How the Chronicle Invented AIDS
by George Trinkaus
Playboy: Do you think there is a sexual revolution going on in this country?Mel Brooks: Yes, I do think there is a sexual revolution going on, and I think that with our current foreign policy, we'll probably be sending troops in there any minute to break it up.
-- Playboy interview, 1966
The San Francisco Chronicle has run more AIDS stories than any other U.S. newspaper, up to 460 in a single year. That's why the Chronicle makes a perfect case study for mass-media AIDS. Is AIDS a disease or a media campaign? What is its true agenda? The Chronicle continues to grind out the old propaganda while ignoring the global scientific revolt against orthodox AIDS that's been boiling for a decade. Written by a media skeptic with 25 years in publishing, this is a review of the forgotten early years of mass-media AIDS as seen through the headlines of a typical big-city U.S. daily. How so-called AIDS has put the fear back in sex. How the early campaign climaxed in the shameless exploitation by the Chronicle and the rest of the death of actor Rock Hudson.
How the Chronicle Invented AIDS
Copyright © 1998, 2000, 2001
by George B.Trinkaus
All rights reserved for any
commercial use.
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This is a review of AIDS headlines in the San Francisco Chronicle from 1981 to 1986. Effective public criticism of AIDS, now a decade old if you date it from Dr. Peter Duesberg's speaking out in 1987, has focused almost entirely on the dubious science. My focus here is on the dubious media.
The scientific critique that has been developed demonstrates beyond any doubt, as far as this writer is concerned, that AIDS has no substance in science, no empirical foundation that can be established in a laboratory. You won't read about it in the Chronicle, but there is a worldwide movement whose purpose is to tear to shreds a tenacious, oppressive, and scientifically in-supportable myth called AIDS. The Chronicle won't tell you. Dan Rather won't tell you. To the contrary, their devotion is to the promotion of the myth. Congress has not aired the resistance. To the contrary, it funds those that promote the myth, including any plausible scientific research that does not question the myth and educational programs at all levels of the public school system. But the official silence notwithstanding, a movement there is. Its manifestations include: organized resistance among scientists; a proliferating network of regularly convening dissident organizations; an anti-red-ribbon campaign; internet activity that includes one site spanning over 500 pages; and a veritable library of dissident AIDS literature that has built up over the last decade. (See "for more information" at end of article).
Among the dissidents there is an emerging consensus that (1) the definition of AIDS is worthless, (2) HIV is a phony, and (3) the deaths result not from any virus but from the "cure."
You've never heard of any of this? Not surprising, considering the relentless intensity of AIDS' triumphant propaganda.
Though many had their doubts from day one, it was the questioning of the theory of HIV that put the anti-AIDS resistance movement into gear. A front-page news story that never made it into the likes of the Chronicle is that the HIV theory has flunked its peer review. Actually, HIV has become an embarrassment in certain sectors of medicine. For example, innocent researchers studying some aspect of AIDS have wanted, as a matter of scientific discipline, to give their papers foundation by citing in footnotes some routine documentation supporting the HIV theory. But, however they persisted, they were unable to find any such documentation.
Nobody has reported isolating the virus. Nobody has reported cultivating the organism out of the tissue of any of AIDS' presumed victims. And nobody has reported that the virus has been planted into healthy tissue with the result of producing the symptoms. Thus HIV flunks that time-honored etiological test called Koch's Postulate.
In fact, there is not even scientific agreement that the elusive retrovirus called HIV even exists, for when it is "identified," it is only by an inference made from the presence of proteins presumed to be "markers" presumed to be associated with the presumed virus.
The web of AIDS is flimsy. Touch it at any spot, and it falls apart.
the test: bizarre rules
The HIV Test, it turns out, is not a test for the virus at all but for antibodies to HIV (or, rather, for markers presumed to be associated with the presumed antibodies). You thought that if your immune system made antibodies to a disease this was a healthy sign? Not under the bizarre rules of AIDS where antibody detection means you flunk. And whether you pass or flunk depends on what lab runs your test and on what day. Among the swelling ranks of AIDS dissidents are many whose experience with conflicting HIV test results has led to their asking questions that embarrassed AIDS doctors were at a loss to answer.
When Dr. Duesberg, an award-winning biochemist, who had specialized in retroviruses (and who had even been a co-worker with HIV inventor Robert Gallo at the National Cancer Institute), called HIV a phony and managed to publish this heresy in a reputable medical journal, it threw the government into a panic. (See federal memo.)
The biggest scandal of AIDS is the "therapy," which is poison. The drug traditionally mandated for the unfortunate AIDS diagnosee, even in the absence of symptoms, even for pregnant women and even for infants, is AZT. This chemical is technically a DNA chain terminator; it does its killing of healthy immune cells such as in bone marrow deep down at the structural DNA level. Rejected long ago by the cancer industry as too toxic even for them (there is a skull and crossbones on the bottle), AZT was resurrected especially for the AIDS emergency. Says Duesberg, "AZT is AIDS by prescription."
It has been argued by some AIDS doubters like Robert Strecker, Alan Cantwell, and Leonard Horowitz that HIV is real and that it has been deliberately bio-engineered as a depopulation agent. In fact, proponents of this idea have uncovered government documents suggesting just such a project. But the big technical problem with biological warfare agents is how to deliver them to their target populations. Isn't it far more elegant to media-brainwash the targets so they voluntarily come to the doctors of death, take their AZT and die? Iatrogenic AIDS is a chemical warfare abetted by a psychological warfare conducted through media like the Chron.
iatrogenics
"Iatrogenic" is a term of long standing in the medical lexicon. It means doctor-caused. AIDS is the Iatrogenic Epidemic.
Geographically AIDS is always where the doctors are. That accounts for its predominantly urban demographic.
But what about the new protease-inhibitor cocktails promoted by the Chronicle and the rest as a breakthrough? "There will be a massive protease-inhibitor die-off," predicts prominent AIDS dissident David Rasnick who holds patents in the very biochemistry on which the protease inhibitors are based. Says Duesberg: "It's like adding cyanide to arsenic."
