Tacoma Reporter, July 25, 2002
Matt Youngmark

It was big news when the mainstream press reported that the U.S. government had some degree of advance warning of the September 11 attacks. Suddenly the White House was admitting that they weren't completely in the dark about the potential for disaster, and the press was all over it. Who knew what? When did they know it? Once the news broke, the nation was in an uproar.

Before that, it was just one of the dozens of scathing and largely ignored exposes laying around in Everything You Know Is Wrong.

Published earlier this year by The Disinformation Company (www.disinfo.com), Everything You Know Is Wrong is a thick collection of articles - many originally appearing in alternative newsweeklies like this one - that sheds harsh light on topic after topic. It's a far cry from the muck thrown about in the myriad of conspiracy books on the shelves, though. Editor Russ Kick (who is also the author of the September 11 chapter, probably the lengthiest in the tome) seems to have no overriding political or social agenda, other than grabbing his readers by the shoulders and shaking them. The book argues against antitrust regulation as convincingly as it argues against the pharmaceutical companies.

Thus, an amazing thing happens as you spelunk through its pages: rather than lulling you into a state of placid absorption, Everything You Know Is Wrong makes you pay attention, analyze the data and come to your own conclusions. Nothing's as predictable as it might seem. A chapter titled "Votescam 2000," for example, doesn't focus on who stole what election in who's brother's state. Instead, it shows that we've always known our computer vote counting methods are enormously flawed, yet even after the last boondoggle that was our last presidential election we've never done a damn thing about it.

Compelling enough to overcome its gray, tedious page layout, Everything You Know Is Wrong accomplishes something truly rare: you can't get through it without challenging your worldview time and time again. This book could change the way you process information.

This book could actually make you smarter.

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Disinformation, Please
An Eye-opening Anthology of Lies the Government Tells Us

Cleveland Free Times, August 7 - 13, 2002
by Frank Green

"While the credibility of government-sponsored news and information has long been considered suspect by both right and left, we've recently sensed a burgeoning perception by mainstream Americans that disinformation is everywhere -- medicine, finance, commerce, media -- often sponsored by very complex webs of influence and power."

Thus speaks Richard Metzger, founder of Disinformation, in his preface to Everything You Know Is Wrong. Metzger responded to the burgeoning need for more reliable information by founding disinfo.com, a website that gathers the voices of a wide variety of alternative thinkers. Like a lit grenade that won't be snuffed, the site's unblinking penchant for discussing the unmentionable led to an extraordinary gathering of contrarian journalists, artists and academics in New York, to the production of a highly censored TV show for the BBC, and to the publication last year of You Are Being Lied To, an anthology of antiestablishment raconteurs and intellectual rabble-rousers, ranging from the well-known (Noam Chomsky and Michael Parenti) to the obscure (R.U. Sirius and opium apologist Jim Hogshire).

The book sold surprisingly well, and was followed recently by a companion volume, Everything You Know Is Wrong. In the intervening year, the bombing of the World Trade Center woke more people up from the slumber of complacency, while making our leaders even more eager to suppress the kind of information found here.

Thus, Russ Kick, a contributor to The Village Voice and editor of both volumes, documents numerous clues that terrorists were planning a major attack on American centers of power, including warnings from Germany, Russia, Israel, the Philippines, various American antiterrorism experts, and, as far back as 1993, from Osama bin Laden himself. Security was stepped up at the World Trade towers the month before the attacks. But did you know any of this? Not likely.

The U.S. government is far from an innocent victim of raving maniacs, sometimes attacking its own people in the name of justice. David Hardy, an attorney for the surviving Branch Davidians, provides evidence that the Waco slaughter was grossly heavy-handed and totally unnecessary. David Koresh did not hate law enforcement officers, as the media claimed. He'd enjoyed a round of golf with agents just nine days before the raid, and offered to come out from the complex voluntarily. Instead, agents drove an armored vehicle into the building, releasing a cloud of anesthetic into the bunker hiding the women and children, paralyzing them so that they were unable to escape the ensuing fire.

You don't have to be a member of an obscure religious group living on the outskirts of society to be at risk. Engineer David Lochbaum reveals 30 accidents and near-misses in nuclear power plants, some as absurd as a Keystone Kops comedy. Researchers at the University of Florida were advised not to flush the toilet while the reactor was running, since they shared the same water, yet the cooling system shut itself down five times because somebody flushed. This stuff would be funny if it weren't so scary.

