What Can a Multiple Sclerosis Charity Teach Us About Medical Propaganda?

Reviewing their recent unjust firing of a lifelong 90-year old volunteer in the name of "diversity, equality and inclusion."

Recently, a heart-wrenching story went viral which inadvertently revealed a great deal about the patient “advocacy” industry.

Briefly, this video focuses on Fran, a 90 year-old woman who had spent 60 years of her life continually volunteering for the national Multiple Sclerosis Society and multiple MS supports groups because her (now deceased husband) had MS and had received numerous accolades over the years for her exemplary service. Recently this 90-year-old noticed people were starting to put pronouns after their names, didn’t understand why this was being done and then asked someone to explain it to her (but was confused by the explanation(. A few days later she was notified that she needed to leave the organization because she was “not inclusive” and therefore she was violating the Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) standards of the organization.

After I heard about this, my immediate thought was “wow, that’s really mean.”

This story has gone viral, and individuals who learned of it are typically stating one or more of the following:

•The National MS Society is a reprehensible organization.

•The National MS Society’s priorities have become political rather than to help individuals with MS.

Since then, the organization chose to internally double-down on that decision and then publicly reaffirmed that decision, their president has stepped down, and its page listing the non-profit’s board of directors was also recently taken down. As best as I can tell, a large boycott is forming against the organization and this decision will ultimately cost them a lot of money.

Modern Charities

I, in turn, would like to offer a different interpretation of the events—this situation illustrates three key issues which hold true for many modern medical “charities.”

1. As organizations grow larger (e.g., the MS society is the 63rd largest charity in the USA and now takes in over 200 million dollars a year), their focus switches from their mission (e.g., helping MS) to simply protecting the institution’s interests.

Note: this applies to many large charities. For example, the pink breast cancer group, Komen (“for the Cure”), is notorious for also raising around 200 million annually, taking very questionable corporate sponsors, spending very little of their budget on cancer research or patients, and suing many other “competing” charities). Throughout my life, I’ve observed that any organization tasked with “solving a problem” will inevitably fail to solve the problem because it has an inherent conflict of interest against the problem being solved (due to the funding or political power it receives then disappearing), and sadly will instead often make it the problem worse (which in turn “necessitates” more funding to “solve” that problem). Recently, I learned from a reader one term for this dynamic is “The Shirky Principle,” and as this MS documentary shows, all of the above issues are seen in MS societies around the world (including lawsuits against anyone competing with their monopoly on eventually “curing” MS).

2. We have a national shortage of qualified individuals to fill our organizations, and as a result, “non-competitive” fields (e.g., “working for the government” or a “non-profit”) tend to be predominantly staffed with the unqualified portion of the American workforce (especially since those sectors often hire based on their diversity and political ideology rather than competency). This in turn is why you can have individuals make terrible (and trivial) decisions, but then have the entire organization circle wagons around that decision instead of rescinding it despite suffering severe consequences for doing so (e.g., consider what recently happened to Budweiser Beer).

At this point, I believe this ultimately originates from the fact our educational system has switched from being merit-based to retention-based (due to unconditional Federal student loans subsidizing otherwise unqualified students paying lots of money to go to college). Because of that, it’s made it possible for ideologically focused course work and nonsensical ideas which have no grounding in reality (e.g., post-modernism) to be able to take over the university system since neither requires the student to have intellectual competency to pass the classes and graduate (which is critical for student retention). In turn, the “intellectual” workforce has gradually become transformed into a highly politicized class whose only real “competency” is pushing their “progressive” political ideology onto everyone else.

Note: After breaking the Snowden revelations, Glenn Greenwald used his newfound fame to do what he felt was the most important thing he could do for the country—start a truly independent news outlet which would publish controversial stories no one else would touch. After a few years however, it transformed into a hyper partisan organization which censored the truth because too many of their new hires were our modern day university graduates.

Eventually Greenwald resigned in dismay from the Intercept and joined Substack, (his article about his resignation was what inspired me to write here as I agreed with his assessment Substack represented a critical direction for journalism in the United States). Since his resignation, things have worsened at the the Intercept (e.g., they’ve never discussed any the unsafe and ineffective COVID-19 “therapies” but have stated right-wing “anti-vaxxers” are killing Republicans by tricking them into not vaccinating, and written hit pieces on the “predatory” doctors who [saved lives] by prescribing repurposed drugs to COVID-19 patients).