As the die-off begins to happen, it is blamed on a smart, mutating HIV. More research is needed, more funding. Round and round goes the deadly bureaucratic game of AIDS' fraudulent science.
But if AIDS has no substance in science, no empirical foundation, then what is it?
From the point of view of the scientific critique, AIDS might be viewed as a disease, but, from the perspective of a media critique, one is tempted to perceive it as a campaign. Whatever the origins of this campaign (corporate, governmental, medical), it could not have been successfully conducted without the central participation of the propaganda machinery we politely refer to as the mass media. Am I daring to say that without mass media like the San Francisco Chronicle AIDS would not exist? Yes.
Given the sweep of mass-media participation in the promotion of the AIDS hysteria, why do I pick on the poor old Chronicle? Most of the media, print or electronic, is editorially dominated by a handful of major city daily newspapers, the most powerful of which, of course, are the New York Times and the Washington Post. But, if you go into the newspaper indexes and count the entries, the winner among daily newspapers in articles run on AIDS, fraudulent AIDS, is the San Francisco Chronicle. For example, in one pivotal year in the campaign, 1984, the New York Times ran 67 articles on AIDS and the Chronicle ran 191.
In 1985 the Times is seen creeping up on the Chronicle, publishing 380 articles to the Chronicle's 404. However, throughout the period, the Times' frequency never quite catches up with that of the Chronicle. Appreciate that the Chronicle, at the peak of our study period, was publishing to the city of the gay Mecca, to Northern California, and to the world, stories promoting the existence of a new homosexual disease at a rate of better than one a day.
Concurrent with HIV-AIDS is an epidemic of germ-scare imagery in the media: mad-cow, e-bola, hepatitis C, encephalitis in the news enriched by all the mass-disease movie scenarios and CB-warfare terrorism scares. The receptive media victims become nervous and intimacy-avoiding, exactly the psychological effects the divide-and-conquer propagandists desire.
statistical deception
In the final year of our study period, 1986, the year by which the myth of AIDS had been firmly planted in the consciousness of its readers, the Chron's annual AIDS-story total soared to 460. But even by 1986, all the scare propaganda notwithstanding, there were still only 20,000 recorded cases of so-called AIDS. This was a cumulative count of total cases since 1981, the year AIDS was invented. Among the anomalies of AIDS is that it is the only disease statistically reported in terms of a cumulative total. For all other diseases the case count is annual. The cancer cases reported that year totaled 480,000, just for that year, but this was not considered newsworthy. When diseases in this period are ranked statistically, AIDS is insignificant. The Statistical Abstract of the United States, published annually by the feds, gives a listing by frequency of all diseases reported for the year. Up through 1986 AIDS did not even rate an entry.
definition worthless
The 20,000 cases themselves, in as much as this statistic can be believed, were rounded up under a nebulous definition that cast a wide net. The definition, as constructed by the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC), is revised periodically to meet the exigencies of maintaining the delusion called AIDS.
CDC Proposes Changes In Definition of AIDS
--Chronicle 12/12/86
An early definition of AIDS went like this: "Any condition at least moderately predictive of a defect in cell-mediated immunity among high-risk groups." That's an awfully loose definition given the grim impact of an AIDS diagnosis. Suppose you were convicted of a crime simply because you were a member of a high-risk group and it was only moderately predictive that you did it?
Back in 1981 when a CDC research group went "into the streets," as they liked to call it, looking for some cases, they found some gays with perianal ulcer, herpes, candida growths, thrush, and a toxic condition of the nervous system. All of these they unabashedly identified as the gay disease that later came to be called AIDS. The official definition of AIDS has developed into a bureaucratic construct so expansive and convoluted that today the CDC must publish it in a book-size volume. AIDS, as now defined, embraces no fewer than 30 diseases, most of which have been described in the medical literature for decades. For example, cervical cancer can enable an AIDS diagnosis. (Essays have been written on the alliance of cancer and AIDS. They are industries that interlink. With AIDS, like cancer, the cure is always just around the corner but somehow never comes.)
Linguistically, one would think that, in order to introduce a brand new term into the medical lexicon, certain criteria of specificity and exclusivity would have to be met, even in the case of the new and fashionable "syndromes." For example, if a researcher were to suggest a term so broad and general that it embraced a number of other terms on the same level of specificity, then that term would likely be criticized by his peers and deemed less than useful. The peers might appreciate, as a matter of scientific housekeeping, that to employ such a term in discourse could only pollute the inquiry, and so principle would argue that the term, and the concept that went with it, be banned from the lexicon. This might have happened to a 15th-rate idea called AIDS had it not been snapped up by the media and made famous and lucrative.
Later, HIV would be introduced in a manner contrary to all the rules of scientific housekeeping. The HIV theory never had an opportunity for peer review in the journals, etc. Its inventor (Gallo), who occupied a lofty post in the federal health bureaucracy, simply had his assistant (Gelman) announce at a conference of virologists that his pet retrovirus was, conclusively, the cause of so-called AIDS. The conferees, recognizing that the jackboot of governmental scientific authority was slamming down on all inquiry, responded with boos. But thereafter the cause of AIDS was a closed matter, and the federal-grant largesse would flow in only one direction.
Although a responsible scientific inquiry into today's extensive immune-system erosion may be appropriate, especially if conducted with an eye to environmental and pharmaceutical impacts, AIDS as an analytical category has been rendered worthless.
So lexically irresponsible is "AIDS" that we best avoid using the term with a straight face, lest we continue to pollute the inquiry. Responsible discourse requires that we resort to constructions like "so-called AIDS."
In 1996, the Chronicle ran 150 stories on so-called AIDS. This, apparently, is the frequency thought necessary to maintain the brainwash.
.
religiously correct
Most organized religions have embraced AIDS, have echoed its propaganda from their pulpits, and have pushed forward its campaign. In secular society, AIDS replaces the church as a moral force. In church society, AIDS is used to reinforce moral traditions, But would moral faith more soundly based need such synthetic scares? The AIDS scare has overshadowed moral perspective and dialog on matters of intimacy and sex. The more vacuous a religion, the more it must invoke the specter of AIDS.
