumple if we get it on mainstream and there is horror at what this government is doing, I promise you,” Gunn said.

She continued, through tears: “I promise you I just want to help this family. Please help me help them. Please, I beg you.”

The fallout
The video was recorded on a Friday, but the parents asked for its publication to be delayed so they could continue talking with medical staff.

Those discussions did not happen. Gunn, however, stayed in regular contact with the family. On the following Monday, she spoke to the baby’s mother on the phone, telling her the hospital was “playing a mind game”, Gunn recalled in one interview.

That evening, the hospital told the parents it would be pursuing legal action to take medical custody of the baby. Such action is rare, but has occurred in response to parents with a religious objection to blood transfusion.

After the meeting, the parents spoke to Gunn once again, and the interview was published later that evening.

It quickly prompted mainstream media coverage of the case. Despite Gunn having actively solicited such coverage during the interview, two days after its release, she was condemning it.

“Mainstream media… I’m trying to protect [the baby’s mother] from it as much as I can”, Gunn said on Counterspin Media on November 30.

“She just needs peace and quiet to have her baby protected.”

In fact, Gunn was actively shielding the baby’s parents from mainstream coverage. When a Stuff reporter contacted the baby’s mother directly, she told Gunn.

The response to the reporter by text insisted they ask questions to prime minister Jacinda Ardern and the head of the New Zealand Blood Service before any interview took place, to demonstrate the reporter was “genuine”. When an NZ Herald reporter asked Gunn to be put in contact with the baby’s mother, Gunn responded with a similar requirement.

By her own account, Gunn was telling the mother not to read “the mainstream media hit-pieces”.

“We’re pretty much shielding the horrific, cannibalising mainstream media from this beautiful family,” Gunn said on December 2.

The parents were, however, giving frequent interviews to one person: Liz Gunn.

Those interviews show an escalation in the family’s frustrations with the hospital. In an interview with the baby’s father, he invoked medical experiments during the Nazi regime, and describes his disbelief that doctors at Starship were not looking at the same information he was.

“I can look on my phone and find something in three minutes… every medical computer in the world is hooked up to the internet, and I wonder why, if they’re not using it,” he said.

A strong conviction
The parents both had strong anti-vaccination views that predated their encounter with Liz Gunn. The baby’s father attended the occupation at parliament earlier this year, and the baby’s mother was mandated out of her job as a midwife.

In court, it was noted they had approved blood from the general supply for a previous surgery. The parents believed the use of blood was unlikely; when a small amount was used, they reiterated their views to the doctors, and made it clear they would not consent again. Their views, by all accounts, were consistent and well known.

What is less clear is if whether Gunn’s aggressive advocacy influenced the way the process played out.

In public statements and interviews, Gunn repeatedly said – both to the baby’s parents, and to their supporters – that she believed the court case would succeed, and that New Zealanders would rise up en masse in support of the parents’ wishes.

During her second interview with the family in their hospital room, Gunn – who was again cradling Baby W’s twin – suggested people donate to the family for future legal expenses.

‘I don’t believe it will come to that… I believe so many Kiwis are rising up on this case, that you will have the support of this country and beyond, in the world, for your cause,” Gunn said.

“I think this is the hill many of us are willing to fight absolutely to our last breath on. That will scare this government, and it should, because New Zealanders are angry now.”

A few days later, during a candlelight vigil outside Starship Hospital, Gunn told the crowd she refused to consider what would happen if the court ruled against them.

“We will keep this going until we win, and the world will support this win,” she said.

“There is no other option. If they think they can try to outlast us, they will find a country that rises up.”

During the hearing, Baby W was brought to court against the medical advice of doctors at the hospital.

Gunn claimed that nurses had deliberately sabotaged the baby’s feeding rate in order to prevent him from being taken away, and that security guards were tailing the baby’s mother.

It tied into existing rhetoric about the hospital and its staff, which had already been fuelled by Gunn.

In an interview with Counterspin Media, she described receiving a phone call from an unidentified man who speculated something “so dystopian that I’m going to call it out ahead”, Gunn said.

“His theory was that they could be wanting this beautiful little baby to die, so they can turn that narrative back so brutally on the parents and say ‘it’s your fault, it’s your fault,” Gunn said.

“I can tell you Jacinda Ardern, if that is your dark plan – and I can’t even imagine a human being with such a dark plan, so I’m hoping that man is wrong – but if it were, do you know whose feet his death would be put at?” She listed various figures including Ardern, the government, the blood service, and the mainstream media.

