Join Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog.com as he interviews Dr. David Martin, the top expert in the ongoing and unfolding CV19 vax genocide and litigation. This is well worth your time to watch, for a variety of reasons.
Look Don’t Listen
Don’t Ask
“The Science Is Settled”
Science is rarely “settled”. Dogma is. Propaganda is. True science, not the bought and paid for pseudoscience that comprises at least half the published studies, according to those who know, is constantly evolving.
Before you accept the propaganda lie that “the science is settled”, do a quick look back at the science from past centuries. The washing of hands by surgeons was vigorously opposed when promoted as a good thing and did not gain acceptance till the late 1800s, Blood letting via leeches was practiced for 2,000 years until the end of the 19th century, despite, according to Wikipedia, “In the overwhelming majority of cases, the historical use of bloodletting was harmful to patients.”
Just as we look back with horror on what was medically accepted only 125 years ago, future generations will look back on many of today’s common medical practices with disdain or disgust.
This is one reason I am so willing to entertain the ideas of those questioning medical orthodoxy. It is only by individuals with above average observational capacity observing where current practice does not yield the optimal result, documenting and communicating it do we have the opportunity to review and improve.
If the medical industry persisted with something as harmful as blood letting for 2,000 years, wonder not that observed truth takes some times to penetrate the establishment. Be vigilant against those who tell you not to look or question. After all, the truth does not mind being questioned, the lie hates being challenged.
UNREAL: Same College Behind Bogus Study Used to Support Shutdowns Is Behind BS Study Used to Force COVID Vaccines on US Children
Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. A study from the Imperial College of London was behind the garbage COVID study that led to US shutdowns which ultimately never should have happened. Now this same college has a legion of individuals behind a garbage study that the CDC is using force killer vaccines on children.
Doctors Fauci and Birx used a BS study from Imperial College to convince President Trump to shut down the economy in 2020. This faulty advice led to the suffering of millions of people around the world after many nations followed the US’s lead. It was wrong and based on a BS study.
Look Up Every Ingredient
When I neglect to do this I usually regret it. By far the majority of packaged food has things in it not good for us.
Wrong Nutrition Whys
Code Red
IQ Bloodshed, Why Isn’t This Toxic Substance Eliminated?
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
- The National Institute of Environmental Health Science-funded Bashash study, published in 2017, showed fluoridated water lowers IQ in children. Each 1-milligram per liter increase in fluoride in a pregnant woman’s urine is associated with a four- to five-point drop in her child’s IQ
- Canadian researchers found bottle-fed children who lived in a fluoridated community had, on average, nine points lower IQ compared to those who were bottle-fed in a non-fluoridated community
- The science showing water fluoridation is hurting our children is significant, and keeps growing. More than 20 studies published since 2017 have confirmed fluoride lowers IQ
- Water fluoridation became public health policy in 1950 when the U.S. Public Service endorsed the practice before any of the trials started in 1945 had been completed. For many decades since then, little effort has been made to research harmful effects
- The Fluoride Action Network (FAN) has sued the Environmental Protection Agency in an effort to end the water fluoridation policy. A win will make it easier to overturn water fluoridation policies on the state level, even if the EPA drags its heels. We’re currently waiting for a final report from the National Toxicology Program. Once the report is released, FAN can go back to court and hopefully win the case
In this interview, Paul Connett, Ph.D., cofounder of and scientific adviser for the Fluoride Action Network (FAN), provides an annual status update for 2022. As long-time readers of this newsletter will know, we’ve supported and promoted FAN for over a decade.
Fluoride is one of the many unnecessary barriers to optimal health, and we’ve been fighting all this time to educate people about the risks of fluoridated water, and to end water fluoridation once and for all. During Fluoride Awareness Week, I will match your donations dollar for dollar, so please consider making a tax-deductible donation today.
Fluoride Lowers IQ
According to Connett, the science was conclusively resolved in 2017, when the first of the National Institute of Environmental Health Science (NIEHS)-funded studies came out. This study, the so-called Bashash study,1 confirmed what many previous investigations had shown, namely that drinking fluoridated water lowers IQ in children.
