The Interview That Never Was: Uncovering a Hidden Agenda in Community Radio

Did a community radio station and a shadowy think tank, the RAND corporation, team up to data mine an activist community?

Before COVID, I was the voice behind a monthly radio program on KVMR's "Heads Up," a show that dared to challenge the status quo, offering alternatives and broadening the dialogue beyond the mainstream narrative. For a decade, this platform allowed me to be an alternative "Voice of the Community" with Nevada City, CA, and beyond, embodying the very essence of what it means to be a part of a community radio station known for exploring diverse perspectives.

However, the tranquility of this mission was disrupted when Ali Lightfoot, then manager of KVMR, approached me with what initially seemed an innocuous invitation for an interview. As a Mayor who wasn't bowing to the prevailing COVID narratives, my stance had evidently piqued Lightfoot's interest—or so it seemed. The turn of events from a seemingly straightforward invitation to an interview ladened with loaded questions revealed a startling shift. It wasn't long before the red flags began to wave, signaling a departure from the station's celebrated ethos and questionable involvement from the world's most shadowy think tank, the RAND Corporation.

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THE BACKSTORY

It was May of 2020. I was the mayor of Nevada City, a little hamlet in the Northern California Sierra Foothills. This was my second term as a city council member, and this 4-year term was a much more tumultuous one than my first term from 2008 to 2012. There was a reason for this. There were a lot of encroaching corporate actors threatening our community, from the expansion of 5G to telecoms to electric companies (PG&E), along with unprecedented threats such as what we had recently seen with 2018’s neighboring Paradise, CA fire.

But the biggest threat of all came rolling in at the beginning of 2020 when I was sitting mayor: COVID-19.

I had been on to COVID earlier in January 2020. It caught my attention, unlike all the other so-called “pandemics” SARS, N1H1, and the Swine Flu.

While I began immediately alerting the county and city officials about Coronavirus, it fell on deaf ears at first. By the beginning of March 2020, it became a topic of official conversation, and once California Governor Newsom gave his stay-at-home orders on March 19th, everything turned upside down.

Initially, I was in favor of the two-week stay-at-home orders. However, as these restrictions extended over several months and I became aware of underlying agendas within my county government, my support for the measures endorsed by Newsom and county officials flatlined. Nobody was doing a cost-benefit analysis of the damage these lockdowns would ultimately do, while other medical options were clearly available but being ignored.

Those attempting to work and keep their businesses, churches, or schools open were vilified. Public meetings were relegated to Chinese-owned Zoom calls (I can only imagine the data they collected during this time), and anybody who spoke up against the “official narrative” was instantaneously demonized.

I began to see red flags all around me: within county/city Zoom meetings, on social media, elected officials’ responses, within the medical community, neighbor-to-neighbor interactions, and most notably, how our so-called “alternative news” sources did an about-face and only reported and endorsed the mainstream narrative around COVID.

When COVID struck, alternative news and information sources were dead in my town.

KILLING THE “VOICE OF THE COMMUNITY”

Before the lockdown, I had been a monthly KVMR community radio broadcaster for a decade on a show called Heads Up, where every month, I was “calling out the unpopular, bringing up alternatives, expanding the conversation about the world around us, and undercutting the left-right-paradigm-top-down-corporate-media… “

The Nevada City-based radio station was known for its tagline, “Music of the World, Voice of the Community.”

By 2016, I was reporting on child trafficking within California’s Child Protection Services, Hunter Biden’s role as a board member of Ukrainian energy company Burisma, China’s social credit system, the mysterious Deagel’s US population reduction chart, the dangers of 5G, and, yes, Jeffrey Epstein’s continued child prostitution ring, to name a few.

My show was considered controversial then, pointing out underreported “red flags,” but it seems a bit prophetic to me today.

I never went along with any official narrative. At that time, that wasn’t an issue for our community-supported radio station dedicated to being the “voice of the community” and always in support of alternative news.

In May of 2020, the relatively new KVMR radio manager, Ali Lightfoot, who had arrived in Nevada City from Colorado a year earlier, approached me about being interviewed for her radio special “The Truth About COVID-19,” an hour news documentary/special that examines sources, information veracity, media ethics and cognitive bias in this pandemic era.”

KVMR’s radio managers generally don’t get into broadcasting their own programs. To me, this demonstrated a cut-and-dry case of conflict of interest. Clearly, Lightfoot was setting up the pretext to justify her managerial style of promoting everything COVID, shutting down, and pushing out everybody who didn’t see eye to eye.

By this time, I had seen an alarming trend within KVMR.

The “voice of the community” had been silenced the day Newsom gave his stay-at-home orders: On March 19th, 2020, without notice, the doors to the KVMR radio station were locked, and key codes made inoperable for broadcasters…. for the next two years.