3. Charities are often an extensions of public relations campaigns for industry.

Public Relations

One of the most important but least appreciated industries in America is Public Relations, which essentially combines marketing, propaganda, and a lot of money to find the most effective ways to influence the public.

Developed a century ago by Edward Bernays (Freud’s Nephew), this industry has proven itself to be incredibly effective at influencing the public and has transformed public policy from being dictated by what the public will support to it being a question of how much a PR firm needs to be paid to get the public behind it. In turn, we’ve had disaster after disaster befall our country (e.g., all our disastrous wars were sold to America by the PR industry) and so many of our unquestioned cultural beliefs ultimately originated from a corporation paying a PR firm to implant that belief into us.
Note: in the last decade, the internet has begun to break the PR industry’s stranglehold on Democracy, which I believe is the root source of so much of the turmoil we are seeing now as the establishment does not want to let the power their monopoly on PR gave them go. For instance, with this story, in a previous era everyone would have swept it under the rug, but due to the massive influence a single (independent) Twitter account has, it has become a publicity nightmare for the organization.

Over the years, a variety of PR techniques have been refined and then used again and again. In turn, being able to recognize those techniques completely changes your conception of reality because you start to see how so many of the things around you are PR techniques—a concept frequently analogized to a 1988 cult-classic where the protagonist acquired sunglasses that allowed him to see things for what they were (e.g., the alien overlords secretly controlling society).

One of the most classic PR tactics is hiring focus groups to determine which language most effectively persuades the audience to support their client’s agenda, and then pay the mass media to use that buzzword on almost every single (local or national) news program. Here are two illustration of how this is done by both a liberal and conservative networks:

Note: the word everyone is in that video is using, “gratuitous,” simply means unwarranted. However, were “unwarranted” to have been used (which would have made it much easier to understand), the same hypnotic pressure each of those statements had would not have existed (which is hence why people pay PR firms a lot of money to find the most emotionally manipulative language that can be identified).

Note: another frustrating illustration of this tactic is the fact that most political debates these days are each candidate just trying to blurt out as many of their sculpted phrases as possible (rather than being real and actually discussing the subject at hand).

One of the things I feel is the least appreciated about the PR industry is how effective it is—as everyone believes they are immune to it, but I’ve lost count of how many people I know who have said that but then clearly fallen for a PR campaign. For example, I believe the campaign used to sell the COVID-19 vaccine to the public was the most aggressive PR campaign I have witnessed in my lifetime. In turn, I observed many people you would have never expected to vaccinate get the shot (and often the booster). This included:

•A colleague who specialized in treating vaccine injured children and had publicly stated multiple times that they felt that it was a grave injustice the government was lying about the very real injuries which follow vaccination.

•Parents of vaccine injured children who have fought for years to get federal recognition of their injury and have campaigned against mandatory vaccination laws.

•100% organic individuals who would never consume a pharmaceutical or eat genetically modified foods.

•World experts on propaganda who could explain how the PR industry lies to people and manufactures consent (e.g., Noam Chomsky).

Note: many of the above people subsequently developed significant injuries from their COVID-19 vaccination, but only about half of them were willing to admit it was due to the vaccine. There’s a lot of ways to take this, but I just view it as an illustration of just how effective propaganda can be.

The Third-Party Technique

Long ago, the PR industry figured out that if an “independent” and “credible” voice promoted their client’s message, the majority of the audience would like to trust the message. For example, if I were to say I had discovered a single magic pill that treated all COVID vaccine injuries (or made you live for 200 years) and I tried to sell it on here for a high price, regardless of how well I pitched it, I would almost certainly be called out for being a charlatan and lose most of my readership.

However, if, instead numerous authors on here (who have built up loyal followings) were to endorse and promote my magic pill, I am relatively sure I would quickly sell a lot of them.

On the surface it seems absurd something like the imaginary story I just shared could ever happen. However, that’s actually what happens around us every single day, and a lot of money is spent on it because it works. For example:

•Prestigious “experts” are constantly run throughout a fawning media to endorse their client’s message (e.g., consider what Fauci did throughout COVID-19).
Note: when you look into these expert’s backgrounds, you inevitably find that they are taking lots of money from the corporations whose interests they are promoting.