“It was a very striking study,” Connett says. “It was a very, very good study. It had to be, to get NIEHS funding. It was based on individual measurements of exposure in pregnant women, and individual measurements of outcome.
They measured the fluoride levels in their urine, three times, once in each trimester. Urine level is a very good measure because it gives you a measure of total exposure, whether it comes from toothpaste, water or food.
They found a strong association between the pregnant woman’s exposure to fluoride and lowered IQ in children, and they’d taken care of dozens of confounding variables. It was four to five IQ points for a 1-milligram per liter increase of fluoride.
In fact, the range for that four to five IQ point lowering was the same range that you get for pregnant women in the United States in terms of fluoride levels. So, that was the most striking thing. The average level in their urine was 0.87 parts per milligram (i.e., 0.87 milligrams per liter).”
Children’s IQ Is Being Decimated
While on the topic of IQ, there’s now evidence suggesting that pandemic measures such as mask wearing and isolation have caused an average 22-point drop in IQ among babies born during the pandemic.2 Normally, only 16% of children are born with an IQ lower than 85. Most are between 85 and 115. During the pandemic years, almost all the babies they tested scored below 85, scoring an average of just 78!
A four- to five-point loss for every 1-mg per liter increase in fluoride in mothers’ urine was shocking, so that really says something about the harm these countermeasures have done. Compound that with fluoridated water, and some children could be looking at a 27-point loss in IQ, which is simply staggering. That’s basically the difference of going from the level of genius to average, or from average to imbecile.
The pandemic restrictions were clearly an aberration, although it’s not impossible that they’ll try to implement them again in the future. But if we discount the impact they’ve had, fluoride tops the list of environmental factors that rob children of intelligence, and has been doing so for the last 75 years. Connett notes:
“Chris Neurath, our science director, estimates that more IQ points are being lost in America from fluoride than caused by any other factor, including premature birth and exposure to lead. Fluoride, today, is causing more loss of IQ points than lead.”
When the Bashash study was published, Connett thought the fight was over. But he was wrong. Water fluoridation continued unabated in many places. A few years later, a Canadian study came out (Till, 2020), showing the IQ difference between children who were bottle-fed in a fluoridated community, compared to those who were bottle-fed in a non-fluoridated community was nine points.
Bureaucratic Inertia and Profit Motives Put Children at Risk
So, the science3 showing water fluoridation is hurting our children is there. As noted by Connett, what we’ve been doing for the last several decades is to try to push back the political forces that refuse to admit the error and stop their endorsement of water fluoridation.
“One of the shocks I’ve had, over the last few years, since 2017, is to discover that there really are people out there who believe a small benefit to teeth, if it exists, actually warrants this risk to the brain,” Connett says. “[They believe] that reducing tooth decay is more important than protecting children’s brains.
And unfortunately, it includes the U.S. surgeon general. It includes the most powerful people in public health in England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Ireland.
When people ask me, ‘Why do they fluoridate the water? Why do they take these risks in order to reduce tooth decay?’ I’ve had to say, ‘Well, you are asking me to come up with a rational explanation for irrational behavior.’ It’s just not rational … there’s no scientific explanation for this practice.
The only thing I can come up with is … money … All the major universities in the United States are benefiting from government money subsidizing dental research. And if you say that fluoridation is the best thing since sliced bread, this money keeps rolling in.
Obviously, there’s also a lot of money going into the phosphate fertilizer industry, where the fluoridated chemicals come from. Instead of treating [fluoride] as hazardous waste, it’s put in our drinking water. So that’s another ‘rational’ explanation, if you like, as to why it’s happening. But the most likely [reason], from my point of view, is bureaucratic inertia.”
