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Every now and then, Haaretz boosts the morale of liberal Zionists by exposing facts and new archived revelations about Zionism’s Nazi-like atrocities against the Palestinian people — but without mentioning the word “Zionism!”

Such pieces give the impression that Israel’s atrocities have nothing to do with Zionism but are rather missteps that the state took upon its founding (or continues to take, as the case might be), mistakes that are possible to ameliorate within the regime of the unmentionable ideology. The ultimate aim is to make Israel appear to the unwary reader as a kinder and gentler Jewish state.

Since very few mainstream newspapers in western countries (and now in the Arab world) dare publish or reference such facts for fear of being accused of antisemitism or worse, many readers are “impressed and amazed” at the seeming virtuousness and honesty of Haaretz, which nevertheless remains a liberal Zionist publication.

On my part, I am amazed how it is possible for Adam Raz, an Israeli historian, to write a long piece in Haaretz titled “Docs Reveal Massacres of Palestinians in ’48 — and What Israeli Leaders Knew” without once mentioning Zionism. Not once.

This is worse than a historian writing about the systematic war crimes of Nazi Germany without mentioning the ideology associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, because Israel’s criminal Zionist practices against the Palestinian people are ongoing and Israel’s oppression of Palestinians must not and cannot endure. The end of Palestinian suffering can come only with the demise of Zionism.

If and when Zionism is mentioned, it is from the point of view of “Arab rejectionism” in Palestine or referencing the Zionist “narrative” that Jewish “return” to Palestine was and continues to be justified as a necessary escape for European Jews from antisemitism, a necessity for Jews to “gain control of their destiny.”

Never mind that such a narrative has been debunked by many scholars, most notably Shlomo Sand in “The Invention of the Jewish People.” Never mind that the destiny of Palestinian Arabs is as important as the destiny of any other group of people, Jews included.

From the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, we have known and have been saying (forever it seems) that Zionists did, in fact, know what they were doing from the beginning of their movement in the early 1900’s and intended to create an exclusive state. We know that these Zionists along with much of the western world ignored our very existence as a significant factor when they weighed it against a “Jewish national liberation movement” (i.e., Zionism) that took over our homeland to escape antisemitism in Europe.

I am not impressed by what Haaretz has published, because Palestinian and other historians have long known such facts without benefit of the Israeli archives Raz was able to access and because the piece lacks the imperative denunciation of Zionism.

Consider the following:

On this day in 2011, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the re-establishment of a regular Bible study group at his official residence in Jerusalem. He claimed the Bible “is our mandate for our country”. He was emulating Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, who also set up Bible study classes to find an ideological “justification” for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the establishment of a “Jewish State”. As non-religious Zionists quip, “There is no God but he gave us the land.”

In other words, the piece in Haaretz is not news. The news is that Haaretz published this history for its own ends, as I explain above. One reader with the handle “goy girl” makes a comment on the article that, to me, epitomizes the paper’s Zionist position, as it echoes Netanyahu’s and Ben Gurion’s actions and thoughts above but in the guise of criticism. (Italics mine).

She says,

“… Having been vindicated by God, Zionists fell into this trap [of acting in humanely] and put Palestinians in ghettos, made Gaza a slave camp, and forced Muslims to dig their own graves. They proved to be just as human and fallible as the rest of us….”

Well, Palestinians, too, are just as human and fallible as the rest of humanity. It is human to resist oppression and it is human to use “violence,” aka armed struggle, to resist that oppression. The trap Palestinians fell into is the trap of Zionism.

Image on the right: Poster–“The revolution continues” (Source: Rima Najjar)

On the 34th anniversary of the Great Palestinian Intifada that launched from Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza on 8 December 1987, Samidoun Palestinian Solidarity Network published an article titled, “The struggle continues until liberation and return.” In it, they joined with the Masar Badil (Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement) in calling for a conference of Palestinian students in 2022 and the Week of Palestinian Struggle in May: “The Intifada is not only a historical moment but an ongoing liberation struggle and an example to the world of the full mobilization of the people for justice and freedom.”

Haaretz, Zionist crimes are not only a moment in history; they are ongoing and embedded in a racist colonial ideology that cannot be wished away or camouflaged as “Jewish and democratic.”

You must recognize the elements that have to be addressed for justice and peace to prevail. Although some Arab countries (not to mention the defunct Palestinian Authority) are normalizing their relationship with Israel, the Palestinian people themselves will never accept Zionism; it is the cause for all the bloodshed in Palestine and must come to an end.

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Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.

She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: From the booklet Ansar III, published by ROOTS and Friends of Palestinian prisoners

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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A ministerial summit of the Forum on China and Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) held on November 29-30 in Dakar, Senegal reinforced the continuing bonds between Beijing and the 55-member African Union (AU).

FOCAC was formed in 2000 during an important period which was marked by several years of substantial economic growth on the continent of Africa and in the People’s Republic of China.

Concurrently, over the same last two decades, the United States, Britain, the European Union (EU) countries and their allies globally, have been embroiled in numerous imperialist interventions resulting in destabilization, military interventions, proxy wars and the expansion of the presence of Pentagon and NATO forces throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America. These imperialist endeavors aimed at maintaining the political and economic domination of the world’s population has created enormous difficulties for peoples globally including the working class, nationally oppressed and impoverished living within the western capitalist countries.

Successive administrations in the U.S. and Britain have turned away, even rhetorically, from the notions of multilateralism, reliance on the United Nations to resolve tensions and conflicts as well, creating the conditions for widespread displacement internationally. The migration crisis in North Africa, the Mediterranean extending into Southern, Central and Western Europe, is a direct result of a series of wars and their aftermaths in Libya, Mali, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Haiti, to name the most well-known and devastating.

The 21st century has witnessed U.S.-instigated regime change in numerous states while the socialist states such as the PRC, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), Cuba, Venezuela, etc., have not embarked upon any destabilization efforts let alone invasions into other sovereign states.

Due to socialist economic planning and their advancement of the notions of international cooperation and peace even among states with varying social systems, there has been tremendous progress in the areas of international solidarity.

The Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) grouping is a manifestation of the role of Beijing, Moscow and Pretoria along with the other states which have varied in regard to their political orientation in recent years. These new alliances are perceived as a threat to the role of the U.S., Britain and the EU since they are not participant-members and cannot directly impact the agendas and goals established by FOCAC and BRICS.

With specific reference to the structures and objectives of FOCAC, the website for the grouping says the following:

“The FOCAC follow-up mechanisms are built at three levels: The Ministerial Conference is held every three years; the Senior Officials Follow-up Meeting and the Senior Officials Preparatory Meeting for the Ministerial Conference are held respectively in the year and a few days before the Ministerial Conference is held; and the consultations between the African Diplomatic Corps in China and the Secretariat of the Chinese Follow-up Committee are held at least twice a year. The Ministerial Conference and the Senior Officials Meeting are held alternately in China and an African country, with China and the African host being co-chairs presiding over the meetings and taking lead in implementing the outcomes of the meetings. The Ministerial Conference is attended by foreign ministers and ministers in charge of international economic cooperation, and the Senior Officials Meeting by director-general level officials of the competent departments of China and African countries.”

At the recent 8th Ministerial meeting of FOCAC in Senegal a myriad of issues were discussed including trade, investment, climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic along with the distribution and manufacturing of vaccines. The gathering coincided with the publication of a White Paper by the Chinese government on the China-Africa cooperation.

This event was marked by a keynote address from President Xi Jinping who evaluated the work of FOCAC over the previous twenty-one years and emphasized that the involvement of Beijing on the continent was not conducted in competition with the U.S. or any other country. Xi announced new projects aimed at assisting Africa in curtailing the impact of the pandemic by building capacity on the continent to produce and deliver medicines including vaccines.

The Chinese president spoke to the summit via video-link. His presentation was widely covered in the state media in China.

Over the period since 2000, China has built 80 large-scale electricity projects, 130 medical facilities, 45 stadiums, 170 schools, numerous rail lines and transport services, the new AU headquarters, to only name a few. In addition, there have been 160,000 Africans trained by Chinese educators and technicians both on the continent and in Asia.

Within the White Paper entitled “China and Africa in the New Era”, issued for the FOCAC Conference, it says that:

“China has been Africa’s largest trading partner for the 12 years since 2009. The proportion of Africa’s trade with China in the continent’s total external trade has continued to rise. In 2020, the figure exceeded 21 percent. The structure of China-Africa trade is improving. There has been a marked increase in technology in China’s exports to Africa, with the export of mechanical and electrical products and high-tech products now accounting for more than 50 percent of the total. China has increased its imports of non-resource products from Africa and offered zero-tariff treatment to 97 percent of taxable items exported to China by the 33 least-developed countries in Africa, with the goal of helping more African agricultural and manufactured goods gain access to the Chinese market. China’s imports in services from Africa have been growing at an average annual rate of 20 percent since 2017, creating close to 400,000 jobs for the continent every year. In recent years, China’s imports of agricultural products from Africa have also risen, and China has emerged as the second largest destination for Africa’s agricultural exports. China and Africa have seen booming trade in new business models including cross-border e-commerce. Cooperation under the Silk Road E-commerce initiative has advanced. China has built a mechanism for e-commerce cooperation with Rwanda, and Chinese businesses have been active in investing in overseas order fulfillment centers. High-quality and special products from Africa are now directly available to the Chinese market via e-commerce platforms. The China-Mauritius free trade agreement (FTA), which became effective on January 1, 2021, was the first FTA between China and an African country. It has injected new vitality into China-Africa economic and trade cooperation.”

This conference obviously has reinforced the existing trajectory of growth in mutual cooperation between Beijing and the overwhelming majority of independent African states with the exception of the Monarchy in Eswatini (Swaziland). Of course, there is an internal struggle taking place in Swaziland over whether the country will be governed democratically or not. The Communist Party of Swaziland (CPS) and its allies are playing a leading role in the democratic movement which has gained considerable attention and support from world communist organizations, labor and anti-imperialist groupings around the world.

State Department Deploys Blinken in Failed Attempt to Weaken FOCAC Conference

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited three African states during mid-November in advance of the FOCAC Conference. Blinken traveled to Kenya, Senegal, the location of the FOCAC Conference, and Nigeria, the most populous state on the continent.

Objectively, no serious observer could argue that the foreign policy of the current President Joe Biden differs fundamentally from his predecessor, Donald J. Trump, in reference to the AU member-states. This lack of even a slight shift in policy towards Africa is reflected in the current conflict in the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia where Washington is backing a rebel group, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which previously was the leading force in the country’s government prior to 2018. The TPLF has maintained close links with the U.S. since in 1991 under the-then administration of President George W.H. Bush, Sr. It was the Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Herman Cohen, who declared the TPLF and the Ethiopian People’s Democratic Revolutionary Front (EPRDF) as the official government in 1991.

Over the next 27 years until 2018, when the EPRDF government collapsed due to an internal uprising which drew mass support, this tendency has collaborated with the U.S. in various military operations across the East Africa region. Since the taking of power by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and his election earlier in the year, the U.S. under Trump and Biden have waged campaigns to undermine the government and install armed opposition groups.

The U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), founded under the administration of President George W. Bush, Jr. in 2008, has been maintained and strengthened by every successive regime in Washington. Biden withdrew Pentagon troops from Afghanistan in August after a two decades-long disastrous occupation, however, there are many other geo-political regions of the world where the U.S. is escalating its military presence.

China is a central focus of imperialism in the Asia Pacific region where Beijing is promoting its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The plans for an alternative economic and trading system includes the African continent as well. Blinken’s visit to three African countries where he sought to place the U.S. at the center of discussions over the future of the continent and the world, did not generate much interest.

Coinciding with the U.S. chief envoy’s trip to Africa, the talking points claiming “Chinese debt traps” surfaced in the corporate media. Both Chinese and African officials dismissed such characterizations of relations between the two entities.

Nonetheless, the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and other financial institutions have entangled post-colonial African states hampering national planning, regional and continental collaboration, and integration. Since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic and the closing down of economies, the rates of joblessness and poverty have accelerated. A recent travel ban initiated by the U.S. and other western governments directed at several Southern African Development Community (SADC), has been condemned as unjustified and damaging to the gross domestic product of these impacted countries.

Global Times noted in an article:

“Even today, the U.S. has still failed to win much trust from African countries, as one of the major purposes of Blinken’s African trip was to get rid of the traumatic effect former U.S. President Donald Trump made to the continent during his term. A recent report by well-known African pollster Afrobarometer shows that China ranks first in terms of external influence in Africa, with 63 percent of Africans saying the economic and political influence of China in their country is ‘somewhat positive’ or ‘very positive,’ and 66 percent perceiving China’s economic and political influence in Africa as positive.”

Democracy: The U.S. vs. China

There was also a White Paper issued in China explaining the concepts of democratic governance embodied within the program of the Communist Party distinguishing its definition from what prevails in the U.S. The U.S. promotes itself as the citadel of world democracy placing human rights as a cornerstone of its foreign policy. This White Paper is entitled “China: Democracy That Works,” which suggests that the western form of democracy has extreme deficiencies.

The worsening economic conditions in the U.S. has served to inflame already existing social contradictions within the society. The country was founded on the seizure of the lands of the indigenous people, their forced removal and mass extermination. Today the indigenous are largely relegated to reservations where many have been subjected to dangerous intrusions into their territories by multinational energy corporations that poison the soil and water sources.

As far as the descendants of African people are concerned, even though the Civil War ended 156 years ago after nearly two-and-one-half centuries of enslavement under Spain, Britain, France and the Netherlands, there is widespread state-sponsored racism across the country where people are often impeded, harassed, arrested, prosecuted, falsely imprisoned and even killed by law-enforcement personnel.

Today, some 56 years since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Supreme Court along with state legislative structures are working feverishly to deny people the right to cast ballots for the candidates of their choice. Impoverishment is highly correlated with color and national origin, meaning that the problem of racism is institutional.

The U.S. Congress has failed to pass legislation which would reestablish the right to universal suffrage. At the same time, the right to housing, reproductive rights, justice in policing and freedom from unwarranted institutional racism remain elusive within the political system led by the politicians in Washington who are underpinned by Wall Street and the Pentagon.

Global Times reports on the China White Paper emphasizing:

“The publication of the document has challenged the U.S. and the West’s monopolistic definition of democracy, marking the further clarification of human beings’ various practices of democracy. China’s economic and social construction continues to make world-renowned achievements, people’s comprehensive rights are also continuously improving. China has also achieved results that have embarrassed the West in the fight against the sudden COVID-19 outbreak, protecting people’s lives in a most effective way. The whole process of people’s democracy proposed by China has a strong realistic foundation and basis. It will not be a short-lived slogan but will continue to unfold with the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and form a demonstration of democratic construction outside of the West.”

Therefore, under existing conditions internationally, the U.S. cannot reasonably say it is the paramount example of democratic governance. As the people of color communities rapidly become a collective majority by the mid-21st century, the undemocratic practices reflected in the neo-fascist movements gaining ground inside the country will continue to pose a challenge to the working class and oppressed.

Internationalism in the 21st Century

China and Africa have similarities in their historical development being post-colonial geo-political countries and regions seeking to reaffirm their places within the international community of nations and peoples. China under socialist construction has moved within a reachable distance to surpass the U.S. in economic status.

The main difference is that the U.S. built its wealth on the expropriation of indigenous land and the enslavement of Africans. During the mid-19th century, Mexico had huge swaths of its territory stolen by Washington under the guise of “manifest destiny.”

In the present period, the people of Mexico, Central America, South America and the Caribbean are being blocked, incarcerated in federal detention facilities and deported from the U.S. on a routine basis. Here again, the anti-immigrant policies of the Trump administration are being extended under Biden. The continued enactment of Title 42 under the Biden regime where migrants fleeing economic distress and human rights violations can be expelled due to there being a public health crisis in the U.S. This measure was specifically designed to deny migrants from Haiti the right to stay within the country despite the role of U.S. imperialism in the isolation and exploitation of Haiti since the early 19th century.

People in North America must not be misled into taking a hostile position towards China in the burgeoning conflict between Washington and Beijing. The role of FOCAC and other structures guiding China-Africa cooperation should be studied as a model for greater international solidarity among working and oppressed people across the globe.

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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of the Pan-African News Wire. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: China graphic on economic crisis in US (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)

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The corrupt UK High Court is nothing but an extension of the corrupt US Department of Justice (sic) and has done its duty to serve as Washington’s agent. See this.

The charges against Julian Assange make no sense. Assange is not an American citizen, but the charges against him assume that he is a US citizen in the pay of a foreign government.

He is charged with spying on the US. Other countries spy on us, as does our own government and commercial firms, just as the US spies on other countries and commercial firms, but no one is arrested for doing so unless it is a citizen of the country spying in the pay of a foreign government. There is no evidence whatsoever that Assange was doing that.

Assange is an independent person practicing legitimate journalism.

He published leaked documents, exactly as did the New York Times when the newspaper published the Pentagon Papers leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, a US citizen with top secret clearances. Unlike Ellsberg, Assange was not the leaker.

Assange was the publisher like the New York Times. The US government’s effort to punish Ellsberg and the NY Times failed in the courts.

Ellsberg was awarded the Olof Palme Prize for “profound humanism and moral courage.”

But times have changed. In Ellsberg’s time, the US government still had enough standing to survive the deception revealed by the Pentagon Papers.

But by the time of Assange, the crimes and misdeeds of the US government had hollowed out Washington’s reputation. The decision was made to make an example of Assange in order to prevent journalists from ever again revealing Washington’s war crimes and deceptions of the American people and US allies.

Rafael Correa, the former president of Ecuador, who was able to remove Assange from Washington’s reach for several years, said that Washington’s aim in its illegal and unconstitutional prosecution of Assange is to “scare others” and shut down real journalism. Correa stated the facts as they are:

“If Assange would have exposed the secrets of China, Russia or left-wing Latin American governments, including my government, he would have been praised by the international press, honored by US Congress and the British parliament. But because his actions were against the interests of the US, the hegemonic country, he was labeled a criminal.” See this.

American journalism is already shut down. All that print, TV, and PBS journalism delivers is official narratives. American journalism serves as a Ministry of Propaganda and as nothing else. It is no longer possible in the “Free West” to practice journalism.

This fact is obvious from journalism’s treatment of Assange.

Real journalism is dependent on the First Amendment.

Without it, there is no journalism. Assange’s persecution signifies the death of the First Amendment. Yet American journalists have served as Washington’s mob squad and have done Washington’s dirty work for a decade beating up Assange with endless lies.

To see the encroaching totalitarianism in the Western World, observe that in the 1970s the case against Ellsberg was thrown out of court, but in the 21st century with a case so weak as to be nonexistent, Washington has managed to corrupt the British High Court to turn over Assange to Washington, not for legal reasons, but for vengeance.

This is persecution, not legitimate prosecution. Add to this Australian concentration camps for citizen suspected of having been exposed to Covid, imprisonment of unvaccinated citizens in Austria and Germany, job- and GDP-destroying lockdowns, restrictions on freedom of association and freedom of movement, silencing of scientific experts who disprove the official false Covid narrative. You can add to this list.

People in the “Free West” are so insouciant that most have accepted the presstitutes’ portrayal of Assange as a Russian spy.

People are too insouciant to recognize that even if the lie were true, it is not grounds for prosecution as Assange is not an American citizen or legal resident.

Rafael Correa is correct. Washington is determined, even at the cost of lawlessness, to make an example of Assange and thereby guarantee that the only permissible “journalism” is propaganda in behalf of Washington’s narratives.

This is the same complete control over explanations as exists in George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984.

1984 arrived 37 years later, but it is here now.

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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog site, PCR Institute for Political Economy, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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This week’s nationwide annihilation of Biden’s Federal Contractor vaccine mandate at the hands Georgia Federal Judge R. Stan Baker has resulted in a landslide retreat of cowardly mega-corporations from their so-confident bullying of American workers.

Biden’s illegal gamble, the nationwide Federal contractor vaccine mandate, has like his previous Medicare mandate and OSHA if-you-have-100-workers-mandatory-vax mandate been ripped to shreds early on in the courts.

Biden’s mandates have always been a bullying gamble, an admission that they knew they were engaging in illegal acts but that they would continue to use the not-insignificant weapons of the executive branch to blast as much harm as possible until the courts stepped in and noted the obvious: “You can’t do this!”

Cynics – and I sympathize – will say that the courts could have ruled either way so don’t get too excited.

That’s the lesson of the past two years: There is nothing below us as we look down. It takes our breath away. We now understand that our civilization has been built on a pile of sand and any determined entity could tunnel under us as we are distracted by the human necessities of providing for our families and living our finite lives as best as possible.

This horrible reality cannot be unseen.

Previously we viewed our rulers – from dog catcher to president – as malevolent but for the most part at a distance. We never thought they would reach out with their gradually but steadily-acquired iron fist and squeeze the oxygen from our lungs: “Take a shot or starve!”

The Hungarians in early 1918 similarly were shocked that living somewhat silently among them were aliens who would activate themselves at the exact most fertile moment and literally up-end their somnambulant state, imposing “mandates” on their society that included mobile gallows – a crude earlier form of the forced vax.

With the welcome disintegration of this evil government decree – via Judge Baker’s ruling that the contractor mandate is illegal – one by one the mega-corporations also see their position as shifting to the untenable. They are bailing out as fast as possible.

Some 83,000 Florida healthcare workers no longer face being kicked to the street by US government-sponsored terrorism, until this week dutifully enforced by the “free market” prostitutes in bed with the state.

As hero Alex Berenson has reported Thursday, mega corporations in the US are also suddenly looking under themselves and finding that they are alone. No more government guns aimed at the powerless…at least for the time being.

General Electric, 3M, Verizon, and Oracle have in the past day or so hedged their bets and snuck out of bed with the US government: no more vax requirements! We are talking about a large group of people no longer bound by the brotherhood of the needle.

We are winning this for now and should pause to drink it in.