The radio station known as a tried and true place for diverse opinions was silenced, and broadcasters were not welcome unless they were willing to repeat the Covid narrative. Their shows were canceled, many broadcasters never returned, remaining broadcasters were relegated to broadcasting from home, festival funding was cut, artists were removed from the roster, lifelong radio staff members were forced into early retirement, profitable events were trashed, loyal KVMR supporters withdrew their financial support, broadcasters’ mail received at the station were returned to senders, and KVMR, known, as a community radio turned into an extension of the CDC….. all while the KVMR board of directors turned a blind eye to the controlled demolition of a cherished community radio station.

I have been told by other broadcasters throughout California that their stations underwent a similar fate.

Unbeknownst to most listeners, they were hearing regurgitated programs from years past, while the word of Fauci/CDC reigned over the airwaves, and all past KVMR talk shows and news programs were “accidentally” erased by a very experienced KVMR engineer, Buzz (fortunately, I still have most of my Heads Up recordings, ha!).

For nearly two years, the radio station doors were closed. Once the doors opened, a broadcaster could only return through COVID inoculation and repeating the “official” COVID narrative.

In addition, the local “alternative online” news source, Yubanet.com, conducted a similar about-face and began repeating the same fear-mongering CDC COVID terror, but online. The only person who was given cart blanche KVMR live coverage day-in-and-day-out was Governor Newsom. His voice bellowed through the airwaves every weekday at the noon hour. This had traditionally been a time slot reserved for news and talk shows. But now it was Newsom and Newsom only, telling us time and time again to be afraid and do as we were told.

By May 2020, I had become very vocal, calling out the fear-porn, censorship, and lack of critical thinking from our city/county officials, the medical community, and news sources. It was a trifecta of deceit.

By this time, KVMR manager Ali Lightfoot reached out to me in what seemed like a benign interview offer. But that changed relatively quickly when this offer continued to unfold.

Now, conveniently, what Ali did not include was that “[co] author of the book “Truth Decay” was Jennifer Kavanagh of the RAND Corporation:

Excerpt from the March 17th, 2020, RAND BLOG: Truth Decay in the Coronavirus Moment: Q&A with Jennifer Kavanagh

WHAT’S YOUR OWN RESEARCH AGENDA AT THE MOMENT?

I'm really interested in tracking public opinion. We have the perfect opportunity here to track how events like this change people's attitudes about the government, about the media, about their community. How it affects their attitudes towards each other, how it affects their attitudes towards things like vaccines. Does it drive people away from them? Does it convince them that they do matter?

I'm interested in the effect on partisanship. Does this event bring people together, as we've seen in past national crises? Or will the health effects or economic impacts worsen the economic and social polarization that we already have in this country?

The other co-author of Truth Decay is Michael D. Rich. The now former president and CEO of the RAND Corporation and member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Truth Decay was published by the RAND Corporation itself.

[Rich] served in a variety of senior leadership positions at RAND and was instrumental in the creation of the RAND National Defense Research Institute, a federally funded research and development center that provides research and analysis to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, the Unified Commands, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the defense agencies, and the Intelligence Community. He also helped lead RAND's diversification and expansion into international markets—including Europe and Australia.

While initially, the invite from Lightfoot seemed genuine, it didn’t take long to see red flags pop up everywhere. Particularly after I asked Lightfoot to send me the questions they intended to ask me.

The below list of questions, forwarded by Lightfoot, sounded the alarm bells for me and other broadcasters and associates to whom I had sent this to get their take.

Whether Lightfoot realized it or not, it was clear that somebody was doing extensive research on me and my leadership style to establish these data-mining questions.

Now remember, these in-depth questions were intended for a “20-minute interview.”

It appears that Kavanagh, a Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation, either provided Lightfoot with a list of questions to ask me or Lightfoot conducted a thorough investigation on RAND’s behalf. This inference is drawn from Kavanagh's known interest in analyzing "public opinion" data, which aligns precisely with the type of information those questions were designed to elicit.

Every question in this list stinks of data mining and is worthy of a 2-3 hour interview, not a mere 20 minutes. How does a radio station manager not know this? It is nothing short of a weaponization of a local radio station.

On the morning that I was to call in for the pre-recorded radio interview, I left a message for Lightfoot and declined the interview scheduled for later that day. That is when Lightfoot left me this message below, as I have also shared at the top of this post:

Since when did an alternative radio station have an issue with, well, alternative news? Since when did elected officials have to toe the line regarding mainstream media’s take? Since when did public officials have to go along with the official county line?

I don’t remember that part in my oath of office.

And did Lightfoot demand these answers from everyone else, or was I just extra special that way?

