“Trust the science” has outed itself and is now demanding your obedience. United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications Melissa Fleming let the cat out of the bag during a “Tackling Disinformation” discussion at a World Economic Forum meeting in New York. She made it very clear that Big Tech is a key part of the effort.
“We’re becoming much more proactive. We own the science, and we think that the world should know it, and the [Big Tech] platforms themselves also do,” Fleming boldly told WEF Managing Director Adrian Monck.
‘We Partnered With Google’
Big-box media was also on board, represented on the panel by CNN Senior Vice President of Global News Rachel Smolkin. Incidentally, WEF host Monck is a former executive at CBS News. Credentialed academia added its insight in the form of Brown University professor Claire Wardle, who heads the Ivy League school’s Information Futures Lab.
But it is Fleming who has generated controversy with her astonishingly blunt acknowledgment that Big Tech behemoths have actively worked with the United Nations to promote its narrative on climate change.
“We partnered with Google,” Fleming crisply stated. “For example, if you Google ‘climate change,’ you will, at the top of your search, you will get all kinds of UN resources.” Then she exclaimed, “We started this partnership when we were shocked to see that when we Googled ‘climate change,’ we were getting incredibly distorted information right at the top” and added her “we own the science” remarks.
United Nations as Propaganda Machine
Fleming is flat-out saying that the United Nations fully expects to control the information narrative on climate change and that the world’s leading internet search engine is doing all it can to help make that happen.
Melissa Fleming (Photo by Monica Schipper/Getty Images for Netflix)
She laid out the vast scale of the massive propaganda operation in a disturbingly matter-of-fact manner. Fleming mentioned Maoist-sounding parental responsibilities that must be granted to dominant establishment organizations and references “Trusted Messenger” projects in which popular social media personalities parrot UN climate change talking points.
“I do think we as news organizations, we as institutions also have a continued responsibility to inform the world about the state of our world, to guide the public,” Fleming stated. “Another really key strategy that we had was to deploy influencers – who have huge followings – who were really keen to help carry messages that were going to serve their communities and they were much more trusted than the United Nations telling them something from New York City headquarters,” she continued.
The coronavirus pandemic provided an excellent training ground for the United Nations in its social control efforts. A November 2020 report by the World Economic Forum detailed how the global communications executive explicitly sought to manipulate public opinion on a worldwide scale and “create” a “new social norm” for sharing health information on social media:
“‘When COVID-19 emerged, it was clear from the outset this was not just a public health emergency, but a communications crisis as well,’ says Melissa Fleming, who leads global communications for the United Nations … ‘So far, we’ve recruited 110,000 information volunteers, and we equip these information volunteers with the kind of knowledge about how misinformation spreads and ask them to serve as kind of ‘digital first-responders’ in those spaces where misinformation travels.’”
At the core of these vast propaganda campaigns is the assertion that the progressive ruling establishment agenda represents empirical truth and therefore any opposition to it is inherently false and harmful. Words like “disinformation” and “misinformation” are meant to bolster the claim. This is the inevitable and long-planned second shoe-drop to the “science is settled” chorus of recent years. Yet its startlingly authoritarian ring cannot help but make for a jarring transition, despite all previous attempts to smooth the ground.
(Photo by Stanton Sharpe/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Nevertheless, it is a transition that establishment elites are determined to make. Fleming’s ownership of science has its obvious political counterpart in Western progressives’ tireless push to define democracy as that which serves their agenda.
As has always been the case with tyrants everywhere, Fleming appeals to the common good to justify her crackdown on the enemies of science and democracy.
“I think [the fight against disinformation] exploded … in our own awareness of the phenomenon and the problem,” she said at the September panel discussion. “And because, you know, as long as the social media platforms had become so dominant, there was already a proliferation of mis- and disinformation that was making achieving what we were trying to achieve – a better world, and a more inclusive, a more peaceful and harmonious world – it was making it more difficult.”
The free exchange of thought is a threat to global peace and harmony, you see. And so it must be remorselessly snuffed out in the name of greater humanity.