But at the same time we must also look at what has rotted in our civilization that would allow such a force to upend us, to unleash this iron fist once hidden in a velvet glove. Life will never be the same knowing what these people have done to us. They must never be allowed to forget it.

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Featured image is from TRPIPP

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A student at the University of Lethbridge (U of L) is suing the institution for imposing a COVID-19 vaccine passport policy calling it “unconstitutional.”

Hayley Nassichuck-Dean is a fifth-year student at U of L and plays on the university’s women’s soccer team.

Nassichuck-Dean, an undergraduate in the biology program, was intending to complete her studies at the end of the school year in 2022 and move on to veterinary studies.

“Partway through the fall, Alberta post-secondaries removed the (COVID-19) testing option they had initially provided when they came out with their vaccine mandates at the beginning of the school year,” said Carol Crosson, of Crosson Law, the lawyer representing Nassichuck-Dean.

“As a result, students were now required to either vaccinate or vacate campus altogether.”

U of L released its vaccination policy mid-August before the start of the school year requiring all attending the campus to either be fully vaccinated, submit to regular COVID-19 testing or produce an exemption.

On September 13, after students had registered and begun classes, the U of L updated their policy to state anyone not fully vaccinated by November 1 would no longer be permitted on campus and rapid testing would no longer be an option.

In the following days, the province announced new public health orders including the Restriction Exemption Program (REP) allowing eligible businesses and institutions to choose whether to adopt a vaccine passport system or reduce occupancy limits to one-third of fire code limits.

Under the new provincial orders, post-secondary institutions are allowed to establish and implement their own proof of vaccination policy. Around the same time, the government of Alberta also provided a provision for post-secondary institutions to apply for government funding for regular COVID-19 testing expenses.

Although the option for funding testing expenses was offered, many post-secondary institutions, including the U of L, remained firm on the requirement to be fully vaccinated to come on campus.

“As a result, many hundreds of Alberta students are now at home, unable to continue their education, without the future they dreamed of,” said Crosson.

Nassichuck-Dean applied for a religious exemption with both the U of L and her soccer team but was denied. She inquired about taking online classes but was also refused.

“The Policy and decisions of the U of L to refuse to allow the Applicant to continue in her activities unless she engages in the medical treatment of taking the vaccine infringe the right to life insofar as they pose an unnecessary and unknowable increased risk of death to the Applicant who by being compelled to take the vaccine faces a possibility of adverse effects, including the chance of death,” the statement of claim reads.

The statement goes on to claim the U of L’s decisions infringe on Nassichuck-Dean’s right to security because they “undermine the applicant’s right to control her own bodily integrity,” adding they have also caused her psychological stress.

“We say that the post-secondary institution vaccine mandates are a breach of Charter s. 7 which protects the right to autonomy or informed consent in regard to medical treatments,” said Crosson.

The lawsuit also claims the university’s vaccination policy is “too extreme” and goes “beyond what is required to achieve the objective.”

“It’s clear from studies that both the unvaccinated and vaccinated are getting and passing on COVID-19,” said Crosson.

“It’s hard to understand how post-secondary institution mandates are accomplishing the goal of decreasing the spread of COVID-19. Students left on campus now are still passing on COVID-19 and will continue to do so in January while their unvaccinated friends sit at home.”

Crosson also claims the U of L’s policy is discriminatory for denying Nassichuck-Dean’s religious exemption as it interferes with her “sincere held religious beliefs” and violates her right to religious freedom under section 2 of the Charter.

“Students across Alberta just want to continue their education,” said Nassichuck-Dean.

“They don’t want to be punished for their medical choices. Discontinuing a testing option does just that.”

The lawsuit is seeking numerous remedies including a reversal of the U of L’s policy to “cease offering the option of rapid testing” calling it “unreasonable” and to reverse its decision to reject Nassichuck-Dean’s religious exemption calling it “illegal.”

Crosson is also seeking court costs be covered for Nassichuck-Dean’s case.

“Post-secondary students all across Alberta have now been sent home, their studies discontinued, because post-secondary institutions have vaccine mandates which no longer even permit regular testing as an option,” said Crosson.

“‘Vaccinate or vacate.’ We contend that this is not about health and safety or these institutions would consider, for example, testing all students on campuses.”

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Melanie Risdon is a Calgary-based Reporter for the Western Standard. She has over 20 years experience in media at Global News, Rogers and Corus. [email protected]

Featured image is from The Western Standard

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***

On the pretext of a respiratory virus
less dangerous than the seasonal flu[1]
they’re requiring a genetic cocktail
be injected into the arms of me and you.
And if you don’t get it, you lose your job,
you lose your means of earning a living.
You can’t go shopping for groceries.
They lie and say you’re spreading disease.

On the pretext of a respiratory virus
less dangerous than the common cold
you damn well better follow their mandates
and do exactly what you’re told—
wear masks indoors, stay six feet apart
because they’ve abolished your brain and your heart.
They lied and told you their so-called “vaccine”
is perfectly safe and would stay in your arm
but it travels throughout your whole body quickly
and causes incalculable harm.
Hundreds of thousands who got the jab
die within a day or a week.
Millions more will deteriorate.
Poor dupes ignored the truth-tellers’ critique.

On the pretext of a respiratory virus
that hasn’t been proven to exist—
and if it does, it isn’t “novel”,
it’s like many others on Fauci’s list—
they’re imposing totalitarian rules
with the full support of the “liberal” fools.
In Australia they’ve got concentration camps
for those who refuse to get the shot.
They’ve got FEMA camps in America too.
While you were sleeping they built a lot.
In New Zealand—a dictatorship
ruled by an ignorant bitch—
protesters get thrown in jail
or beaten up and tossed in a ditch.
Germany and Italy have fallen.
Canada is almost gone.
Who knows how long this insanity
will last…but we know WHY it’s going on:
Depopulation, pauperization,
Government By Regimentation
and endless rounds of vaccination
to cull the “useless eater” mob.
One World Government under Schwab.
You’ll get a booster every six months.
They’ll monitor your thoughts and your grunts.

This is the New World Order—
a boot stomping endlessly on your face.
And if you continue to let it happen
you are immoral and a disgrace.
Tell every do-nothing politician.
Tell every employer in your workplace:
If you continue to let this happen
you are immoral and a disgrace.

*

“There is no SARS-CoV-2 epidemic of national scope, thus no pandemic. This is already evident from the lack of excess mortality when corrected for demographics, and from the rather low occupancy of the intensive care units, whose capacities, in addition, have been massively reduced since April 2020.” —Dr. Thomas Binder, M.D., (The Prevailing Corona Nonsense Narrative, Debunked in 10 or 26 Minutes.) See this.

Dr. Binder has 32 years experience in diagnosis and treatment of Acute Respiratory Illness and did his thesis in immunology and virology.

*

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Notes

[1] COVID-19 “is not a mass murderer. The most recent realistic estimate of the global IFR [infection fatality rate] is 0.15%, below 0.05% for under 70s. After replacing the number of deceased within 28 days with a positive PCR test on whatever cause by the number of deceased from COVID-19, it is even much lower, well below that of seasonal influenza….SARS-CoV-2…self-evidently occurs seasonally from November to April and mutates, without human intervention, in such a way that it becomes ever more contagious but less dangerous. Because of existing basic and cross-immunity, only a fraction of the population falls ill. The disease is usually self-limiting and leaves immunity, possibly for life, and better than the best vaccination ever could. It kills comparatively few people and, unlike influenza, no children.

Featured image is from Medical Tyranny

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***

That was the motto given to Superman, of all people, in comic books. It started out as just ‘truth and justice’ when the DC Comics’ superhero first appeared in 1938, but then the originators added the last bit about the ‘American way’ as an attempt to bolster public morale during the Second World War.

There it remained in Superman’s speaking balloons during the McCarthy years and beyond when Americans became paranoid about Communism and began to propagate the notion of American exceptionalism.

With the latest iteration of the superhero on film, the motto was updated last October to ‘truth, justice and a better tomorrow.’

But the original is the motto I grew up with, probably helped to form my moral compass, and had something to do with my becoming a journalist: the notion that justice and truth do prevail and that these ideals are somehow encapsulated in America with a constitution that embraced truth, justice and human rights for all.

In other words, I grew up believing that the good guys do, eventually, carry the day in order to preserve all those great fundamental rights.

These days, there isn’t much evidence of any of this in America or many other places, given all the lies and corruption in politics, industry and the media, the great economic divides, the unfairness and prejudice now built into many systems, and more.

But every so often truth and justice and all those lofty values we believe in do prevail, and not just in America.

That’s what just happened in Britain, when a court decision upheld the right of a lone UK doctor to speak up against the official line about Covid.

The plantiff’s name was Dr. Sam White, who practices in the Southeast. After qualifying as a conventional doctor, he ultimately turned to functional medicine to solve his own issues with Lyme disease and then decided to turn to integrative solutions to help his patients, too.

Dr. White’s record was impeccable until he started speaking out about Covid. He produced a YouTube video, questioning mask-wearing, lockdowns. and especially the efficacy and safety of the Covid vaccine.

National Health Service England responded by suspending him from a right to practice medicine on June 21 with the following statement:

‘Through a social media video, Dr White spread misinformation and inaccurate details about the Coronavirus and how it is diagnosed and treated, including saying the vaccine is a form of genetic manipulation which can cause serious illness and death and that he advised against wearing masks.

‘Dr White has potentially put patients at risk and diminished the public’s trust in the medical profession by disseminating misinformation and inaccurate details about the measures taken to tackle the Coronavirus pandemic.’

In the video, according to court documents, Dr. White claimed doctors and nurses were ‘having their hands tied behind their backs’ preventing them from using treatments that had been established as being effective both as prophylaxis from Covid19 infections and as treatments for it.’

During the hearing after which his license was revoked, Dr. White’s statement supporting his position ran to 106 paragraphs that addressed, point by point, the allegations contained in the summary of the YouTube video, eventually producing an ‘extensive volume of literature and other sources’ to support his position.

Nevertheless, the UK’s General Medical Council suspended Dr. White’s license to practice medicine for 18 months, on the grounds that he was undermining public confidence in doctors, which would have a real impact on patient safety.

The Tribunal also imposed ongoing monitoring on Dr. White and restricted him from posting or sharing his views about Covid on any social media platforms, even forcing him to remove previous posts.

The GMC quickly revoked that decision about his license a month later, but that wasn’t good enough for Dr. White.

He decided to sue them in the high court, arguing that the GMC had infringed upon his right to freedom of speech.

In hearing the case, the court did not examine the merits of Dr. White’s views – only his right to make them. Referring to Article 10 of the European Court of Human Rights, Justice Dove, who presided over the case, noted:

‘Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.’

However, as Judge Dove pointed out, freedom of expression is a qualified right and as a ‘medical practitioner expressing opinions about medical matters his entitlement to freedom of expression is not absolute.’

Nevertheless, said the court, the GMC both ‘failed to afford sufficient respect to the claimant’s right . . . to freedom of expression or to ‘take account of the support for the claimant’s views to be found in the bodies of medical and scientific opinion which he had furnished to support the witness statement he lodged in the proceedings.’

Bottom line: Dr. Sam White won. He can put up his videos, he can speak out against the standard medical response to Covid, he can criticize the vaccine, he can put forward the other side of the story. And he is more than ready to do so.

As Judge Dove said, there are always qualifications about free speech. In the US, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, in making his decision on the Schenck case in 1919 said, that the test for limiting free speech is, essentially, context. Does it present ‘clear and present danger’ or cause national panic?

His famous analogy was that an individual is free to shout ‘fire’ when in front of a handful of people, but only in a crowded cinema as long as there is one – or the person mistakenly believes there is one.

That decision was later overturned in 1969 with Brandenberg v Ohio, which enlarged our First Amendment rights by concluding that free speech can only be curtailed if it is likely to incite imminent lawless action (like a riot).

So in these fevered Covid times, when anything criticizing government and medical policy is being removed on Facebook and elsewhere, Sam White finally fought over truth and justice about free speech – and prevailed.

His case, which demonstrated that there is sufficient scientific evidence countering every aspect of the official handling of Covid, may well provide precedent to others who are being deplatformed or silenced for criticizing the official line.

He showed us all that even during times of crisis, it is absolutely crucial for a democracy to allow dissenting views to be voiced and aired if we are going to arrive at truth or justice.

That, to my mind, is the very definition of a modern superhero.

*

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***

Only Stoltenberg’s opening statement, neither Scholz’s brief comments nor answers by both to reporters’ questions, is currently posted in transcript form on the NATO website. But all can be heard in the video below. The new NATO satrap confirms there will be no change in NATO nuclear sharing in his nation; the NATO chieftain reiterates that NATO is a nuclear alliance.

[Stoltenberg] You are part of our mission in the Baltic region, with German jets regularly patrolling the skies as part of NATO’s Baltic air policing.

German ships contribute to NATO deployments in the Mediterranean.

German troops help to…in our mission in Kosovo.

And the NATO multinational battlegroup you lead in Lithuania helps to deter any aggression.

So today we discussed Russia’s substantial military build-up in and around Ukraine.

This raises tensions, and undermines security in Europe.

In our meeting today we also discussed the importance of strengthening our transatlantic bond in an age of global competition.

Where countries like Russia and China are undermining the rules-based international order.

Threatening their neighbours.

And expanding their nuclear capabilities.

*

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Rick Rozoff, renowned author and geopolitical analyst, actively involved in opposing war, militarism and interventionism for over fifty years. He manages the Anti-Bellum and For peace, against war website

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Featured image is a screenshot from the video

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***

Nicolas Derome, PhD is a deeply qualified, passionate scientist who lays out a compelling case against injecting children with the mRNA vaccine. In a video exclusively translated from French for RAIR Foundation USA, the Biology professor explains that he makes his case as a scientist and as a father.

It is difficult to find a compelling reason to subject children to the mRNA vaccine, which continues to be experimental and seeks to tackle a disease that barely impacts healthy people in general, but children in particular.

Dr. Derome’s presentation “Gene therapy in 5 to 11 year olds: what are the risks?” has been viewed on YouTube almost 72,000 times since it was published on November 25, 2021. In it, Dr. Derome uses visual slides as he lays out the evidence against injecting children with the “experimental” vaccine.

Dr. Derome works with “Reinfo Covid”, which is the Quebec branch of the French group of the same name. The mission as explained in part on their website “is to bring together health professionals, in order to support them and jointly find solutions to the health crisis.”

Coronavirus Risk in Children

As for the coronavirus itself, Derome explains that the Quebec public health organization INSPQ has not reported any “serious cases related to Covid in children under 17 years old, even up to 19 years old.” Further, the “mortality rate [for Covid] on a worldwide scale is extremely low”.

Children have “innate immunity,” the doctor explained, that is “far more effective than the one in adults,” which explains their “very low mortality rate” of “.0002% which represents one death out of five hundred thousand children”.

One argument for vaccinating children is that it would prevent them from infecting adults, but it is not easy to find data on how often this happens. The Centers for Disease Control is very vague on the matter, stating that “[T]he evidence that children and adolescents can be infected with, get sick from, and transmit SARS-CoV-2 continues to evolve.”

In this vein, the doctor explained that it is “very well documented that the transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for COVID 19 is mainly transmitted from adults to children.” In fact, “[C]hild to adult virus transmission is extremely rare,” he says.

Experimental Gene Therapy

Dr. Nicolas Derome explains that citizens must have appropriate information “in order to make a free and informed choice about this vaccination campaign, which is now intended for children from 5 to 11 years old.”

The professor at the Institute of integrative biology and systems at Université Laval in Québec is particularly interested in the area of molecular biology referred to as functional genomics, or put simply, how to “figure out what roles genes have in an organism.”

It is in this field of study that the professor is exceedingly qualified to discuss the mRNA vaccine being used globally. It is in this context that Derome refers to the injection as “experimental” and as a type of “gene therapy.”

The scientist uses the word “experimental” because the mRNA vaccine is “in phase three of clinical trials”:

Currently, the third phase of these studies for the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, as you see, will be completed in October 2022 (for Moderna) and May 2023, respectively.

Derome states that “[B]ecause this experimental vaccination makes use of messenger RNA,” it is “in fact a kind of gene therapy [also see here].”

Derome points out that the data from vaccine studies is unsatisfactory, and what data is available only shows how the mRNA vaccine simply is “not effective in reducing transmission and infection in adolescents or adults”. Further:

They [the studies] show us that children have a different form of immune defense, different from those of the adolescents and the adults, and, well, it is unlikely that these vaccines will be effective in children.”

Predictable Backlash

As can be expected, Laval University distanced themselves from Dr. Nicolas Derome’s viral presentation. “These words do not in any way reflect the positions of Laval University and its Faculty of Science and Engineering regarding the health crisis,” the spokesperson for the educational institution, Andrée, was quotedas saying in La Presse.

The article is disingenuous, as it mentions the Pfizer clinical trial as evidence that children have been a part of vaccine research.

However, Derome specifically highlighted the Pfizer study, outlining his concern:

Another very important point is that children weren’t included in the initial trials of the vaccines against Covid-19. That means, the famous phase three study that I mentioned earlier, which ends in 2022 for Moderna and in 2023 for Pfizer. From an ethical point of view, there is little or no data on the safety or efficacy of these vaccines for children under 16 years.

All opinions must now reflect that of the state.

The smear piece points out that Mathieu Nadeau-Vallée, who goes by the name Wal_Trudeau on Twitter, “first highlighted the false information disseminated by the professor”. Evidently, Nadeau-Vallée spends his days rooting out what he considers to be “disinformation” online and makes a snarky TikTok video. Sounds very scientific.

Watch the presentation and read the full translated transcript below:

*

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Renee Nal is an investigative journalist and documentary film producer.

Featured image is from RAIR

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***

If the pandemic policy response had taken the form of mere advice, we would not be in the midst of this social, economic, cultural, political disaster. What caused the wreckage was the application of political force that was baked into the pandemic response this time in a way that has no precedent in human history. 

The response relied on compulsion imposed by all levels of government. The policies in turn energized a populist movement, Covid Red Guard that became a civilian enforcement arm. They policed the grocery aisles to upbraid the maskless. Drones swarmed the skies looking for parties to rat out and shut down. A blood lust against non compliers came to be unleashed at all levels of society.

Lockdowns granted some people meaning and purpose, the way war does for some people. The compulsion to bludgeon others trickled down from government to the people. Madness overtook rationality. Once this took place, there was no longer a question of “Two weeks to flatten the curve.” The mania to suppress the virus by ending person-to-person contact extended to two years.

This happened in the US and all over the world. The madness achieved nothing positive because the virus paid no attention to the edicts and enforcers. Ending social and economic functioning, however, shattered lives in countless ways, and continues to do so.

It is precisely because so much about life (and science) is uncertain that civilized societies operate on the presumption of the freedom to choose. That’s a policy of humility: no one possesses enough expertise to presume the right to restrict other people’s peaceful actions.

But with lockdowns and the successor policy of vaccine mandates, we’ve seen not humility but astounding arrogance. The people who did this to us and to billions of people around the world were so darn sure of themselves that they would take recourse to police-state tactics to realize their goals, none of which came to be realized at all, despite every promise that this would be good for us.

It’s the compulsion that’s the source of all the issues. Someone wrote the edicts at someone’s behest. Someone imposed the orders. Those somebodies should be the people who should own the results, compensate the victims, and otherwise accept the consequences for what they have done.

Who are they? Where are they? Why haven’t they stepped up?

If you are going to force people to behave a certain way – to close their businesses, kick people out of their homes, stay away from meetings, cancel vacations, physically separate everywhere – you have to be damn certain that it is the right thing to do. If the people who did this were so sure of themselves, why are they so shy to take responsibility?

The question is pressing: who precisely bears the blame? Not just in general, but more precisely: who was willing to step up from the beginning to say “If this does not work, I accept full responsibility?” Or: “I did this and stand by it.” Or: “I did this and I’m very sorry.”

So far as I know, no one has said anything like this.

Instead, what we have is a big jumble of messy bureaucracies, committees, reports, and unsigned orders. There are certain systems in place that seem structured in a way that makes it impossible to find out who precisely is responsible for their design and implementation.

For example, a friend of mine was being harassed by his school for not being vaccinated. He wanted to speak to the person who imposed the rule. In his investigation, everyone passed the buck. This person put together a committee which then agreed on best practices left over from some other printed guidance approved by another committee, which had been implemented by a similar institution on another matter. This was then adopted by a different division and passed on to another committee for implementation as a recommendation and then it was issued by another division entirely.

Incredibly, throughout the whole investigation, he failed to find a single person who was willing to step up and say: I did this and it was my decision. Everyone had an alibi. It became one big mush of bureaucracy with no accountability. It’s a tub of dough in which every bad actor pre-built a hiding place.

It’s the same with many people who have been disemployed for refusing to divulge their vaccine status. Their bosses typically say that they are very sorry for what happened; if it had been up to them, the person would continue to work. Their bosses in turn demur and blame some other policy or committee. No one is willing to speak to victims and say: “I did this and stand by it.”

Like millions of others, I’ve been harmed materially by pandemic response. My story lacks drama and is nothing remotely close to what others have experienced but it is salient because it is personal. I was invited to join in a live studio appearance on TV but then was refused because I refused to divulge my vaccine status. I was sent to a separate studio reserved for the unclean where I sat by myself.

The person who informed me said the policy was stupid and he objected. But it is the company policy. Maybe I can speak to his boss? Oh, he is against this stuff too. Everyone thinks it is dumb. Who then is responsible? The buck is always passed on and up in the chain of command but no one will accept the blame and bear the consequences.

Even though the courts have repeatedly shot down the vaccine mandates, there is universal consensus that the vaccines, while perhaps offering some private benefits, are not contributing to stopping infections or spread. Which is to say: the only person who might suffer from being unvaccinated is the unvaccinated himself. And yet still, people are losing their jobs, missing out on public life, being segregated and blocked, and otherwise paying a heavy price for not complying.

And yet there are still people who are intensifying the blame game that blames not government nor public health authorities nor anyone in particular but rather a whole class of people: the evil unvaccinated.