AIDS itself has become a sort of religion. It can become a religious exercise in tenacious belief, where knowing is sacrificed to believing and raising questions is taboo.
inquisition
AIDS takes place in an inquisitional context. The TV news dependably serves up the Sex Criminal of the Week. Any celebrity is at risk for being used as grist for the insatiable mill of the new sex inquisition. Any public official is fair game. Sexual nonconformity will be sought out, accusers brought forward. The suspect, privacy rights suspended, is exposed to the cruel light of publicity. Of all the presidential crimes Clinton might have been exposed for, the new inquisitors elected to scandalize his comparatively petty sexual deviations. (Interesting synchronicity that, in the inquisition of the Middle Ages, the most notorious judicial body was called the Star Chamber.) Presidential incumbents of the past were discreetly permitted privacy in matters of sex, but Clinton was used by the inquisitional media to put the citizenry on notice that no one's privacy will be respected. For the common citizen there is the Oprah-style format on the TV with its accusers, the confessors, and the selected studio-audience participants whose role is to stone verbally the deviate, and always the judicial presence of the psycho-babbling almighty counselor to enunciate the norms.
politically correct
Our headline-study period embraces the years in which an official truth was established. It took, at the outside, only five years to spin, as we shall see, out of thin air, a mythological viral sex plague in which an entire nation and much of the entire planet place their belief as if it were an em- pirically supportable reality.
Orthodox, inquisitional AIDS is sacred, and to question its authority is an heretical act. Before the specter of AIDS, the usual voices of dissent have fallen silent. Along with the forces of mass media and organized medicine, the AIDS campaign is driven by the force of massive governmental and corporate funding that has spawned 92,000 AIDS organizations to beat on the drum so that even the usually dissident constituencies that one would expect to rebel have been seduced into a consensus that AIDS is politically correct. In some circles, AIDS is downright chic. (That 92,000 figure in not an hyperbole but an actual count, so profusely flows the governmental and corporate largesse.)
It is acceptable, even on the radical left, to take orthodox AIDS right off the newswires at face value. The same leftist publications and Pacifica radio stations which are in open disdain of the World Bank, IMF, and WTO will intone with respect in their news columns and broadcasts trumped-up scare statistics (African, Indian, Thai, etc.) from press releases straight from the flackmen at UNAIDS and WHO.
The outspoken heretic can encounter a violent refusal. (Question AIDS: make new enemies; lose old friends.) This may be because people just don't want to accept that the citizenry can be duped on such a scale. It's too pathetic a truth to swallow, this Orwellian political catastrophe in which we live.
By what ingenuities can one conduct a counter-propaganda against such a force? What a challenge!
censorship
"Without censorship propaganda is impossible," wrote journalist Walter Lippman. This was back in 1922 when a few insiders published on their craft with surprising candor. "In order to conduct a propaganda, there must be some barrier between the public and the event," continues Lippman. "Access to the real environment must be limited before anybody can create a pseudoenvironment."
Never mind the manifest censorship of the Chron and the rest. Some unlikely media are protecting the "pseudoenvironment" of AIDS, alternative media whose vigilance we depend upon.
KPFK, the Pacifica FM in L.A., is one peculiar entity. Roy Tuchman, host of "After Midnight" on that station has run for many years a regular series called "AIDSgate," hundreds of hours of lively interviews with all the dissidents. But elsewhere on KPFK there has been no deviation from the official line. The same with Pacifica news and even the alternative-alternative news on stations in the network lately boycotting Pacifica. KBOO in Portland, Oregon provides no relief at all. What about your Pacifica station?
Most of the so-called alternative news- weeklies, conform, and the Sacramento News & Review and San Francisco Weekly have published attacks on AIDS dissidents. Back in 1989, L.A. Weekly did run John Rappaport on Duesberg, but the local gay-AIDS establishment must have jumped on that paper with both feet, for, in a quick about-face, it hired onto their staff as their new editor of AIDS their own version of the Chron's Randy Shilts.
Back in '89, this writer ventured to arrange with the Clairmont, California Quakers, some of whose meetings he had been attending, for John Rappaport to speak. "Fine," said the elder to whom the proposal was made, and this writer sent a letter of invitation to the author of AIDS Inc, Scandal of the Century. But later this writer was taken aside privately, not by any elder, but (deniably, deviously) by an agent with no particular status in the meeting, and was shown a copy of a letter already sent to the author denying him the opportunity to speak.
Various drafts of this little self-published work you are reading (first penned in 1986), have bounced off of some other barriers in the alternative press: The East Bay Express, The Anderson Valley Advertiser, The Bay Area Reporter, The Advocate, and even Mother Jones.
Interestingly, all these publications wrote back. "This is inconsistent with our editorial policy," was the terse reply from The Advocate's editor, Goodstein himself. An editorial intern at Mother Jones wrote a long anguished letter insisting that such a phenomenon as a bogus AIDS could not happen here.
history of a propaganda
How, in the first place, does such a propaganda get "planted," as they say in the industry, take root and grow? Let's quote the Chron's own headlines and build a little history of the first five years of so-called AIDS:
US CDC Studies Pneumonia That Strikes Gay Males
-- Chron 6/4/81
This is the first AIDS headline, the story that launched the Chron's campaign. What is behind this story? What is the medical science behind this remarkable new disease that selects its victims not only by gender but by sexual orientation?
In June of 1981, Michael Gottlieb, a doctor at UCLA medical who had a specialty in the immature science of immunology (and who had some Hollywood connections), reported his discovery of cases of pneumocystis pneumonia in some men he identified as gay. PCP, though announced as new and rare at the time, had actually been described for 30 years and had even been epidemic at times. (The same goes for Kaposi's Sarcoma, KS, which became a bit later another infamous gay-AIDS indicator disease.) Though well studied in the past, PCP had never been remotely associated with gender or with sexual transmission, much less with sexual orientation, and, as a matter of fact, no disease in the history of medicine had been known to display these amazing peculiarities. But Gottlieb's conjectures on a presumed gay disease were blandly published in the New England Journal of Medicine, echoed solemnly by the CDC in its Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report, and pounced upon by the media as if a gay disease were exactly what its inquisitional little souls had been hungering for.
