'Public Health' Fascism: A Glossary

If you're a regular fellow jewel robber here, you'll have often read my referring to those in 'public health' - and particularly the tobacco control industry racket - as fascists. Perhaps, by way of social media examples from the past day or two, I can explain why.

Carl Phillips recently drew parallels with a Twitter account parodying Kim Jong Un's North Korea.

The @DPRK_News comedy includes treating one-off problems from the news of the day as being representative of all life in Western societies. “Public health” treats transgressions by cigarette companies that occurred two generations ago, by no one who is still active today, as if they have a bearing on the quality of current research. What makes @DPRK_News particularly funny, more so than if similar jokes came from a mock Mother Jones or Rush Limbaugh feed, is the contrast between the supposed Western problem and the reality of North Korea, which is worse by most any measure. The parallel with the accusations from “public health” should be clear: A huge portion of “public health” research is utter junk science, blatantly tortured to serve their special-interest political goals, while research done by the tobacco companies is honest and consistently high quality, and has been for a few decades.

OK, you can quibble about North Korea being a fascist regime, it's communist. And everyone knows communism is the polar opposite of fascism, right? Well not really, because what do you associate with brutal dictators and fascism? I think you'd come up with the same criteria as me.

1) What we say goes

I don't think this needs much explaining when it comes to 'public health'. Whether it be smoking, drinking, sugar, vaping or anything else, the organised criminals in the state-funded finger-wagging Mafia have always decided what they want to implement and then constructed a framework of lies around it.

The public is rarely consulted, and even if we are, we are routinely ignored.

2) Propaganda

Not content with ignoring public objections, 'public health' also completely ignores proper science in favour of their own corrupt policy-based evidence-making. Trying to control the public with falsehoods to drive through whatever daft scheme they have already committed to is the first thing they teach you at 'public health' school. Here's an example from today.

The science on alcohol consumption is unequivocal and has been built up over decades. The message that moderate alcohol consumption reduces all cause mortality compared to teetotalism - which is incontrovertible - is an inconvenient thing for bansturbators and prohibitionists to work with, so instead 'public health' desperately tries to create its own narrative based on lies.

(Further reading on this concept here)

3) Monitor dissent

Any fascist regime worth its salt monitors its citizens closely in order to track dissent and control them. You can't have the public having their own opinions if they disagree with those of the regime, now can you? 'Public health' does the same, as we saw the other day.

We used a set of manually curated key phrases to analyze e-cig proponent tweets from a corpus of over one million e-cig tweets along well known e-cig themes and compared the results with those generated by regular tweeters.

Only "proponents" you notice, the lies spouted by insane e-cig denialists are perfectly hunky-dory.

Proponents also disproportionately (one to two orders of magnitude more) highlight e-cig flavors, their smoke-free and potential harm reduction aspects, and their claimed use in smoking cessation. 

Given FDA is currently in the process of proposing meaningful regulation, we believe our work demonstrates the strong potential of informatics approaches, specifically machine learning, for automated e-cig surveillance on Twitter.

If you express an opinion which differs from the narrative 'public health' wants to create, you will be monitored and reported to the authorities. "Re-education" has been a central plank of fascism since time immemorial.

4) Crush freedom of speech

Hand in hand with 3) if you are a fascist dictator, is not just to monitor your dissenting public, but also to silence the dissent you have identified. Yep, 'public health' loves to do that too. Here's an example from this week (emphases mine).

Objective: To quantify e-cigarette-related videos on YouTube, assess their content, and characterize levels of engagement with those videos. Understanding promotion and discussion of e-cigarettes on YouTube may help clarify the platform’s impact on consumer attitudes and behaviors and inform regulations. 

Conclusions: There is evidence that YouTube videos promote e-cigarettes as cigarette smoking cessation tools. Presence and reach of e-cigarette videos on YouTube warrants attention from public health professionals and policymakers.

Too many people are talking positively about vaping on social media, so the state needs to step in and censor them. And 'public health' are just the tell-tale fascists to persuade them to.

(Side note: If you're laughing at how absurd these people are, I assure you I am too. They couldn't possibly better confirm everything I've been saying on this blog for the past seven years)

5) If challenged, play the man not the ball

All dictators have their favourite way of doing this because it's vital to make sure unapproved ideas do not spread. But the aim is to ensure that resistance is either crushed or discredited, it should never - under any circumstances - be allowed to create a factual debate (see also 4) above).

Of course, this is a link to my page at the incredibly incompetent - and quite hilarious - smear site paid for out of £350k of our taxes by the now rightfully defunct Smokefree South West.

Because, as one of their own has highlighted, if you're a 'public health' careerist in a sticky situation you must always default to pretending your opponent is somehow paid.

It is, as Michael Siegel explains, Tobacco Control 101.

In the 20 years that I was a member of the tobacco control movement, I was led to believe that there were only two sides to any anti-smoking issue: our side and the tobacco industry side. Therefore, anyone who disagreed with our position had to be, in some way, affiliated with the tobacco industry. I was also taught to respond to their arguments not on any scientific grounds or on the merit of their arguments, but by simply discrediting the person by attacking their affiliation with the tobacco companies.

Moreover.

If you take part in secondhand smoke policy training in the tobacco control movement, chances are that you will be taught that all opposition to smoking bans is orchestrated by the tobacco industry, that anyone who challenges the science connecting secondhand smoke exposure and severe health effects is a paid lackey of Big Tobacco, and that any group which disseminates information challenging these health effects is a tobacco industry front group. Consequently, the chief strategy of tobacco control is to smear the opposition by accusing them of being tobacco industry moles. And in no situation should one say anything positive about an opponent, even if true.

Who is this rogue? A tobacco shill himself? Well, no. Quite the opposite, in fact.

How do I know this? 

Because for many years, I was one of the main trainers of tobacco control advocates in the United States. And this is what I taught, because this was what I was led to believe. I attended many conferences and trainings and this is precisely what I was taught. I accepted it for the truth, and passed it along to others. 

So, to recap. 'Public health' likes to present itself as some benevolent movement dedicated to improving people's lives, and if it was I would happily support it. However, it seems to have lost its way somewhat. and when it embraces and enthusiastically apes the methods of some of the most disgusting regimes in the history of mankind, I think it's perfectly fair to term 'public health' as fascist.

QED.