Funding better COVID propaganda: The Mercury Project - Part 2
Meet the real Deep State
In Part 1 of this series, I introduced the Mercury Project and contrasted its stated aims – to improve COVID-related health outcomes in 17 countries (16 of them low and middle-income) by combating “heath mis- and disinformation” that had dissuaded people from accepting a COVID-19 injection – with the reality on the ground. That reality is simply that the countries with the highest uptake of COVID jabs generally have the highest COVID-attributed death rates and the highest excess mortality, and conversely those countries whose populations largely rejected the jabs are doing the best on both counts.
Given that the entire raison d’etre of the Mercury Project is self-evidently fallacious, you may be asking yourself how, and why, it has managed to attract over US$30 million in funding, and snare some big-name researchers including Angela Duckworth of Grit fame and Katy Milkman, host of the behavioural economics podcast ‘Choiceology’ and author of several popular books on behaviour change.
(You’ll be pleased to know that these celebrity researchers are going to lend their talents to persuading more Americans to accept boosters that have negative efficacy – that is, they increase the risk of infection – against the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2. Nice work!)
To answer those ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions, we need to delve into the history of the organisations behind the Mercury Project. As you’ll remember from Part 1, the project was initiated by the Social Science Research Council, with seed funding by the Rockefeller Foundation ($7.5 million), Robert Wood Johnson Foundation ($2 million), Craig Newmark Philanthropies ($500K), followed by a $250K grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and US$20 million from the National Science Foundation.
In this post, we’ll delve into the Social Science Research Council and the Rockefeller Foundation. Part 3 will examine the remaining foundations.
The Social Science Research Council
This is how the Social Science Research Council describes its history and mission:
“The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) is an independent, international, nonprofit organization founded in 1923. It fosters innovative research, nurtures new generations of social scientists, deepens how inquiry is practiced within and across disciplines, and mobilizes necessary knowledge on important public issues…
For nearly 100 years the Social Science Research Council has coordinated the research, policy, and philanthropic communities in the pursuit of evidence-based policies to promote human well-being, emerging as both a pivotal force in the academy and a respected contributor to the public good. The SSRC is guided by the belief that justice, prosperity, and democracy all require better understanding of complex social, cultural, economic, and political processes. We work with practitioners, policymakers, and academic researchers in the social sciences, natural sciences, humanities, and related professions. We build interdisciplinary and international networks, working with partners around the world to link research to practice and policy, strengthen individual and institutional capacities for learning, and enhance public access to information.”
But the real story is rather more complicated – and much less benign. In reality, the SSRC itself was established by tax exempt foundations, for the purpose of steering the development of the social sciences – that is, psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, political science, history and statistics – in a direction which supported the financial, social and political objectives of the robber barons who established them.
The 1915 report of the Walsh Commission on Industrial Relations had excoriated the tax exempt foundations, particularly the Rockefeller Foundation, for using its vast wealth to mould public policy to its founders’ financial interests, whilst being “subject to no public control”:
“The entrance of the foundations into the field of industrial relations, through the creation of a special division by the Rockefeller Foundation, constitutes a menace to the national welfare to which the attention not only of Congress but of the entire country should be directed. Backed by the $100,000,000 of the Rockefeller Foundation, this movement has the power to influence the entire country in the determination of its most vital policy…
The so-called ‘investigation of industrial relations’ has not, as is claimed, either a scientific or a social basis, but originated to promote the industrial interests of Mr. Rockefeller.”
Final Report of the Commission on Industrial Relations, p. 121
As a consequence, the foundations established “academic holding companies” such as the SSRC and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), in order to launder their agenda-shaping research funding through ostensibly independent bodies which were, in reality, anything but:
“The ACLS and SSRC were formed in 1919 and 1923 respectively, and between 1925 and 1960 the former organization received US$20 million from foundations (60 per cent of which came from the big three [the Rockefeller, Carnegie and Ford Foundations]), and from 1925 to 1960 the SSRC received US$28 million (95 percent of which was funnelled to them by the big three).”
The agenda of the SSRC was laid bare by Norman Dodd, in his 1954 report to the Special Committee of the House of Representatives to Investigate Tax Exempt Foundations, which became known as the Reece Committee. Referring to the complex web of associations, societies and councils established and maintained by the largesse of the tax exempt foundations, Dodd concluded:
“The broad study which called our attention to the activities of these organizations has revealed not only their support by Foundations but has disclosed a degree of cooperation between them which they have referred to as ‘an interlock’, thus indicating a concentration of influence and power. By this phrase they indicate they are bound by a common interest rather than a dependency upon a single source for capital funds. It is difficult to study their relationship without confirming this. Likewise, it is difficult to avoid the feeling that their common interest has led them to cooperate closely with one another and that this common interest lies in the planning and control of certain aspects of American life through a combination of the Federal Government and education.
