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Omidyar is also the founder of First Look Media, the parent company of the online news site The Intercept.
Intercept cofounder Glenn Greenwald, who led the NSA reporting for a Pulitzer for the Guardian, shares a seat at the FPF table with his subject, Snowden.
Julian Assange did not hide the apparent falling out with FPF over its subsequent abandonment of WikiLeaks, likening the board to rats on social media.
The Soros Economic Development Fund (SEDF), Omidyar Network, and Google.org partnered on a $17 million-dollar Investment Company for startups. Even Facebook co-founder and critic Chris Hughes joined their elite philanthropic ranks, with a $10 million “anti-monopoly fund,” backed by Soros and Omidyar.
Having involvement with prior color revolutions throughout the decades in other countries, Soros and Open Society funding is currently linked to organizations that include Antifa and Black Lives Matter.
This is just one but a significant example of a cursory dig into the tangled web of economic pressure and influence over ‘alternative’ media and even more alarming, popular whistleblower platforms — an illustration of the potential avenues for exploitation, astroturfing and costly honeypots.
These influencers contribute towards the management of information. Even leaked or declassified information is subject to selective release and ad hoc redaction across all platforms, including usurpers within our own three letter agencies.
YEAR OF THE RAT
The year began with harrowing social media scenes of mosh-pit waiting rooms and citizens lining the roads outside of Chinese hospitals. We saw ghost towns, trucks full of body bags, incinerators working overtime and people barricaded into their homes as agents wearing white HAZMAT coveralls forced others into unmarked vans.
Managing to escape the heavily censored Chinese bandwidth, recordings of distressed citizens flooded Twitter. Facing an impending pandemic of disease and starvation, they risked everything to send out these messages — to warn the world of what was coming.
Avid researchers feverishly refreshed Johns Hopkins’ Resident Evil-styled dashboard1 as it ticked up the recovered and dead at a remarkable rate of 50% according to China’s initial reporting.
It looked bad. Doomsday bad.
The next day after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the novel coronavirus a Public Health Emergency of International Concern2 and reiterated Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’s warning against limiting travel and trade913, the State Department began the process of imposing the highest global level travel advisories on coronavirus hotspots.3
The Trump administration’s task force artfully navigated the move as ‘complementary’ to WHO’s announcement. It wasn’t complementary. It was in direct defiance.
Some of the more inquisitive reporters challenged the WHO on China’s response and absence of adequate personal protective equipment (PPE). The WHO had some interesting answers.
Director of the Pandemic and Epidemic Diseases Department Sylvie Briand said that trained health professionals would get too cocky if they had PPE — that they would forget to wash their hands.13
The Executive Director of WHO's Health Emergencies Michael Ryan topped that with a metaphor — giving frontline healthcare workers the PPE they need would be akin to burdening a novice with scuba equipment and telling them to go jump into the ocean.13
It was clear the WHO were shamelessly running PR for China.
The White House established the Coronavirus Task Force and held lengthy daily press briefings in collaboration with the NIH and CDC, culminating in the 15 Day Plan to Slow the Spread, then 30 Days to Slow the Spread, then a phased plan to open up, followed by the infamous ‘second wave.’
The nation entered summer with ‘illegal’ haircuts, banned worship, mandatory masks, sand-filled skate parks, Interstate checkpoints, and shutdown shorelines and beaches.
The Navy hospital ships, Mercy and Comfort embarked battle. Makeshift field hospitals were constructed in parks and convention centers. The National Guard was deployed. Distilleries repurposed their outfits to produce hand sanitizer. Ford turned out face shields, respirators and facemasks. It was mass mobilization against an invisible enemy — a whole-of-nation effort.