The number of sick gay men in Dr. Gottlieb's milestone study numbered five (5). One of Gottlieb's five sick men had been dead a month before Gottlieb even heard of him; he existed only in hospital files. Another was diagnosed for the PCP on the telephone: "That was the first time I diagnosed PCP by telephone," boasted Gottlieb to the authors of an early AIDS propaganda book, "I've done it many times since."
Because Gottlieb's specialty was immunology, the new gay disease had the immunodeficiency spin on it from the get-go, but I hazard to suggest that if a practitioner of another specialty had reported a new sex disease from his quarter, the media would have similarly pounced, and we would have a sex plague of a different color.
Immunology itself was in its infancy when AIDS was invented. In the specialty, so-called AIDS was placed in a classification called primary immunodeficiencies. At the time there were a few rare, usually congenital, diseases that fell into this category. Secondary immunodeficiencies result from the stress of another sick condition such as cancer, or from its treatments like radiation or chemotherapy (AZT), or from environmental stresses such as chemical insults, or from exhaustion, starvation (as in much of so-called African AIDS), depression (as from an AIDS diagnosis), etc.
The system that defines primary immunodeficiencies was developed by the World Health Organization. WHO has become a big international player in the game of AIDS.
WHO Begins Global Fight against AIDS
--Chron 11/21/86
But WHO's system of definitions has been broadly assailed as an inadequate apparatus for diagnosis. Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine calls the system "unfortunate."
It was into this definitional muddle that Gottlieb threw his new gay disease.
Gottlieb was also the founder of the T-cell-counting fashion, but, as it was pointed out by some critics even way back then, there was no research behind human T-cell counts such that a benchmark of normalcy could be established. That the diagnostic meaning of any count was a purely subjective matter, did not deter the cavalier Dr. Gottlieb, who was receiving from the media every encouragement to plunge forward with his sensational new sex disease.
US Survey Links Diseases to Gays
--you know who 9/1/81
Strange Deadly Diseases Striking Gay Men
-- 5/13/82
Diseases Linked to Gays Turning Up in Heterosexual Patients
-- 6/11/82
Now the gay disease is spreading into the general public. Or is it? Throughout the campaign, the media will oscillate between the strictly gay disease and the generalized one, maintaining the gay identity but intimating the threat to all. The media always wants to have it both ways. Today the posture is that the gay disease has not spread to straights quite as much as had been expected.
Gay Plague Is Epidemic
-- 6/15/82
Way down in paragraph nine of this article, the case count of this epidemic plague is revealed to be fewer than 400.
Study Shows Impairment to Immune System Among Many Gay Men
--9/16/82
A Hard Look at AIDS Among Gay Communities
--10/24/82
This headline from the fall of 1982 was the first to use the new acronym "AIDS." Prior to settling upon this designation, the editors experimented with the acronym GRIDS, for Gay-Related Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome.
CDC Calls Urgent Meeting On Disease that Hits Gays
--10/29/82
SF Mayor Seeks Funds to Fight Gay Disease
--10/30/82
CDC Orders Lab Workers to Take Precautions against Gay Disease
- 11/5/82
The statistically reported incidence, the number of cases behind these headlines, is relatively trivial. Several years earlier the media had taken an ancient little malady called herpes and similarly amplified it into a national STD scare. (Geraldo did a segment on herpes, Time picked it up, and a new sex panic was rolling.) Syphilis had also been exaggerated and exploited over the decades. And so, in the case of AIDS, no way do the numbers justify the intensity of coverage. Can you not sense in these headlines a palpable passion to invent a sex disease? This whole frenzy, mind you, has been generated out of Gottlieb's five gay men. The CDC, taking note of the media's interest, is grinding out the press releases, and the Chron is gobbling them up wholesale.
Today's journalists are notorious for processing government press releases uncritically. Did any of the cynical staffers over at the Chron pause in the frenzy to question - maybe privately in their own heads or in whispers over martinis - the veracity of releases specifically from the CDC? Somebody there must have recalled an embarrassing CDC episode back in the '70s called Swine Flu.
Swine Flu was another invented disease that, with the help of the media, the CDC propagandized to the public as the latest threat. The science behind Swine Flu was just a notch superior to that of AIDS: the number of cases upon which the CDC's Swine Flu campaign was predicated numbered six (6). Hastily, a new vaccine was concocted, and the public was urged by the media to get injected ASAP. Millions of medically compliant Americans responded to the CDC's emergency call.
But the epidemic never materialized. In the exposés that were published years after the episode had blown over (and which some Chron folk might have read), the vaccine was cited as the cause of 35 senior citizens being killed outright, and who knows how many over time.
Even in the absence of a vaccine or even a causative agent, the CDC was campaigning for mass inoculations for AIDS way back in 1985.
AIDS Official Says All Americans Should Be Vaccinated
- 4 /1/85
The CDC was also the agency that conducted the notorious Tuskegee Syphilis Study, for which President Clinton finally apologized. Hundreds of southern black men diagnosed with syphilis were left untreated for decades while observed by a network of doctors in on the CDC plan. (Since the therapies back then were allopathic arsenic and mercury, the untreated did not fair that poorly, as the data of the deceptively conducted study reflect.) With the Swine Flu campaign the CDC learned how to conduct a propaganda campaign in the media. With the Tuskegee Study, it learned how to conduct a conspiracy of doctors.
These CDC adventures the well-informed folks over at the Chron must have known about. However, skepticism had been suspended for the emergency.
US Votes $2.6 Million for Research on Gay Disease
- 9/1/82
The Gay Disease, Sick Gay Men. Numerous headlines and thousands of column inches of verbiage that practically nobody ever read through worked to establish these myths.
