How to Create 'Right-Wing Extremists' in 3 Easy Steps

1. Gaslight the People. 2. Lie About the Gaslighting. 3. If the People Catch On, Label them 'Right-Wing Extremists'. Austria in 2023, Where Mental Illness Masquerades as 'Journalism'

Yesterday, we took a long dive into the Court of Audit’s (Rechnungshof) recent report on Covidistan’s testing frenzy:

Covidistan Annals: Court of Audit Chastises Gov’t: Testing 2020-22 Cost 5.9b Euro: ‘no strategy, no use’

Generally, Austrian/Covidistan legacy media is heavily subsidised in a myriad ways, most prominently via advertisements paid for by (technically) gov’t ministries that use taxpayer money to do so. Of course, there are certain technical limitations of doing so: party hacks serving as ministers, for example, must not use their own party symbols or the like, but even if the (trade-sponsored ‘Presserat’, or ‘media association’) finds something amiss, a slap on the wrist is typically what ensues, if at-all.

In all fairness, it was almost never necessary to actually use ‘force’ on part of the gov’t. Most people ‘doing journalism’ in legacy media are actively doing the gov’t’s bidding. There is, in other words, no need to actually use Nazi-style top-down control via a Propaganda Ministry, as our Western gov’ts are able to effectively achieve comparable control over content and messaging by other means. (See Sheldon Wolin, Democracy, Inc., for further references.)

Austro-Covidistan’s premier Zero Covid hawks (nuts) were founds among the ‘journalists’ over at Der Standard, which brings us to today’s posting: today we shall explore how the Zero Covid hawks over at this particular ‘newspaper’ dealt with the Court of Audit informing them that the tyrannical hate-mongering preached by Covidistan’s Zero Covid hawks (nuts) was, in effect, ‘without strategy’ and/or ‘use’, as the Court of Audit called it.

In what follows, I shall (partially) provide translations of pieces written by (sic) some Der Standard’s most notorious Zero Covid hawks who (just search for, e.g., Colette M. Schmidt or David Krutzler appearing in my Substack), on top of it their unwillingness to accurately perceive reality, have apparently learned nothing at-all over the course of the past three-plus years. Shame on them, I’d say.

The first of the two pieces appeared in mid-May when the ‘draft report’ (Rohbericht) discussed at-length yesterday, was first presented; the second article is from 21 July 2023.

All translations and emphases below mine, as are the bottom lines.

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Court of Audit Draft Report Criticises Covid Test Strategy

[no author cited], By Der Standard, 16 May 2023 [source]

Austria's handling of Corona tests is picked apart by the Court of Audit in a recent draft report available to [the Austrian Press Agency]. At least 5.2 billion euros were spent on Covid 19 tests until the end of 2022. By the end of March 2022 alone—still excluding living room tests—at least 306.4 million tests were carried out. 16 times more tests were carried out via different channels than in Germany, yet ‘the concrete benefit of this variety of test offers remained unclear’, the Court of Audit criticised…

The Court of Audit fundamentally questions mass testing that has been carried out in Austria for a long time. ‘In testing, the targeted, risk-oriented approach should be pursued and expanded’, the auditors say verbatim: ‘Population-wide tests should be offered in addition to this approach only depending on the epidemiological situation and based on cost-benefit aspects compared to surveillance programmes’…

During 2021, the Health Ministry changed its strategy considerations several times within a few months, but a new testing strategy was not published until April 2022…the States then began to expand a population-wide PCR test offers on their own account. The federal government bore the test costs almost without limit and did not analyse which type of tests cost how much on average…

Due to the spread of new virus variants, conditions changed. Then, in April 2022, the Ministry of Health returned to risk-based testing…there were no Austria-wide specifications here either, which made it difficult to compare the results and include them in the national monitoring.

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Covid Tests Cost At Least 5.2b Euros until the End of 2022

By David Krutzler, Der Standard, 21 July 2023 [source]

The Court of Audit published its report on the Covid 19 tests on Friday [21 July 2023]. Auditors criticised the lack of strategy and concrete benefits of the many offers.

The review of the Covid-19 pandemic in Austria under scientific supervision announced by the federal government has begun, but we are still waiting for the results. The first interim results should be available by the end of summer. On the other hand, the Court of Audit published a balance sheet on the Corona tests on Friday: according to the report, at least 5.2b euros were spent on Covid-19 tests by the end of 2022 alone. How many tests were carried out in Austria has not yet been finalised, but the auditors have determined a first concrete finding: according to this report, at least 306.4m tests were evaluated by the end of March 2022 alone. This figure does not even include the millions of so-called living room tests or antigen self-tests. According to statistics available to the auditors, around 123 million living room tests were distributed in 2021 alone.