The first municipality to institute water fluoridation was Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1945,4 but it wasn’t until 1950 that the U.S. Public Health Service and the American Dental Association endorsed it.5 This occurred before any of the trials — which were supposed to be ongoing for at least 10 years — had been completed. For many decades since then little effort has been made to research fluoride’s harmful effects.
This changed in 2017 with the NIEHS National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences-funded IQ studies. However, even now, the people in charge of this policy have not been willing to admit they were wrong in promoting this practice for fear of losing credibility. It may be that if they were to admit that fluoridation was a mistake, the public wouldn’t trust them on other public health practices.
Unfortunately, over time, it has only become more difficult to admit the mistake. Who wants to admit government has been harming children’s health for more than 75 years without ever changing course? Personal careers may no longer be at stake, but the credibility of the agency is. Loss of public trust in our health agencies could also affect people’s trust in other public health measures, including childhood vaccinations, which they want to avoid at all costs.
Warnings Are Not Being Put Out
Now that we know there’s no protection for fetuses — that any fluoride a pregnant woman consumes goes into her developing child, including its brain — pregnant women need to be told to stop drinking fluoridated water and using fluoridated toothpaste, at least while they’re pregnant and possibly for some time before. But those warnings are not going out. Connett says:
“We begged the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, saying, ‘We know it’s going to take you time to stop your support of this policy, but at least warn pregnant women to avoid fluoridated water and tell parents who bottle feed their infants not to use fluoridated water.’
But they won’t do it. We wrote several letters to the head of the CDC, and then we asked them to listen to experts. We got experts of some of these IQ studies.
Philippe Grandjean, Bruce Lanphear and Christine Till gave a 30-minute presentation to Dr. Karen Hacker at the CDC. This was all private, no one was watching except us, and they had no questions whatsoever … but they continue to promote fluoridation as the best thing since sliced bread.
In fact, they’re planning right now to increase the number of people potentially getting fluoridated water by 19 million, because they’re developed a tablet system, like the tablets you put into urinals, big tablets of sodium fluoride, and these are injected [into the water supply] through a plastic tube. It’s a very cheap delivery system, which is suitable for small communities.
So, 19 million people who have been living in rural areas, who’ve been protected because it was too expensive to put in all the usual equipment, now have the wonderful benefits of these fluoride tablets. And the promotion of this new delivery system is going on at the same time that the science is coming out [showing it’s] lowering the IQ of children and increasing symptoms of ADHD.”
EPA Has a Duty to End Water Fluoridation
In 2016, FAN filed a petition under the Toxic Substances and Control Act (TSCA) with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), primarily based on Chinese studies showing fluoride harms the brain, urging them to end water fluoridation. Under the TSCA, the EPA is required to ban uses of chemicals shown to pose an unreasonable risk to the health of the American people, including vulnerable subsets.
“Dr. Philippe Grandjean did a risk assessment using the Canadian study and the Mexico City study — the Bashash6 and Green7 studies — and estimates the level of fluoride in mothers’ urine associated with a one-point IQ loss in offspring is 0.2 ppm. The average in the United States is about 0.8 to 0.9 parts per million in a fluoridated community.
0.7 ppm is the recommended level to put in the water. I’m talking about the level in a mother’s urine, which is approximately the same level. In Canada, they measured it as 0.91 ppm. So, if 0.2 ppm lowers IQ by one point, 0.8 ppm would lower the IQ by four IQ points; 0.9 ppm would lower it by 4.5 IQ points. The relationship is linear.”
Update on FAN’s Lawsuit Against the EPA
When the EPA rejected FAN’s petition, FAN filed a lawsuit against them. The trial began in June 2020. Leading experts and scientists testified on FAN’s behalf. The EPA, meanwhile, used experts from Exponent, a consulting company that does the dirty work for Dow, DuPont and other chemical companies. They’ve defended dioxins, PCBs and RoundUp, just to name a few.
“They tried to show, in court, that none of those things are harmful. It’s all in our imagination. And they tried to do the same with fluoride, but the judge at the end was clearly impressed with the evidence … The other striking thing in the trial is that these industry-friendly consultants, Exponent Inc., admitted that the studies we were citing … were the best studies conducted to date.