Let's appreciate that in 1982 you could have a gay disease, but in 1962 the language of these headlines would not have been possible. In the intervening decades, the foundation had been laid by the media so that the invention and promotion of a gay phenomenon was feasible. Of course, the word "gay" itself was not in the media's vocabulary until after 1972, but that's not my entire point. Prior to the era of the so-called gay liberation, homosexual America was an underground phenomenon. Its existence went generally unacknowledged in the mass media. It had no official status. There was a tacit cultural consensus that sexual matters in general and this one in particular were undiscussable in public. In the intervening decade, this consensus was smashed, and, for better or for worse, a new candor emerged. So in the '70's, the Chron and the rest, affecting a spirit of sexual liberation and liberal tolerance, began to construct a new minority identity, and, as long as certain clichés were observed, homosexuality, under the benign-sounding "gay," suddenly became a proper subject for discussion in public forums.
Today we have a scientific effort to nail down this identity at the genetic level. The new Gay Gene is a product of the fed's National Cancer Institute, the same folks who brought us the gay-virus HIV fraud. Embraced by the official gay establishment because it reinforces the identity notion and implies apologetically that "it's not our fault; it's in our genes," the new gay gene raises the ominous specter of the Gay Test. The gay test, in turn, raises the specters of dividing the population (again) into positives and negatives, of premarital testing, of interuterine testing, of preemptive abortion.
The gay establishment bought into the AIDS propaganda early on, echoed it, and reinforced it.
AIDS Patients Lead Gay Freedom Day Parade
-- 6/27/83
SF Gay Man Starts Campaign to Ban Sex In Bathhouses
-- 3/28/84
The gay-plague mythology firmly established, the Chron hired on to reporting staff one Randy Shilts, a bona fide member of the afflicted community. Shilts was the author of an AIDS-scare work called And the Band Played On. Some of these headlines carry his byline. Shilts, true to the religion to the end, got himself an AIDS diagnosis, took his AZT, and died. Another print-media gay who honored the same sad scenario was David Goodstein, publisher of the slick national gay identity monthly, The Advocate, which continues to be highly AIDS-promotional.
The new gay-consciousness sexuality makes a big deal out of your "orientation." But the real issue in your sexuality is who owns it, you or somebody else. Those who aspire to rule us would own it to the root. The AIDS campaign has greatly abetted state, corporate, and medical control at the root of sex and has succeeded in such intrusion into our intimacy as to have interposed between partners a layer of federally mandated latex.
You could argue that the synthetic gay identity was developed to co-opt the spontaneous resistance of a genuine radical gay movement post-Stonewall. But whatever genuine culture may have existed, a new spurious culture was introduced into the American consciousness, a culture called Gay. Homosexuality was now a phenomenon that could be defined and controlled.
By 1980 the spirit of anarchy in gay San Francisco had been beaten down. The spirit had suffered the escalation of rents that had oppressed all of Bohemia. It had suffered the Milk-Moscone murders and the Dan White acquittal. The last voice of protest may have been heard on the occasion of the latter, and this was rewarded by a midnight police invasion of the Castro in which heads were broken and gay bars trashed.
Under a new beaten-down gay leadership and with the encouragement of the media, the rich spectrum of human sexuality was polarized into narrow bands of "straight" and "gay." A radical movement that might have defended sexual nonconformity in general compromised itself into just another disadvantaged minority. This was the deal struck, and a subdued, domesticated gay elite emerged to defend it. This made fertile ground for the implantation of AIDS.
In the media this new minority was processed, just like the TV Black, into a distinct set of behaviors, characteristics, styles and fashions. Soon one could speak glibly of a Gay Lifestyle. For a time, the new gay life was portrayed as all glamour. The straight media itself seemed to be encouraging people to come out. In retrospect we can wonder if this was the old military strategy, now applied to the enemy within: Drive 'em out into the open, where, exposed and unsuspecting, they can be mowed down. Like Harvey Milk.
At the center of the art of mass manipulation is constructing the language that will resonate in the public consciousness. Experimental "cliché probes" (McLuhan) are launched. Some stick.
Having established the notion of a gay lifestyle, the associated imagery could be manipulated at will. The party-through-the-night imagery then segued into the decadent gay lifestyle of excessive perverse sex and recreational drug abuse, i.e., unhealthy, which then easily could be engineered into the Sick Gay Men imagery of AIDS.
The imagery has been so well established that even people hip to the fraudulence of HIV and AIDS feel they have to find an explanation for the alleged Sick Gay Men and do so by pointing to the alleged recreational drug abuse. (Amphetamines are blamed, and, true, crank can be immuno-destructive. But gay is just one relatively minor dimension of the crank demographic, which is predominantly working class. So why then do we not have in the media a "blue-collar AIDS" or a "truck-driver AIDS"?) Just as HIV and AIDS are fraudulent media-propaganda constructs, so are the propagandas that support them.
Thus the construction of a gay identity was a prerequisite for the creation of a Gay Disease.
Soon it became unnecessary to refer to a Gay Disease, and the term yielded to "AIDS" in the headlines. But when the Chron ran:
US Urges Potential AIDS Victims Not to Donate Blood
- 3/4/83
everybody knew who those potential AIDS victims were who were polluting the blood supply. And, of course, they put everybody else in the world at risk:
Study Shows AIDS is Threat To Entire Population
- 5/19/83
The above "study" is the CDC's, but, for the Chron, any authority will do:
Rajneesh Predicts AIDS Will Kill 2/3 of World
- 7/16/84
The trial balloon of AIDS is now in 1984 taking off like a rocket. Could any planted story attain such propulsion without the nitro-charisma of sex and death wrapped up together? The imagery of sex and death is widely manufactured in the mass-media industry. It is woven into the daily news and into scripts for movies and TV dramas. The formula: intercourse (rated R or PG) followed by the knife in the back, the bullet in the brain. Want to succeed in writing for the corporate screen? Don't miss this device.
Early on, in the style of classic wartime propaganda, the Chron has the gay disease killing babies.
Doctors Probe Mystery of SF Baby with Gay Disease
- 12/10/82
Baby with AIDS Disease Raises Doubts about Blood Transfusions
- 12/11/82
US Officials Say AIDS May Have Killed 3 Babies
- 12/17/82
Canadian Baby Dies from AIDS after Tainted Blood Transfusion
- 9/1/83
And at the Chron, the gay disease is bayoneting babies right up through our study period.