“I am furious at the unvaccinated,” writes Charles Blow of the New York Times, a paper that kicked off the pro-lockdown propaganda as early as February 27, 2020. “I am not ashamed of disclosing that. I am no longer trying to understand them or educate them. The unvaccinated are choosing to be part of the problem.”

How precisely are the unvaccinated the problem? Because, he writes,“it is possible to control the virus and mitigate its spread, if more people are vaccinated.”

This is plainly untrue, as we’ve seen from many countries’ experiences around the world. Look up Singapore or Gibraltar or Israel or any high vaxx country and see their case trends. They look the same or worse than low vaxx countries. We know from at least 33 studies that the vaccines cannot and do not stop infection or transmission, which is precisely why Pfizer and people like Anthony Fauci are demanding 3rd and now 4th shots. Shots without end, always with the promise that the next one will achieve the goal.

Mr. Blow is propagating falsehoods. Why? Because there is an appetite out there to tag someone or something with the fault for the wreckage. The unvaccinated are the scapegoats to distract from the real problem of discovering and holding to account those people who undertook this experiment without precedent.

The trouble now is finding out who they are. The governor of New York did terrible things but now he has resigned. His brother at CNN propagated lockdown ideology but he was fired. The mayor of New York has perpetrated evil but he is sneaking out of office in a few weeks. Some governors who locked down their populations have declined to run again and will try their best to disappear.

Dr. Deborah Birx, whom we know for certain was the person who talked Trump into approving lockdowns, quietly resigned and has done her best to avoid the spotlight. The journalist at the New York Times who whipped up total hysteria while calling for brutal lockdown has since been fired from his job. So too for hundreds of public health officials who have resigned or been fired.

Who is left to blame? The most likely candidate here is Fauci himself. But I can already tell you his excuse. He never signed a single order. His fingerprints are on no legislation.

He never issued any edicts. He never had anyone arrested. He never blocked the entrance to any church nor personally padlocked any school or business. He is merely a scientist making recommendations supposedly for people’s health.

He has an alibi too.

Much of this reminds me of World War I, the “Great War.” Look up the causes. They are all amorphous. Nationalism. An assassination. Treaties. Diplomatic confusions. The Serbs. Meanwhile none of these reasons can actually account for 20 million dead, 21 million wounded, and wrecked economies and lives all over the world, to say nothing of the Great Depression and rise of Hitler that came as a result of this appalling disaster.

Despite investigations, countless books, public hearings, and public fury that lasted a decade or more after the Great War, there never was anyone who accepted responsibility. We saw a repeat of the same following the Iraq War. Is there any record of anyone who said “I made the decision and I was wrong”?

So it might be for the lockdowns and mandates of 2020 and 2021. The carnage is unspeakable and will last a generation or two or more. Meanwhile, the people responsible are slowly slipping out of public life, finding new jobs and sanitizing their hands of any responsibility. They are scrubbing resumes and, when asked, blaming anyone and everyone else but themselves.

This is the moment in which we find ourselves: a ruling class terrified of being found out, called out, and held accountable, and therefore incentivized to generate an endless series of excuses, scapegoats, and distractions (“You need another shot!”).

This is the least satisfying conclusion to this awful story. But there it is: it is very likely that the people who did this to us will never be held accountable, not in any court and not in any legislative hearing. They will never be forced to compensate their victims. They will never even admit they were wrong. And herein lies what might be the most egregious feature of evil public policy: this is not and will not be justice or anything that even vaguely resembles justice.

That is what history would suggest, in any case. If it is different this time and the perpetrators actually do face some consequences, it would still not make things right, but at least it would set a fabulous precedent for the future.

*

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Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. [email protected]

Featured image is from Brownstone Institute

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***

Dr. Joseph Ladapo was appointed Florida surgeon general and secretary of the Florida Department of Health by Gov. Ron DeSantis September 21, 2021

Ladapo has now issued a statewide public service announcement in support of commonsense COVID prevention strategies such as optimizing your vitamin D, staying active, eating nutrient-dense foods and boosting your immune system with supplements such as vitamin C, quercetin and zinc

Florida Health even highlights emerging treatments such as fluvoxamine and inhaled budesonide. Importantly, Florida Health now states that

“Physicians should use their clinical judgment when recommending treatment options for patients’ individualized health care needs. This may include emerging treatment options with appropriate patient informed consent, including off-label use or as part of a clinical trial”

Despite publishing a scientific review on vitamin D for COVID in the peer-reviewed journal Nutrients, and the paper being the second most downloaded article this year, I’ve been vilified and targeted by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission for reporting its benefits

The evidence for vitamin D against COVID-19 satisfies Hill’s criteria for causality in a biological system, and dozens of studies have demonstrated vitamin D helps reduce all risks associated with COVID

*

As a ray of hope in what appears to be an utterly broken medical system, Florida’s new surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, has issued a statewide public service announcement in support of commonsense COVID prevention strategies such as optimizing your vitamin D, staying active, eating nutrient-dense foods and boosting your immune system with supplements.

The HealthierYouFL.org website¹ now urges Floridians to “Talk to your health care provider about how certain supplements or foods containing vitamins and minerals might help boost your immune system, such as zinc, vitamin D, vitamin C and quercetin.” These are all well-known supplements that have been shown to have a positive impact on your COVID-19 risk.

The surgeon general also supports the use of monoclonal antibodies in acute cases, and as prevention in high-risk patients who have been exposed to COVID-19. Available treatment locations can be found on FloridaHealthCOVID19.gov.

Florida Health even highlights emerging treatments such as fluvoxamine and inhaled budesonide. Importantly, Florida Health now states that:²

“Physicians should use their clinical judgment when recommending treatment options for patients’ individualized health care needs. This may include emerging treatment options with appropriate patient informed consent, including off-label use or as part of a clinical trial.”

Well, no one could be happier about this than I. I’ve been calling for vitamin D recommendations since the earliest days of the pandemic — ideally nationwide, but statewide is at least a start, especially considering Florida is the sunshine state. Instead, I’ve been vilified and targeted by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and mainstream media for reporting its benefits.^3,4

The FDA specifically mentioned Vitamin C, Vitamin D and Quercetin in their warning letter.   Now that the Florida surgeon general agrees, will they also be warned by the federal authorities?

Ladapo was appointed Florida surgeon general and secretary of the Florida Department of Health by Gov. Ron DeSantis September 21, 2021,⁵ and it’s refreshing to finally see COVID guidance that makes sense. In his acceptance speech, Ladapo said:⁶

“I am honored to have been chosen by Governor DeSantis to serve as Florida’s next Surgeon General. We must make health policy decisions rooted in data and not in fear …

I have observed the different approaches taken by governors across the country and I have been impressed by Governor DeSantis’ leadership and determination to ensure that Floridians are afforded all opportunities to maintain their health and wellness, while preserving their freedoms as Americans.”

Vitamin D Papers Top List of Most Popular Studies of the Year

October 31, 2020, I published a scientific review⁷ in the journal Nutrients, co-written with William Grant, Ph.D., and Dr. Carol Wagner, both of whom are part of the GrassrootsHealth expert vitamin D panel.

As of October 31, 2021, our paper, “Evidence Regarding Vitamin D and Risk of COVID-19 and Its Severity” — which you can download and read for free — was the second most downloaded study from this journal in the past 12 months. It was also No. 2 in citations and No. 4 for views.

The study with the most downloads in the past year and the all-time highest number of views was another vitamin D paper⁸ by Bhattoa et.al., which found vitamin D supplementation reduced the risk of influenza and COVID-19 infections and deaths. The coauthors of my paper, Grant and Baggerly, were coauthors on this paper as well.

A third vitamin D paper, by Annweiler et.al., also nabbed the No. 1 spot for most-cited study in the past 12 months. This study found vitamin D supplementation improved survival in frail elderly hospitalized with COVID-19.

Clearly, vitamin D has been on the forefront of many minds, and I’m glad the Florida surgeon general recognizes its importance as well. While mainstream media and many so-called health authorities still hold on to the ridiculous claim that there’s “no scientific basis” for the recommendation of vitamin D for COVID, that is just false.

As early as the end of September 2020, data from 14 observational studies — summarized in Table 1 of our paper⁹ — showed that vitamin D blood levels are inversely correlated with the incidence and/or severity of COVID-19. Many critics of vitamin D will claim that these associations are not causal. However, there are statistical tools such as Bradford Hill that can actually prove causation through these associations are strong enough.

The Bradford Hill criteria are a group of nine principles (i.e., strength of association, consistency of evidence, temporality, biological gradient, plausibility or mechanism of action, and coherence, although coherence still needs to be verified experimentally) that can be useful in establishing epidemiologic evidence of a causal relationship between a presumed cause and an observed effect.

It has been widely used in public health research and has determined that the vitamin D insufficiency for COVID is indeed causal.¹⁰

It’s important to realize that your body is well-equipped to handle just about any infection, provided your immune system is working properly, as that is your body’s first line of defense. Vitamin D receptors are found in a large number of different tissues and cells, including your immune cells. This means vitamin D plays an important role in your immune function specifically.

If vitamin D is lacking, your immune system will be impaired, which in turn makes you more susceptible to infections of all kinds, including COVID-19. As explained in our paper, having sufficient vitamin D in your system can reduce your risk of COVID-19 and other respiratory infections through several different mechanisms, including but not limited to the following:¹¹

• Reducing the survival of viruses
• Inhibiting the replication of viruses¹²
• Reducing inflammatory cytokine production
• Maintaining endothelial integrity (endothelial dysfunction contributes to vascular inflammation and impaired blood clotting, two hallmarks of severe COVID-19)
• Increasing angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) concentrations — Angiotensin II is a natural peptide hormone that increases blood pressure by stimulating aldosterone. ACE2 normally consumes angiotensin I, thereby lowering the concentration of angiotensin II. However, SARS-CoV-2 infection downregulates ACE2, resulting in excessive accumulation of angiotensin II, which worsens the infection
• Boosting your overall immune function by modulating your innate and adaptive immune responses
• Reducing respiratory distress¹³
• Improving overall lung function
• Helping produce surfactants in your lungs that aid in fluid clearance¹⁴
• Boosting T cell immunity, which plays an important role in your body’s defense against viral and bacterial infections. When vitamin D signaling is impaired, it significantly impacts the quantity, quality, breadth and location of CD8 T cell immunity, resulting in more severe viral and bacterial infections.¹⁵
  According to a December 11, 2020, paper,¹⁶ high-quality T cell response actually appears to be far more important than antibodies when it comes to providing protective immunity against SARS-CoV-2 specifically
• Increasing expression of antimicrobial peptides in your monocytes and neutrophils — both of which play important roles in COVID-19
• Enhancing expression of an antimicrobial peptide called human cathelicidin, which helps defend respiratory tract pathogens

From my perspective, vitamin D optimization is one of the easiest, least expensive and most impactful strategies to reduce your risk of serious SARS-CoV-2 infection and other respiratory infections.

Vitamin D optimization is particularly important for dark-skinned individuals (who tend to have lower levels than Caucasians unless they spend extended time in the sun), the elderly, and those with preexisting chronic health conditions. All of these are also risk factors for COVID-19, so population-wide optimization of vitamin D levels could significantly improve COVID outcomes among the most vulnerable.

How Vitamin D Influences Your COVID Risks

At this point, there’s no shortage of studies showing higher vitamin D levels beneficially impact all stages of COVID-19. It:

Lowers your risk of testing positive for COVID — The largest observational study¹⁷ to date, which looked at data for 191,779 American patients, found that of those with a vitamin D level below 20 ng/ml (deficiency), 12.5% tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, compared to just 5.9% of those who had an optimal vitamin D level of 55 ng/ml or higher. This inverse relationship persisted across latitudes, races/ethnicities, sexes and age ranges.

Reduces your risk of symptomatic illness — SARS-CoV-2-specific investigations have found that COVID-19 is far more common in vitamin D deficient individuals.

In one such study,^18,19,20 82.2% of COVID-19 patients tested were deficient in vitamin D, compared to 47.2% of population-based controls. (Mean vitamin D levels were 13.8 ± 7.2 ng/ml, compared to 20.9 ± 7.4 ng/ml in controls.)

They also found that blood levels of vitamin D were inversely correlated to D-dimer levels (a measure of blood coagulation). Many COVID-19 patients have elevated D-dimer levels, which are associated with blood clots. This was particularly true with the original SARS-CoV-2 virus, but while less common with subsequent variants, some blood clotting, just less intense, can still occur.

Reduces infection severity — Our vitamin D paper²¹ also lists data from 14 observational studies that show vitamin D blood levels are inversely correlated with the incidence and/or severity of COVID-19. This is quite logical, considering vitamin D regulates inflammatory cytokine production — a lethal hallmark of COVID-19 — and is an important regulator of your immune system.

Reduces your risk of hospitalization — Reduced severity would translate into a lower risk for hospitalization, and that’s precisely what researchers have found.

A Spanish study^22,23 found baseline vitamin D levels inversely correlated with the risk of ICU admission, and that giving supplemental vitamin D3 (calcifediol at 532 micrograms on the first day of admission followed by 266 mcg on days 3, 7, 15 and 30) to hospitalized patients with PCR-confirmed COVID-19 reduced ICU admissions by 82%.

Reduces your risk of death — COVID-19 patients with a vitamin D level between 21 ng/mL (50 nmol/L) and 29 ng/mL (75 nmol/L) had a 12.55 times higher risk of death than those with a level above 30 ng/mL in one study.²⁴ Having a level below 20 ng/mL was associated with a 19.12 times higher risk of death.

Another study^25,26 found the risk of severe COVID-19 and related deaths virtually disappeared when vitamin D levels were above 30 ng/mL (75 nmol/L).

A third paper²⁷ found a marked variation in mortality depending on whether the patients lived above or below 35 degrees North latitude. As noted by the authors, having adequate vitamin D “could be very important in preventing the cytokine storm and subsequent acute respiratory distress syndrome that is commonly the cause of mortality.”²⁸

Speeds viral clearance — While having enough vitamin D in your system will reduce your odds of infection and serious illness, taking oral vitamin D once infected can still help you recover faster.

Research²⁹ published in November 2020 found oral vitamin D supplementation in SARS-CoV-2-positive individuals with mild symptoms who also had low vitamin D, helped speed up viral clearance.

Participants were randomly assigned to receive either 60,000 IUs of oral cholecalciferol (nano-liquid droplets) or a placebo for seven days. The target blood level was 50 ng/mL. Anyone who had not achieved a blood level of 50 ng/mL after the first seven days continued to receive the supplement until they reached the target level.

Periodically, all participants were tested for SARS-CoV-2 as well as fibrinogen, D-dimer, procalcitonin and CRP, all of which are inflammatory markers. The primary outcome measure of the study was the proportion of patients testing negative for COVID-19 before Day 21 of the study, as well as changes in inflammatory markers.

Of the 16 patients in the intervention group, 10 (62.5%) tested negative by Day 21, compared to just five of the 24 controls (20.8%). Fibrinogen levels were also significantly decreased in the treatment group, indicating lower levels of clotting.

How to Optimize Your Vitamin D Level

For optimal health, immune function and disease prevention, you want a vitamin D blood level between 60 ng/mL and 80 ng/mL year-round. In Europe, the measurements you’re looking for are 150 nmol/L and 200 nmol/L.

If you live in a sunny locale like Florida and practice sensible sun exposure year-round, you might not need any supplements. The DMinder app³⁰ is a helpful tool to see how much vitamin D your body can make depending on your location and other individual factors.

Many, unfortunately, don’t get enough sun exposure for one reason or another, and in these cases, an oral vitamin D supplement may be required. Just remember that the most important factor here is your blood level, not the dose, so before you start, get tested so you know your baseline.

Here’s a summary of how to determine whether you might need an oral supplement, and your ideal dosage:

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Japan is now labeling Covid “vaccines” to warn of dangerous and potentially deadly side effects such as myocarditis. In addition, the country is reaffirming its commitment to adverse event reporting requirements to ensure all possible side effects are documented.

These efforts from Japan’s health authority are in stark contrast to the deceptive measures taken by other countries to coerce citizens into taking the injection, downplaying side effects, and discouraging proper adverse event reporting.

Additionally, Japan is emphasizing informed consent and bodily autonomy. Until the coronavirus pandemic, the concept of “informed consent” was considered sacred to healthcare professionals in the West.

Japan is particularly raising concerns about the risks of myocarditis in young men injected with Pfizer or Moderna’s gene–therapy treatment. The country is enforcing a strict legal reporting requirement of side effects that must take place within 28 days of the injections.

Novel Additives: Descriptions Clarify

Three Covid-19 gene-therapy treatments are currently offered in Japan. They include the Pfizer/BioNTech (Comirnaty) and Takeda’s Moderna formulation. The product descriptions (here and here) state that “this product contains an additive that has never been used in a vaccine before.”

Furthermore, the pharmaceutical companies urge you to consult your doctor about the additive if you plan to be injected with it. In addition to the Pfizer and Moderna gene-therapies, Vaxzevria (formerly AstraZeneca) is also administered in Japan. However, Japan only recommends it to people 40-year-old and over. Reference is also made to the new type of additive in the Vaxzevria injections.

No Compulsory Vaccination Or Discrimination

Japan’s Ministry of Health of health website encourages citizens to receive the “vaccine”; however, they stress it is not mandatory,

Although we encourage all citizens to receive the COVID-19 vaccination, it is not compulsory or mandatory. Vaccination will be given only with the consent of the person to be vaccinated after the information provided.

In addition, the government recommends those who are considering taking the shot carefully consider both its effectiveness and side effects.

Please get vaccinated of your own decision, understanding both the effectiveness in preventing infectious diseases and the risk of side effects. No vaccination will be given without consent.

Furthermore, they stress that businesses do not force employees to receive the experimental gene therapy. Nor should employees discriminate against those who refuse the injections,

Please do not force anyone in your workplace or those who around you to be vaccinated, and do not discriminate against those who have not been vaccinated.

The government even links to a “Human Rights Advice,” including instructions for handling any complaints if individuals face “vaccine” discrimination at work.

Japan Breaks Ranks

Doctors worldwide have echoed Japan’s health authority warnings about the gene-therapies side effects. However, this kind of proper informed consent has cost many doctors in western nations their licenses to practice medicine. The government has accused these doctors of spreading ‘vaccine hesitancy.’

Furthermore, while Japan allows its citizens to choose whether to be injected with the experimental gene-therapies, other countries are forcing citizens to receive the jab. For example, in February 2022, Austria will mandate the injections. Citizens who refuse will face heavy fines and up to one year in prison.

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Amy Mek is an investigative journalist: Banned in parts of Europe, Wanted by Islamic countries, Threatened by terror groups, Hunted by left-wing media, Smeared by Hollywood elites & Fake religious leaders.

Featured image is from RAIR

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The US Africa Command, AFRICOM, has launched “Task Force Red Dragon,” which includes more than 2,000 Virginia National Guard (VNG) personnel (by January), the largest VNG deployment since WWII. Added to that will be National Guard Soldiers from Maryland and Kentucky which totals the most soldiers the division has mobilized since 1942. While Maj. Gen. Timothy P. Williams, the Adjutant General of Virginia said, “The soldiers of Task Force Red Dragon are great examples of citizen-soldier service.” The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) rejects the idea that there is any useful service to be had in the continuing U.S. interference in the affairs of sovereign nations on the African continent or elsewhere. BAP demands not only the withdrawal of all U.S. troops in Africa, but the closure of all U.S. bases throughout the world.

As Netfa Freeman, co-cordinator of BAP’s Africa Team, reminds us,

“the real purpose of AFRICOM is to enable terrorism while at the same time prosecuting the “war on terror” in Africa. This contradictory action ensures that Africa is in a constant state of war and instability. In doing so AFRICOM nurtures and justifies its own reason for being while developing a dependence of African states on AFRICOM for their defense.“

While the Black Alliance for Peace is committed to peace, we understand there can be no peace without justice, and we will stand in solidarity with all peoples (and nations) who strive to liberate themselves from all forms of neocolonial oppression. BAP takes a resolute anti-colonial, anti-imperialist position that links the international role of the U.S. empire to the domestic war against poor people and working-class Black people within the United States. We unequivocally support and uplift mutual cooperation, solidarity, and peace among all parties and people in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and the broader Horn of Africa region.

The U.S.-EU-NATO axis of domination will ultimately find its deathbed in Africa at the hands of the Pan-African masses. We support African-led, localized conflict resolution that is not tied to advancing imperialism, neo-colonialism or any other nefarious Western agendas.

The deployment of U.S. troops to Africa and the phony democracy summit are a reminder that we must remain vigilant against all efforts to confuse the real intent of the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of domination. All of our organizing and mobilizations must have one objective- to  forge transcontinental public cooperation that will save ourselves from the greatest threat to peace and stability on the planet, the U.S. government.

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Some campaign promises, it turns out, should not be kept. In a major foreign policy address delivered on July 11, 2020, then-candidate Joe Biden declared that, if elected,

“I will ensure that democracy is once more the watchword of U.S. foreign policy — not to launch some moral crusade, but because it is in our enlightened self-interest. We must restore our ability to rally the Free World — so we can once more make our stand upon new fields of action and together face new challenges.”

To this end, Biden promised that

“We will organize and host in the United States, during the first year of my administration, a global Summit for Democracy to renew the spirit and shared purpose of the nations of the Free World.”

This summit, Biden noted, would build off “the successful model we instituted during the Obama-Biden administration with the Nuclear Security Summit,” adding that those who attend this Summit for Democracy “must come prepared with concrete commitments to take on corruption, counter authoritarianism, and advance human rights in their own nations.”

On Thursday, Joe Biden will make good on this promise, convening a two-day virtual “Summit for Democracy”

“which will bring together leaders from government, civil society, and the private sector to set forth an affirmative agenda for democratic renewal and to tackle the greatest threats faced by democracies today through collective action.”