And so, he said, ‘I want to see three things. I want to see this BMD analysis published’ — that was by Philippe Grandjean, and it’s since been published; 0.2 ppm in mothers’ urine [results in the] loss of one IQ point — ‘I want to see the National Toxicology Program’s (NTP) final report, and I want to see if there are any other studies which have taken place, which contradict what we’ve heard.’
Well, he’s got the BMD analysis from Grandjean, but we are still waiting for the National Toxicology Program to finalize [its report]. And this is the final act of politics versus science in the whole fluoridation fiasco. For 70 years, they really haven’t had decent science demonstrating benefits and certainly not decent science showing it was safe.
They’ve avoided the studies showing harm. Finally, we’ve got those studies. This is the final act, but clearly something is delaying that NTP report, and we think it’s the dark forces behind fluoridation, the dental lobby and the other people with perhaps economic interest who cannot bear to see this practice go.
For them, protecting this policy is more important than protecting the health of our people, and that’s a scary thing. When policy is king, science is a slave, and that’s what we’re seeing.”
Are We Witnessing the Battle of Two Agencies?
The sad fact is, many if not most of our public health agencies and regulatory bodies are completely captured by the industry, which is why public health now comes last.
Connett’s wife is currently researching the role of the National Institute of Dental and Cranial Facial Research (NIDCR) in the fluoridation program. This agency came into existence in 1948, on the back of the water fluoridation program. As such, it became the conduit for dental research on the taxpayer’s dime, and a lot of that money was siphoned into fluoridation.
“Fluoridation was the justification for the gravy train,” Connett explains. “My wife has been going into that gravy train and I have a hunch that what we are looking at right now is the battle between two agencies: the NIEHS, which is concerned about fluoride’s neurotoxicity, and the NIDCR, which does not want to see fluoridation go down the tubes.”
The good news is that, since we started over two decades ago, highly-respected top experts in neurotoxicity are now involved in the research on fluoride, and more are joining in to look at the toxicity of fluoride on various tissues. New studies are coming out all the time. More than 20 have been published on fluoride and IQ since 2017.
And, even if the EPA ends up dragging its heels for years when it comes to implementation at the federal level, a positive ruling would make it far easier to end water fluoridation at the state level.
How to Avoid Fluoride Exposure
In the meantime, how can you avoid fluoride exposure? Connett responds:
“I’ll tell you what we do. We get our water from a local spring. And you do have companies that deliver spring water to your household. If you can afford it, that is the best way. If you have it done by a company that does that, they will tell you how it’s tested and you will be secure knowing that you’re not drinking fluoride.
I think that’s the single best investment. Get non-fluoridated spring water, and use that for cooking, tea, coffee, et cetera, and drinking. The other thing you can do is, obviously, avoid fluoridated toothpaste.
Avoid mechanically deboned meat — patties, where they mince up the meat using a machine — because fluoride accumulates in animal bone, so that’s where you’re going to get fluoride from. If you’re going to eat meat, eat whole steaks, whole chickens or whatever, not minced up. Avoid ground meat.
The other thing is fish. Tinned fish, pilchards, sardines, salmon, the bones in those tinned fish tend to be very soft [and contain loads of fluoride]. In the sea, [natural fluoride] is 1.4 ppm, parts per million, so the fish [bones contain it].
For 20-odd years I’ve been trying to tell people the fluoride ion is the toxic thing … There’s nothing safe about natural fluoride. The only thing about natural fluoride is when you get it, you usually get a lot of other minerals as well, including magnesium and calcium, and they in turn can be protective against fluoride.
So, if you get 1 ppm fluoride but you get 100 ppm of calcium or magnesium, that will help protect you against that fluoride ion being taken up.”
