As reported in The Epoch Times, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has launched open warfare to promote "joint action" on conspiracy theories which cause "significant harm," form "the backbone of many populist movements," and "foster and reinforce harmful thinking patterns and exclusive worldviews."
Examples cited in UNESCO's recent report include "climate change denial," "manipulation of federal [U.S.] elections," and suggestions that COVID-19 originated in a laboratory.
In labeling and discrediting "conspiratorial thinking," UNESCO illustrates a rather far-fetched "birds aren't real" theory that concludes birds are robots spying on people and the government creates replica eggs to cover it all up.
There is apparently no mention of a contemporary analogy with humans regarding whether pregnant male birds — robotic or not — can lay those eggs.
Most concerning in Alex Newman's Epoch Times article are UNESCO's Orwellian efforts to target school children.
A June summit in Brussels titled "International Symposium on Addressing Conspiracy Theories through Education" brought together participants from academia, governments, and the private sector to plan and discuss a variety of related strategies.
One priority urges teachers to engage in what the agency describes as "prebunking," or "inoculation." The UNESCO report reads that "Psychologists have proven that weakened forms of harmful information, carefully introduced and framed, can help to strengthen the resilience against wider harmful messages, much like a vaccine."
If, for example, a student expresses concerns about the COVID-19 vaccine, teachers are instructed to "state that the vaccine has been scientifically proven to be safe" and "that it is important to get vaccinated to curb the pandemic."
That vaccine analogy of official truth determinism comes at a particularly dubious time when trusted government health authorities such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have gotten some facts wrong about that very topic, such as that injections neither prevent infection nor transmission of the disease.
Nevertheless, questioning this obvious reality was being censored by many social media companies as "misinformation" merely a few months ago.
Developer of the mRNA vaccine technology Dr. Robert Malone and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., were permanently suspended from Twitter for demonstrating skepticism about the COVID-19 vaccines' safety and effectiveness.
And yes, it's also legitimately suspected that the virus was, in fact, created through gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in communist China, information that too, was blocked and censored from the U.S. and global public.
Based upon government reports, The New York Times, Washington Post, and Scientific American were among many major publication outlets that used the "conspiracy theory" term to describe any suggestion that COVID-19 was man-made.
Questioning suspicious "official" narratives is what is supposed to happen in a free society. It's not only lawful ... but also fundamentally necessary to preserve precious constitutional American liberties that are envied throughout the world.
Let's recall some other powerful reminders of why this is necessary.
Remember that absurd "conspiracy theory" that Donald Trump was being spied on throughout his presidential campaign and term of office?
We have since learned that this was entirely true.
Based upon a phony "dirty dossier" report sponsored and funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee, an FBI Crossfire Hurricane espionage operation against Trump and his associates began before he was elected and continued with tacit approval by the Obama White House long after he was sworn in.
Recall when the major mainstream and social media platforms dismissed and blocked the October 2020 New York Post headline report exposing emails on the hard drive of Hunter Biden's computer indicating that his family — including Joe — may have participated in illicit business deals in Ukraine, China, and other countries?
Immediately after the story broke, more than 50 former U.S. intelligence officials, including then-CIA Director John Brennan, signed a public letter claiming the material published by the Post from Hunter's hard drive "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian disinformation operation."
The FBI clearly knew the contents were real. It had been sitting on that knowledge since December 2019 and revealed nothing throughout the election season.
According to an August survey of 1,335 adults conducted by the New Jersey-based Techno Metrica Institute of Policy and Politics, a whopping 79% believed that Donald Trump would have been reelected for a second term had they known the laptop contents were real.
On the other side of the disinformation superhighway there's that false narrative that Trump had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election from Hillary ... charges used to impeach him after he was elected.
Not only was that conspiracy theory debunked by the Mueller report, but as former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified before the House Intelligence Committee in 2017, "I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting/conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election."
When asked if she ever saw evidence of collusion, former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice answered, "I don't recall any intelligence or evidence to that effect."
Intelligence declassified in April also suggested that Obama's CIA Director John Brennan suppressed evidence that Russia actually wanted to help Hillary Clinton "and put forward lower quality intelligence to claim the Russians backed Trump."
Last year, the Biden administration's U.S. Department of Homeland Security suggested that conspiracy theories such as widespread belief in voter fraud or alternative views on COVID-19 and public health measures represented a major terrorism threat to the United States.
There are, however, far more dangerous threats to worry about when free expression questioning official narratives is discouraged or censored by infallible "authorities" claiming to be looking after our best interests.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.