Many progressive voices otherwise sympathetic to Biden’s candidacy thought the idea of a Summit for Democracy was a bad idea.

David Adler and Stephen Wertheim, for example, went so far as to write an OpEd for The Guardian in December 2020 criticizing the summit as “at once too blunt and too thin an instrument,” noting that

“although the summit might serve as a useful forum for coordinating policy on such areas as financial oversight and election security, it is liable to drive U.S. foreign policy even further down a failed course that divides the world into hostile camps, prioritizing confrontation over cooperation.”

On this point, Adler and Werthheim have proved to be prescient. In March, Biden took the unusual step of publishing an Interim National Security Strategic Guidance “to convey my vision for how America will engage with the world.”

This document was intended to be a policy placeholder while Biden’s national security and foreign policy team finished the bureaucratic processes associated with promulgating a new, coordinated National Security Strategy to replace the one published by former President Donald Trump back in 2018.

Tool of Exceptionalism

Biden latched on to “democracy” as a tool of American exceptionalism, the promotion of which would serve to rally like-minded nations into the American camp to oppose the forces of autocracy. The rejuvenation of the United States under Biden’s leadership, the interim strategy guidance stated,

“begins with the revitalization of our most fundamental advantage: our democracy. I believe we are in the midst of an historic and fundamental debate about the future direction of our world. There are those who argue that, given all the challenges we face, autocracy is the best way forward. And there are those who understand that democracy is essential to meeting all the challenges of our changing world.”

Democracy, Biden claimed, “holds the key to freedom, prosperity, peace, and dignity. We must now demonstrate — with a clarity that dispels any doubt — that democracy can still deliver for our people and for people around the world. We must prove that our model isn’t a relic of history; it’s the single best way to realize the promise of our future. And, if we work together with our democratic partners, with strength and confidence, we will meet every challenge and outpace every challenger.”

Stirring words, for sure, which, to an untrained ear, might very well inspire one to actually believe such lofty goals and objectives were both genuine and achievable. Sadly, on both counts, Biden and his Summit for Democracy fail. The reasons for this are many, but for the sake of brevity, will be encapsulated in the “golden rules” which should never be broken if a project like the Summit for Democracy is going to be undertaken.

Golden Rule No. 1: Pick a model of success that actually succeeded.

The first Nuclear Security Summit on April 13, 2010. (Korean Culture and Information Service, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Biden and his team of advisers have modeled the Summit for Democracy on President Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit (NSS), the first of which was convened in 2010, and the last in 2016.

Like the Summit for Democracy, the NSS was an exclusive event, limited to 53 nations. Critics have pointed out that, regardless of the limited advances made regarding the issues surrounding nuclear security, when it came to the larger (and far more important) issue of nuclear non-proliferation, the exclusivity of the invitation process politicized what was otherwise a technical discussion, breaking the world down into “haves” and “have nots” when it comes to matters pertaining to peaceful nuclear activity.

This exclusivity proved to be the undoing of the NSS, with the narrow focus of the topic, combined with the limited invitation list, serving to kill the momentum generated during the first summit in just four years’ time.

The lack of a true multi-lateral composition resulted in the NSS failing to be able to extend its reach beyond 2016, the year of the last summit. Despite the limited gains made during the four summits, the fact remains that the world was a far more dangerous place in terms of nuclear proliferation in 2016 than it was in 2011, underscoring the reality that exclusive, ideologically aligned summits are not conducive to achieving broad-based global change.

Given the scope and scale of Biden’s ambitions for democracy, perhaps a different organizational model should have been embraced. But that could only happen if Biden were truly interested in change. The fact is, Biden is seeking to replicate the atmosphere of optimism and hope that defined the Obama administration in its first years. The mirror imaging of the NSS model by the Summit for Democracy only underscores the importance of process over substance in the Biden administration. Perception, not reality, is the name of the game.

Golden Rule No.2: Be consistent about what’s being promoted. 

In his July 2020 address on foreign policy, then-candidate Biden highlighted what he termed one of the great successes of the Obama administration when it came to promoting democracy abroad.

“Take, for example, the nations of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. As vice president, I secured commitments from the leaders of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to take on the corruption, violence, and endemic poverty in their countries that are driving people to leave their homes. Then I worked with a Republican Congress to approve a $750 million aid package to help support those reforms. And guess what — it worked.”

It worked so well that neither El Salvador, Guatemala nor Honduras are being invited to the Summit for Democracy.

As Juan Gonzalez, the White House lead for U.S. policy towards Latin America, explained in a recent interview, “we would have loved to have the countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador at the democracy summit.”

However, Gonzalez explained, “we don’t think that El Salvador is — is perhaps either ready or will contribute productively to the conversation that we’re going to have.” Gonzalez then proceeded to provide a laundry list of reasons, including El Salvador’s “refusing to take action on corruption,” to justify its exclusion.

The same argument was made regarding Guatemala.

“[W]e are very concerned about widespread corruption in Guatemala and one where judicial institutions are facilitating or even protecting it,” Gonzalez said. Likewise on Honduras, which Gonzales recognized “as a democracy and a longstanding partner,” before declaring that “we had some serious concerns about matters that have been unaddressed on corruption.”

In short, the nations that Biden singled out as representing foreign policy success under the Obama-Biden administration are now being excluded from the very forum in which such successes should be highlighted.

The problem, however, is that the Obama-Biden policies failed to achieve the results Biden claimed had been accomplished. And the price these three Latin American countries are paying is to be excluded from a summit which ostensibly promotes the very “democratic values” the U.S. is trying to facilitate in these nations.

One thing is for certain — by denying El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras a seat at the table of democracy, Biden will only further entrench the very forces he is seeking to address by holding the summit in the first place.

And, as a corollary to this rule, don’t invite C.I.A.-sponsored opposition figures whose most recent contribution to governance is a series of failed coup attempts. By extending an invitation to Juan Guido to attend the Summit for Democracy, Joe Biden is making a mockery of the very principles he claims to be promoting.

Golden Rule No. 3: When selling democracy, get your own house in order first.

Storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. (TapTheForwardAssist/Wikimedia Commons)

This one is basic. In selling democracy as a concept worthy of emulation, Biden, in his interim national security guidance, declared that “we will demonstrate not only that democracies can still deliver for our people, but that democracy is essential to meeting the challenges of our time.”  This was going to be an uphill struggle, Biden noted.

“[D]emocracies across the globe, including our own, are increasingly under siege. Free societies have been challenged from within by corruption, inequality, polarization, populism, and illiberal threats to the rule of law.”

Biden declared that under his leadership, the United States would “lead by the power of our example,” adding that this would require

“hard work at home — to fortify the founding pillars of our democracy, to truly address systemic racism and to live up to our promise as a nation of immigrants. Our success will be a beacon to other democracies, whose freedom is intertwined with our own security, prosperity, and way of life.”

Rare, however, is the successful salesman who seeks to peddle a product still under development. This task is made even more difficult if the product being pitched has undergone recent catastrophic failure which has yet to be repaired. American democracy is broken, and it remains to be seen as to whether it can be fixed. The events of Jan. 6, 2021, cannot be viewed as a one-off anomaly, but rather as a symptom of a larger disease of partisan divide that has caused many Americans to lose faith in the very institutions which serve as the foundation of what passes for democracy today.

By convening the Summit for Democracy, Biden is engaging in a very public theatrical event, a show which has him seated at the head of the table, like King Arthur, inviting lesser democratic partners to join him so that he can begin the process of confronting the forces of autocracy which have taken root in the world today.

A king, however, should be believable when he opines on issues, especially those that define his kingdom and the nature of his rule. Biden is not believable when it comes to matters pertaining to democracy.

The American model of democratic rule is no longer worthy of emulation, and America has long lost the ability to export this failed model from the tip of a bayonet. Simply convening a gathering, and placing yourself at its head, does not in and of itself imbue one with legitimacy or authority. In the immortal words of Tywin Lannister, “Any man who must say, ‘I am the king,’ is no true king.”

Joe Biden is no true king, especially when it comes to the issue of democracy.

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Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.

Featured image: Joe Biden on Election Night in Pittsburg, Nov. 3, 2020. (Adam Schultz, Flickr, Biden for President)

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The International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor for Afghanistan has defended his decision to “deprioritize” the focus on the United States in an investigation of war crimes in Afghanistan, saying that the “worst crimes” were committed by Daesh and the Taliban. [both of which were supported by the CIA]

ICC’s prosecutor Karim Khan on Monday told a meeting of ICC countries that the decision was made based on evidence.

“I made a decision, based upon the evidence, that the worst crimes in terms of gravity and scale and extent seem to be committed by the so-called Islamic State [in] Khorasan and also the Taliban,” he said.

ICC prosecutors also asked the judges to authorize the start of the investigation in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, the Islamic Emirate said it has not committed any war crimes and accused the ICC of being biased.

“The Islamic Emirate has committed no war crimes against civilians in Afghanistan. In the last 20 years, we fought for an inclusive government,” said Bilal Karimi, deputy spokesman of the Islamic Emirate.

Meanwhile, international relations and political analysts said the United States should also be included in the investigation.

“In the past 40 years, these courts failed to carry out an impartial and comprehensive investigation into Afghanistan to make the criminals afraid of committing war crimes,” said Mahdi Afzali, an international relations analyst.

“US and NATO soldiers committed war crimes in their 20-year presence in Afghanistan. There are sensitivities inside ICC that prevent an investigation of these crimes,” said Ahmad Khan Andar, an international relations analyst.

The ICC launched a preliminary investigation into Afghanistan in 2006, and asked judges to authorize a full investigation in 2017.

In 2020, the former government of Afghanistan asked the court to pause its investigation, saying the government itself will investigate the issue.

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“On Wednesday afternoon (12/8), I was informed by Jack Knott, Dean of NYU’s Steinhardt School, that his office’s “review” of my “conduct,” carried out at the insistence of my department colleagues last October, finds that my teaching has not violated any of NYU’s policies, and, therefore, that the university will take no further action in my “case” (as there isn’t one).

This is, of course, good news; so it may be churlish of me to observe that, since they came to that conclusion in the spring, they might have let me know before this week.   

In any case, this decision is a great relief, for two reasons. 

First, I no longer have to worry that I might be harried any further by the university (over this matter, anyway); and, second, through this formal exculpation, NYU has, tacitly, disavowed my colleagues’ slanderous petition to the dean back in October, 2020, demanding that he order that “review”—because, they argued, my “conduct” in the classroom had violated NYU policy. It was so egregious, they asserted, that it ought to nullify my academic freedom, so that I might be duly punished (i.e., fired): for my routine “hate speech,” “attacks on students and others in our community,” “aggressions and microaggressions,” and other crimes that I have not committed, ever, at NYU or anywhere else. 

It is because of those wild lies, and my colleagues’ refusal to retract them (or even to reply to me about them), that I am suing them for libel. While we await the judge to rule on their motion to dismiss (filed back in February), I am encouraged that the university appears not to support their drive against me; and I continue to look forward to my vindication, as a victory for academic freedom and free speech.”

– Mark Crispin Miller 

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We heartily congratulate Mark Crispin Miller (who has been a great friend and ally of The Truth Barrier) and look forward to his day in court, bringing, hopefully, his final vindication and compensation.

Sharyl Atkisson’s coverage of Mark Crispin Miller’s story here.

Kyle Rittenhouse was innocent on all counts. Jessie Smollett was guilty on all counts. Now we have the Dean of NYU having to admit he could find no wrongdoing in Miller’s classroom teaching, which is like saying: “We have concluded that no dogs speak Finnish.”

There was never anything to examine, study, or worry about. It was always a nothing-burger, a fit of covid era histrionics. Luckily, Miller fought back, thus raising the price of the lynching of every tenured university Professor who stays grounded in reality in the future. My own experience with a libel lawsuit taught me that getting the case before a jury can be tough. But even if, as in my case, it doesn’t make it that far, you’ve still raised the price of politically motivated globalist lynchings. I hope Jordan Peterson invites Mark Crispin Miller onto his show to discuss this. And Brett Weinstein. And every other academic who still hasn’t lost their mind. Like Peterson and Weinstein, the attackers only succeeded in making their hopeful victims household names with vast audiences.

Could this be the start of the death throes of the woke plague, that peddles lies, and ruins lives for political posturing?

Put me down as a “yes.”

And speaking of lynchings:

The primary blame for perpetrating the Jussie Smollett hoax obviously rests with Smollett , but it's still worth asking (a) what cultural factors incentivize this behavior and (b) why so many leading Dems instantly and unquestioningly seized on this before anything was known: https://t.co/D0apIyme9C

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 10, 2021

So am I following this big brained plot properly? Jessie Smollett paid his gay lover to beat him so he could blame it on white people because he wanted to make an extra 10 grand an episode?

— QuarantinedCoof (@QuarantinedCoof) December 6, 2021

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RCMP National Headquarters
73 Leikin Dr
Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0R2

October 21, 2021

Dear Commissioner Brenda Lucki:

We respectfully submit this open letter to express our most sincere concerns and resolute stand against the forced coercive medical intervention of Canadians, and against the undue discrimination experienced by those exercising their lawful right to bodily autonomy. We are not against vaccinations, but as law enforcement officers, we cannot in good conscience willingly participate in enforcing mandates that we believe go against the best interests of the people we protect.

Executive Summary

As Canadians, our constitutionally-protected freedoms precede the government, and may only be temporarily limited if the majority of evidence justifies such infringements as reasonable, provable, and guided by law. If presented with all available evidence in a court, we firmly believe the government implemented mandates would not hold up under scrutiny.

As experienced investigators, we look past what information is provided and focus on how the information is presented. A proper investigation should be conducted as objectively as possible, and follow the principle that it is better to have questions that cannot be answered than to have answers that cannot be questioned. A complete investigation must include full disclosure of all the facts of the case, even contradictory evidence. Why, then, is there little to no tolerance for free and open debate on this matter? Many credible medical and scientific experts are being censored. Accordingly, we rightly have concerns about “the science” we are being coerced to “follow”.

As representatives of our communities within the RCMP and representatives of the RCMP in our communities, we have never witnessed such division in our country. This sense of “Us versus Them” will be further fueled by having a police force consisting only of “vaccinated” people, while serving communities consisting of “unvaccinated” people, which goes against the community policing model the RCMP has strived to achieve.

As law enforcement officers, we already face higher levels of stress and mental illnesses due to the nature of our work. These have been compounded – considerably – by mandates that we believe are deeply unethical, threatening our livelihood, and dividing society.

As federal employees, what is being done to mitigate this stress? Moreover, what assurances are we given that the injections will not cause short or long-term side effects? What steps will be taken to ensure members are compensated for adverse side effects?

Police officers are expected to preserve the peace, uphold the law, and defend the public interest. We strongly believe that forced and coerced medical treatments undermine all three and, thus, contradict our duties and responsibilities to Canadians. We remain loyal to the Charter and Bill of Rights and ask you to send investigators to collect statements from medical professionals (and other reliable witnesses) who allege they have been silenced – putting lives at risk. Allow us to make this information publicly available to all so the public can scrutinize it and achieve informed consent.

About Us

This letter was created from the collective thoughts, beliefs, and opinions of actively serving police officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) from across the country. We have a wealth of experience which includes, but is not limited to, General Duty, Federal Serious and Organized Crime, School Liaison, Prime Minister Protection Detail, Emergency Response Team, Media Relations, and Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit. We come from various ranks, levels of experience, communities, cultural backgrounds, religious beliefs, and vaccination statuses. Together we are the Mounties for Freedom. We are individual police officers who united in the belief that citizens, including federal employees, should not be forced and coerced into taking a medical intervention.

Our Stance

In August 2021, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced, “Federal public servants need to be fully vaccinated,” and that for those without a medical exemption who choose not to be vaccinated: “There will be consequences”¹.

Since that statement, many federal employees have been told they will be sent home without pay for refusing to receive a contested medical treatment. We have united in the belief that people should not be forced or coerced into receiving the current COVID-19 treatments – it should be voluntary. We stand united against the forced and coerced medical intervention of Canadians and against the discrimination faced by those who have exercised their right to bodily autonomy. We believe in democracy, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the Bill of Rights.

This is not about whether people should be vaccinated – that is a personal choice.

The Law

Our primary duty as peace officers in the RCMP is the preservation of peace². We have never witnessed the level of division in our country as we currently see from the COVID-19 pandemic. It is our responsibility, now more than ever, to make all efforts at preserving the peace in our country.

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms (the Charter) protects fundamental rights and freedoms essential to keeping Canada a free and democratic society³. The Canadian Bill of Rights adds, “… the Canadian Nation is founded upon principles that acknowledge … the dignity and worth of the human person and the position of the family in a society of free men and free institutions.⁴” It continues to say, “Affirming also that men and institutions remain free only when freedom is founded upon respect for moral and spiritual values and the rule of law.⁵”

We believe our federal and provincial governments have failed to uphold the Charter, Bill of Rights, and Constitution and we are witnessing the erosion of democracy in Canada. As you know, the Charter does not guarantee absolute freedoms. If the government is going to limit freedoms, it must establish the limitations are reasonable given all available facts. The government must adhere to a process to prove their actions are appropriate, called the Oakes test. We firmly believe, if presented with all available evidence in a court, the government implemented mandates would not pass the Oakes test. At the time of writing this letter, the Charter’s section 33 Notwithstanding Clause has not been invoked for this pandemic.

Requiring mandatory COVID-19 treatment options is a slippery slope and allows the government to overstep its authority unchecked. It infringes on the fundamental belief in our society that the individual has the right and freedom to choose. The choice of whether to receive medical treatments has always been an individual’s right in Canada. The Canadian National Report on Immunization (1996) stated “Immunization is not mandatory in Canada; it cannot be made mandatory because of the Canadian Constitution.⁶” Section 2 of The Charter guarantees these fundamental freedoms through the freedom of conscience (subsection a) and the freedom of thought, belief, opinion, and expression (subsection b)⁷. Without individuals having the freedom to choose, we would not have a democratic society.

Though the Nuremberg Code is not a law, it is internationally accepted and falls in line with the spirit of our Charter and Bill of Rights. A key component of the Nuremberg Code is that participants in a medical experiment need to participate voluntarily without any form of force or coercion⁸. We have obtained documentation from several Canadian doctors who have explained the current COVID-19 treatment options in Canada, being referred to as “vaccines”, were recently authorized as new drugs despite the absence of long-term data⁹. According to these accredited Canadian doctors, these treatment options did not meet the criteria of true vaccines until very recently when the definition of vaccine was changed^10,11. Without long-term data, these vaccines are still experimental. We believe the act of removing the rights and freedoms of citizens who refuse to participate in specific COVID-19 treatment options is a form of coercion.

The Criminal Code contains our country’s Criminal Offences and explains that a person commits an assault by intentionally applying force to someone else without that person’s consent¹². The Criminal Code further explains that consent is not obtained from a person who submits, or neglects to resist, on the grounds of authority being exercised over them¹³. How then can someone give proper consent to a COVID-19 treatment injection when doing so under the threat of losing their job, freedoms, or livelihood? Canadian courts have already ruled that medical treatment without proper informed consent is an assault¹⁴.

As law enforcement officers, we cannot in good conscience willingly participate in enforcing mandates that violate the laws of our country and breach the rights and freedoms of the people we protect.

Les We Forget

Each year, on the 11th of November, we remember those who sacrificed their lives for our freedoms. From Flanders Field to Juno Beach, many Canadians have bled and died fighting tyrannical nations. We need to remember past events to prevent the repetition of history’s greatest mistakes.

On the 30th of September, we had the opportunity to reflect on such times during our first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. Under the direction of the Government of Canada, RCMP members were once issued lawful orders to remove children from their homes and transport them to residential schools. Canada is still recovering from the impact of those decisions and actions. The RCMP has yet to regain the trust of some citizens.

There was a time when scientists believed humans were divided into racial hierarchies and that a person’s intelligence level and characteristics were determined by race¹⁵. These beliefs were not heavily contested and were widely accepted as scientific fact¹⁶. Phrenology was also widely accepted as being a legitimate scientific study¹⁷. These are not examples of science being wrong but of people conducting poor investigations or misunderstanding their findings. These are just two of several historical examples of widely accepted scientific truths, which became ridiculed practices.

We look back at those times of racial hierarchy and wonder how something so wrong could have been so widely accepted as truth. It is just as hard for many people to conceptualize how RCMP officers could have blindly followed lawful orders that devastated so many lives. Yet now we find ourselves in dangerous waters, when RCMP officers are being forced under coercion and duress to participate in actions they believe go against the spirit of Canadian laws.

We find it ironic that an organization that preaches the honour and respect of Canadian values, and the sacrifice of their veterans, would support actions that contradict the values our veterans fought to uphold. Enforcement of identification and checkpoints was an early step in what would become the Holocaust. Canadian citizens of various backgrounds are being segregated and punished for choosing not to disclose a personal medical decision. We cannot think of a more ironic and cruel way for our governments to pay homage to the sacrifices Canadians have made worldwide to protect individual freedoms than by participating in a process that takes those freedoms away.

Today, instead of having one version of scientific “truth” during this pandemic, we have versions that contradict one another. How can some professionals be so certain their interpretation of science is correct when others give evidence to the contrary? History has already demonstrated we get things wrong even when our scientists agree.

We acknowledge there is a spectrum filled with beliefs relating to this pandemic. For the sake of simplicity, we will refer to two main schools of thought: the common narrative (those who believe the current COVID-19 treatment injections are the way through the pandemic) and those who have concerns with the COVID-19 treatment injections. It’s important to note we are not discussing “antivaxxers” in this letter. We are discussing people with various vaccination statuses who pose questions about the current COVID-19 treatment options being forced upon them.