If you want to get your fluoride level tested, just look up labs that measure fluoride in water. They will be able to provide you with that test, and it’s typically quite inexpensive. If you have fluoridated water, be aware that it’s very difficult to filter out. Cheap carbon filters won’t do it. You need either reverse osmosis or distillation equipment to get it out, which is why NOT adding fluoride in the first place really is the best solution.
What’s Next With the EPA Lawsuit?
For now, we’re waiting for the NTP report to come out. Once published, FAN will go back to the court. At that point, the judge will want to hear expert analyses of the report from both sides.
“He will read it, but he will want experts from both sides to convince him that the NTP is saying what we think it says — that the best studies show that fluoride lowers IQ …
The NTP has had two draft reviews, and in those draft reviews, they found — according to Chris Neurath who analyzed them — 27 studies which they classified as high quality, meaning low risk of bias … and of those 27 high quality studies, 25 found a lowering of IQ and two did not. So, 25 out of 27.
Of those 25, 11 were done at less than 0.7 ppm or equal to 0.7 ppm. That’s the level at which we fluoridate … and the majority of the high-quality studies … found a lowering of IQ at less than 1.5 ppm. And 1.5 ppm is what the EPA considers to be relevant, as far as any study pertaining to water fluoridation.
Remember, you’ve got to deal with things like margin of safety, and if IQ is lowered at 1.5 ppm, there is no margin of safety to protect children drinking 0.7 ppm, because some could drink twice as much water as other children. They would be getting the equivalent of 1.5 ppm in terms of dose. Then, you’ve got the range of vulnerability of those children.
So, less than 1.5 ppm fluoridation would have to end if it lowered IQ. That’s if you lived in a world which was rational and in which science had a chance of actually functioning in the regulatory bodies. But most of them are captured by industry. The CDC is captured by the drug industry, the EPA is captured by the chemical industry, the FDA, until recently, [by] the mercury people [and the drug industry].”
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2022/06/26/2022-fluoride-action-update.aspx
The ‘3.5% rule’: How a small minority can change the world
Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.
In 1986, millions of Filipinos took to the streets of Manila in peaceful protest and prayer in the People Power movement. The Marcos regime folded on the fourth day.
In 2003, the people of Georgia ousted Eduard Shevardnadze through the bloodless Rose Revolution, in which protestors stormed the parliament building holding the flowers in their hands. While in 2019, the presidents of Sudan and Algeria both announced they would step aside after decades in office, thanks to peaceful campaigns of resistance.
In each case, civil resistance by ordinary members of the public trumped the political elite to achieve radical change.
There are, of course, many ethical reasons to use nonviolent strategies. But compelling research by Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard University, confirms that civil disobedience is not only the moral choice; it is also the most powerful way of shaping world politics – by a long way.
Looking at hundreds of campaigns over the last century, Chenoweth found that nonviolent campaigns are twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent campaigns. And although the exact dynamics will depend on many factors, she has shown it takes around 3.5% of the population actively participating in the protests to ensure serious political change.
Chenoweth’s influence can be seen in the recent Extinction Rebellion protests, whose founders say they have been directly inspired by her findings. So just how did she come to these conclusions?
The organisers of Extinction Rebellion have stated that Chenoweth’s work inspired their campaign (Credit: Getty Images)
Needless to say, Chenoweth’s research builds on the philosophies of many influential figures throughout history. The African-American abolitionist Sojourner Truth, the suffrage campaigner Susan B Anthony, the Indian independence activist Mahatma Gandhi and the US civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King have all convincingly argued for the power of peaceful protest.
Yet Chenoweth admits that when she first began her research in the mid-2000s, she was initially rather cynical of the idea that nonviolent actions could be more powerful than armed conflict in most situations. As a PhD student at the University of Colorado, she had spent years studying the factors contributing to the rise of terrorism when she was asked to attend an academic workshop organised by the International Center of Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC), a non-profit organisation based in Washington DC. The workshop presented many compelling examples of peaceful protests bringing about lasting political change – including, for instance, the People Power protests in the Philippines.