•The mainstream media (which due to being viewed as an impartial and objective source is allowed to determine what is “credible”) takes most of its money from industry (particularly Big Pharma) and as a result, routinely squashes stories and individuals that challenge corporate interests.

•Like the mainstream media, the academic press (e.g., the medical journals we all consider to the origins of “credible” sources) takes a lot of money from industry (e.g., Big Pharma) and will only publish research which supports their sponsor’s interests (e.g, this is why the blatantly obvious COVID-19 scam was never exposed by our medical journals).
Note: the pharmaceutical industry also spends a lot of money buying off “expert” physicians in each speciality since they know its rank and file physicians will use whatever drugs those experts promote.

•Much of medical practice has shifted from a clinician following their best judgement to them being forced to follow the current “guidelines,” which in turn are made by “highly-trustable” expert committees. Remarkably when you dig into them, you find over and over that they are stacked with people who are on the pharmaceutical industry’s payroll (e.g., Fauci’s federal COVID-19 treatment committee which pushed remdesivir and blocked all the competing off-patent therapies from ever being used in America was full of people who took money from remdesivir’s manufacturer).

•Seemingly independent foundations are created that actually promote the interests of their sponsor. For example, the “non-profit” Foundation for Clean Air Progress is an industry front group that has aggressively lobbied both the public and the government for reducing the existing air quality standards mandated by the Clean Air Act.

Note a more detailed description of the third party technique can be found here.

Patient Groups

One of the classic ways the third party technique is utilized by the pharmaceutical industry is by creating patient advocacy groups, as a loyal group will:

•Draw attention to the disease, thereby creating far more customers for the disease franchise and often far more political pressure to “do something” about the disease (e.g., spend money on it). Additionally, they also often convince people who otherwise would not have though they had the disease that they have it and need treatment (especially when the franchise is first being built and no one realizes the disease is a “problem”).

•Ensure funding is made available to reduce the R&D costs for the pharmaceutical industry.

•Lobby the government to approve new drugs for the disease get approved.

•Ensure the drug is regularly sold to patients (e.g., by lobbying to get it into all the clinical practice guidelines).

•Can produce experts on demand to defend a pharmaceutical company the public (or legislators) are justifiably outraged at.

•Ensure attention is always diverted from the root causes of the disease. For example, the American Heart Association has repeatedly downplayed the risk of myocarditis from COVID vaccination and does not even mention heart attacks or strokes when discussing the risks of the COVID vaccine.

•Prevent any discussion of effective (but non-commercializable) treatments from seeing the light of day.

•Have the public become psychologically invested in the industry narrative about the disease through their donations to the charities for it.
Note: this is a commonly used tactic to get the public to comply with a draconian policy (e.g., consider how committed masking made its adherents to the lockdowns and vaccine mandates).

One of the fascinating things I observed throughout COVID-19 was that every single patient advocacy group strongly endorsed the COVID vaccines. For example, I believe headaches and migraines are one of the most common side effects of the COVID vaccines. In turn, by the time 6 months had elapsed since the vaccine came out, there were numerous discussions of severe migraines which lasted for days following COVID-19 vaccination that did not respond to medications.

At some point in those discussion, the moderator of a major online forum (reddit.com/r/migraine) decided to settle the issue by pinning a definitive article on the subject at hand from “the” authoritative source on the matter, The American Migraine Association. Their article predictably repeatedly emphasized the risk COVID-19 had of causing long term persistent headaches and stated:

Remember, the headache, even if it is slightly worse than the one from the first vaccine, is short-lasting and mild. The headaches and other vaccine side effects may make you uncomfortable for a few days. But it is a small price to pay considering that COVID-19 can be deadly or lead to long-term disability.

I then went and checked their sponsorship page, and sure enough they had extensive pharmaceutical funding.

So as I am sure you can imagine, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society (NMSS) was pretty explicit. If you have MS, you should get vaccinated for COVID no matter what.