RCMP members are not scientists nor healthcare professionals; our profession is law enforcement. We do not pretend to be experts in medical or scientific fields, but we are experienced and professional investigators: we look for the facts. Proper investigations follow simple practices that remain consistent across most fields. These practices include but are not limited to: asking the right questions, following evidence, being aware of how biases may affect results, and allowing the evidence to point to the conclusion – not allowing the conclusion to point to the evidence. Most importantly, a proper investigation should be conducted as objectively as possible and follow the principle that it is better to have questions that cannot be answered than to have answers that cannot be questioned. A complete investigation must include full disclosure of all the facts of the case, even contradictory evidence.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused several scientists and medical professionals to provide us with information they described as “science”, “scientific”, or “facts”. The problem with many of these statements is that the provided information often contradicted another piece of “scientific fact” that an equally qualified professional had produced. This makes it near impossible for the average person to know what to believe and what not to believe.

As experienced investigators, we look past what information is provided and focus on how the information is presented. This allows us some insight into the credibility of the information. Some professionals make definitive statements such as “It’s safe and effective” or “This is the way”, giving little or no explanation of how they reached their conclusion. When the information provided is challenged or questioned, the response often indicates the answer is something that cannot be questioned. The CDC recently changed its definition of immunity and vaccine^10,11, allowing the current COVID-19 treatment injections to fit the definition. This is an example of actions taken when you allow your conclusion to point to your evidence.

Other qualified professionals have provided alternate pieces of information during this pandemic. It is not what their results were, but how they arrived at their results that we believe in. These professionals have all been able to articulate their findings quite well and are quick to admit the remaining questions they cannot answer. These professionals (from Canada¹⁸and abroad¹⁹) have expressed warnings and concerns with the current COVID-19 treatment options condoned by the governments. Some of these concerns suggest a higher-than-average number of moderate to severe side-effects from the COVID-19 “vaccinations” compared with our traditional vaccinations¹⁹. Others have stated the current COVID-19 treatment options are proving to be less effective than initially believed^20,21.

We have attached several documents as appendices to this letter which contain information we believe raises reasonable concerns with the current COVID-19 vaccination mandates seen across our country. We encourage you to review the documents and the work each document references thoroughly. Though we understand we have provided a lot of material – which will take time and resources to read – we believe the fact that there is so much evidence opposing the mandatory roll-out of the current COVID-19 treatments is reason enough to take our concerns seriously.

There have also been scientific papers that suggest natural immunity is a better form of protection than what the COVID-19 vaccination can give^21-24. Why is antibody testing not being discussed as a potential option for RCMP members?

Here is a list of the documents we’ve attached to this letter. These documents are a sample of what is available and were written by people (or groups) of scientific or medical professionals in fields directly related to the COVID-19 pandemic. We defer to their expertise.

• Appendix A – This is an open letter from Dr. Eric Payne, a pediatric neurologist in Alberta, to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta. In his letter, Dr. Payne highlights several inconsistencies he has found with the common narrative. Dr. Payne provides several sources from around the world throughout his letter.
• Appendix B – This is the Canadian Covid Care Alliance Declaration. This heavily sourced document provides information on the current pandemic and makes recommendations based on their findings.
• Appendix C – This is a letter from Dr. Byram Bridle, a viral immunologist in Ontario, to the President of the University of Guelph. Dr. Bridle uses his extensive experience and qualifications to explain his concerns with the common narrative surrounding the COVID-19 treatment injections. Dr. Bridle also articulates his concerns with the COVID-19 health mandates.
• Appendix D – This is an open letter from Health Professionals United to the Alberta Health Services. The letter outlines reasons why several frontline healthcare workers in Alberta heavily oppose mandatory COVID-19 vaccination mandates.
• Appendix E – This is an open letter from frontline healthcare workers in British Columbia to Dr. Bonnie Henry, Adrian Dix, and Premier John Horgan. The author(s) state their experiences and expertise are being ignored and ask that the vaccination mandates be revoked.
• Appendix F – This is a report from Dr. Tess Lawrie from the United Kingdom. Dr. Lawrie demonstrates the abnormal number of reported adverse effects from the current COVID-19 treatment injections.
• Appendix G – This is a comprehensive report comparing natural immunity to COVID-19 vs Vaccine-Induced Immunity. It was comprised from several scientists from Ontario and British Columbia.

Censorship

We are not against vaccinations, and we are trying to aid our country through this pandemic. We want to participate in a way that is safe for both our physical and mental well-being. We believe it is essential for people to participate with full informed consent by understanding all the risks of what they are being asked (or in this case forced) to participate in.

As experienced police officers, we have become accustomed to the media portraying us negatively or experienced the media misrepresenting the outcome of a police incident. It would be little to no surprise for us to hear that a media agency misreported an incident. However, it was surprising for us to learn that several of these scientists and doctors, who questioned the information fueling the COVID-19 treatment mandates, also spoke of censorship^25-27.

As experienced investigators, we know it is our responsibility to present all available facts to the public – by proxy of the courts. It is not our place to decide what the outcome of an investigation should be. Our job is to collect all available facts so that the public (the courts) can make an informed decision. We have learned from past mistakes that presenting evidence that only supports one side, while ignoring or refusing to acknowledge evidence from another side, is wrong and tarnishes an investigation. We cannot provide evidence from witnesses who agree on one story while ignoring or hiding the witnesses who agree on a different account of an incident.

It would be unthinkable that RCMP members would blatantly disregard witnesses in an investigation to mislead the courts. The investigation would lose all integrity and the members would be criticized. Why then are we allowing this same behaviour to occur by other public figures? There are accredited medical professionals from our own country who are desperately trying to have their findings heard. Instead of allowing these professionals to speak freely and discuss their results publicly, they are being silenced by governing bodies^25-27.

Our experience in law enforcement and as investigators have allowed us to see how crucial it is that these professionals be allowed to speak openly and publicly. Without the information being included in discussions, we believe the citizens of Canada (including RCMP members) are not receiving the information they need to make an informed decision. This is contrary to our laws and beliefs, and we do not support it.

These medical professionals have tried to stand up and support their country. We are now standing up and supporting them. They must be allowed to share their information publicly to maintain people’s faith in the government. If the people believe the government is continuing to censor experts, the country will fall into instability. This is common around the world in countries whose tyrannical governments sensor information from their people.

Discrimination

We strongly oppose the discrimination that has already begun to create segregation in our country. It has divided families, ended friendships, torn apart spouses, and entered the RCMP workplace. We believe the current messaging being put out by our provincial and federal governments is promoting the creation of an in-group referred to as “Vaccinated” and an out-group as “Unvaccinated”. Even worse, the out-group has been labelled “Anti-vaxxers,” a term used out of context in a negative and derogatory way. The messaging from our governments is causing the dehumanization of the “Unvaccinated” group. By dehumanizing the out-group, an institution creates a greater divide between them and the in-group.²⁸

Police agencies across Canada pride themselves in their efforts to hire officers reflective of the communities they serve. This allows community members to relate to their officers and see them as part of the community. We are representatives of our communities within the RCMP and representatives of the RCMP in our communities. Having a police force consisting only of “vaccinated” people while serving communities consisting of “unvaccinated” people will tear down some of the similarities RCMP members share with their communities. This will create a greater sense of “Us versus Them” between communities and police, which contradicts the community policing model the RCMP has strived to achieve for decades. We anticipate that unless this is corrected soon, it will continue to increase the divide in our country.

Dehumanizing individuals is challenging. It is easier to attach a label and stigma to a group. That way, anyone or anything that comes from the group can be written off²⁸. The term “Anti-vaxxer” is currently being used to mislabel and group people into a category to take away their credibility. This has allowed things to be written and said against this group that would be intolerable if written or said about any other group.

On August 26th, 2021, the Toronto Star ran an article that read in large bold letters, “I have no empathy left for the wilfully unvaccinated. Let them die. I honestly don’t care if they die from COVID. Not even a little bit. Unvaccinated patients do not deserve ICU beds. At this point, who cares. Stick the unvaccinated in a tent outside and tend to them when the staff has time.^29,30” If “willfully unvaccinated” was replaced with “Black”, “Gay”, or “willfully Muslim”, this would have been labelled a Hate Crime. How then can we allow such things to be said about people who choose not to receive a medical intervention? Should we allow the same messaging for those who choose not to get a flu shot one season?

The boldness of this statement being printed in a major newspaper shows how acceptable it is in our society to treat people as a lower class of citizens. As RCMP members, we must preserve peace in our communities and put a stop to this.

Physical and Mental Health

This pandemic has increasingly made people feel isolated from their friends, families, and peers. RCMP members already face higher levels of stress and mental illnesses due to the nature of our work. Members affected by the double-vaccination mandate have faced greater stress and isolation as they have watched their status as citizens and regular members begin to diminish. There is currently insufficient support for these members, and there does not seem to be a plan insight to provide adequate support.

The recent vaccination update has left some people feeling more isolated than ever. In times like this, people need support from a community, and our membership is no different. We fear there are more members afraid to speak up about these recent updates for fear of being targeted. Many members may be trying to stick this out on their own, or worse, suffering in silence. We ask that you attempt to reach out in partnership with the NPF to all members who may be negatively affected by these mandates and let them know their employer and governments support them.

Though most people seem to have little to no side effects from the COVID-19 treatment injections, an abnormal number of moderate to severe adverse reactions have included death³¹. What assurances are we given that the injections will not cause short or long-term side effects? Studies show that stress and sleep can play a huge factor in whether a vaccine is effective or not^32,33. Are you ensuring RCMP members are provided with the appropriate amount of rest before an injection? What steps will the RCMP take to ensure members are compensated for adverse side effects?

We also believe enough evidence has been presented to question whether our governments’ actions in this pandemic are the most appropriate. This is causing moral and ethical stressors for some members as they no longer believe their role as police officers is reflective of the democracy Canada claims to be. Mental health and stress levels will have an impact on how members interact with the public.

Paralleling Domestic Violence

The RCMP has taught us the importance and severity of domestic violence. Domestic violence is centred around power and control between an abuser and a victim. One of the biggest problems with domestic violence is there is often an escalation in the severity of abuse. RCMP members have been taught how to identify the signs that someone is involved in an abusive relationship.

There are different types of abuse the abuser may engage in to keep control over their victim: Physical, Financial, and Emotional.

Emotional abuse is quite complex and will often include a variety of tactics such as socially distancing the victim from friends and family, discrediting the victim so they have difficulty obtaining support from others, and making the victim believe that their thoughts and beliefs are wrong – to the point the victim thinks they must be insane. When it comes to finances, an abuser will withhold money and assets from the victim. This ensures the victim cannot survive without remaining in the abusive relationship with the abuser. When an abuser feels they are losing control over their victim, it is quite common for them to escalate their tactics to maintain control.

The federal government is currently displaying several of those traits with its own employees, including the RCMP³⁴.

Commissioner Lucki, we understand your position is appointed, and we are concerned that you too may be subject to a similar relationship with the Prime Minister. Though you, as our top Mountie, should be impartial, you may be forced into supporting some of these actions out of duress. We ask that you do what we ask our domestic violence victims to do – to take a stand against the abuser. This country needs strong and supportive people in positions of authority. Please show Canadians that the RCMP will remain impartial to political agendas and true to the Charter and our Bill of Rights.

Public Interest

Lastly, we want to draw attention to the public safety issues that will arise if these COVID-19 mandates are upheld.

Pierre Elliot Trudeau once said, “There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.³⁵” How is it our federal government is now saying it will be mandatory for employees working from home to receive the COVID-19 treatment injections?³⁶

Regardless of their vaccination statuses, there are RCMP members who feel the steps taken by the federal and provincial governments are too extreme and do not have the best interest of Canadian citizens. Forcing these mandates will cause several RCMP officers to lose faith in the federal government’s commitment to the Charter. These RCMP officers will not participate in actions they believe contradict their morals, ethics, and Canadian laws. These RCMP officers believe it is their responsibility to challenge the federal government in court if necessary.

The RCMP, which is already understaffed, will have additional gaps to fill across the country when these members are not working. Communities will have lost healthy and experienced officers, causing a decrease in available resources. There will also be an increase in taxpayers’ spending as the federal government attempts to fill these gaps. Being short-staffed will have a trickle-down effect causing fewer RCMP bodies to be available to properly recruit, assess, and conduct adequate background checks on potential cadets.

Our experience in law enforcement and as investigators have allowed us to see how crucial it is that professionals be allowed to speak openly and publicly. Without including their information in discussions, we believe the citizens of Canada (including RCMP members) are not receiving the information they need to make an informed decision. This is contrary to our laws and beliefs, and we do not support it.

We want to reiterate a point stated earlier in this letter, so it is remembered. If the people believe the government is continuing to censor experts, the country will fall into instability. We are experts in law enforcement and investigations. We are losing faith in the motives of our government, and we will not willingly participate in actions against people whose Charter rights and freedoms are being violated.

Call to Action

Commissioner Lucki, we ask that you represent the best image of the RCMP by remaining loyal to the Charter and Bill of Rights and not to any particular public figure. Our job as Mounties is to preserve the peace. If we continue down this road of segregation and discrimination, we risk repeating past mistakes. The divide in our society is quickly leaning toward a level of national security. We ask that you open an investigation to ensure no criminal acts were committed in the dissemination of information from federal and provincial health authorities or public figures in positions of trust. We ask you to send investigators to collect statements from medical professionals (and other reliable witnesses) who allege they had been silenced – putting lives at risk.

Allow us to make this information publicly available to all so the public can scrutinize it and achieve informed consent. As Canada’s national police force, we are unique in our ability to conduct a large-scale cross-country investigation, which must be transparent to regain trust in the government.

We also ask that you challenge the Federal Government’s decision to send Mounties home without pay for decisions they’ve made on beliefs protected by Canadian laws. Neither the RCMP, nor the communities they serve, can endure the loss of experienced police officers.

We await your response and your plan of action.

Respectfully,
Mounties for Freedom

cc.

The Honourable Bill Blair, Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness The Honourable Jean-Yves Duclos, President of the Treasury Board of Canada Brian Sauvé, President of the National Police Federation

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Notes

1. Connolly, Amanda, “Notice Offering Options for Federal Workers Who Refuse Vaccines Was ‘Erroneous’: Trudeau,” Global News (2021). Accessed September 30, 2021, https://globalnews.ca/news/8118913/canada-mandatory-vaccines-federal-workers/.
2. Government of Canada, “Duties,” Royal Canadian Mounted Police Act (R.S.C., 1985, c. R-10). Accessed October 19, 2021, https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/r-10/page-3.html.
3. ———. “Learn about the Charter,” Accessed October 19, 2021. https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/rfc-dlc/ccrf-ccdl/learn-apprend.html.
4. ———. “Bill of Rights,” Canadian Bill of Rights (S.C. 1960, c. 44). Accessed October 19, 2021. https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-12.3/page-1.html.
5. Ibid.
6. Public Health Agency of Canada, “Canadian National Report on Immunization – 1996,” Accessed October 19, 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20080414131846/http:/www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/publicat/ccdr-rmtc/97vol23/23s4/23s4b_e.htmlhttp:/www.phacaspc.gc.ca/publicat/ccdr-rmtc/97vol23/23s4/23s4b_e.html
7. Government of Canada, “Guide to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms – Section 2,” Accessed October 19, 2021, https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/how-rightsprotected/guide-canadian-charter-rights-freedoms.html#a2b.
8. National Institutes of Health, “The Nuremberg Code,” Accessed September 30, 2021, https://history.nih.gov/display/history/Nuremberg+Code.
9. Canadian Covid Care Alliance, “Canadian Covid Care Alliance Declaration,” (September 24, 2021), p. 18, par. 3. Appendix B.
10. Payne, Eric, “RE: Mandatory mRNA Vaccine Mandate for Alberta Physicians,” (September 14, 2021), p. 1, par 1. Appendix A.
11. Centers for Disease and Control Prevention, “Immunization: The Basics,” Accessed October 19, 2021, https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/imz-basics.htm.
12. Government of Canada, “Assault,” Criminal Code (R.S.C., 1985, c. C-46), S. 265 (1)(a). Accessed October 20, 2021, https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-46/FullText.html.
13. ———. “Assault,” Criminal Code (R.S.C., 1985, c. C-46), S. 265 (3)(d). Accessed October 20, 2021, https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-46/FullText.html.
14. Supreme Court of Canada, “Hopp v. Lepp,” 1980 CanLII 14 (SCC), [1980] 2 SCR 192. Accessed October 20, 2021, https://www.canlii.org/en/ca/scc/doc/1980/1980canlii14/1980canlii14.html.
15. Bryson, Bill, The Body, narrated by Bill Bryson (New York, NY: Random House Audio, 2019), Audible audio ed., 14 hrs., 4 min.
16. Ibid.
17. Encyclopedia.com, “Phrenology in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America,” Accessed October 19, 2021, https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/phrenology-nineteenth-century-britain-and-america.
18. Canadian Covid Care Alliance, “Canadian Covid Care Alliance Declaration,” (September 24, 2021), p. 2, par, 1. Appendix B.
19. Dolan, Mark, and Lawrie, Tess, “16 July 2021,” YouTube, July 16, 2021, Interview, 14:56 min. Accessed on October 19, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgsXVe9IXco&t=2s.
20. Lawrie, Tess, “RE: Urgent preliminary report of Yellow Card data up to 26th May 2021,” (June 9, 2021), p. 6, par. 4. Appendix F.
21. Bridle, Byram, “COVID-19 Vaccines and Children: A Scientist’s Guide for Parents,” (June 15, 2021), p. 2, par. 2. Accessed October 20, 2020, https://www.canadiancovidcarealliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/2021-06-15-children_and_covid-19_vaccines_full_guide.pdf.
22. Canadian Covid Care Alliance, “Canadian Covid Care Alliance Declaration,” (September 24, 2021), p. 2-3. Appendix B.
23. Bridle, Byram, “An Open Letter to the President of the University of Guelph,” (September 17, 2021), p. 2. Appendix C.
24. Mallard, Bonnie, et al., “Which is better for future COVID-19 prevention: Immunity Following Natural Infection or Vaccine-Induced Immunity?” (October 8, 2021), p. 2, par. 3. Appendix G.
25. Payne, Eric, “RE: Mandatory mRNA Vaccine Mandate for Alberta Physicians,” (September 14, 2021), p. 1-14. Appendix A.
26. Dzsurdzsa, Cosmin, “Derek Sloan Hosts Press Conference with Censored Doctors,” True North News. Accessed October 20, https://tnc.news/2021/06/17/derek-sloan-hosts-press-conference-with-censored-doctors/.
27. Sloan, Derek, “Censorship in Canada,” Vimeo, June 17, 2021, CPAC Parliamentary Press Conference, 3:15. Accessed on October 20, 2021, https://standupcanada.solutions/censorship-in-canada.
28. Wilkerson, Isabel, Caste, narrated by Robin Miles (New York, NY: Random House Audio, 2020), Audible audio ed., 14 hrs., 26 min.
29. Slapinski, Mark, “‘Hate Speech’: The Toronto Star Slammed for Headline Wishing Death on the Unvaccinated,” Toronto 99. Accessed October 20, 2021, https://www.toronto99.com/2021/08/26/hate-speech-the-toronto-star-slammed-for-headline-wishing-death-on-the-unvaccinated/.
30. Bridle, Byram, “An Open Letter to the President of the University of Guelph,” (September 17, 2021), p. 5. Appendix C.
31. Dolan, Mark, and Lawrie, Tess, “16 July 2021,” YouTube, July 16, 2021, Interview, 14:56 min. Accessed on October 20, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgsXVe9IXco&t=2s.
32. Walker, Matthew, Why We Sleep, narrated by Steve West (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster Audio, 2017), Audible audio ed., 13 hrs., 52 min.
33. Ibid.
34. Sauvé, Brian, “Members who do not complete an attestation to being fully vaccinated can expect to be put on administrative Leave Without Pay,” National Police Federation (October 7, 2021). Email broadcast to NPF members.
35. CBC Archives, “Trudeau: There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation,” CBC News (1967). Accessed October 20, 2021, https://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/omnibus-bill-theres-no-place-for-the-state-in-the-bedrooms-of-the-nation.
36. Johnson, Gail, “Declare Your Covid-19 Vaccination Status,” RCMP NOC News. Email broadcast to RCMP members.

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***

Edward Bernays may be known as the Father of Public Relations, but you would not be mistaken if you thought of him as the Father of Lies. He was a BS artist par excellence who pioneered countless methods of deceiving the public.

For Bernays—author of mind-control manuals like Propaganda and The Engineering of Consent—there was no truth, no concept of an objective right or wrong. There were only wants, needs and desires. From advertising cigarettes to overthrowing governments—anything was possible. In his autobiography, Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of a Public Relations Counsel, Bernays borrowed a quote from a friend to describe this post-truth reality: “The cure for propaganda is more propaganda.” [1]

Big Tobacco

Bernays understood the truth is malleable based on an individual’s needs. People are not purely rational actors. They make choices contrary to their self-interest, ignore facts they find inconvenient, and avoid information that may damage their ego. The nephew of famed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, Bernays drew on Freud’s work into the unconscious mind to construct elaborate public relations campaigns that preyed on these tendencies. His preferred tactic? The astroturf campaign—which gave off the illusion of having grass-roots support.

Today, Bernays is best remembered for a series of ads and media events dubbed “Torches of Freedom,” an early venture into social marketing that turned smoking into a form of gendered rebellion, but his first position in Big Tobacco was far more prescient of a future spent manipulating the public.

[Source: intelligentcollector.com]

Working for Liggett & Myers, Bernays established a fake pressure group called the Tobacco Society for Voice Culture and blitzed letters to the editor to influential newspapers under an assumed identity. [2] The letters attacked claims made in ads for cigarette brand Lucky Strike that stated the cigarette helped singers overcome, as Lucky owners American Tobacco put it, “voice irritation.” Bernays’s campaign resonated to such a degree that The New Yorker ran a profile in which it interviewed the group’s “sole member” Henry Bern, a Bern-ays patsy. [3]

Bernays sought to exploit the gap between what the media report and what the public hears and, though his ideas were not always immediately successful, they would blossom strange fruit for decades to come.