It all comes down to money. Arianna Huffington suspects that collusion between the pharmaceutical industry, the FDA and Congress allows inadequately tested toxic drugs to make it to market, sometimes -- as with the asthma drugs Flovent and Flonase -- with disastrous results. Jonathan Levy documents the Mafia connections of the Vatican Bank, while Lucy Komisar's examination of offshore banking shows that the middle class pay most of the taxes, while the rich hide their money in secret accounts.

If you believe our leaders, globalization is the answer. Wrong again. Greg Palast and Oliver Shykles take on those financial behemoths, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In 1980, the organizations began sending out loans to the Third World that were attached to conditions of deregulation and privatization. The result? Latin America sank from 73 percent growth per capita income to no growth at all, while Africa dropped from 34 percent to 12 percent. Only Botswana, which refused to accept the loans, is doing well. The liberalization of world markets just made the rich richer and the poor poorer. Today, the combined wealth of the world's 475 billionaires is greater than the combined income of the poorest half of humanity.

In a world in which everything you know is wrong, this book tries to set you straight, providing plenty of information you can use in daily life. Before you reach for that next hamburger, read "Bovine Bioterrorism and the Perfect Pathogen," in which Gabe Kirchheimer argues that many people diagnosed with Alzheimer's actually died of Creutzfeldt-Jacobs disease, the human form of mad cow disease, which will soon run rampant in the U.S.

If you think that your kids would be easier to control on Ritalin, you're right. But do you really want to turn them into unquestioning zombies, or subject them to a long list of side effects? Dr. Peter Breggin's essay on this overly prescribed and addicting stimulant follows the ruminations of antipsychiatry guru Dr. Thomas Szasz about the invention of the bankrupt concept of mental illness.

Political correctness has no place in this anthology. Wendy McElroy insists that if the laws were changed, both pornography and prostitution would actually empower women. Tristan Taormino waxes poetic about the joys of multiple sex-partnering. Philip Cook documents numerous cases of domestic violence against men, while Lucy Gwin fumes in one of the book's most entertaining articles that the last thing disabled activists want is pity.

It's unlikely that anyone will agree with all 50 authors, but if you're looking for an injection in the brain to shake you off your feet, this book is hard to beat.

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Untitled review from Rain Taxi Review of Books, Summer 2002

by Christopher Luna

Have you ever read a book that contained information so revelatory that your perspective underwent a complete transformation as a result? The kind of book you want to buy and give to everyone you know? The Disinformation Company's Everything You Know is Wrong is such a book. It collects a wealth of articles similar to those that can be found on Disinfo.com, a website that features information on counterculture, occultism, conspiracy theory, "deviant" sexuality, underground art and music, and government wrongdoing. Since its launch in September 1996, Disinfo has earned several awards and has expanded into other media; a censored version of the company's "Disinfo TV" series aired on the BBC's Channel 4, and will soon be released in unexpurgated form on DVD.

Everything You Know Is Wrong, the follow-up to Disinfo's successful anthology You Are Being Lied To, is a provocative and startling collection filled with persuasive, extensively researched articles on a plethora of subjects including religion, politics, pornography, the "war on some drugs," and youth culture. So much of what is said runs counter to traditionally accepted American history and media-perpetuated stereotypes that, for a person raised with a Western education, the experience of reading the book is tantamount to deprogramming. The conscientious reader is forced to face tough philosophical dilemmas, question preconceived notions, or rethink comfortable ideological positions. While this process can be painful, confusing, even life-changing, I submit that in today's climate of information overload coupled with willful ignorance, one cannot afford to miss such a wake-up call.

Richard Metzger's preface functions as a manifesto for those who have suffered from the "widespread angst that something is very wrong with the barrage of information and advertising that we are bombarded with, not just daily, but during virtually every moment of our waking days." He claims that the growing popularity of Disinfo.com reflects a growing distrust among not just left- and right-wing conspiracy theorists, but middle-of-the-road Americans as well. (The recent success of Michael Moore's Stupid White Men and Noam Chomsky's 9-11, both of which offer a decidedly critical assessment of U.S. foreign and domestic policy, would appear to support Metzger's contention.) According to Metzger, consensus reality died sometime in the mid-'90s, when the Internet became more widely utilized by citizens seeking alternative sources of information. "All of a sudden there were places - hundreds of them - where you could find high quality 'alt' reporting on a variety of topics-foreign news, investigative journalism, health, and yes, even conspiracy theories, UFOs, fundamentalist Christian doomsday prophecy, and niche sexual perversions." Metzger suggests that it is the perfect time for "what's left of the left, progressives, and everyone willing to fly their freak flag high to stop complaining about the media and become the media."