POLICY, CULTURE, WARS, RAND CORPORATION LEADING THE CHARGE

In my recent Substack post, "2024 Davos Summit: The Essential Recap," I discussed how the World Economic Forum identified "misinformation and disinformation" as the world's most significant short-term risks. This announcement comes after years of the RAND Corporation's relentless critique of independent journalism, social media, and the increasing public skepticism towards mainstream media. Influenced by RAND's stance, the leaders of the WEF have positioned themselves against what they perceive as the disinformation community — in spite of the truther movement’s accurate reporting on COVID for the last four years.

The greatest irony is that everything the so-called conspiracy theorists were calling out four years ago has now been verified as, well, the Truth!

Fauci lied, and so did the CDC, Newsom, government officials, the Western medical world, including Johns Hopkins University, and especially Main Stream Media….. all lied.

THE RAND CORPORATION: HOW TO CONTROL THE WORLD

For those of you who are not familiar with the RAND Corporation, it is no ordinary corporation.

Rand rose out of the ashes of World War II. After witnessing the success of the Manhattan Project—the $2 billion initiative that created the first atomic bomb—a five-star Air Force general named Henry "Hap" Arnold concluded that America needed a team of great minds to keep the country's technology ahead of the rest of the world, and utilize scientists for military purposes as well as bypass a lot of bureaucratic red tape that had previously hindered the development of new military technologies. . In 1946, he gathered together a small group of scientists [many of them from Operation Paperclip) and $10 million in funding and started RAND (which stands for Research and Development).

RAND has a total revenue of $345 million with more than half coming from US government institutions. Looking at the overall ranking, they had received $61 million from the US Department of Defense and security agencies, $46 million from the Department of Homeland Security, $40 million from the US Army and $49 million from the US Air Force. 

The Soviets had good reason to worry about RAND. In 1957, the Air Force hired the think tank to create spy satellites. Within two years, it developed CORONA—a covert system that aimed to send camera-carrying satellites into orbit on the backs of missiles. 

Soon enough, however, RAND became a key institutional building block of the Cold War American empire. As the premier think tank for the U.S.'s role as hegemon of the Western world, RAND was instrumental in giving that empire the militaristic cast it retains to this day and in hugely enlarging official demands for atomic bombs, nuclear submarines, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and long-range bombers. Without RAND, our military-industrial complex, as well as our democracy, would look quite different.

RAND is also responsible for packet switching, the technology that made the Internet possible and was in receipt of the explosive Department of Defense’s classified study, “United States – Vietnam Relations,” leaked to the New York Times in 1971 by Danielle Ellsberg, in what is known today as The Pentagon Papers.

Why am I going on and on about the RAND Corporation? Whether the now former manager of KVMR, Ali Lightfoot, realized it or not, she was setting up a channel for the RAND Corporation to data mine information from the mayor of a small activist community.

Considering the US government has been turning on its own citizens, this is a big deal.

And during a time when the right to free speech is under attack —think of the latest proclamation from the World Economic Forum’s Davos Forum as “disinformation being the biggest emerging risks the world is facing’ —exposing alternative voices to the likes of the RAND Corporation is a terrible idea.

The level of denial by these global parasites is staggering, particularly after being so utterly wrong on every aspect of the “official COVID narrative.”

It sounds to me like the WEF got its marching orders from the RAND Corporation.

The RAND Corporation’s think tank is known for identifying global policies, practices, key findings, tools, and actions for the military and other global agencies to act upon. Wars, political movements, popular terminology, policies, and national and global agendas all stem from the RAND Corporation.

THE GLOBAL WAR AGAINST TRUTH-TELLING IS ANYTHING BUT OVER

Officials around the world continue their attack on the freedom of speech, as highlighted during the WEF Davos Forum and, most recently, in France.

According to the law, which was passed quietly and secretly through the French parliament on Wednesday, advisement against mRNA or other treatments which are deemed ‘suitable’ based on current ‘medical knowledge’ can lead to a 3-year prison sentence and up to a $48,400 fine.

SOROS SUCKS UP RADIO-LAND

With the recent announcement that George Soros has “purchased a potentially controlling stake in America’s second-largest chain of radio stations,“ independent radio stations are more important than ever.

The current KVMR board has a lot of work to do. Our local radio station, reflective of other community based radio stations, should be the last bastion for Truth.

Whether the KVMR board realizes it or not, Nevada City’s “voice of the community” has been ravaged, and at a time when truth in the media has been so rare. Not RAND-engineered truth, but citizen journalism-truth. The truth that counters the heavily financed mainstream media that has caused egregious suffering, injury, and death over the last 4 years.

This not only goes for KVMR, but for every independent radio station that exists…. if any do remain.

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