In one of his more ambitious proposals, he called for American Tobacco (now his employers thanks to the success of the Liggett & Myers campaign) to create a front group that could anonymously promote its interests. This fake news group, the Tobacco Information Service Bureau (TISB), would send made-up press releases and articles to newspapers and magazines to create the illusion of a legitimate news bureau. [4]

One of the examples of an intended Bernays pitch highlights the absurdity of the TISB: “DOCTORS SAY CIGARETTES REDUCE NUMBER OF MOUTH BACTERIA.” [5] Although American Tobacco never implemented the suggestion, this would not be the end of Bernays’s infatuation with fake news.

The United Fruit Company

By 1950, the United Fruit Company had a problem. Guatemala, the source of its largest cash crop, was in the midst of a protracted revolution.

For most of the 20^th century Guatemalans had lived under the authoritarian rule of American agribusiness. The United States government propped up successive Guatemalan dictators in exchange for the right of American companies to establish plantations in the country. Working conditions on these plantations were harsh—but worse still was the Guatemalan government’s clear favoritism toward American business owners.

[Source: warhistoryonline.com]

In 1936, for example, then-President Jorge Ubico negotiated a deal with United Fruit exempting it from most export taxes. Resentment built among Guatemalans until 1944, when student protests at the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala spiraled into a general strike.

It was clear to United Fruit’s leadership, in particular company president Sam Zemurray, that the country was moving left. Guatemalan military leaders confirmed these fears in October 1944 when they overthrew the Ubico government, in what came to be known as the October Revolution. In the aftermath, Guatemala elected “spiritual socialist” Juan José Arévalo as its new leader. United Fruit needed something—or someone—to save its business.

It should come as no surprise that Sam Zemurray sought out the services of Edward Bernays. In the wake of Arévalo’s ascendance, Guatemala continued to experience political turmoil.

Between 1945 and 1951, there were anywhere from 25 to 30 coup attempts against the Arévalo government. [6]

Bernays was not troubled by this violence. In fact, he found a use for it. His strategy in Guatemala would be simple: He would encourage further unrest. His goal, as described in Biography of an Idea, was to help the public “learn more about the countries in which [United Fruit] functioned and what social, economic, or other purposes it fulfilled.” [7]

But this would be no innocent public relations campaign. Bernays, the Father of Lies, went back to his time in the tobacco industry to pull from his bag of tricks.

The Middle American Information Bureau

Established in 1943, the Middle America Information Bureau (MAIB) served, by Bernays’s estimate, 25,000 Americans working in the media. [8] The organization spun events in Central America through the filter of United Fruit’s economic and political goals, providing American journalists and opinion leaders with United Fruit-approved context.

In the run-up to the 1945 Guatemalan revolution, for example, the MAIB published a pamphlet titled “Every American has a personal stake in our relations with Middle America.” It collated pull quotes from military leaders, business executives, and government officials explaining the “interdependence of Middle America and the United States.” [9]

The MAIB was part of a much larger infrastructure Bernays and Zemurray had set up to dupe the public. The phrase “Middle America,” an attempt by the two at rebranding Central America, came from the Middle American Research Institute (MARI), a Zemurray-funded research group at Tulane University. [10]

Zemurray had established MARI with the intention of focusing on the cultural history of Mexico but, over time, its focus shifted to include countries colonized by United Fruit. Bernays found this of particular importance in his goal of deposing the Guatemalan government.

He could use the patina of respectability provided by MARI to lend his new front an air of legitimacy. “Within a year authoritative atlases used the name Middle America to describe the territory in which the company was active,” he wrote in Biography of an Idea. “We were succeeding in equating the company with the area in which it functioned.” [11]

This infrastructure would expand over the course of the 1940s and 1950s. What was once a simple front operating as a news bureau grew into a propaganda machine that oversaw company newsletters in multiple Central American countries. [12]

At least one of the United Fruit-affiliated newsletters, Latin American Report, was later found to have CIA connections through its editor William Gaudet, whom the agency supported by paying for more than 20 subscriptions a year. [13]

It is unclear what Bernays’s level of knowledge was regarding Gaudet and his association with the CIA. An FBI memorandum dated June 28, 1968, noted that United Fruit officials viewed Gaudet as suspect due to various threats he had leveled at the company in the past. [14]

By that point, however, Gaudet and United Fruit had a collaborative relationship dating back more than a decade, based on articles and advertisements found in Latin American Report. [15] Does this mean the CIA was backing Bernays and his plan to topple the Guatemalan government?

Bernays Tricks a Nation

Bernays was an innovator in that he did not need to rely on others. By the time he felt he had exhausted all possibilities at diplomacy with the Guatemalan government, in 1950, he already knew how he intended to agitate his coup.

Arévalo’s successor, Jacobo Árbenz, was promising agrarian reforms that would return land from American businesses to the Guatemalan people.

Bernays surmised he could use this land-back promise to convince Americans that Árbenz was a threat not only to United Fruit but to the United States as well.

If Bernays could brand Árbenz a communist, he could inflate the threat posed in Guatemala. This would not be difficult, as he already believed Árbenz sympathetic to the communist cause. Writing in Biography of an Idea, he argued the Guatemalan leader “considered the anti-Communist movement subversive and openly accepted the Reds as allies.” [16]

A coup, however, required the full support of both the government and United Fruit, and United Fruit’s problem was that, to Bernays’s mind, its campaign against Guatemala was not aggressive enough. Sam Zemurray, United Fruit’s president, was well aware of the company’s image among American liberals as an aggressor in Central America and he had gone to great pains to rehab it.

United Fruit plantation in Guatemala. [Source: allthatsinteresting.com]

An open coup could hurt business. So, in January 1950, when liberal magazine The Nationpublished “Democracy in Latin America: Chaos on Our Doorstep” attacking United Fruit’s exploitation of countries like Guatemala, it came as a shock to Zemurray. Zemurray was an avid reader of the magazine and took its positions as a bellwether on public opinion. The article threatened the reformed image that Zemurray had spent years cultivating. He endeavored to pen a response. Bernays, ever the opportunist, jumped into action.

Bernays knew that for a coup to take place he would have to appeal not only to United Fruit but also its well-intentioned liberal critics. Thus, on March 18^th, a week before Zemurray’s letter was set to appear in The Nation, the magazine published “Communism in the Caribbean?” an article by a pseudonymous American writer identified as Ellis Ogle. The article was an about-face and made the case for a military intervention from a liberal perspective, with Ogle attacking Guatemala’s “free election” and lamenting that “foreigners have no votes in Guatemala.” [17]

Bernays could not have been happier. “I proposed sending the Nation article to 100,000 liberals,” he wrote in Biography of an Idea. “I believed the Caribbean ferment was bound to become increasingly important. Liberals must play a decisive role. Zemurray agreed.” [18]

What role did Bernays play in the writing of The Nation article? He had, in the past, written letters to publications using pseudonyms, as in the case of the Tobacco Society for Voice Culture. On the other hand, someone identifying as either a real or pseudonymous Ellis Ogle had appeared once before in the pages of The Nation—but that Ellis Ogle was no journalist and certainly not one stationed in Central America.

That Ellis Ogle appeared in a 1920 letter-to-the-editor chastising the Boston Evening Transcript for its labor coverage. [19]

One final wrinkle: The CIA first authorized William Gaudet to begin receiving payments for “special reports” in 1950. [20] The same FBI case file that contained the earlier 1968 United Fruit memorandum also observed that he “may do some free-lance writing under a pen name.” [21]

Regardless of who wrote the article, it achieved its intended effect. Zemurray appeared happy with its influence and started providing direct financial support to The Nation the following year. [22]

Bernays, having removed his final obstacle to a coup, began organizing trips to Guatemala for reporters. Beginning with New York Times writers Will Lissner and Crede Calhoun, Bernays instigated a press panic with carefully curated tours highlighting the dangers of the Árbenz government. [23]

These Bernays-sponsored trips coincided with violent protests, helping to shape perception of Árbenz as a power-hungry dictator. Ludwell Denny, foreign editor for Scripps Howard Newspapers, summed up this sentiment best in a February 1952 syndicated story comparing an alleged alliance between “Guatemalan National Socialists” and Moscow to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. [24]

Once again, as with his prior stunts, Bernays’s media blitz worked. The incoming Eisenhower administration—which included Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, a partner at the law firm which had helped United Fruit negotiate the 1936 tax-dodging contract with Jorge Ubico—was open to the idea of a coup. [25]

Thus, in August 1953, President Eisenhower authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to undertake a covert operation to topple Árbenz.

Operation PBSuccess

Code-named Operation PBSuccess, the CIA operation lasted almost a year and consisted of psychological warfare designed to break the will of the Guatemalan people. Although Bernays was not directly involved, the CIA took a cue from the PR guru and flooded Guatemalans with propaganda to counter the Árbenz government’s own messages, the most notorious example being a fake radio station named the Voice of Liberation.

The station, directed by agent and ex-actor David Atlee Philllips, broadcast messages ranging from fake bulletins on troop movements to disinformation intended to stir hysteria and sow confusion among Guatemala’s citizens. One such broadcast: “It is not true that the waters of Lake Atitlan have been poisoned.” [26]

If Bernays could not take part in the coup in person, he was there in spirit because, on June 27, 1954, he achieved what no PR professional had before him. In the late hours of the evening a pre-recorded broadcast went out to the Guatemalan people. “Workers, peasants, patriots,” intoned the voice of Jacobo Árbenz. “Guatemala is going through a hard trial. A cruel war against Guatemala has been unleashed. The United Fruit Company and U.S. monopolies, together with U.S. ruling circles, are responsible for…” [27]

Jacobo Árbenz had resigned as president. Árbenz ended the broadcast by declaring, “Long live Guatemala!” but this sentiment would be short lived. After a series of political maneuvers, exiled military leader Carlos Castillo Armas returned to Guatemala and took power with the full support of the United States government. Guatemala backslid into authoritarian rule and the Castillo Armas government established concentration camps for political prisoners, where they executed suspected communists. [28]

Castillo Armas and his supporters at the presidential palace. [Source: allthatsinteresting.com]

Bernays, for his part, was ambivalent about his involvement in the coup. In his war on the truth, he had somehow lost sight of his role in fomenting unrest and convinced himself that he was the real victim. “I, too, became a casualty of this revolution,” he wrote, reflecting on his time lobbying against Guatemala. “[United Fruit’s public relations director] sent me a note telling me I was so well off economically that I didn’t need the United Fruit Company as a client.” [29]

The Father of Lies

Whether selling cigarettes or deposing world leaders, Edward Bernays molded reality like clay. In his hands, words spun like so many hollow jars. However, the one constant, the one truth among his many distortions, is that Bernays had no use for the truth.

In this sense, Bernays is responsible for our current information crisis. His public relations campaigns formed the foundation of modern disinformation and influence operations. You are not really lying if the lies you tell are to counter other lies. The cure for propaganda is more propaganda.

We can see the influence of Bernays today all around us, in politics and beyond. Dark money networks birthing artificial advocacy organizations, shadowy donors funding fake pressure groups. Bernays’s specter illuminates the television, where think tanks assemble pundits on the factory line. But most of all, we see him on social media platforms, spaces reliant on a kind of emotional manipulation Bernays perfected a century before Facebook and Cambridge Analytica existed.

Astroturfing is now the primary tool of political deception online. Militaries and police departments operate under fake identities; politicians maintain burner accounts; and government agencies direct troll armies.

If the 20^th century was the century of the self, then the 21^st is the century of the second self—of the third, the fourth, and the fifth. We are no longer bound by the constraints of the truth; as with Bernays, we are free to create and assume identities as we desire. Will we use this freedom to topple governments? Who has already?

Edward Bernays: The father of public relations, the father of lies.

*

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Robert Skvarla is a Philadelphia-based writer. His work has appeared in Diabolique Magazine, Atlas Obscura, and PhillyVoice. You can find him on Twitter at @RobertSkvarla.

Notes

[1] Edward Bernays, Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of a Public Relations Counsel (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965), 384.

[2] Larry Tye, The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays & the Birth of Public Relations (New York: Crown Publishers, 1998), 35-36.

[3] Josef Israels and James Thurber, “The Talk of the Town”, The New Yorker, December 23, 1927, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1927/12/31/a-roland-for-an-oliver.

[4] Allan M. Brandt, The Cigarette Century (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 81-82.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Richard H. Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention(Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1982), 57; Jim Handy, “The Guatemalan Revolution and Civil Rights: Presidential Elections and the Judicial Process under Juan José Arévalo and Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán,” Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 10, no. 19 (1985): 7.

[7] Edward Bernays, Biography of an Idea, 749.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Middle America Information Bureau, Every American has a personal stake in our relations with Middle America (New York: Middle America Information Bureau, 1945), 4, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nnc2.ark:/13960/t0vq8b37p&view=1up&seq=1&skin=2021.

[10] Edward Bernays, Biography of an Idea, 749.

[11] Ibid., 749-750.

[12] Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1982), 82.

[13] Ibid. See also U.S. Congress, House Select Committee on Assassinations, 1975, “Memo of Conversation Between George Gaudet and Bernard Festerwald,” Unclassified Memorandum, Washington, D.C.: United States House of Representatives, https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/180-10112-10390.pdf.

[14] SAC New Orleans, “Reurlet of 6/14/68” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, New Oleans, LA: June 28, 1968), 2, https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32298962.pdf.

[15] William George Gaudet, “The Bounding Main…”, Latin American Report, 1, no. 8 (1956): 3; United Fruit Company, “Seven to One,” Latin American Report, 3, no. 4 (1959): 1; United Fruit Company, “United Fruit Is Growing With Jamaica and Helping Jamaica to Grow,” Latin American Report, 5, vol. 3 (1963): 8.

[16] Edward Bernays, Biography of an Idea, 762.

[17] Ellis Ogle, “Communism in the Caribbean?” The Nation, March 18, 1950, 246-247.

[18] Edward Bernays, Biography of an Idea, 759.

[19] Ellis Ogle, letter to the editor, The Nation, July 10, 1920, 44.

[20] Raymond Reardon, “Subject: William George Gaudet” (Security Analysis Group, Washington, DC: January 16, 1976), https://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/jfk/NARA-Oct2017/NARA-Nov9-2017/104-10133-10236.pdf. [NOTE: Shouldn’t it state that it is a “CIA Routing and Record Sheet” somewhere?]

[21] SAC New Orleans, “Reurlet of 6/14/68,” 3.

[22] Dan Koeppel, Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed The World (New York: Hudson Street Press, 2008), 119.

[23] Will Lissner, “Soviet Agents Plotting to Ruin Unity, Defenses of Americas,” The New York Times, June 22, 1950, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1950/06/22/84659993.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0; C.H. Calhoun, “Guatemalan Reds Trade on Old Ills”, The New York Times, June 5, 1951, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1951/06/05/87046312.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0.

[24] Ludwell Denny, “Enemy Below the Border,” Knoxville News-Sentinel (Knoxville, TN), February 11, 1952, https://www.newspapers.com/image/595431436/.

[25] Richard Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala, 71.

[26] Evan Thomas, “You Can Own the World,” The Washington Post, October 22, 1995, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/magazine/1995/10/22/you-can-own-the-world/c772e3f1-2634-4fb1-a223-b681d63a539d/.

[27] Jacobo Árbenz, “Arbenz Speech Delivered at 0310-0320” (speech, Guatemala, June 27, 1954), CIA Historical Review Program, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000920952.pdf.

[28] Richard Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala, 198-199. 

[29] Edward Bernays, Biography of an Idea, 775.

Featured image: Edward Bernays [Source: thoughtco.com]

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***

In November 2008, while ambassador to Nicaragua, death-squad manager nonpareil John Negroponte’s long time torture and terror campaign sidekick, Robert Callahan, remarked to a reporter in Managua, “US foreign policy toward Latin America has not changed in 50 years and is unlikely to do so under President Obama”. Just months later, the June 2009 coup in Honduras against President Manuel Zelaya proved him to be right. In fact, the veteran US war crimes insider’s comment explained unwittingly why US and allied foreign policy lurches from one mass murdering catastrophe to another.

International context

Callahan and Negroponte, himself a veteran of the Phoenix Progam in Vietnam, were the enforcers in Honduras of the US war against Nicaragua in the 1980s. Back then, they facilitated death squads that disappeared over 180 left wing Honduran leaders of rural workers, student and labor organizations. To the end of his career, Callahan embodied the atrocious US foreign policy history whose continuity he affirmed back in 2008. Since then, only thirteen years have passed but the world continues changing at a vertiginous pace even more rapid than the notable acceleration of international instability following the disastrous Iraq war, in which Callahan also served, assisting yet another of Negroponte’s terror campaigns.

The North American ruling elite and their European and Pacific allies follow the same murderous, despotic unilateral policies they have always done. At home, they apply a woke, quasi-anti-racist, pseudo-feminist, false human rights gloss to pacify domestic liberal or social democrat qualms and progressive dissent. All the while they repress their impoverished lower classes with austerity, and, more recently, undeniably harmful, arbitrary public health restrictions. Overseas, Western elites continue to destroy or destabilize dozens of countries, falsely claiming to promote freedom and democracy, which even their own repression-drunk populations find ever harder to believe.

Central America

Recent events in Central America have underlined the malevolence, stupidity and incompetence of US foreign policy, especially in what US policy makers continue to view through their Monroe Doctrine blinkers as their exclusive sphere of influence. Last November 28^th mass political resistance in Honduras made possible a coalition that has inflicted a truly humiliating electoral defeat on the US backed narco-terror regime fronted by President Juan Orlando Hernandez. Two weeks earlier, in Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega‘s Sandinista government won re-election with massive support from voters for their poverty reduction policies, economic democratization and defense of basic rights to food security, health care and education.

Honduras now looks forward to a government promising to follow the successful socialist-inspired policies which, prior to the ruthless campaign of US destabilization and aggression in recent years, transformed life for the impoverished majorities of Bolivia, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Among the measures president-elect Xiomara Castro has suggested she may take on assuming office is the rupture of relations with Taiwan, allowing Honduras to open full diplomatic relations with China. Over the last few days, following President Ortega’s re-election, Nicaragua has now recognized China’s territorial integrity. No one should be perplexed about why Nicaragua has opened up to China nor why Honduras may well do the same.

Reasons to recognize China

In 2008 prior to Honduras joining the ALBA regional bloc of countries, founded by Venezuela and Cuba, then Honduran President Manuel Zelaya visited then President George W. Bush in Washington asking for substantial development aid and investment. Bush told him there was nothing doing beyond the meagre assistance already on offer. So Honduras joined ALBA and began to get significant support facilitating Manuel Zelaya’s ambitious national development program. Unwilling to accept the regional implications of Zelaya’s advocacy of progressive poverty reduction policies, the US government and its European allies helped promote the coup and legitimize violent repression of protests and the subsequent elections, only making possible Zelaya’s return to Honduras after months of persecution and exile.

After that bitter experience and the experience of US and EU support for the electoral fraud of 2017, Xiomara Castro knows she can expect no useful economic aid or respectful political acceptance from either the US or its European Union allies. Nor is Venezuela in any condition to be able to help Honduras, after itself suffering a decade of North American and European economic aggression. So opening up Honduras to China is practically the only realistic option for Honduras to access the kinds and amounts of development support it needs to recover from over a decade of US inspired economic catastrophe that has left over 70% of Hondurans living in poverty.

The landslide electoral wins for Daniel Ortega and Xiomara Castro, along with the volatile unpredictability of President Bukele in El Salvador, have significantly complicated US policy options in the region. If Honduras does indeed open full diplomatic relations with China, only Belize and Guatemala of the eight Central American Integration System countries will still recognize Taiwan. Apart from purely commercial reasons for moving to recognize China, Nicaragua’s Sandinista government has effectively stymied current and looming overt and covert US economic coercion. The incoming government in Honduras could also likewise pre-empt potential US trade and economic aggression.

Nicaragua’s recognition of China also negates the US government’s boycott of loans from the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank or support from the IMF, whose resources pale beside the massive financial power of China’s state-controlled banking system. The US authorities recently deepened already existing measures attacking Nicaragua’s economy with the punitive Renacer Act. Nicaragua has countered that economic aggression by placing itself to benefit from the substantial bilateral support it can now expect from China. The same would appply in the case of Honduras. But beyond those reasons Nicaragua may share with Honduras for resuming full diplomatic relations with China, other related factors certainly influenced Nicaragua’s decision.

Its new relations with China also complement Nicaragua’s already strong economic and trade relations with the Russian Federation, and other member countries of the Eurasian Economic Union like Belarus. The move also enhances its trade prospects with member countries of the Asia-Pacific countries Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, apart from already longstanding trade partners, South Korea and Japan. In that context, Nicaragua is of strategic importance to both the RCEP countries and more particularly to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, especially given the advanced stage of planning and preparation for the country’s proposed interoceanic canal carried out since 2013 by China’s HKND company.

Underlying all these economic and trade reasons for Nicaragua to resume full diplomatic relations with China after a break of over thirty years, is also Nicaragua’s global moral and diplomatic commitment to peaceful negotiations for the resolution of international conflicts, Ever since taking office in 2007, President Ortega has encouraged Taiwan to reach a negotiated settlement with the People’s Republic of China.

However, especially since her re-election last January, Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen has pushed an implacable militarist agenda rejecting negotiation and dialogue in favor of provocative confrontation with China, cynically supported by the US goverrnment. Nicaragua could hardly have continued recognizing Taiwan in a context where Taiwan is counting on US military intervention in a potential war with China.

Consequences

For Honduras, any move to recognize the People’s Republic of China may possibly involve no more than the same low key disapproval on the part of the US that met the same policy decision by Costa Rica, El Salvador and Panama. But given increasing US desperation at losing its accustomed control of Central America, more high profile intimidation is probably more likely, certainly as regards Nicaragua. Back in 2005, then US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick made clear that the Central American Free Trade Agreemen was as much a political as a trade measure, in large part aimed at corraling countries into even deeper trade dependence on the US.