In his introduction, editor Russ Kick also expresses a desire to oppose the status quo, even as much of the country blindly rallies behind the president's so-called "war on terrorism." Despite the rise of nationalist fervor, Kick believes that "dissent is never more needed than when conformity is at an all-time high. When the fewest questions are being asked is when they're most needed." He promises that the book's contributors were chosen in an effort to avoid the "intellectual balkanization" that results in essay collections that "typically are either academic or alternative, leftist or rightist, atheistic or religious, or otherwise unified in some similar way." This dedication to egalitarianism is part of what makes Everything You Know Is Wrong such a disturbing and persuasive read. The current attention being paid to the failure of the government and its intelligence to prevent the September 11 terrorist attacks renders Kick's 16-page article "September 11: No Surprise" the centerpiece of the book; the author provides one damning example after another of warnings unheeded by both past and present administrations, up to and including the day of the attack. Like many of the essays in Everything You Know Is Wrong, Kick's article systematically presents such an array of facts that it appears virtually irrefutable.

The book begins with "Lucre," a section devoted to the effects that the free economy and globalization have had on people around the world. Jonathan Levy's "The Vatican Bank" takes a look at the financial dealings of this powerful and secretive organization, which has been infiltrated by the Mafia and which allowed gold that had been stolen from the victims of the Nazis to be transferred into Vatican accounts during World War II. In another essay, Dominick T. Armentano claims that antitrust regulation was never intended to help consumers; his "The Antitrust and Monopoly Myth" attempts to demonstrate that such laws have primarily served "to bludgeon aggressively competitive firms that innovate and lower costs and prices." Lucy Komisar's "Dirty Money and Global Banking Secrecy" examines the lengths to which businesses and nations will go to avoid paying taxes: "Between 1989 and 1995, nearly a third of large corporations operating in the United States with assets of at least $250 million or sales of at least $50 million paid no US income tax."

"The High and Mighty" contains essays which question: Senator Bob Kerrey's claims about the massacre of civilians by a group of Navy Seals under his command during the Vietnam War; the myths surrounding the industry that runs the Olympic Games; the European Union, which hopes to destroy the autonomy of individual nations in order to fill the coffers of the rich and powerful men behind the scenes; and watchdog organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith and the Southern Poverty Law Center, whom Cletus Nelson accuses of exaggerating the influence of hate groups in order to keep their organizations viable. The following section, "True True Crime," takes a closer look at the myths that result from the public's fascination with murderers and serial killers such as Charles Manson and Henry Lucas, whom Brad Shellady claims confessed to numerous murders that he did not commit, allowing crooked law enforcement organizations to close cases, gain publicity, and cover up their shoddy police work. In Kick's incredible "Witnesses to a Massacre: Other Participants in Columbine," the author selects excerpts from over 11,000 pages of documents related to the infamous school shooting in Littleton, Colorado. Witness after witness told investigators that they saw more than just two shooters on that day, and others claim to have heard shooting in the building more than an hour after Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris had killed themselves. Kick's essay includes descriptions of a third man who was seen throwing explosives onto the roof of the high school, as well as a sketch of the third gunman by one of the witnesses.

"Mind and Body" contains informative and sometimes sickening articles about mad cow disease, the benefits of veganism, and long-held misconceptions regarding mental illness. The most important piece in this section is Dr. Peter Breggin's "Psychiatric Drugging of Children for Behavioral Control," which speaks out against the use of stimulants such as Ritalin to manage children who exhibit behaviors that are quite normal. According to Breggin, parents are being "pressured and coerced" by schools to give their children drugs that result in a host of side-effects including psychosis, mental impairment, and aggressive behavior. He also blames the pharmaceutical companies who manufacture such drugs for over-exaggerating the prevalence of attention deficit disorder (ADHD). Breggin further demonstrates that the ADHD diagnosis itself was created primarily "to redefine disruptive classroom behavior into a disease."