At the end of the hearing, Gunn left the court to address supporters and media outside. She broke down in tears, saying she was exhausted and hadn’t slept. She had been advocating for the parents for nearly two weeks

The aftermath
The court ruled in favour of health authorities . The surgery would go ahead, using blood from the general pool.

The family, Gunn, and Grey, appeared resigned to the decision. They did not appeal.

The alternative media campaign, nevertheless, continued apace.

The parents and Gunn were invited to appear on Infowars, and were interviewed by Alex Jones. His show is enormously popular in the online conspiracy movement; just a week earlier, the rapper Ye had appeared on the show and publicly praised Adolf Hitler, drawing tens of millions of viewers.

During their interview, the parents claimed to be prisoners in the hospital.

Among those who saw the clip were two surgeons from the US. They got in touch with the parents and – after a Zoom consultation, and a review of the baby’s medical files – concluded the baby did not require immediate surgery.

One of the surgeons, Gunn recalled the next day, had offered a lifeline.

“He said we could get you to America, operate on [Baby W] in the new year… the relief in our family,” Gunn said, seemingly referring to the parents and the baby.

By now, the relationship between the parents and the hospital had broken down irrevocably. The parents were refusing pre-surgery tests for Baby W, and appeared to object to the surgery taking place at all (they had previously only objected to the blood transfusion).

This prompted the hospital to file another court action, seeking clarification that police could use reasonable force to remove the parents to ensure Baby W could receive surgery. The parents’ lawyer, Sue Grey, cited the US doctors’ evidence in response, requesting to stop the surgery. It was rejected.

Gunn had been trespassed from the hospital, but she was keeping in regular contact with the family. That included having a friend of hers stay with them in their hospital room.

Late on Thursday night, several police officers entered the hospital room, picking up the baby and taking him away for pre-surgery tests. His distraught mother screamed, begging for her baby to be returned, as his father shouted at the police officers, calling them criminals.

The harrowing moment was captured by a camera operator in the room. He was filming content for Liz Gunn. The only other person with the family was Gunn’s friend, who could be seen holding the baby’s twin throughout the ordeal, and speaking to both police and hospital staff.

The campaign continues
The footage was later posted on Gunn’s channel, as was a late-night conversation between Gunn and both parents shortly after the baby was taken.

It was part interview, part strategy meeting.

Gunn, once again, invoked her belief that Baby W represented something much greater than himself.

“My darling, this baby is surrounded by white light, every bit of our energy,” she told Baby W’s mother.

“He is surrounded by angels – he is operating on another level, your baby. He is in the world, but he is not of the world. There is a soul energy keeping him safe.”

The baby’s mother, who is clearly upset, said she must consent to several conditions before the baby would be returned to her – that she would be alone, it would not be recorded, and that a police officer would be present.

“I just need to be with my baby,” she said. “What am I meant to do? I’m not going to say no.”

Gunn, from her home, weighed in with advice. “Every mother on Earth would understand… we will be weeping with you.

“As much as you register this is fully in coercion, it will never hold up in court as an agreement. These people are criminal doing this.”

The conversation continues, with the baby’s father objecting to the conditions and saying he wants one of the doctors to face imprisonment. Gunn gives further advice, and advanced a conspiracy theory that the doctors were secretly soliciting unvaccinated blood to use in the surgery.

“This has been the most horrific thing ever,” the baby’s mother concluded.

“I never want anyone to experience this.”

After a long night, Baby W was due to undergo surgery on Friday morning. Gunn continued her media campaign.

She appeared for a second time on Infowars, speaking to a different host, Owen Shroyer.

During the lengthy interview, Gunn and Shroyer broke down the video of the baby being taken by police, which is shown at length. Gunn, at times, appeared to be in disbelief, as she rattled through numerous conspiracy theories she presented without evidence.

The High Court judge who ruled on the case was corrupt and had been involved in rolling out “climate change tyranny”, she claimed. She floated a political bid, and speculated that Ardern might try to murder her, announcing that she “was not suicidal” and regularly checked her car, so it would not be involved in a suspicious crash.

She had been told – but could not verify – that “Tedros from the UN” (an apparent reference to the World Health Organisation’s director-general Tedros Ghebreyesus) had been in Wellington that week in response to the Baby W situation.