This may explain why the Foundations have played such an active role in the promotion of the social sciences, why they have favored so strongly the employment of social scientists by the Federal Government and why they seem to have used their influence to transform education into an instrument for social change…
In summary, our study of these entities and their relationship to each other seems to warrant the inference that they constitute a highly efficient, functioning whole. Its product is apparently an educational curriculum designed to indoctrinate the American student from matriculation to the consummation of his education. It contrasts sharply with the freedom of the individual as the cornerstone of our social structure. For this freedom, it seems to substitute the group, the will of the majority, and a centralized power to enforce this will—presumably in the interest of all. Its development and production seems to have been largely the work of those organizations engaged in research, such as the Social Science Research Council and the National Research Council.”
Dodd Report to the Reece Committee on Foundations, pp. 10-11
You can watch G. Edward Griffin’s interview with Norman Dodd on his investigation of the tax exempt foundations, and his disturbing conclusions, here:
Historian Dorothy Ross, in her 1991 book The Origins of American Social Science, crisply summed up the role of the SSRC as handmaiden to the agenda of the tax exempt foundations:
“By 1923 the formation of the Social Science Research Council and the Rockefeller largesse had… plunged the [sociological] profession wholesale into empirical research, from which they hoped a basic science of social control would emerge [my emphasis].”
Fostering collectivism. Centralising power. Harnessing the scientific enterprise in service of crony capitalism, to engender social control. That’s what the SSRC is all about, not “promot[ing] human well-being” as their boilerplated mission statement would have you believe.
Is it any surprise, then, that the SSRC unabashedly heads the page on which it lists the sub-projects on which Mercury Project grantees will be beavering away, as follows:
(Because nothing screams “essential health services” like the use of applied behavioural science to manipulate people who don’t want them, into taking them up.)
The Rockefeller Foundation
The strategic use of the tax exempt foundation was pioneered by industrial robber barons who made their vast fortunes – but squandered their social capital – in the nineteenth century, by seizing control over natural resources, engaging in anti-competitive business practices, buying the influence of elected officials, ruthlessly exploiting labour, and fleecing unsuspecting investors.
Railroad and steel magnate Andrew Carnegie was the first to grasp the utility of the tax exempt foundation as a vehicle for perpetuating the crony capitalism that had facilitated his accumulation of unfathomable wealth, whilst dodging income and inheritance taxes, and replacing his tarnished public image as a ruthless monopolist with that of a civic-minded philanthropist.
As James Corbett explains in his documentary How Big Oil Conquered the World, which is a must-watch for anyone interested in the subversion of the founding principles of the United States by the tax exempt foundations, and the ripple effect this has had on every other nation,
“In 1905, he established the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, a tax-free foundation through which Carnegie and his appointees could direct the development of the education system in the United States, and, eventually, worldwide.”
Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller quickly cottoned on to the multidimensional utility of the tax exempt foundation as a tool for reshaping humanity to serve his vision, while preserving his vast wealth for his descendants. After an initial charter application was withdrawn due to an ongoing antitrust suit against Standard Oil, and deep public misgivings about how the reviled robber baron intended to spend his massive endowment, the Rockefeller Foundation was finally chartered in 1913.
Under the chairmanship of John D. Rockefeller II, the foundation rapidly inserted itself into moulding virtually every field of human endeavour into a form more to its liking. It lavishly funded research and reform projects in education, medicine, social science and the natural sciences, both through direct grants and the maze of ostensibly independent organisations such as the Social Science Research Council, which were established by the tax exempt foundations to deflect public attention from their agenda-shaping activities.
And the public was right to be suspicious of the Rockefeller Foundation’s intentions. As Norman Dodd concluded, the tax exempt foundations – in particular, the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations – had used their colossal endowments to “finance ideas and practices incompatible with the fundamental concepts of [the US] Constitution”.
Of all those “ideas and practices”, the most reprehensible was eugenics.
The pseudoscience of eugenics (derived from the Greek word eugenes, meaning “good in birth” or “good in stock”) was developed by Francis Galton, who was Charles Darwin’s first cousin. (The full title of Darwin’s seminal work, which is usually referred to simply as On the Origin of Species, is On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.)