Across a wide variety of offers, 16 times more tests were conducted per capita than in neighbouring Germany. ‘The concrete benefit of this variety of test offers remained unclear’, the auditors critically noted. The decision for the broad-based test offers were ‘made without a strategic basis and appropriate preparation’. For example, the Turquoise-Green [in Austria, it is long customary to describe coalitions according to the party colours, with turquoise being the conservative’s colour and green, well…] federal government under the then Chancellor Sebastian Kurz (ÖVP) as well as the states had made the decision in January 2021 for a population-wide test offer, ‘although a test strategy of the Ministry of Health had not been prepared’.

The lack of federal guidelines for the Länder on the implementation of population-based testing also led to the testing strategy being implemented in different ways. The many different options for testing in Austria also increased the likelihood of parallel structures, especially in metropolitan areas, according to the auditors. Insufficient data also meant that the cost-benefit ratio of the different test offerings could not be analysed. The variety of test offers also led to non-uniform registration of the tests. The Ministry of Health had also failed to "link the billing of the tests carried out to the complete collection of test data".

Targeted Testing Instead of Mass-Testing

For future pandemic management, the Court of Audit recommends, as a lesson learned [sic] from the Covid pandemic, that the targeted, risk-oriented approach should be pursued, i.e., the strategy that was initially also pursued by the Ministry of Health before it was replaced by mass testing [which, again, lacked any scientific basis and was contradicted by the Health Ministry, yet the gov’t pressed on anyways]. The Court of Audit is not fundamentally opposed to population-wide tests, however, in future these should only be offered ‘depending on the epidemiological situation and based on cost-benefit aspects’ in comparison to other monitoring options such as wastewater monitoring.

According to the auditors, the proliferation of different testing options should also be clearly curbed. Federal states would have to report the necessary data according to uniform guidelines—’and the costs would have to be linked to the number of tests’. This is the only way to assess the appropriateness and effectiveness of the different types of tests. ‘Decisions on pandemic management should be made by the Ministry of Health and not by other agencies.’ [and that, above all, should include both the federal chancellor and the states, eh?]

The Court of Audit’s draft report on the Corona tests had already been leaked in May. Health Minister Johannes Rauch (Greens) said then that the recommendations would be followed.

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Bottom Lines

Please take a moment and (re)read the long posting I composed yesterday:

Covidistan Annals: Court of Audit Chastises Gov’t: Testing 2020-22 Cost 5.9b Euro: ‘no strategy, no use’

As the Court of Audit clearly holds—and David Krutzler actually accurately reports—the point-man in the ‘pandemic’ management would be the Health Minister. What Der Standard omits, however, is that it took until spring 2022 for a Health Minister to actually do so, with the resulting power vacuum having been usurped by the Chancellor announcing mass testing—and the accompanying introduction of Covid Passports—on his own ‘authority’. In this highly questionable matter, the gov’t was aided and abetted by legacy media that simply parroted the government line (lies).

As the auditors’ report expressly states, the ‘legal instruments available’ pandemic management ‘often remained unused’, which is why I have used the word ‘Covid Coup’ to refer to what was (is) going on.

Note the power vacuum at the top of the federal gov’t whose consequences ‘trickled down’ to encompass ‘subsequent versions of the test strategy…because the implementing authorities in the states were not bound by it’. Talk about the left hand not knowing what the right hand does.

Egregiously, David Krutzler and Der Standard gloss over what amounts to perhaps the biggest blunder in this entire sorry affair (except for the so-called ‘vaccine’ roll-out). The Court of Audit’s report is crystal-clear on this one (my emphases):

In mid-November 2020, then-chancellor [Sebastian Kurz] announced publicly a mass test for the entire population, without consulting the without consulting the Minister of Health…The health minister’s advisors did not favour mass testing, as the testing strategy followed a risk-oriented approach. The Austria-wide participation rate in the mass test was 23% (2,045,155 tests performed), of which 0.21% (4,254 persons) tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 [line break added]

A retrospective evaluation therefore concluded that mass testing of asymptomatic persons was not effective, and an internal paper of the internal paper from the Ministry of Health also pointed out that the medical medical benefit of mass testing was unclear.

Leaving aside what amounts to a putsch by Sebastian Kurz, the gov’t knew of these shenanigans and legacy media simply parroted the régime’s lies.