“Has a tiny four-month-old baby threatened this evil structure with his purity and his love so much that they sent the head of the UN [sic] to tell our prime minister what to do?” Gunn said.

She finished with a now familiar line. This baby, who’d she’d first met around two weeks earlier, and became entranced by his soulful blue eyes, could change the world.

“Can you imagine the effect of this pure little baby… and here we are at Christmastime, when another pure baby came into the world and changed the world.”

(The baby has automatic and permanent name suppression, but has been widely named online. The parents also have name suppression to protect the identity of the child, which has also been breached.)

Here is an article about the author: [standard.co.uk]

Sean Adl-Tabatabai on being in the eye of the 'fake news' storm
With millions of readers, Sean Adl-Tabatabai’s site is at the heart of the fake news row and has been accused of trying to destabilise democracy. He tells Richard Godwin about his ‘alternative’ reality.

RICHARD GODWIN
16 FEBRUARY 2017
Sean Adl-Tabatabai doesn’t look much like a Russian propagandist. He doesn’t come across much like your average alt-Right agitator either, with his neat Burberry polo shirt and his overwhelming nimbus of aftershave. And if you call what he does “FAKE NEWS”, he gets a little defensive.

“I define my job as overseeing and editing an alternative news website — that’s what I do,” says the founder-editor of Your News Wire as he squints into the sun on the roof of his apartment in Los Angeles. He regrets the fact that Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump’s long-suffering spokeswoman, has given “alternative facts” a bad name. “What I mean is that we cover stories that the mainstream media isn’t covering.”

Stories such as: “George Soros Orchestrates Devastating Plan to Kill 100,000 Haitians”. And: “Autism Rates in California Skyrocket Following Mandatory Vaccine Bill”. And: “Nicole Kidman Sent For ‘Reprogramming’ After Supporting Trump”. Stories that report from a looking-glass world where Hillary Clinton is connected to elite paedophile rings in Washington pizzerias, where climate change is a hoax, where Trump is mobilising US troops to counter a Chinese “Pearl Harbor-style” attack on California. All under a banner of “NEWS. TRUTH. UNFILTERED.”

Stories that have had Adl-Tabatabai, a former MTV producer from north London, accused of being part of a deliberate campaign to destabilise Western democracies with disinformation. His site has been blacklisted by an EU task force set up to combat Russian propaganda, and cited as one of the main reasons that Trump would win (or more accurately, Hillary Clinton would lose) the US presidential election.

Adl-Tabatabai, 35, lives in a Hollywood-Gothic apartment complex that you can imagine Philip Marlowe staking out in a Raymond Chandler novel. There’s something guileless about him. He actually seems to believe the stuff his site publishes — or at least, to relish its textures and its tremors, like a teenager who’s got a little lost inside a role-playing game. He lives with Sinclair, his American husband — they signed the register in Camden at one minute past midnight on the day that David Cameron legalised gay marriage. Their apartment is filled with art, and I can’t help but notice a Bernie Sanders bumper sticker too. “Most of my friends — and I would say, me too — are liberals,” he says. “I’m not some member of the alt-Right trying to stir up racial hatred or homophobia or anything. I’m just ... very open to ideas.”

He believes that the war on fake news is “ridiculous — it’s just ridiculous”. “The mainstream media is the sole reason for Trump’s victory. They ignored the public. They didn’t have their finger on the pulse. And I think what’s happened since with this whole ‘fake news’ debate is sour grapes. Instead of fixing the problem, they’re trying to blame someone else.” And there’s a certain truth to this; a recent Stanford University study concluded that the influence of sites such as his was marginal compared to the might of, say, Fox News. However, it did also note the “stunning and dismaying consistency” with which the participants of the study failed to tell the difference between advert, news and conspiracy.

As for the idea that he’s an unwitting stooge of the Kremlin: “It’s so weird.” Does he read Russia Today, the Moscow-sponsored news network? “I love Russia Today!” (Of course he does — it’s one of his most cited sources.) You are aware that it’s Russian propaganda, right? “Well, the BBC is British propaganda. It’s the same thing.” It’s not the same thing. Britain has a free press, Russia does not. British journalists are not censored for criticising the Government, Russian journalists are. Publicly funded is not the same as state broadcaster … I could go on. “I just think there’s some hypocrisy there,” he pleads. What about his article that claimed the Queen would “flee Britain” if we didn’t leave the EU, since World War Three was on its way? This particular story featured direct quotes from Her Majesty, apparently overheard by a BBC employee: “One is making the necessary preparations to abandon ship … A violent storm is coming, the likes of which Britain has never seen.”