"Social Distortion" contains articles that present alternative views of social problems. In "The Whole Truth About Domestic Violence," Philip W. Cook debunks the myth that women are the only victims of spousal abuse, pointing to studies which found that nearly as many men are abused by their female partners. Lucy Gwin's angry and sarcastic "Postcards From the Planet of the Freaks" rails against the ways in which people condescend to the disabled. Gwin reveals how the handicapped are exploited by sheltered workshops, companies not unlike sweatshops who pay them as little as $4.15 a month to do degrading and dangerous work such as taking apart used hypodermic needles. Annie Laurie Gaylor's "Why Women Need Freedom From Religion" demonstrates how all patriarchal religions oppress women and consider their "inferiority to be divinely decreed."

"Not on the Nightly News" contains frightening articles about nuclear power, the Waco incident, the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, members of the caste of untouchables known as "Dalits" in India, the increasing power wielded by China, and the stolen 2000 presidential election. It also includes a compilation of statements about the futility of the drug war by political officials from all over the world. After a series of essays on the terrorist attacks which took place in New York and Washington on September 11, the book concludes with "Hidden History." This section includes articles by Jack Niedenthal on the testing of nuclear weapons on Bikini Atoll, and Howard Zinn on the Ludlow Massacre, in which men, women, and children were murdered by strikebreakers. Educator/activist John Taylor Gatto's "Some Lessons From the Underground History of American Education" provides evidence that following the Industrial Revolution, business leaders and the so-called elite conspired to transform the education system from a focus on literacy and independent thinking to the creation of generations of conformists whose primary value was as cheap unskilled labor. Gatto includes unbelievable quotations from the men who engineered the mass psychological conditioning of forced schooling in order to contain "the menace of overproduction." Consider this statement from a speech that Woodrow Wilson made to businessmen: "We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." The book's appendices contain a number of shorter articles as well as brief book reviews to facilitate further reading.

At the time of this writing, power-hungry men are taking advantage of the fear caused by recent terrorist attacks on American soil in a deliberate attempt to strip citizens of their civil liberties and preciously guarded freedoms. Books such as Everything You Know is Wrong, though not always pleasant and reassuring, are a much-needed attempt to lift the veil from our eyes.

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From a long untitled review in Discourse & Disclosure, Summer 2002

by Sue Potvin

[Everything You Know Is Wrong] blows the lid off.... Russ Kick, together with cohorts Richard Metzger and Gary Baddeley, have brought together a veritable treasure trove of writers to provide alternative, sometimes conflicting, views of what the mainstream media is telling you. You will learn to question their motives and agendas and get a feel for what the truth may really be.... You won't be reading this book at a single sitting. It is massive - 340 letter size pages of well-substantiated revelations. A bit of it may be familiar - especially to readers of alternative media such as D&D. Much of it will shock your sensibilities. It's mind boggling stuff. But read it you should.

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Untitled review from Movement Magazine
by Will

Choice Quote: "Don't believe what you are being spoon-fed in the media, go out and take the time to find out for yourself. As these guys have clearly shown, the truth is not hidden, just obscured.... These people went to great lengths to bring some of this stuff to light. Even if you just check it out from the library, you owe it to yourself to read it."

Review: As you might gather from the title, this book falls into the 'expose conspiracy' subsection of Current Affairs when it is shelved in most bookstores. Unlike most of the books in that genre, this one is not a collection of far-out ramblings by fringe element spokespersons with axes to grind. Far from it, this is a collection of over 45 well-written and well-researched articles and essays. The list of contributors is a virtual who's who of contemporary counter culture political writers. Among them are Richard Metzger, Arianna Huffington, Mike Males, Howard Zinn, William Blum, and Wendy McElroy, just to name a few.

What makes this book credible is also its main drawback. It is long and exhaustive. A definite pick-up and put down book, but still worth owning. Almost all the selections in the book are not the result of someone just coming up with a theory or having a vision of some sort. They are the result of someone sitting down in a courthouse annex somewhere and taking the time (a lot of time) to sift through and read piles of documents on whatever subject they were researching. The fact that most of the evidence presented is available to anyone with the time and patience to pursue it makes a good point about the age we live in. In the era of technology any major event produces a massive amount of documentation. While remaining under the umbrella of freedom of the press, the powers that be just decide what version of any major event they want the masses to believe and present only the documentation that supports their version of things. Everything else is dumped into boxes, microfiche, or disc and simply not mentioned in the mass media. This whitewash of current events has left enough people with enough nagging doubt that they go out and research whatever it is that's bothering them. Enough of these kinds of folks get together and you have this book.