Couple Sues Blood Bank Over Baby's Death
-- 9/5/86
The Chron is intent. The Chron and the rest mean business. The corporations of the mass media (which have over the last thirty years become so highly conglomerated, coordinated, and centralized that they can facilely conspire as one) demonstrate in such warlike headlines that they are irreversibly committed to establishing the AIDS sex plague as a permanent fixture of consensus reality.
Why?
Let the Chron speak for itself:
Fear of AIDS Causes Many Gays to Change Lifestyles
-- 10/12/82
The Effect of the AIDS Epidemic on Gay Lifestyles Discussed
-- 5/2/83
Hothouse Bathhouse Closes Because of AIDS Fear
-- 6/11/83
Gallup Poll on Changed View of Gay Friends Because of AIDS
-- 8/1/83
The propagandists regularly poll the market to measure results. The poll is then fed back as "news " that helps to reinforce the propaganda.
Changes in Gay Lifestyles Caused by Fear of AIDS
- 9/25/83
Some Gay Men's Lifestyles Change in Response to AIDS
- 1/15/84
Study Finds that Fear of AIDS Reduces Homosexuals Sex
- 8/2/84
Gay Promiscuity and the AIDS Scare Viewed
- 5/11/83
AIDS puts the fear back in sex, but not just for the gays. The AIDS behavior-mod campaign is for everyone:
AIDS Researcher Urges Safe Sex for Everyone
--11/6/84
Sex Expert Says AIDS May Cause Return to Monogamy
- 4/20/86
Rajneeshees Told to Stop Kissing and Limit Sex Over Aids
- 11/17/84
THERE IS NO SAFE SEX
-- kicker head (unindexed), Sunday supplement, c. 1986
The Safe Sex campaign, born solely out of AIDS, sets some political precedents. Will this de-facto legislation set a precedent for written laws regulating sexual conduct in the future? The safe sex campaign does not derive from any real concern for the health of the populace, nor does it derive from any moral concerns religious or secular, but is driven by ruling-system concerns, invasive and controlling. Rule by fear, rule by terror. A panic is synthesized. Government mobilizes. When we wake up from the fear-trance, we find some more of our private turf has been taken over, some very private turf indeed.
Interesting: Parallel with the building of the AIDS sex-behavior-mod campaign, you get this huge, maybe five-fold, increase in the intensity of sex imagery on TV. In both the program and commercial content, its suddenly sex, sex, sex. And especially some very candid male-erotic imagery like never before. What a jack-around! Seems like the plan for us citizens is the maximum of titillation with the minimum of fulfillment.
A scanning of the headlines with an eye to the dates reveals a step-up in AIDS propaganda in the seasons of rut, especially around the solstices.
There is a well-funded behavioral-science sub-industry of AIDS in academe. Its concern: the regulation of sexual behavior in the name of safe-sex AIDS.
AIDS Experts Say Behavior Change is Key to Disease Control
-- 2/9/84
As chemical control is fundamental to our way of rule (the War on Drugs), so is sex control. (AIDS: the War on Sex.) When the rules serve no constructive social purpose but exist only to control and disempower, many, of course, will rebel.
gays fold. Haitians resist.
Gottlieb's little AIDS story, then, was fervently developed from a tenuous, microscopic germ of an idea into a full-blown hysteria by the mass media. Then all the little fishes of US media followed obediently along. Opposition from the expected quarters never materialized. There was not a peep of resistance. The so-called alternative media ran some of the obligatory AIDS-promotional stories themselves, stories which were hardly distinguishable from those of the Chron. Most alternative media to this day clings to orthodox AIDS as an article of political correctness.
This is still lamentably true of the gay press, which long ago was usurped to promote the myth. By what agonies among staffers did these gay community papers succumb to official AIDS? I know that the managing editor of one of the most prominent of these attributes his firing to AIDS. It would be fascinating to document this metamorphosis of community-supportive news- papers into AIDS-promotional media. How was the gay press enlisted in the mass-media effort to identify their community with a virus?
The only resistance mounted against the AIDS campaign came when the city moved to close down the baths, a campaign in which health authorities attempted to institute a "bathhouse sex police."
SF Health Sends Bathhouse Sex Rules to Police Dept.
--6/2/84
There was a flurry of resistance against the closings.
300 Protest Against Closing of SF Bathhouses
--10/30/84
But this resistance got scant support in the established gay community and press. Defending the baths was offensive to the new gay respectibles.
The Chron, which editorialized heavily for the closings, records the struggle in some 40 stories from 1983 to 1985. When it got into court, the resistance turned on the issue of a government's right to shut down a private business. If anyone challenged the science, there is no record of it in the Chron.
One exception in this sea of apathy came from the Haitians, a group that, along with the gays, was singled out as a target minority for AIDS. In 1982 the Haitians were put on the New York City Health Department's high-risk list, then on the CDC's. The Haitians, who came from a nice little dictatorship where things are clear, saw this persecution for what it was. They made some waves through their community organizations, and the Haitian ambassador visited city officials. As a result, the Haitians were dropped from the New York list. It took a few years longer to change the feds.
US CDC Drops Haitians From High-Risk List
- 4/9/85
What African AIDS crisis?
The AIDS campaign targets Africans today as it did gays and Haitians in the 1980's and with an even more shameless statistical inflation..
The targeting of blacks has been with the campaign from the start. The propaganda hints at an African genesis for AIDS associated with alleged black sexual rapacity and tribal green-monkey blood rituals. The imagery is designed to push every sex-alarm button in the white middle class soul. Trumped-up scare statistics paint the African subcontinent as a cesspool of HIV infection, a security threat to the entire planet.
In Africa, where most governments collect no health data whatsoever on AIDS or any other disease, the statistical-inflation game is blessed with a clean slate for creative imaginations to write upon.
As to the HIV scare numbers, any systematic HIV testing in Africa is impossible because many common local disease microbes like malaria cross-react producing voluminous false-positives. All African HIV statistics, no matter how solemnly intoned by the Chron and the rest, are just wild extrapolations from sloppy spot testing, if from any data foundations at all.