Multiple Sclerosis and Vaccination

When the COVID-19 vaccines were released upon the public, I had expected the vaccines would have issues and cause an above average rate of autoimmunity, as there were multiple reasons their design predisposed them to having issues here—yet as leaked regulatory documents showed, this obvious risk was “never” tested for, which led me to take that as a tacit admission issues had been detected and they did not want any data to show it.

Despite these expectations however, I was not at all prepared for the deluge of autoimmune injuries I witnessed (many of which I documented here). Of those conditions, I categorized them into three general categories:

1. The most common autoimmune conditions I was seeing after COVID vaccination (e.g., myocarditis and polymyalgia rheumatica).

2. Well-known autoimmune conditions that were happening far too frequently following COVID vaccination (e.g., Guillain–Barré syndrome).

3. Highly unusual autoimmune conditions I was seeing multiple cases of after vaccination (e.g., ALS or transverse myelitis).

By far, the condition I most associated with the second category was multiple sclerosis as:

•I had multiple consults from patient who either had developed MS after a COVID vaccination, or who’d had stable MS for years that suddenly became much worse after vaccination and no longer was effectively managed with their existing meditations.

•Medical students I mentored shared that on their neurology rotations, they were seeing a concerning pattern of patients with stable MS then have it become much worse after vaccination.

I did a bit of digging and before long noticed evidence I was not the only one seeing this. For example, these were the events reports to VAERS after COVID-19 vaccination:

Note: in the entire 38 year history of VAERS, a total of 970 cases of MS have been reported to it so approximately half of them were observed after the COVID-19 vaccines hit the market.

Likewise, I saw detailed case reports of MS after vaccination begin to emerge (e.g., this paper covers five cases, while this one covers two).

While these numbers seem small, it’s important to understand that due to the existing political biases against reporting vaccine injury cases like these almost never get published, so this many existing is actually quite significant.

Note: a much more detailed discussion on vaccines and autoimmunity can be found here. That summary includes:

•The stark correlation between a spike in childhood vaccination rates and autoimmune conditions.

•The mechanisms for it with a variety of vaccines. For example, the hepatitis B vaccine has a significant overlap with myelin (overlaps are a primary cause of autoimmunity), and as one study discovered, 60% of those who received the hep B vaccine develop immune reactivity to the myelin which coats their nerves (MS in turn is a severe form of autoimmunity to myelin). As you might expect, the NMSS society denies this link.

•Why the COVID-19 vaccine design had a high risk of autoimmunity and numerous datasets which demonstrated autoimmune conditions were a frequent side effect of the injections.

What has the NMSS Accomplished?

Given that the NMSS has been around for 78 years and has received billions of dollars, it’s worth looking at what the research they’ve sponsored has accomplished. According to their website they have [I shortened this]:

•Recruited, trained and supported MS researchers.

•”Set standards in diagnosis, symptom management, pediatric MS, complementary and alternative medicine, rehabilitation and wellness research, clinical trial strategies and stem cell research.”
Note: their complementary and alternative medicine guideline page essentially dismisses all non-conventional therapies and while another goes further and actively attacks a few approaches we’ve seen completely reverse MS (along with referring patients to Quackwatch—one of the most industry biased resources on the internet). Sadly neither of them even mention many of the other therapies patients have had dramatic responses to.

•Made MS research prioritize considering gender and genetic differences.

•Helped launch the MS field of nerve and myelin repair.

•Funded pivotal findings on the role of EBV and other viral triggers of MS.
Note: they also somewhat fairly discuss Lyme disease (although unlike them I believe Lyme is frequently present in MS patients in a form which is difficult to detect and hence not normally recognized).

•Paved the way for the development of disease-modifying therapies for MS and launched a unique commercial research funding program to support the creation of new treatment strategies.
Note: as you might expect, NMSS gets a decent amount of money from the pharmaceutical industry and other corporate sponsors. Likewise, many MS patients are well aware of the fact MS societies around the world are in bed with the pharmaceutical industry.

In short, from a conventional standpoint, they’ve definitely helped the MS community as:

•The MS medications now are better than they were in the past (which makes MS not be as bad for people now, which is a big deal for people with the disease—although sadly what the existing medications can offer is nothing compared to what many of these patients need, and they often have severe side effects.

•They’ve helped create better practice guidelines which have made it possible to identify MS and to some extent stop its progression (which is often a big deal for patients—although it’s debatable how much is done here).