Galton defined eugenics as “the science of improving inherited stock, not only by judicious matings, but by all the influences which give more suitable strains a better chance.” Galton’s intentions for the application of eugenics were not subtle: “to give the more suitable races… a better chance of prevailing over the less suitable.”
Eugenics quickly became popular among the British upper crust. According to eugenics, both wealth and poverty were passed through the “germ plasm”; hence the ruling classes were wealthy and powerful despite their lack of productive labour because of their innate superiority, whilst the masses who toiled in the farms and factories could never escape their position at the bottom of the socioeconomic heap because of their inherited inferiority. Not only need the idle rich suffer no ethical qualms about their unearned privilege, they were actually morally obliged to ensure that the poor continued to be starved and oppressed, to dissuade them from “breeding” and hence threatening the purity of the racial stock.
Galton’s ugly and scientifically baseless ideas quickly leapt across the Atlantic and caught on in progressive circles. As described by Edwin Black in his 2003 book War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, they found an enthusiastic adherent in John D. Rockefeller. Rockefeller ploughed the equivalent in today’s terms of $100 million into the Eugenics Record Office in its first two years of existence.
The first mission of the Eugenics Record Office, as Black recounts, was
“To identify the most defective and undesirable Americans, estimated to be at least 10 percent of the population. This 10 percent was sometimes nicknamed the ‘submerged tenth’ or the lower tenth. At the time, this amounted to millions of Americans. When found, they would be subjected to appropriate eugenic remedies to terminate their bloodlines. Various remedies were debated, but the leading solutions were compulsory segregation and forced sterilization.”
War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, p. 52
This was no idle talk. By 1937, 32 US states had passed laws authorising forcible sterilisation of individuals – and in many cases, entire families – who were judged by authorities to be unfit to procreate. As many as 70 000 Americans were involuntarily sterilised under these laws, most of them poor, black, Mexican or of other “undesirable” racial background.
John D. Rockefeller Jr shared his father’s penchant for eugenics. He lavishly funded the transplantation of American eugenics into Germany, establishing the complex of twenty-plus Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes as the pre-eminent centre of German race biology. One of the recipients of Rockefeller largesse was Ernst Rüdin.
Rüdin went on to become the architect of Adolf Hitler’s program of systematic medical repression, which began in 1934 with at least 56 000 forced sterilisations, disproportionately targeting German Jews, Gypsies and others who did not conform to the standards of racial purity that Hitler had imbibed from the American eugenicists. It escalated into a euthanasia program that murdered up to 100 000 Germans who were deemed too old, mentally or physically disabled to be useful, along with barbarous medical experiments that tortured and killed thousands of inmates of concentration camps and prisoners of war.
The post-war revelation of Nazi atrocities, committed in the name of racial purification, drove the eugenics movement underground. It resurfaced as population control, which the Rockefeller Foundation zealously backed. Rockefeller funding was lavished on Planned Parenthood, an organisation which continues to this day the mission of its founder, the avowed racist eugenicist Margaret Sanger, by positioning 79 percent of its surgical abortion facilities within walking distance of black or Hispanic communities. John D. Rockefeller III founded the Population Council, which focuses on reducing birth rates in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, primarily by supplying long-acting contraceptives.
And, as science historian Lily Kay relates in her 1993 book The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the rise of the new biology, the discredited pseudoscience of intentional human breeding for enhanced social control was edged out by molecular biology, which received extensive Rockefeller funding. However, as with eugenics, molecular biology did not spontaneously “evolve” as new scientific discoveries emerged, but instead was systematically moulded by key scientists and the foundations that supported them, who directed the development of biological research toward a preconceived vision of science and society:
“Animated by a potent conjunction of Protestant values and technocratic visions, the [Rockefeller] Foundation’s civic missions were formulated within the dominant cultural categories of race, class, and gender, as well as within a socioeconomic framework that defined norm and deviance for individuals and groups. The Rockefeller philanthropies cultivated scientific and managerial elites in order to address the root causes of social dysfunction: culturally specific and historically contingent forms of maladjustment. Their projects aimed to restructure human relations and to develop social technologies commensurate with the material and ideological imperatives of industrial capitalism.”