But Chenoweth was surprised to find that no-one had comprehensively compared the success rates of nonviolent versus violent protests; perhaps the case studies were simply chosen through some kind of confirmation bias. “I was really motivated by some skepticism that nonviolent resistance could be an effective method for achieving major transformations in society,” she says
Working with Maria Stephan, a researcher at the ICNC, Chenoweth performed an extensive review of the literature on civil resistance and social movements from 1900 to 2006 – a data set then corroborated with other experts in the field. They primarily considered attempts to bring about regime change. A movement was considered a success if it fully achieved its goals both within a year of its peak engagement and as a direct result of its activities. A regime change resulting from foreign military intervention would not be considered a success, for instance. A campaign was considered violent, meanwhile, if it involved bombings, kidnappings, the destruction of infrastructure – or any other physical harm to people or property.
“We were trying to apply a pretty hard test to nonviolent resistance as a strategy,” Chenoweth says. (The criteria were so strict that India’s independence movement was not considered as evidence in favour of nonviolent protest in Chenoweth and Stephan’s analysis – since Britain’s dwindling military resources were considered to have been a deciding factor, even if the protests themselves were also a huge influence.)
By the end of this process, they had collected data from 323 violent and nonviolent campaigns. And their results – which were published in their book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict – were striking.
Strength in numbers
Overall, nonviolent campaigns were twice as likely to succeed as violent campaigns: they led to political change 53% of the time compared to 26% for the violent protests.
This was partly the result of strength in numbers. Chenoweth argues that nonviolent campaigns are more likely to succeed because they can recruit many more participants from a much broader demographic, which can cause severe disruption that paralyses normal urban life and the functioning of society.
In fact, of the 25 largest campaigns that they studied, 20 were nonviolent, and 14 of these were outright successes. Overall, the nonviolent campaigns attracted around four times as many participants (200,000) as the average violent campaign (50,000).
The People Power campaign against the Marcos regime in the Philippines, for instance, attracted two million participants at its height, while the Brazilian uprising in 1984 and 1985 attracted one million, and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in 1989 attracted 500,000 participants.
“Numbers really matter for building power in ways that can really pose a serious challenge or threat to entrenched authorities or occupations,” Chenoweth says – and nonviolent protest seems to be the best way to get that widespread support.
Once around 3.5% of the whole population has begun to participate actively, success appears to be inevitable.
Besides the People Power movement, the Singing Revolution in Estonia and the Rose Revolution in Georgia all reached the 3.5% threshold
“There weren’t any campaigns that had failed after they had achieved 3.5% participation during a peak event,” says Chenoweth – a phenomenon she has called the “3.5% rule”. Besides the People Power movement, that included the Singing Revolution in Estonia in the late 1980s and the Rose Revolution in Georgia in the early 2003.
Chenoweth admits that she was initially surprised by her results. But she now cites many reasons that nonviolent protests can garner such high levels of support. Perhaps most obviously, violent protests necessarily exclude people who abhor and fear bloodshed, whereas peaceful protesters maintain the moral high ground.
Chenoweth points out that nonviolent protests also have fewer physical barriers to participation. You do not need to be fit and healthy to engage in a strike, whereas violent campaigns tend to lean on the support of physically fit young men. And while many forms of nonviolent protests also carry serious risks – just think of China’s response in Tiananmen Square in 1989 – Chenoweth argues that nonviolent campaigns are generally easier to discuss openly, which means that news of their occurrence can reach a wider audience. Violent movements, on the other hand, require a supply of weapons, and tend to rely on more secretive underground operations that might struggle to reach the general population.
By engaging broad support across the population, nonviolent campaigns are also more likely to win support among the police and the military – the very groups that the government should be leaning on to bring about order.
During a peaceful street protest of millions of people, the members of the security forces may also be more likely to fear that their family members or friends are in the crowd – meaning that they fail to crack down on the movement. “Or when they’re looking at the [sheer] numbers of people involved, they may just come to the conclusion the ship has sailed, and they don’t want to go down with the ship,” Chenoweth says.