That's the point that the people at Disinformation are trying to make. Don't believe what you are being spoon-fed in the media, go out and take the time to find out for yourself. As these guys have clearly shown, the truth is not hidden, just obscured. Unfortunately they have also shown that the truth is not pretty and is in most cases disturbing. For example, even before reading this book, I had my doubts that there were only the two kids involved in the whole Columbine mess. The numerous Soldier of Fortune articles about mismatching calibers to the guns recovered not withstanding, it always seemed unlikely to me that two people could have planned and executed that alone with there only help being 'innocent' friends who were duped into purchasing guns and ammo for them. After reading the dozens of excerpts of eyewitness testimony presented in this book, I am certain those guys did not act alone.

Columbine is but one of the subjects covered. Among other noteworthy selections is Philip W. Cooks' piece on the truth about domestic violence. From Brad Shellady we get an insiders look at the confessions of alleged serial killer Henry Lee Lucas revealing that of the 3000 murders he confessed to, he might only be guilty of one. Village Voice regular and editor of this collection, Russ Kick, contributes five pieces. Among them is a story on politicians who want drug laws relaxed titled Leaders Against the Drug War, which was very compelling reading. The list of topics goes on and on. Mad Cow Disease, Waco, Charles Manson, the World Bank, the Vatican Bank, and others too numerous to mention.

This book is definitely an eye opener, it is laid out in a straightforward format, and unlike so many others in this category it does not load you down with a bunch of grainy photos and complicated flowcharts. It would be a shame for this book to sit on the shelves unnoticed and unappreciated. These people went to great lengths to bring some of this stuff to light. Even if you just check it out from the library, you owe it to yourself to read it.

If you would like more info about what all this is about before plunking down the dough, you can check out the Disinformation website at www.disinfo.com.

Truth Decay
Two new books show who is wagging the dog, and just how they're wagging it

from The Independent Weekly (Durham, NC)
by Jeff Turrentine

Choice Quote: [A]n oversized paperback bible of polemic that will surely become for the Pacifica-radio crowd what Our Bodies, Our Selves was to feminists in the 1970s and 1980s.

Review: Full disclosure: I accepted the assignment of writing about two recently published books, Trust Us, We're Experts! and Everything You Know Is Wrong, with an arsenal of prejudices fully engaged and awaiting deployment....

With horror and fascination we read of chimerical watchdog outfits and Potemkin public interest groups, made up of nonexistent citizens whose letters to the editor and desktop-published newsletters are in fact artful forgeries crafted in the sleek offices of P.R. firms to resemble the nascent stirrings of grassroots movements.

That's the kind of Bizarro-world, major-league deception that really gets Russ Kick excited. Kick is the editor of Everything You Know Is Wrong, an oversized paperback bible of polemic that will surely become for the Pacifica-radio crowd what Our Bodies, Our Selves was to feminists in the 1970s and 1980s. Contributors to this fascinating and irreverent volume include Old Left stalwarts like Paul Krassner (who gives us, in just a few hundred words, the real story behind the Manson murders) and Professor Howard Zinn (who thoughtfully documents the sorely underdocumented Ludlow coal miners' massacre of 1913-1914), sex-positive post-feminists like Tristan Taormino and Wendy McElroy, and even that lovable conservative turncoat with the fabulous Eva Gabor purr, Arianna Huffington. Essay titles range from the alarming ("Call it Off! New Revelations About Waco," "The Bombing of PanAm Flight 103: Case Not Closed") to the totally creepy ("Bovine Bioterrorism and the Perfect Pathogen," "Psychiatric Drugging of Children for Behavioral Control"). There's something for everyone at this jaundiced jamboree....

Read these books if you're looking to be bothered. If you're not, I'd recommend going about your business quietly and not drawing too much attention to yourself. Everything's going to be just fine. Honest.

For Further Exploration:

Purchase Everything You Know Is Wrong

Everything You Know Is Wrong Homepage

Table of Contents

A Thumbnail Sketch (Summary)

Quiz

Sample chapter: “Fission Stories: Nuclear Power's Secrets” by David Lochbaum

Sample chapter: “A Canticle for Osama bin Laden” by Alex Burns

Bios of Contributors

Complete Index

Reviews & Interviews

Press Releases