The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the rise of the new biology, p. 10
Understand, then, that when the Rockefeller Foundation funds the Social Science Research Council to investigate the phenomenon of “vaccine hesitancy”, or hosts a scenario planning exercise which envisions a world-wide authoritarian response to a respiratory viral outbreak (complete with effusive praise for “the Chinese government’s quick imposition and enforcement of mandatory quarantine for all citizens” and collapse of global supply chains), or funnels $500K into the development and promotion of a “digital health app that you can use to present proof that you were vaccinated or tested negative for COVID-19”, or formulates and markets a National Covid-19 Testing & Tracing Action Plan that insists that normal life can only resume if the population submits itself to unreliable tests and utterly pointless contact tracing strategies, or sinks $20 million into increasing COVID-19 injection rates in US “communities of colour”, they’re not doing it because they love you.
They’re doing it because they are convinced that not only do they know better than you, how you should live your life, but that they have the right to impose their technocratic, collectivist solution on you, whether you like it or not. The bevies of scientists-for-hire who accept their grant funding apparently agree, because – unlike them – you are plainly too stupid, ignorant and selfish to make the “right” decision for your own sake and that of the collective good.
And who defines that collective good, you ask?
At the very end of his interview with Norman Dodd, G. Edward Griffin questioned the veteran investigator, “Why do the foundations generously support communist causes in the United States?” (As Griffin later explained, the word “collectivist” is a better description of these causes than “communist”.)
Dodd replied, “Well, because to them, communism represents a means of developing what we call a monopoly. That is the organisation, we’ll say, of large scale industry into an administerable unit.”
Griffin responded, “Do they think that they will be one of the administrators?”
And Dodd replied, “They will be the beneficiaries of it, yes.”
Those who hold the reins of power, set the agenda and as George Carlin trenchantly observed, it’s a big club, and you ain’t it:
We'll dig into the history and agenda of the remaining donors to the Mercury Project, in Part 3.
The more I read about these things the more anti-vaccine I become.
Another beauty, thanks Robyn.
Here's the Empowered comment section ridiculousness :)
Handouts are coming!
Following decades of successful inflationary theft by fiat currencies, The Deep State has announced plans to replicate the model in other areas. Here are some excerpts from their report, entitled “Spending the next generation’s equity on yourself”
Education
“....In education, we are tired of providing a set number of hours to each child. The new model will allocate 6 hours of schooling per day to each child redeemable as coupons, but we will then print 6 additional hours of schooling coupons per child, and we will give most of them to state schools, and some of them to existing students as ‘school hour’ handouts. This will create the illusion of extra hours of schooling, but in reality, the public schools will now be using their additional coupons to take lunch breaks, effectively halving contact teaching hours.”
Roads
“...Full credit goes to our roads and motorways team for finding creative solutions. After spending taxpayer money to build the roads, then making taxpayers pay for them again via privately owned tolls, then making them pay again via vehicle registration fees, fuel taxes and subsidies to private construction companies, then making them pay again with exorbitant fines, parking fees and regular inefficient repairworks, it seemed like we had reached a limit of enriching ourselves at the expense of citizens. However our roads team has introduced ‘carbon social credits’ for all transport, which will allow us to transfer inflationary theft even to something as simple as using a footpath.”
First home subsidies
“...We were able to shut down small and medium businesses for two years, which really hid the 30% extra cash we printed and gave to ourselves. Unfortunately, Asset Inflation is a bit harder to sweep under the rug. Since we also decreased overall GDP, we now have poorer citizens with less purchasing power, trying to buy more expensive assets. We don’t want them to know that these assets are already promised to our multinational political donors, so we have raised the first home owners grant to $10,000.
It takes a little to understand just how this helps the average citizen, so let’s use an example.
Pre-covid, Johnny had a 20% deposit saved ($100,000) to buy a $500,000 home. We locked him up and stopped him from working, so he couldn’t get into the market so easily. This allowed us time to print 33% more currency and increase national debt by hundreds of billions. The increased currency pushed the home price up to $650,000 and the extra debt ensured variable home loan rates would go up.
Johnny now does not have enough deposit to buy the same home, and is liable to get upset. To avoid this, we offer him a $10,000 first home subsidy. This is just enough to keep Johhny working, but not enough that he attempts to make a purchase of the asset, which would push up the price and annoy our Chinese Communist Party/Great Reset Partners. Johnny will continue to get raises of 5-10% each year, but will never be able to match our asset inflation figures of 12-20%, and the high variable interest rates will further encourage the gap between wealthy and poor to widen. Johnny will choose to rent, and obviously, will be happier owning nothing. Meanwhile, we can spend the cash we printed and gave to ourselves in the short term to continue buying assets, and use the upcoming hyperinflation food, job and housing shortages to push through a central bank digital currency to replace the now worthless old currency.”
Did you hear that people, get ready for bread and circuses, or at least circuses. Hurrah!