A case count of so-called AIDS in South Africa, the exception in record-keeping, totals cumulatively over 20 years only 13,000. The propagandists meanwhile smugly predict that 7 million there will die. The main cause of death in South Africa is violence (murder, suicide, and accidents): 20 percent.. Only two percent of deaths are attributed to so-called AIDS.
South African president Thabo Mbeki continues to resist this AZT colonialism, media reports to the contrary notwithstanding. Mbeki has appointed a 33-member panel to look into the whole dubious matter. Twelve on the panel are AIDS-doubting scientists and scholars who have been shut out of all other official forums. Since Mbeki's action, orthodox AIDS science has gone on the defensive.
In the U.S. blacks forced to seek government assistance get sucked into the AIDS-testing machinery of government welfare health bureaucracies, thus generating some HIV-positive data for the media to manipulate into menacing black demographics. In Africa, however, there is no such base data to get in the way, and the press-release writers at UNAIDS and WHO can have a field day.
The diseases in Africa are not so-called AIDS but malaria and dysentery and also malnutrition, with all the diseases and disorders that that condition implies. Many of these health problems rise from a crowding into cities by refugees from the countryside forced there by drought and by violent civil wars often contrived by outside neocolonial forces, including the CIA.
AIDS gets a different official definition in Africa, where a 10 percent weight loss and 30 days of diarrhea can get you, according to the diagnostic criteria of WHO, an AIDS sentence to die.
Such is the AIDS "crisis" in Africa.
Rock gets used.
As the AIDS campaign ground on into 1985, there might have been concern among the propagandists that, despite the gigantic presence of AIDS in media-land, the new plague lacked a palpable presence out there in the real world, not a surprising situation for a media disease with no empirical foundation. Compared to the hype, the body-count was still disproportionately low. The modality that would change this, AZT, was still in its early testing. The nation had yet to experience the impact of full-blown iatrogenic AIDS. Something had to be done, and the opportunity seized upon by the Chron and the rest was the illness of a faded movie star whom the media, at least at the tabloid level, had already identified as gay.
The orgy conducted by the shameless Chron on the occasion of the death of Rock Hudson starts with:
Rock Hudson in Paris with Cancer: AIDS Rumor Eyed
- 7/24/85
If you are a famous person with cancer, then you have cancer, unless you have been identified as gay, then you have AIDS. (By this logic, an ambitious prosecutor in Riverside County ordered the body of Liberace exhumed from its Palm Springs grave weeks after his death so that he could test the remains for HIV.) Here the Chron is rumoring Hudson from cancer into AIDS.
Dozens of American AIDS Victims Seek Treatment in Paris
- 7/24/85
Actor Rock Hudson's Reservations About Expressing Lifestyle Eyed
- 7/25/85
The inquisition is alive and well. The inquisitional Chron wants Rock to confess, come out, and play the role of a proper cliché gay according to the media-approved program.
Pres. Reagan Calls Actor Rock Hudson over Illness
-- 7/25/85
Pressure from the very top. They weren't going to let go of poor Rock.
Actor Rock Hudson Reportedly Has AIDS
-- 7/26/85
From "rumored" to "reportedly" in three days.
Actor Rock Hudson's Treatment in France Discussed
- 7/27/85
100 Americans go to France for Experimental AIDS Treatment
- 7/28/85
The foundation is being laid for bringing Rock back home. Has he fled to France to escape the stigma of AIDS? The media wants him back in the spotlight.
Gossip about Star's Illness Discussed
- 7/27/85
Rumor, gossip. Has the Chron gone tabloid?
Actor Rock Hudson Asks To Move to French Military Hospital
- 7/29/85
But there will be no privacy for Rock. Finally:
Actor Rock Hudson Flies to LA to Seek Treatment at UCLA
-- 7/30/85
Actor Rock Hudson's Return To US Discussed
-- 7/31/85
Now they've got him back in Hollywood where they can do his death up good. The media has conscripted poor Rock to play a final, sad role. You might say that Rock, having fled to Paris to escape this fate, has been taken into custody and extradited.
The Agent of AIDS who went to Paris, arrested Rock, and brought him back turns out to be none other than Dr. Michael Gottlieb. The Chron now reveals that Gottlieb has become Rock Hudson's personal physician. So the inventor of AIDS becomes its promoter, with one foot in medicine and the other in media.
Actress Liz Taylor Visits Rock Hudson at UCLA Medical Center
-- 8/6/85
Did agent Gottlieb arrange the visit? Liz here begins an AIDS career that will carry her for a dozen years.
Joan Rivers Scores Handling of Report of Rock Hudson's AIDS
- 8/16/85
Good for you, Joan. But this dissent could have done your career no good.
Actor Rock Hudson Returns Home
- 8/26/85
A last attempt at privacy. Rock will die at his house in Beverly Hills. But, with his death just 13 days away, he is given a part to play.
Actor Rock Hudson to Issue Statement at AIDS Fundraiser
- 7/19/85
But he never made it to the photo opportunity. On October 3rd the Chron celebrated Rock's death by running eleven articles under a screaming front-page banner headline:
ROCK HUDSON DIES OF AIDS
- 10/3/85
This was a colossally disproportionate coverage for the death of a mere movie star, a volume that might have been appropriate for the passing of a president in office or for a declaration of war.
The eleven articles consumed 236 column inches of type. But nowhere in this verbiage can one find a single medical detail. What did Rock really die of? By what clinical or diagnostic process did his cancer segue into so-called AIDS? What therapies did Dr. Gottlieb administer?
Was Hudson used as a test subject in early AZT trials?
The Rock-Hudson AIDS campaign begins on July 24 and climaxes with his death on October 3. This brief duration makes a neat media-propaganda package, but it is a remarkably rapid decline for a man called Rock.
In its editorial that day, the Chron rejoiced, "Now, at last, we all know someone who has died of AIDS. We all know Rock Hudson."
If Your Husband is a Pos,
And You Still Let Him,
Call 1-800-ConfessThe Inquisition is alive and well.