“I knew you’d mention that one,” he sighs. He justifies it by telling me he put it in his CONSPIRACIES section, where the most wackadoo content ends up. (A distinction that wouldn’t trouble someone who came across the story on a Facebook news feed of course.) “It was a BBC employee who emailed the website. The information he was giving us was so far-fetched, it was not something I could present to my audience as 100 per cent verified fact. But I did investigate and discovered that this person could have been party to that information. And I could say: ‘Someone is claiming this, make of it what you will.’ I can’t say whether that was real or not.”

Between clickbait, sensationalism, exaggeration, satire, trolling and agenda-driven reporting, there is a whole dreamland of grey. Adl-Tabatabai claims kinship with Info Wars, whose creator Alex Jones promoted the idea that 9/11 was an inside job. (Trump’s a fan.) But his dafter stuff isn’t much different from, say, US supermarket tabloids such as the Weekly World News — or the BIZARRE sections of our own much- vaunted press, which relish UFO stories and celebrity reincarnations. “People are so hysterical now, there’s this idea that anything weird must be wiped from the web because readers are crazy,” says Adl-Tabatabai. “No one’s saying The Sun or the Express or the Mail should be banned.”

Adl-Tabatabai had what he describes as an “average childhood”. His father is an accountant of Iranian origin; his mother Carol is an “alternative health” practitioner; he grew up in a council estate with a brother and a sister and attended an all-boys Catholic school. He wasn’t academic but a teenage role as an extra on Grange Hill excited his interest in the media — and when he left school he found a job as a runner on Top of the Pops. (Presumably this is where his faith in the BBC began to erode … the stars were MIMING! It’s fake pop, folks!) He later took a course in media studies — “It was a pile of s**t really” — and worked his way up through various TV production jobs. But it was a meeting with David Icke — the former BBC presenter who announced that he was the son of God on Wogan in 1990 — that he describes as “the biggest step” to what he does now.

Adl-Tabatabi was working on a pilot for a conspiracy theory show on MTV and had been tasked with duping Icke into making a fool of himself again. “He was actually a really decent guy with a few wacky ideas — and I thought, no, he doesn’t deserve this.” He tipped off Icke — who was grateful. When he was sacked from MTV, he worked for Icke for years as a web designer and producer. Icke has since turned on his amanuensis (“WHY ARE YOU FILLED WITH SUCH HATRED SEAN ADL-TABATABAI? What is your motivation? And who benefits?&rdquo But Adl-Tabatabai remains respectful. “He’s just misinformed. That’s fine. What I liked about him was that he was fearless.”

He reflects that his mother’s approach to medicine may have made him more open-minded. “A lot of people dabble in strange theories. It’s not confined to this small subsection of ignorant people. Believing one or two things that another person doesn’t think is legitimate doesn’t mean that they’re thick.

“You can be really passionate that these are the facts — but someone else can come along who’s equally as passionate.” But it doesn’t matter how passionate you are — the facts remain the same. “When you say facts are sacred, I would argue that no they’re not.”

Adl-Tabatabai does have some regard for facts. As editor, he says he spends around 30 minutes fact-checking all the stories he publishes. “If a story is particularly complex it can take a lot longer.” He produces most of his “news” from a Macbook Pro on a glass desk next to a butterfly palm beneath a circular sunburst mirror. On a typical day he writes four or five stories personally, and puts up about 15 on the site. There are four or five regular contributors, including Baxter Dmitry (a Milo Yiannopoulos fanboy whose Facebook profile is taken in front of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg) and his mum, Carol. They tend to be paid commission, so the more clicks a story gets, the more cash the site generates — thank you Google! He makes an OK living, he says, but the overheads are high and it’s all a bit harder since people started to worry about fake news. Still, the site receives between three and five million hits per month and he’s delighted to say it has celebrity fans: “Roseanne Barr loves us … And Elijah Wood. And who’s that woman who wrote Fifty Shades of Grey?”

What was the last story he rejected? He thinks about this one for a while. “There was a story about Hillary Clinton dying in hospital and having a body double and here’s the proof ... I considered it. People like that stuff. We’d covered a lot of her illness. But it just felt a bit cheap and nasty and there was no real merit to it.”

If you believe that, I have some land in Florida I'd like to sell you.

Credulous to the Max, you are.