But at the same time, it seems a bit lackluster that nothing more has been figured out after almost a century of research—especially that the cause of MS is still not known, and in the last 50 years, on a per-person basis MS is now three times as common as it was in the past.

Note: For those interested in learning more about this subject, this is a excellent documentary video which goes into much more about the issues with the MS industry.

Conclusion

I believe groups like the NMSS have effectively transformed MS from a debilitating death sentence to a challenging but manageable chronic disease and simultaneously made a lot of money in the process (e.g., there are roughly 1 million Americans with MS and the drugs they need cost between $57,202 to $92,719 a year). That’s a big deal.

At the same time however, despite almost having almost infinite time and money to do it, the NMSS has failed to ever find their promised cure for MS. Conversely, I know of numerous effective integrative treatments for MS which have been in use for decades that are still almost completely unknown within conventional neurology and in many cases completely eliminated the disease.

Hence, when I see charities like this, I am a bit torn on exactly what position to take as I can see reasons to both support and to not support them. Presently, my view is that since there are so many charities you could support, the best “solution” to this dilemma is to identify the ones that do the best work and most need outside support (which tends to be the smaller ones which are run by volunteers who are very dedicated to their mission) rather than the large ones which have become institutions which inevitably prioritize protecting their own interests.

In turn, much in the same way I can see both the upside and the downside to these institutions, I also hold a similar position towards the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) movement. On one hand, I feel our society has had a massive problem with discrimination and that there are many who still suffer from the effects of it to this day (which is the rationale for the importance of DEI), but at the same time, I feel the push for DEI is only making things worse as it increases social divisions and almost never touches upon the root causes of the inequalities in our society.

Throughout history, one of the most common strategies the upper class has used to control the populace has been to fracture them into groups and then pit them against each other as this prevents the population from recognizing how the upper class is exploiting them or coming together to oppose it.

Since the DEI push is so at odds with reality (e.g., why would you tell people to discriminate in order to “end discrimination”), a lot of theories have been put forward to explain why it’s being done. Presently, I believe it’s designed to serve as a smoke screen so people won’t recognize how their institutions are failing them (e.g., there are so many predatory corporations which have managed to make themselves be loved by the left because of their token commitments to diversity and fighting climate change).

For example, I recently came across this advertisement about Raytheon’s partnership with the Girl Scouts of America:

This clip emphasized Raytheon’s virtue for empowering our girls and featured the remarkable line:

We desperately need an educated workforce that can create, can innovate, design, and we need to tap into that large untapped resource of girls in in America. Raytheon's vision about making the world a safer place and the Girl Scouts' vision of making the world a better place couldn't be more well suited as partners.

For context, Raytheon is a premier defense contractor who supplies many of the armaments used to kill people across the world. Since Biden’s Secretary of Defense served as a Raytheon board member during the Trump years (after he left his command under Obama), many of us correctly predicted that numerous horrific wars would be started once Biden took office to make up for lost revenue during the relatively peaceful Trump years. Since I’ve had a lot of past involvement with the Girl Scouts, I found this promotion really depressing (as did Jimmy Dore).

In short I believe, the DEI narrative essentially is being used to:

•Make the public unaware the same people promoting it are also stealing all the wealth for themselves—which, as I’ve discussed previously is probably the greatest issue of our time and the means being utilized to enslave us as once people are desperate for work, they tend to comply with whatever dictates they corporate lords give them (e.g., the deadly COVID vaccination mandates). This trend has greatly accelerated during COVID, and I saw one of the clearest illustrations of it in a recent USA Today article.

•Cause those who are being exploited the blame their problems on another demographic (e.g., those of a different race, sexuality, or religion) rather than the billionaire class.

•Cause the institutions which are failing to do their jobs to have the public’s focus be diverted away from their shortcomings (which often arise from the fact their actual priority is serving their corporate sponsors rather than advancing their stated mission).

In turn, I would argue that the recent events at the NMSS embody each of the previous, and it is my sincere hope these events can make the public aware of the critical need to rebuild our decaying institutions so that they can both help the people they serve and allow our country to remain economically competitive in an increasingly dire economic climate. I thank each of you for your support of this newsletter and providing me with the means to do my part in helping to correct the terrible direction our society is moving in.