That mass test in November 2021 revealed that, out of approx. 9m inhabitants, little more than 2m—i.e., less than a quarter—participated in this charade. Of these 2m people, .21% ‘tested positive’: 4,254 individuals. All it took for massive gov’t reprisals against ‘the unvaccinated’, blown out way beyond any proportion (or decency) by legacy media BS peddlers—such as David Krutzler—were 4,254 individuals ‘testing positive’ for a respiratory virus.

For a totally absurd comparison, but tragicomedy is all that we have left, it would seem, we note, in passing, that in pre-’pandemic’ Germany, that the test-positivity rate for syphilis among what is euphemistically labelled ‘sex-workers’ was 4.6% of the cohort tested (source).

Moreover, ‘Covid’ is perhaps best thought about as the (also mostly fake) ‘Wild West’ of the late 19th century. With the federal gov’t knowingly paying off both ‘health care providers’ to do their bidding and legacy media to cover this up, the outcome was perfectly obvious:

According to the Court of Audit’s estimation, the large number of offers resulted in at least 306.4m tests carried out until the end of March 2022. This number does not include the following data—because they were not compiled centrally—of

• at-home antigen [lateral flow] tests (according to the available statistics, in 2021 approx. 123m test kits were distributed)

• tests carried out by private providers

• tests carried out in businesses with fewer than 50 employees.

Due to lack of available data, there was no overall overview of the actual number and the costs of the tests incurred throughout Austria to date.

Everyone knows that any kind of analysis is only as good as the data inputs. Restrictions on civil liberties were imposed deriving from incomplete and badly-aggregated ‘data’ (if, in fact, we can speak of that):

No-one has any idea about the total number of tests conducted, their results (as if they mattered, you know, ever), the relation between repeat testing of asymptomatic vs. symptomatic individuals, ‘vaccination’ status, and the like. I do not mention this to complicate matters or to simply add variables seemingly at-will; I mention this because these facts matter to conduct any kind of serious analysis, to say nothing about the drawing of conclusions or policy decisions of such severity.

The last word in this posting, however, goes to one Colette M. Schmidt, a co-worker of Mr. Krutzler’s and a very obnoxious Zero Covid/all mandate protesters are literally Nazis BS peddler.

To drive home that point, reference is made to a since-deleted (I think) reply Ms. Schmidt posted to a Tweet by someone on Twitter using the moniker @InViennaVeritas who self-identifies (on his website) as having ‘graduated with a meteorology diploma’ and ‘part-time journalist’, uses the email account ‘longcovidaustria[at]gmx.at’ (in the imprint of said website, which, however, does not reveal the identity of this individual, thus rendering the imprint completely, well, useless), and describes his ‘expertise’ as follows (translation and bold-face emphasis mine, Italics in the original):

I have collected a lot of literature on my blog, both preprints and peer-reviewed. However, I don’t save everything I get my hands on, but often have the content and significance summarised by experts on Twitter beforehand or take over their ‘review process’, a Twitter peer review so to speak. This is also the reason for many comments when linking. If studies subsequently turn out to be inadequate or methodologically incorrect, I remove the paper or make a corresponding note.

And this admission of (partial self)censorship of what ultimately proves to be inconvenient or an outright fraudulent claim is at the heart of the afore-mentioned tweet-reply by this Twitter user and Colette Schmidt (I’ve taken a screenshot, hence I’m able to document this):

InViennaVertias: ‘“mandate opponent” is a neat euphemism for right-wing extremist,’

Colette Schmidt: ‘It is, indeed.’

By this ‘logic’, anyone who ever opposed the heavy-handed actions of the Covid putschists—which have now been revealed as incompetence-cum-fraud, peppered with intentional and pre-meditated opportunism, is, following Ms. Schmidt, a ‘right-wing extremist’.

It brings back quite ugly memories of 2021-22 in Austria and elsewhere, but it also leads to the burning question of how does one explain the consistent high polling numbers for the one party in Austria (FPÖ) that, after some dithering in spring 2020, maintained their strong anti-mandate stance? (The same holds true for the AfD in Germany, by the way.)

The fastest way to ‘create’ Nazis, right-wing extremists, and ‘white supremacists’ is—to simply label—defame—as such everyone with whom one does not agree on literally anything. Et voilà, there are Nazis, right-wing extremists, and ‘white supremacists’ everywhere (except for Ukraine, of course, if one believes Ms. Schmidt).

The saving grace for people like Ms. Schmidt and that particular Twitter user might be—neurological/cognitive impairment, perhaps brought about by repeat injection with the so-called ‘Covid vaccines’, and, of course, an unhealthy dose of mental illness.

This is going to make for an extremely unhappy hangover once Ms. Schmidt and her ilk return to reality.