So it would come as no surprise if the US formally threatened to withdaw from CAFTA unilaterally, as it has done from numerous other treaties, most notoriously perhaps the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action over Iran’s nuclear program. When it comes to sadistic, vindictive, gangster-style menaces nothing is off the table as far as the US authorities are concerned. Consequently, wayward Central American countries like El Salvador, Nicaragua and perhaps Honduras can well expect all kinds of threats covering issues like migration rules and quotas, development cooperation, or even the family remittances so vital to the survival of millions of families in Central America.

On the other hand, however, Mexico should welcome the new development options for the region opened up by China’s growing influence in Central America. Mexico is a decisively important country for the region and prioritizes social and economic Central American regional stability as an imperative. China’s win-win cooperation philosophy offers new options for development cooperation, investment, trade, technology transfer and financial support, far preferable to the current US model of heavily conditioned neocolonial cooperation. Apart from Central America, should Nicaragua and China indeed go ahead with the proposed interoceanic canal, that project would diversify regional trade and shipping options not only for Cuba and neighboring Caribbean island nations but for Venezuela too.

Both Xiomara Castro’s electoral win in Honduras and Nicaragua’s recognition of China threaten US control in the region. Faced with a Chinese-built interoceanic canal through Nicaragua, the US will probably intensify its current diplomatic and economic aggression and also progressively devise more direct provocations. For example, it may encourage its ally Colombia to escalate its navy’s continuing violations of Nicaragua’s maritime territory which ignore the 2012 judgment of the International Court of Justice. More generally, the entrenched US military and naval presence across Central America and the Caribbean is a constant, menacing reality. Even so, recent events in the regionmark a new phase of notably more resilient and savvy popular resistance to the most recent episodes of over 150 years of Yankee intervention.

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This article was originally published on Tortilla con Sal.

Stephen Sefton, renowned author and political analyst based in northern Nicaragua, is actively involved in community development work focussing on education and health care.

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

All images in this article are from TCS

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***

It’s being reported today Julian Assange suffered a stroke while interned and tortured at Belmarsh Prison in the UK. It’s said the stroke occurred after Assange learned he will be extradited to the US to face espionage and computer hacking charges.

This, of course, is only a pretense. Like Chelsea Manning and others who dare expose the filthy underside of US foreign policy, Assange will be further tortured and abused until he is verifiably insane or dead, the latter being the preferable method.

Assange’s stroke was reported in Britain and Europe, but scantily covered in the United States. This is because the media in this country is nothing less than a mouthpiece for the government. Few care about this truth teller’s fate, even less know the details of the case, let alone who Julian Assange is beyond misleading headlines and sensationalistic blurbs coloring him as a dangerous enemy.

I am of the opinion the American people don’t care about what really is important. In this case, knowing about the murder of children and journalists in Iraq, war crimes that are at best scantily reported by the corporate-state news manufacturers, usually with utterly flimsy provisos about “bad intelligence” and “accidents.”

The facade of “nation building” (actually a program of nation destruction) and facile promises of “democracy” in foreign lands (where natural resources await exploitation) are now believed by less and less people, that is those who care to ponder the vile truth behind multiple invasions, drone strikes, assassinations, illegal detainment, deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure, and the calculated murder of literally millions of people over the last seventy years.

It’s all coming home now. Prior to the political aberration of Donald Trump, the subversive act of arranging elections usually went off without a hitch despite exhaustive investigations into voting machine fraud, voter impersonation, false registrations, duplicate voting, ballot petition and absentee ballot fraud, and altering the vote count. It is now obvious, though strictly unreported by corporate-state media, that there were multiple and serious irregularities with the 2020 vote that put a crime family dementia patient in office.

For the state, it does not matter what you think about COVID and vaccines, this is merely a showroom performance leading up to what is coming. Surely, people have died, as they do continually from viral infections, but the real “pandemic” will be the surveillance panopticon watching your every move, 24/7.

If you believe this is nothing but a conspiracy theory (thus rendering me a domestic terrorist) , take a look at a recent story in the Los Angeles Times, “Who’s watching? How governments used the pandemic to normalize surveillance,” or “COVID tracing apps ‘normalise surveillance’ of daily activities,” in the Sydney Morning Herald.

COVID provided a near perfect excuse to impose total 1984-style tyranny. Pandemics and other emergencies, real or hyped, declared by globalist organizations, “can be moments where governments roll out new invasive forms of data collection and it just becomes the new normal, because in moments of crisis there’s a deeper allowance in terms of public trust and legal authority,” assistant professor Ben Green at the Ford School explained. “There’s less of a sense of pausing for reflection, because there doesn’t feel like there is time when dealing with a global pandemic.”

And that’s where we are now—trusting a lying, murdering, torturing, and thieving government draping itself in the tattered rag of democracy. While many are debating a third or fourth vaccine to supposedly fight off emerging “variants” (Delta, Omicron, more to come), the government is closing the circle on total surveillance.

“Increased use of surveillance technologies might make states less democratic and more tolerant of China’s authoritarianism,” writes Muhammad Faizal Abdul Rahman.

This concern is more of a geopolitical construct. An overemphasis of the dangers of China’s authoritarianism can overlook how other powerful states have disregarded human rights in the use of technology. Ultimately, the decision to adopt new surveillance technologies needs to a strike a difficult balance between legitimate privacy concerns and guarding public health and the economy… Such considerations point to a future where tech-enabled state surveillance becomes an unstoppable global trend. Covid-19 may be a turning point that causes states to make tougher choices to better prepare for both man-made and biological threats. Public health unpreparedness has already resulted in severe harm to national interests. Keeping people safe and economies functioning is fundamental for a state’s political legitimacy.

Truth be told, the ruling elite—an aggregation of the state and the private sector (otherwise known as fascism or corporatism)—are not specifically concerned about the mass of commoners dying from pandemic diseases, that is if they can isolate themselves from the pathogen. More than anything, COVID is a scare tactic designed to enforce conformity and obedience to often absurd government edicts and mandates. A worldwide viral pandemic, with endless variants arising, is likely one of the scariest dangers short of thermonuclear war. During such events, people willingly crawl to the government and beg for protection, most unaware the state does not have their best wishes in mind.

Top globalist Henry Kissinger allegedly said following the riots in Los Angeles:

Today, America would be outraged if UN troops entered Los Angeles to restore order. Tomorrow they will be grateful! This is especially true if they were told that there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all people of the world will plead to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by the world government. (Emphasis added.)

Every state, before and since Niccolò Machiavelli, has held a primary interest in retaining power and will often employ extreme measures—including assassination, murder, even genocide—to undermine and neutralize any serious political opposition.

It will also go to extreme lengths to demonize, prosecute, and imprison all who reveal the brutality of the US war machine, a fate suffered by Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Reality Winner, and others. If not for sanctuary in Russia, Edward Snowden would be included in this lineup. The government will go to any length to stop the truth about its war crimes coming to light, not that a large percentage of Americans care, distracted by vaccine battles, ideological rifts, and a dazzling array of distracting entertainment.

The future is Chinese-styled authoritarianism. Recall top globalist, the late David Rockefeller, commending Mao for his ruthless rule, killing millions in the process. “The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao’s leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history,” Rockefeller told the New York Times on August 10, 1970.

How did China acquire the technology to build its censorship machine? It was in large part given to China by the United States. “When Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller met with Zhou Enlai in China in 1973—just after President Richard Nixon had visited China establishing official relations—an understanding was reached whereby the U.S. would supply industrial capital and know-how to China,” notes Dick Eastman.

It doesn’t take much effort to uncover the agenda here. First and foremost, the ruling elite of David Rockefeller’s ilk abhor the common man and woman. It is not so much “climate change” that is afflicting the planet, but the presence of billions of humans, many considered “useless eaters” (those who do not work to make the rich even richer, are on Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, welfare, etc.; i.e. the poor and downtrodden, increasing exponentially with the passing of each year). Population control has been at the top of the agenda since at least the 1960s. For more detail on this ongoing agenda, see Prof. Michel Chossudovsky’s “Shrink the World’s Population”: Secret 2009 Meeting of Billionaires “Good Club.”

According to the second richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos (net worth, over $200 billion), the elite and their handpicked minions will live in orbiting cylinders above the earth, while the earth below will become a massive Yellowstone, a sprawling exclusive park for the entitled. Bezos, of course, does not mention what will happen to the poor left on earth. Considering the history of the US government, the Pentagon, CIA, FBI, Justice Department, and an array of intelligence agencies, it is not a stretch to believe something sinister will happen to reduce population, be it war or yet another virus, this one far more dangerous and deadly than the flu-like COVID and far less dangerous Omicron.

In the society imagined by our “democratic” rulers, you will be given a credit score, similar to the score given to average Chinese citizens, and if you dare disagree or, worse, become a whistleblower like Julian Assange, the result may result in prison, torture, reeducation (with a large dose of Critical Race Theory) or possibly execution, depending how far the next row of governing psychopaths want to take it.

The United States is now dividing along artificially imposed political lines. On one side, deluded and brainwashed “socialists” (who know next to nothing about socialism beyond freebies), and on the other MAGA zombies following a reality TV and crony capitalist who, at the close of his disastrous presidency, pardoned corrupt bankers and a rap star, but not Julian Assange, whom Trump cited favorably numerous times during his campaign. His opponent, the CFR functionary Hillary Clinton, asked why the US couldn’t just drone Assange.

“This is the state of the rule of law and due process in the American empire. We do not accuse, we do not ask for explanations, we do not give ‘enemies’ any opportunity to appear before an unbiased tribunal. We simply take note of the offense and then order that the offender by killed by a missile strike fired from a drone,” writes Joe Wolverton, II, J.D.

Julian Assange’s mistake was to uncover US war crimes, crimes kept secret so as not to tarnish the ersatz benefits of diluted democracy and hide the blood, theft, murder, and monetary manipulation that is transferring money from the poor to the ultra-wealthy who plan to live in space while the rest of us no longer have children and die off from mysterious, previously unknown diseases.

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Kurt Nimmo is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from 21st Century Wire

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Over the past month the drum beat of a new war in the east of Europe has grown ever louder. So loud, in fact, that US president Joe Biden and Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, felt the need to hold a virtual summit on Tuesday this week. The stated aim from the Russian side was to try to clear the air and, from the US side, to stall what it had presented as Russian preparations to invade Ukraine.

The outcome, as spun by the US, included loud threats of new Western sanctions and embargoes should Russia take a step across the Ukraine border. As spun by Russia, the summit allowed for new discussions, which was in turn spun by some advocates for Ukraine as potentially jeopardising its independence.

What seems not to have been resolved in those two hours of talks, however, is the original question: is Russia mobilising to invade Ukraine? (For the New Cold Warriors, this would be the second invasion, the first being Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and its ill-defined support for anti-Kiev rebels in eastern Ukraine.) And if Russia is not planning to invade, then what is going on?

The problem, as so often, is that the very same elements that can be cited as evidence of Russia’s aggressive intent, in terms of troop deployment and rhetoric, can also be viewed as reactive – that is, defensive. Yet the idea that Putin might be trying to reinforce Russia’s national security against what he might see as a Western threat – taking the form, say, of the NATO-backed land-grab for Ukraine – is almost never entertained. Yet consider which side has made the running here.

This latest West-Russia stand-off would appear to date from a hawkish Pentagon briefing on 10 November, which coincided with a visit to Washington by the Ukrainian foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, and the signing of a US-Ukraine strategic partnership agreement. Both the Pentagon and the US secretary of state referred to ‘unusual troop movements’ near Russia’s border with Ukraine, a figure of 100,000 troops was mentioned, and the supposed threat received blanket coverage in the US media.

The UK picked up the war cry. In a series of valedictory speeches and interviews in mid November, the outgoing UK chief of defence staff, General Sir Nick Carter, commanded headlines, warning of a Russian threat that had been a leitmotif of his three-year tenure at the top of the UK’s military establishment. Then came a veritable festival of Cold Warriordom in the shape of the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting on 30 November, held in the Latvian capital, Riga.

Here, NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg was on unusually eloquent form in defence of Ukraine’s independence and sovereign states’ right to choose their allies. Stoltenberg also harked back to a decade-old NATO-Russia quarrel about spheres of influence. In a rare nod to his native country, he noted that Norway had never called for any sphere of influence despite its border with Russia, therefore Russia didn’t need any buffer against NATO either. (A glimpse at the map might show the short length of Norway’s Arctic border with Russia and the huge buffer afforded by neutral Sweden and Finland, but that’s another matter.)

At the same time as the Riga meeting, an inimitable contribution to the general climate of peace and friendship was made by the UK’s new foreign secretary, Liz Truss, who posed, helmeted, in a tank while visiting a British troop unit in Estonia. It was not her fault that the pictures were seen less as a warning to Russia than a Thatcher tribute act – and, as such, as an unsubtle hint about Truss’s future ambitions.

Nor was this the end. From here the torch of invasion-alarm was passed to Germany where, following hot on the heels of Angela Merkel’s military farewell after 16 years as chancellor, the popular Bild published an enormous ‘exclusive’ on 4 December, complete with an elaborate map, headed: ‘This is how Putin could annihilate Ukraine.’ It set out the supposed positions of Russian troops (inside Russia) and detailed a Russian plan for a three-phase attack sometime in the New Year. In this piece the estimated number of Russian troops deployed ‘near’ the border with Ukraine was upped from 100,000 to a ‘potential’ 175,000 – a number instantly promoted and repeated, unqualified, across the Western media.

It might now be worth considering some peculiarities about the way this whole Russian-invasion scenario has been put about and how it has been magnified into a threat not just to Ukraine, but also to the EU and to the West as a whole.

First, we have been here before. Back in mid April, it was confidently reported that 100,000 Russian troops were mustering near the border with Ukraine – except that quite soon it transpired that they weren’t. Most were at their barracks at least 200 kilometres away. Russia’s fervent denials that anything was afoot were dismissed, but there was no advance and, in time, the accusations melted away.

Seven months later, in November, the same number of Russian troops had supposedly been spotted, split between Ukraine’s eastern border – in the Donbass – and its northern border. Why was the number suddenly upped to 175,000? Was it because US spy satellites – whose grainy pictures periodically pop up as supporting evidence – really showed this? Or was it perhaps because some Western military experts had argued that a 100,000-strong force was way too small to pacify Ukraine, so the numbers had to look more convincing?

Which leads on to Russia’s supposed objective. A favourite Western theory has long been that Putin wants not just to return Ukraine to Russia’s sphere of influence – he also wants to rebuild the Soviet Union, restore the Russian Empire, or at the very least to create a new Russia-led federation with Ukraine and Belarus.

Regardless of the presumed end point, however, many Russia-watchers in the West view the current military impasse affecting a small part of Ukraine as generally satisfactory to Moscow. It leaves the Donbass as a familiar ‘frozen’ conflict in which Russia retains enough leverage to exert influence, with minimal costs in terms of troops, weapons and risk.

So why would Russia even think of invading? And if it did, would it be a full invasion to take Kiev and bring all of Ukraine back into Russia’s strategic fold, or an occupation of just the mainly Russian-speaking Donbass? Or is Russia just sabre-rattling in the hope of somehow forcing the Kiev government and / or its Western backers to the negotiating table? There has been no clarity whatsoever on this score.

Quite simply, an invasion, and a winter invasion at that, makes no sense. The last thing Russia wants or needs is more territory. It can be argued that there was a strategic imperative for Moscow to annex Crimea – to secure its warm-water base at Sevastopol and its hinterland, which it saw as possibly falling into NATO hands. There is no such imperative to take the Donbass; it would be an unstable drain on Russia’s resources for the foreseeable future. Russia’s prime need is for a stable border region.

And this highlights another peculiarity. From the start, this whole Russia-invasion story, from April this year onwards, has been entirely in one direction – from the US, and then moving eastward across Europe. Ukraine itself, and its leaders, no strangers to alarmism, have maintained an almost surreal calm. When President Volodymyr Zelensky mentioned Russian troop movements for the first time this November, he noted the information had been passed on by US intelligence. No changes in Russia’s troop dispensations or in supplies to the rebels seem to have been registered by Ukraine’s own – always active, alert and at times inventive – secret services.

Russia also took the accusations with more equanimity than it sometimes does – which, of course, invites the West to conclude that US intelligence has got Moscow bang to rights. But its messages in recent weeks have also been unusually clear. It has denied any aggressive intent, blaming the West for trying to incite tensions. It has stated that a sovereign country has the right to move forces within its borders (which it does). But it has also, and crucially, said in no uncertain terms that for Ukraine to join NATO would, for Russia, constitute a ‘red line’. All this should leave no doubt that Moscow is in reactive, not proactive, mode.

Logic might also dictate that if anyone has a motive to launch a new military action now, it would be the Kiev government, freshly equipped with military equipment from the UK and the US. After seven years of intermittent fighting, it could finally judge – or have been persuaded – that force is the only way to reclaim the rebel regions in the east. Indeed, that it could be now or never.

Look again not just at the recent Western statements of support for Ukraine and the sabre-rattling against Russia that accompanies them, but also to Western actions over recent months. There are the defence agreements with Ukraine on the part of the US and the UK, the multiple NATO land and sea manoeuvres, including in western Ukraine and the Black Sea, and the current dispositions of NATO forces (including, officially for training purposes, at bases inside Ukraine and, officially for advisory purposes, actually inside Ukraine’s defence ministry). Then there are the recent US weapons supplies, including Javelin missiles, the Turkish supplies of drones, and an agreement with the UK on building warships. If you are sitting in Moscow, Ukraine starts to look very much like a NATO Trojan horse.

Is it so unreasonable to ask who is threatening whom here? Who is on offence – and who on defence? Anyone who notes Russian troop movements, within however many kilometres from Ukraine, should also look to the west of Ukraine, where NATO forces have been stationed since the alliance was enlarged to include most of the former Warsaw Pact and Yugoslav states (with Ukraine and the flaky Belarus constituting the only buffers).

From Moscow’s perspective, it is a travesty of recent history for NATO, with the US, the UK and former Eastern bloc states holding the megaphones, to denounce Russia as an expansionist power. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 aside, Russia has been contracting for the past 30 years, including the past 11 years under Putin.

From NATO troop movements Russia might also divine other reasons for the West’s war-talk than an invasion threat to Ukraine. Could the alarms sounded first in Washington provide cover for a Western-backed attempt to ‘change the facts on the ground’? Could Russia perhaps be tricked into a move that it would see as defensive and NATO would present as aggression? Remember that incident last summer with the British warship in the Black Sea.

In my view, and it is only my view, Russia might not be averse to a deal that would bring peace to the Donbass and leave it in Ukraine. But it would aim to secure guarantees for the Russian-speaking population (as the UK tried to do for British nationals in Hong Kong before the return to China and would doubtless try to secure for Brits in Northern Ireland in the event of Irish unification). Russia would be far less amenable to the Donbass being reincorporated into Ukraine by force, still less with Western help. It would see that – probably rightly – both as a humiliation and as presaging instability for years to come.

The bigger context is the current state of US-Russia relations. The speed with which this week’s summit was arranged hints at a lot going on behind the scenes. Ukraine does not like it, but hardly for the first time its future is tied up in a bigger game. It is one of the last pieces in the chess game that has been in progress since the end of the Cold War and the Soviet collapse.

Russia would dearly like a pan-European security agreement that would enshrine a US commitment to no further NATO expansion. This combines an old idea dating back to Gorbachev with Russia’s newly articulated ‘red line’ over Ukraine, and the West has ruled both elements out.

But could Biden and Putin, who both face re-election in 2024, be looking for a legacy agreement that would set Western-Russia relations on a new course? If so, it is no wonder that both sides are posturing to maximise their advantage. As the invasion-talk shows, however, posturing is a risky business, not least because there are real people and a real country, Ukraine, in the middle.

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Mary Dejevsky is a writer and broadcaster. She was Moscow correspondent for The Times between 1988 and 1992. She has also been a correspondent from Paris, Washington and China.

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The ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ campaign was launched earlier this year. It is designed to enable people to participate in a grassroots nonviolent campaign to strategically resist the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ and related initiatives of the Global Elite including the transhumanist, eugenics and Cyber Polygon agendas.

Since being launched, people have been joining from all over the world.

A key initiative of the campaign was to prepare and design a one-page flyer so that people could be given, by various means, a short list of nonviolent actions that offered a series of simple but powerfully effective ways in which anyone could participate in the strategy to defeat the elite agenda.

With the invaluable assistance of members of the campaign from around the world, translations of this one-page flyer are now available in English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian and Spanish with other languages imminent or in the pipeline.

Each of the posters is available on the website.

If this campaign interests you, the website is here and our Telegram group is here.

You can also watch a video interview explaining what is happening and how to address it effectively too. Watch ‘Henna Maria interviews Robert Burrowes “The Origin of Violence”’.

You are welcome to join us!

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Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence His email address is [email protected] and his website is here. http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Anita McKone has been a nonviolent activist, educator and researcher since 1993. She has been arrested and imprisoned on a number of occasions for her activism. She has written many articles on different aspects of nonviolent activism, psychology and philosophy. Her website is here. https://anitamckone.wordpress.com/

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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***

Are the CIA and its contractors able to bully not only the U.S. Department of Justice, but also the UK judiciary? This is not hard to conclude after the High Court decision announced early Friday to bow to the US and extradite Julian Assange.

Underneath the pettifoggery, the decision demonstrates that the British will lop the “juris” off jurisprudence and pay heed only to “prudence” in kowtowing to the security state in Washington and its junior partner in London.

The objective, of course, is to warn any journalist or publisher tempted to investigate and and expose U. S. war crimes or political sabotage, US”Justice” is going to get you, no matter who you are or where you live. (Call it a new wrinkle on the concept of “universal jurisdiction”, if you will.)

All According to (Updated) Plan

Assange’s lawyers have said they intend to appeal the High Court decision. But, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out, “today’s victory for the US means that Assange’s freedom, if it ever comes, is further away than ever: not months but years even under the best of circumstances.” That, of course, has been the plan for a decade or more.