In terms of the specific strategies that are used, general strikes “are probably one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful, single method of nonviolent resistance”, Chenoweth says. But they do come at a personal cost, whereas other forms of protest can be completely anonymous. She points to the consumer boycotts in apartheid-era South Africa, in which many black citizens refused to buy products from companies with white owners. The result was an economic crisis among the country’s white elite that contributed to the end of segregation in the early 1990s.
Nonviolent protests are more likely to attract support from across society. Here a pro-reform protestor faces security forces in Morocco in 2011 (Credit: Getty Images)
“There are more options for engaging and nonviolent resistance that don’t place people in as much physical danger, particularly as the numbers grow, compared to armed activity,” Chenoweth says. “And the techniques of nonviolent resistance are often more visible, so that it’s easier for people to find out how to participate directly, and how to coordinate their activities for maximum disruption.”
A magic number?
These are very general patterns, of course, and despite being twice as successful as the violent conflicts, peaceful resistance still failed 47% of the time. As Chenoweth and Stephan pointed out in their book, that’s sometimes because they never really gained enough support or momentum to “erode the power base of the adversary and maintain resilience in the face of repression”. But some relatively large nonviolent protests also failed, such as the protests against the communist party in East Germany in the 1950s, which attracted 400,000 members (around 2% of the population) at their peak, but still failed to bring about change.
In Chenoweth’s data set, it was only once the nonviolent protests had achieved that 3.5% threshold of active engagement that success seemed to be guaranteed – and raising even that level of support is no mean feat. In the UK it would amount to 2.3 million people actively engaging in a movement (roughly twice the size of Birmingham, the UK’s second largest city); in the US, it would involve 11 million citizens – more than the total population of New York City.
The fact remains, however, that nonviolent campaigns are the only reliable way of maintaining that kind of engagement.
A couple commemorate the Velvet Revolution of 1989, which helped bring down Communist rule in Czechoslovakia – another example of Chenoweth’s “3.5% rule” (Credit: Getty Images)
Chenoweth and Stephan’s initial study was first published in 2011 and their findings have attracted a lot of attention since. “It’s hard to overstate how influential they have been to this body of research,” says Matthew Chandler, who researches civil resistance at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.
Isabel Bramsen, who studies international conflict at the University of Copenhagen agrees that Chenoweth and Stephan’s results are compelling. “It’s [now] an established truth within the field that the nonviolent approaches are much more likely to succeed than violent ones,” she says.
Regarding the “3.5% rule”, she points out that while 3.5% is a small minority, such a level of active participation probably means many more people tacitly agree with the cause.
These researchers are now looking to further untangle the factors that may lead to a movement’s success or failure. Bramsen and Chandler, for instance, both emphasize the importance of unity among demonstrators.
As an example, Bramsen points to the failed uprising in Bahrain in 2011. The campaign initially engaged many protestors, but quickly split into competing factions. The resulting loss of cohesion, Bramsen thinks, ultimately prevented the movement from gaining enough momentum to bring about change.
Chenoweth’s interest has recently focused on protests closer to home – like the Black Lives Matter movement and the Women’s March in 2017. She is also interested in Extinction Rebellion, recently popularised by the involvement of the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. “They are up against a lot of inertia,” she says. “But I think that they have an incredibly thoughtful and strategic core. And they seem to have all the right instincts about how to develop and teach through a nonviolent resistance campaigns.”
Ultimately, she would like our history books to pay greater attention to nonviolent campaigns rather than concentrating so heavily on warfare. “So many of the histories that we tell one another focus on violence – and even if it is a total disaster, we still find a way to find victories within it,” she says. Yet we tend to ignore the success of peaceful protest, she says.
“Ordinary people, all the time, are engaging in pretty heroic activities that are actually changing the way the world – and those deserve some notice and celebration as well.”
David Robson is a senior journalist at BBC Future. Follow him on Twitter: @d_a_robson.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190513-it-only-takes-35-of-people-to-change-the-world