Its name is Sally Jessie Raphael.
Oprah, Ricki, and Geraldo, too.
They all love AIDS and the sex taboo.
So wrap yourself in the flag of AIDS.
Get scared straight and never get laid.
Pledge your allegiance to HIV.
Get a federal grant. Go on TV.
But if pos husband you must screw,
Just ask Sally what to do:
Move out, divorce, feel no guilt.
Or join dead hubby on The Quilt.
Selling AIDS and World War III
The best ally any brainwashing campaign ever has, be it for a disease or for a war, is a body count, the bigger and more vivid the better.
Until the AIDS campaign had AZT, the body count had to be conjured in the public imagination with scare projections and with Rock Hudson. The Gulf-War-CNN campaign was body-count deficient in its early days, and this might account for its mercifully short duration. As a curiously well-timed major motion picture called Pearl Harbor recently reminded us, the campaign for World War II had no such deficiency. Unfortunately, the same goes for a campaign on the WWII model not yet (of this writing) quite officially called World War III.
When one dares to challenge the AIDS orthodoxy, the most vehement backlash comes from the believer who shrieks, "But how can you say that? My boyfriend (or whoever) died of AIDS!" as if the fact of death alone closed all inquiry.
Brainwashing experts say that a traumatized subject is the most susceptible. Funeral directors know this, and so do those who exploit the AIDS diagnosee. The media practitioners who sell us war are giddy with delight when they can exercise their mass psychology on a traumatized and grieving public.
As if the September 11 body count were not terrifying enough, the campaigners follow up by conjuring in the public imagination future casualties in the megadeath range.
As with AIDS, the public is fed victim stories without end.
As with HIV, the enemy is invisible and ubiquitous and may strike new victims anywhere at any time.
On September 11 the media presented a traumatized and susceptible public with an explanation, a story. Despite the suspicious alacrity with which the suicidal-Arab-terrorist-hijacker explanation was broadcast, it was promptly cast in stone as the conclusive Official Truth, this in the absence of any supporting evidence whatsoever. All information issued from a few officials in the Administration. If a reporter dared to ask at a press conference exactly how the official has obtained this critical information, the answer was that it was "classified." In such a void, any disinformation can be established and become unanswerable to any of the standard tests of truth.
In this vacuum of information, free minds are invited to speculate on what really happened. Some interesting counter-explanations will no doubt be articulated outside of mass-media land.
designer wars
By comparison with the events of September 11, Rock Hudson's death was just a little pseudo-event. Yet, in its wake, the Chron's headlines report the following AIDS-war mobilizations:
U.S. Okays Boost in Spending on AIDS (10/3/85), Celebrities Vow to Fight AIDS in Rock Hudson's Memory (10/3), Acting SF School Chief to Seek AIDS Screening for Workers (10/8), Researchers Accelerate Human Tests of AIDS Treatments (10/8), Major SF Arts Orgs Raise $350,000 for AIDS Services (10/13), Defense Dept. to Screen all Military Personnel for AIDS (10/13), NY Gov Urges Ban on Bathhouse Sex (10/25).
Throwing money, mobilizing celebrities, institutionalizing new restrictions and repressions: sound familiar?
Crisis. Reaction. Solution. And look out for those solutions. As with AIDS, the solution is another deadly cure.
The pressure of an agenda lurks behind these solutions. When the awaited crisis materializes, that pressure is released in a burst, as if on cue. There is a scripted feel to the whole process. The solutions fit well-known agendas too conveniently. In the mobilization for war, familiar campaigns are abetted. It begins to feel as if the crisis were brought into existence simply to provoke the reactions that permit the solutions. Issues of opportunism, of prior knowledge, collusion, and even outright contrivance of the precipitating event, begin to loom as the smoke clears and the critical consciousness recovers from the initial shock.
"There are two reasons for doing anything," said J.P. Morgan, "the real reason and the one that shows."
In retrospect we can now see how the collective consciousness had been primed in the news for the precipitating event of September 11, how the nebulous word "terrorist" had been established in the daily vocabulary, how the Arab-Palestinian suicide-bomber model had been cranked up in Israel by deliberate provocations. As with the "sick gay men," the media imprints in the consciousness, by endless repetition, the words, the definitions, and the imagery. The language is prepared that will enable the brainwash.
As with "AIDS," the definition of "terrorist" intends to expand to encircle ever more high-risk groups.
As with AIDSpeak, the language of the official story quickly becomes embedded in the culture. Even war protestors, for lack of an alternative terminology, may echo the official vocabulary, inadvertently buttressing the propaganda.
AIDS' brave future
Surprise. Awakening from the September 11 fear trance, we find that, in the name of the latest emergency, our right to freely travel has been de-facto restricted, a new level of surveillance of the citizenry has been certified, new standards of detention and of secret evidence. All this in just a few days of body counting.
If the WWIII salesmen are allowed to succeed in their campaign, the aging AIDS-scare campaign may recede into the background, obscured by the newly escalated level of ambient terror. But AIDS by now is so well established, so solidly institutionalized into the culture that it may no longer need much more scare campaigning.
Will AIDS try to find new reinforcement in the emerging war machine? It has already been hinted that the new national identity card could have as a prerequisite a combo of vaccinations including one for so-called AIDS. The CDC would flourish in a germ-warfare-scare environment. All established AIDS bureaucracies could find new teeth to sink into sexual nonconformists and into AIDS-dissident "terrorists."
After all, what is the purpose of a war if not to advance (for as long as the salesmen can make that war last) the more ruthless and murderous powers of rule?
--GT 10/4/01
AIDS, Inc., Scandal of the Century by investigative reporter Jon Rappaport (Human Energy Press) is the first book to bust the scam (1988) and is still relevant. What if Everything You Thought you Knew about AIDS Was Wrong by Christine Maggiore is a comprehensive summary of the absurdities of AIDS "science." (11684 Ventura Blvd., Studio City, CA 91604). aliveandwell.org is the Alive and Well group's web site where you can print out HIV-test consent forms with which to stump your doctor. actupsf.com is the website of ACT-UP/San Francisco.