Glenn also noted that post-Obama Democrats and their security state allies have a particularly potent reason to exact vengeance on Assange, who published those DNC emails showing that Bernie Sanders was cheated out of the nomination in 2016. Add the indignity suffered by the CIA, when an insider apparently leaked a treasure trove of unique documents on cyber warfare. WikiLeaks promptly published parts of “Vault 7”, the family jewels of offensive cyber tools, in which the CIA and NSA has invested Billions. The security state had a witches’ brew.

In early July, I pointed to some graphic evidence that this was about bloodlust as well as vengeance, noting that the British were following the detailed ‘Washington Playbook” approach that was exposed by WikiLeaks itself in Feb. 2012.

Some readers may recall that WikiLeaks-revealed confidential emails from the US private intelligence firm Stratfor mentioned that the US already had a secret indictment against the WikiLeaks founder. Bad enough.

Inspector Javert

What also showed up in the Stratfor emails was the unrelenting, Inspector-Javert-type approach taken by one Fred Burton, Stratfor’s Vice-President for Counterterrorism and Corporate Security. (Burton had been Deputy Chief of the Department of State’s counterterrorism division for the Diplomatic Security Service.)

Here’s Javert – I mean Burton:

“Move him [Assange] from country to country to face charges for the next 25 years. But seize everything he and his family own, to include every person linked to Wiki.” [my comment: “country to country”, or – equally effective – court to court]

“Pursue conspiracy and political terrorism charges and declassify the death of a source, someone which could link to Wiki.”

“Assange is a peacenik. He needs his head dunked in a full toilet bowl at Gitmo.”

“Take down the money. Go after his infrastructure. The tools we are using to nail and de-construct Wiki are the same tools used to dismantle and track al-Qaeda.”

“Bankrupt the arsehole first; ruin his life. Give him 7-12 years for conspiracy.”

“Assange is going to make a nice bride in prison. Screw the terrorist. He’ll be eating cat food forever … extradition to the US is more and more likely.”

Nice people – once sworn under oath “to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic”. Since comparisons are invidious, apologies to “Javert” and Victor Hugo.

“The Truth Will Always Win”

This saying of Julian’s is one that we strong supporters are determined to hang onto – and believe, even when it stretches credulity. Throwing in the towel is not an option. Inspiration can also be taken from the dismal-sounding, but nonetheless uplifting words of I. F. Stone:

“The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you’re going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins.”

The late Kurt Vonnegut may seem like a strange person with which to close in this way, since he was the quintessential “humanist”.

“How do humanists feel about Jesus? I say of Jesus, as all humanists do, ‘If what he said is good, and so much of it is absolutely beautiful, what does it matter if he was God or not?’

“But if Christ hadn’t delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn’t want to be a human being.

“I’d just as soon be a rattlesnake.”

I imagine that one part of that Sermon on the Mount Vonnegut may have had in mind was this.

People are going to insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of slander against you because you tell the truth. What it means is that the truth is too close for comfort and they are uncomfortable. Know that you are in good company. They persecuted the prophets before you in the very same way.

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Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President’s Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

Featured image: Julian Assange court sketch, October 21, 2019, supplied by Julia Quenzler.

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Hundreds of European parliamentarians co-signed a letter on Tuesday urging the European Union (EU) to take action against Israel’s forced dispossession of Palestinians, referencing apartheid and the ongoing siege on the Gaza Strip.

A total of 370 European lawmakers from 21 countries submitted the letter to European foreign ministers and the EU’s High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borell.

The letter referenced a Human Rights Watch report which slammed Israeli violations against Palestinians as being so severe that they meet the legal definition of the crime of apartheid according to the Rome Statute.

Among the signatories were the UK’s former Opposition Leader Jeremy Corbyn, Labour MP Diane Abbott and Conservative peer Baroness Sayeeda Warsi.

The MPs said that they are “deeply concerned” about the escalations taking place against Palestinians and that they are “alarmed” at the violence that took place in the besieged Gaza Strip over the summer.

In May, Israel launched an 11-day bombardment operation that killed 250 people, including 66 children, and destroyed some 2,200 homes and damaged 37,000 others.

“We are alarmed by the latest escalation in Gaza, the civilian casualties on both sides and the devastating humanitarian consequences for the already hard-hit population in Gaza. We call upon both sides to protect all civilians and to keep them out of harm’s way, as well as to provide unhindered humanitarian access as mandated by international humanitarian law”, the letter said.

The MPs asserted that Israel’s last offensive in Gaza “makes clear that the status quo is untenable and that it is both urgent and imperative that we address the root causes of this flare-up.”

My speech – Part 1
The UK governments policy on #Israel and #Palestine
What we says and what we do!
“Each time we fail to act we embolden an increasingly right wing Israeli government with the message that there are no consequences to its illegal &morally indefensible actions” pic.twitter.com/xqlKD5T3Ml

— Sayeeda Warsi (@SayeedaWarsi) May 20, 2021

They also deplored the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

“The widespread displacement and forcible transfer of Palestinians taking place across the West Bank, including imminently in the East Jerusalem neighbourhoods of Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan, are part of that reality”, the MPs said in their letter.

“Europe must work together with like-minded allies to challenge this status quo and to take robust steps to pave the way for a safer, just and democratic future for Israelis and Palestinians alike.”

“Violations of international law, like the ones we witnessed unfolding, must come with robust consequences, in Israel-Palestine, as elsewhere. It is crucial that the EU and European governments support relevant international accountability efforts,” they added.

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Featured image is from Maan News Agency

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UK government officials visited Tehran last week to discuss legal ways for Britain to pay a four-decade-old £400m ($530m) debt to Iran, the Iranian ambassador to the UK has said.

Mohsen Baharvand told reporters on Friday that “obstacles are not insurmountable” regarding the payment and that he was in ongoing talks with the UK’s foreign office.

Iranian state TV has previously suggested that the payment, stemming from an arms deal with Iran’s shah that was cancelled after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, could be tied to a deal that would release detained British-Iranian aid worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, although the UK and US have denied this.

Earlier this week, UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss acknowledged that the UK owed the debt during a question-and-answer session at Chatham House, a UK think tank.

According to Baharvand, Iran and the UK had been close to an agreement on the debt in the summer, the Guardian reported.

“We wanted to use that deal to ask our people that we are seeing a good sign from the UK and then that gives us a possibility to expedite our efforts to help the dual nationals and things like that. Then we had a deal.

“We signed it but two days after the signature of that deal the UK government said they could not implement it because of US sanctions,” he said.

Asked if the US could provide a letter to the UK to guarantee that the payment would not be sanctioned, Baharvand said: “The US are not doing that. They have to help the UK government to do that. It is not impossible.

“Obstacles are not insurmountable, but we have to discuss, negotiate and find a way.

“We are now discussing through what channel that money be transferred. There is a negotiating process now.”

‘Foreign Office is very good at gaslighting’

Families of UK dual nationals detained in Iran, as well as former UK foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt, have said they do not believe those detained will be released until the debt is paid.

Hunt told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme last month that “practicalities” were holding the UK back from paying off the debt to Iran.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian dual national, was arrested in 2016 as she was leaving Iran after taking her then 22-month-old daughter to visit her family.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s husband, Richard Ratcliffe, has insisted that the case against his wife is a sham and is being used as a bargaining chip by Tehran to secure the debt payment from the UK.

“The [UK] foreign office is very good at gaslighting,” he told Middle East Eye last month while on hunger strike over his wife’s case.

“It’s very good at claiming it’s doing things that it isn’t. I think it’s perfectly clear after five and a half years that their approach is unsuccessful.”

Among other high-profile British-Iranian citizens detained in Iran is Anoosheh Ashoori, who has been held at the notorious Evin prison in Tehran for four years on disputed spying charges.

Prolonged legal case

Shortly before the 1979 Iranian Revolution that overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the British government struck an arms deal with the shah to sell more than 1,500 Chieftain battle tanks and 250 repair vehicles to Iran.

Iran paid £600m ($795m) for the tanks in advance, but having delivered only 185 tanks, Britain refused to deliver the remaining equipment when the shah was deposed.

The international court of arbitration in The Hague ordered Britain to pay the debt in 2001, a ruling upheld in 2009.

However, the two governments have been locked in a prolonged legal battle in the British courts over the exact sum owed and whether or not the UK should pay interest on it.

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The change in the nature of the US mission in Iraq first announced in July this year has been rejected by the Iraqi militias who are demanding a complete withdrawal of all foreign troops from the country

Iraqi groups expressed dissatisfaction and opposition to the official announcement of the end of the US combat mission in the country on Thursday, December 9, weeks before the deadline of December 31. The groups pointed to the official declaration by the US that no troops will be withdrawn from Iraq immediately but that the remaining troops will shift their mission to assisting and training the Iraqi forces. The groups have reiterated their demand for a complete withdrawal of foreign troops.

Qasim al-Araji, Iraq’s national security advisor, tweeted, “today we finished the last round of dialogue with the international coalition..to officially announce the end of the combat mission of the coalition forces and their withdrawal from Iraq.”

In a meeting between Iraqi prime minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi and US president Joe Biden in July, it was agreed that all US combat forces will leave the country by the end of year.

Following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, thousands of troops were stationed in the country which were formally withdrawn in 2011. The US redeployed its troops in October 2014 as a part of an international coalition against the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group which threatened to capture whole of Iraq and Syria to establish an Islamic Caliphate in the region. However, the Iraqi forces, with the active support of Iran and the coalition forces, were able to defeat IS and recapture most of the territories from it by 2017. Since then, Iraqi groups have been demanding the withdrawal of all foreign troops from the country. Iraqi militias have also been attacking their bases.

A popular uproar broke out against the presence of foreign troops following the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and Iraqi commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in a US drone attack in January last year. Following the assassinations, physical attacks on the foreign troops in the country also increased. The Iraqi parliament unanimously passed a resolution asking the government to ensure that all foreign troops leave Iraq.

Attacks on foreign troops in Iraq forced the US to abandon some bases in the country. It gradually redeployed its troops to “safer locations” over the last two years and also withdrew nearly half of its troops. Today, as per unofficial estimates, a total of 2,500 US troops and around 1,000 from other international forces remain in the country.

No withdrawal

However, according to chief Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby, the end of the combat mission in Iraq does not mean withdrawal of US forces from the country. He asserted on Thursday that “there won’t be a dramatic shift” and “what we hope that Iraqi people see is the continued competence and confidence of their security forces in the field fighting against ISIS.”

Iraqi militias and various political groups who have been demanding a full withdrawal issued strong statements rejecting the decision. Some of them also warned of increased attacks on the foreign troops claiming that “the occupation only understands the language of armed struggle.”

Various constituents of the Popular Mobilisation Forces (Hashd al-Shaabi or PMF) were quoted by media groups asserting that they want a full withdrawal of all foreign troops. The spokesperson of Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, a constituent of the PMF, said that US forces will be treated as occupiers “if they do not withdraw by the end of current year,” Iranian Press TV reported.

Commenting on the agreement between Kadhimi and Biden, Sheikh Kadhim al-Fartousi, spokesperson of Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada, another constituent of the PMF, was quoted by Rudaw in August saying that “changing clothes and appearances is not withdrawal” and “the US and foreign forces withdrawal from Iraq has to be in full.” He also warned of “appropriate responses” if the withdrawal is not complete.

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This article was originally published in September 2021.

Aim Was to Sow Fear in the Public and Condition it to Support Wars of Aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Recent reporting shows both FBI and CIA suppressed evidence and blamed “foreign Muslim extremists” and then “a lone nut”—even though they knew the anthrax came from our own CIA-contracted military labs? 

Will justice (too long delayed) soon expose and punish the real criminals whose deceit helped launch 20 years of criminal wars in the Middle East that murdered millions in order to funnel trillions into our rogue military-industrial-intelligence complex?

Would you believe this ABC News Story?

A man walks into an office of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Florida.^[1] It is spring in the year 2000. Speaking to a loan officer, Johnelle Bryant, the man explains that he has come from Egypt via Afghanistan. He wants to fulfill his dream of becoming a pilot.

More specifically, he wants to acquire a crop-duster with which he can dust American crops. His name—he is careful to spell it for her—is Atta. He wants a loan of $650,000 with which to buy a two-engine, six-passenger aircraft. He wants to take this substantial plane and modify it so that it can be used as a crop-duster.

Unlike traditional crop-dusters, which are small and agile, Atta’s creation would, he explains, be able to hold a very large chemical tank. He is an engineer, he says, and will find it easy to modify the plane as required. With its extra-capacity tank, he would be able to do all the spraying required in one flight, not needing to land to refill his tank as he would with an ordinary crop-duster.

Bryant is confused by this requirement. Why does he need to do all his spraying in one flight?

Bryant continues to question Atta. Pouring cold water on his evident hope of quick and easy money, she explains that there are procedures for handing out funds. Even in the best of circumstances he would not be able to walk out of her office with $650,000. He would need to make an application.

Atta is not pleased. He points out that he could go around Bryant’s desk, cut her throat, and take the money from her safe. Untroubled by this suggestion, Bryant assures Atta that there is not much money in the safe and, in any case, she knows karate.

Bryant continues to pour cold water on her visitor, explaining that he is ineligible for a loan because he is not a U.S. citizen.

This does not bring an end to the conversation. In fact, when Atta sees an aerial photograph of Washington, D.C., on Bryant’s wall he is delighted and begins throwing down cash in an offer to buy it. The representation of important monuments, including the view of the Pentagon from the air, inspires his admiration. He inquires of Bryant what the security is like at these monuments. He wants to visit these monuments and hopes he will be given access.

Atta next tells Bryant of his desire to visit the World Trade Center in New York City. What is the security like at the Trade Center? he asks.

Not quite finished, Atta tells Bryant of an organization, al-Qaeda, with which, he implies, he is associated. He adds that there is a wonderful man named Osama bin Laden, who “would someday be known as the world’s greatest leader.”

Bryant parts on good terms with the man from Egypt, referring him to a bank where he might get his loan.

Here endeth the tale.

The gentleman seeking the loan was, according to these sources, none other than the famous Mohamed Atta, the alleged ringleader of the 9/11 attacks who, we are told, piloted American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower. And the ABC News journalists who recounted this story were apparently serious and wanted us to believe their story.

I suggest that “Atta Seeks a Loan” is most definitely not a believable account of the actions of a leader entrusted with a top-secret, world-changing mission. It is either a yarn ungrounded in events or the recounting of a rehearsed drama in which the chief actor was an operative tasked with leaving a trail of monstrous breadcrumbs.

Atta’s exploits, as described by the mass media, include many similar incidents, of which the following are but samples:^[2]

• Atta Annoys Airport Employees
• Atta Leaves Incriminating Evidence in his Luggage
• Atta Is Bitten by a Dog
• Atta Visits a Drugstore and Frightens an Employee
• Atta Gets Pulled over for Driving without a License (and has a warrant for his arrest issued after he fails to show up for his court hearing)
• Atta Abandons a Stalled Plane on the Runway
• Atta Gets Drunk and Swears at a Restaurant Employee

A strange list of exploits for this secret operative. But let us return to the Atta who went to get a federal loan in Florida. In this tale Atta had a quite specific aim. He wanted to spray large amounts of a mystery substance on U.S. soil. He was apparently as intent on this as he was on his coming suicide mission at the Trade Center.

If we are to believe the mystery substance was anthrax—and, as I shall argue, this fits the story—the famous 9/11 “hijackers” (meaning, in this article, the alleged hijackers) would appear to be implicated not only in the 9/11 attacks but in the anthrax attacks that immediately followed the 9/11 attacks.

But before we get into these issues, a quick reminder of the main elements of the attacks may be helpful.

The Anthrax Attacks: A Refresher

Many people have only vague memories of the 2001 anthrax attacks. I do not think this is entirely due to the frailties of memory. These attacks have, due to the disastrous failure of the operation’s narrative, been ushered down the memory hole by the FBI.

Here are the key facts:

The first anthrax letters were mailed about a week after the 9/11 attacks. When the anthrax letters made their way to news agencies in those early days after 9/11, several people developed cutaneous anthrax, but it was not initially recognized as such.

Letter with anthrax directed to NBC anchor Tom Brokaw. [Source: archives.fbi.gov]

The first anthrax diagnosis was made on October 3, 2001, when Robert Stevens, who worked for American Media Inc., the publisher of The National Enquirer tabloid in Boca Raton, Florida, was discovered to have pulmonary anthrax. He died two days after the diagnosis. The last victim died on November 21. At least 22 people were infected with either cutaneous or pulmonary anthrax and five died.

The first wave of attacks, where letters were sent to media outlets, were followed in early October by a second wave of attacks. These second wave anthrax spores were more sophisticated and deadly in their preparation. This time two elected representatives were the targets: Democratic Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy.

The view that these were terrorist attacks by foreign enemies—the second blow, after 9/11, in a one-two punch against the United States—quickly became widespread. First, al-Qaeda was the chief suspect. Then Iraq was added to the suspect list. The Double Perpetrator hypothesis—Iraq supplied the anthrax to al-Qaeda foot soldiers—then began to make its way into a wide variety of news media.^[3]

By the end of 2001, however, all stories of foreign terrorists had collapsed.^[4] The nature of the spore preparations revealed the operation as an inside job—the spores came from one of three possible labs, all inside the U.S. and serving the military and the CIA.

The events were also a false-flag attack, since great care had been taken to deceptively pin the attacks on foreign Muslims. The FBI and the Office of Homeland Security, as it was then called, avoided both the expressions “inside job” and “false-flag attack,” but they could not avoid the realities to which these expressions refer.

Once the foreign Muslim story collapsed, the FBI got busy looking for a lone wolf perpetrator on whom to put the blame. The Bureau eventually settled on Dr. Bruce Ivins, an anthrax researcher at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Ivins died, allegedly by suicide, shortly before he was to be indicted.

The Failure of the FBI’s Hypothesis

In my 2014 book, The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy, I outlined the reasons the Ivins’ hypothesis was already widely held in contempt.^[5]

I argued, with other researchers, that labs at Dugway Proving Ground and Battelle Memorial Institute were much better suspects than those at USAMRIID, and that Bruce Ivins lacked the resources, skill, time and motives that would have made him a serious suspect.

Dugway Proving Ground. [Source: military.com]

Batelle Memorial Institute. [Source: wikipedia.org]

There have been several developments since my book was written, two of which are especially important.

The first concerns Richard Lambert, who was for some years the Inspector in Charge of the FBI’s anthrax investigation. In 2015, after he had left the Bureau, Lambert brought a lawsuit against the FBI, claiming that the Bureau was retaliating against him—ruining his chances of employment—because of his criticism of the FBI and of its conduct of the anthrax case.^[6]

Lambert said he had made repeated complaints that the Washington field office of the FBI was mismanaging the case. He said, moreover, that the case against Ivins was clearly weak. The circumstantial case against Ivins would not have resulted in a conviction had it gone to court.

He said that, “while Bruce Ivins may have been the anthrax mailer, there is a wealth of exculpatory evidence to the contrary which the FBI continues [2015] to conceal from Congress and the American people.”^[7]

Strangely, these bombshell pronouncements did not rouse the mass media from their slumber.

The second development occurred in 2020, when the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry sent a petition to the U.S. Congress.^[8]

(Disclosure: I was at that time a member of the Anthrax Attacks Investigation Committee established by the Lawyers’ Committee to prepare the petition.)

The petition requests that:

“Congress should initiate its own focused inquiries into the post-9/11 anthrax attacks, and should establish as well a properly staffed and funded independent commission to conduct a comprehensive inquiry into these attacks which used biowarfare agents against Congress and the free press and involved the attempted assassination of two United States Senators.”

The Lawyers’ Committee argues, in 76 pages and with 69 exhibits, that the FBI’s case against Bruce Ivins entirely lacks merit and that the FBI is guilty not merely of incompetence but of obstruction, cover-up and deliberate deception of both Congress and American civil society.

The petition concentrates on the physical evidence relating to the anthrax spores; and the labs of Dugway and Battelle, associated with the U.S. military and the CIA, emerge from this research as chief suspects for the source of the anthrax attack.

The exhibits attached to the Petition include affidavits from several of Ivins’ colleagues. These go beyond character references. Several include specific reasons why these colleagues have never believed Ivins was the culprit.

In my view, the work of the Lawyers’ Committee lays the FBI’s case against Ivins in its grave.

And what are we to think of the FBI’s treatment of Bruce Ivins? The Bureau, aware of credible suspects, directed attention away from these suspects and onto an innocent man.

Aware of Ivins’ emotional vulnerability, the Bureau put extreme pressure on him, which resulted in his death. Then, after he died it publicly pronounced him the anthrax killer; said he had killed himself out of guilt; and closed the case. Ivins’ family was left in grief and shame to pick up the pieces of their lives.’

The Lawyers’ Committee notes that the domestic parties responsible for the anthrax attacks are guilty of treason. The Committee holds out the possibility that certain FBI officials may also be guilty of treason.

The Lone Nut

As Lisa Pease points out in her volume on the RFK assassination, when intelligence agencies plan complex operations they plan both for the success of these operations and for their possible flaws and failures.^[9]’

There were plenty of failures in the 9/11 operation (such as the ill-timed destruction of Building 7), and there is evidence of rapid moves to conceal these failures. Although the anthrax operation failed in an even more thorough way than the 9/11 operation, those in control moved quickly and smoothly to repair the damage.

One of their first moves was to shift from a hypothesis of multiple attackers (multiple attackers were widely assumed prior to the collapse of the narrative) to a hypothesis of a single attacker.^[10] The single attacker, or “lone wolf” hypothesis, is a common fallback position when an intelligence operation falters. Being alone, this wolf implicates others only weakly. He or she is ultimately uninteresting and raises few questions.

There is a subcategory of the lone wolf hypothesis that, for better or worse, is often called the “lone nut.” This narrative is extremely valuable for intelligence planners. A “lone nut”—a mentally unbalanced perpetrator—is even less interesting, in terms of connections and motives, than other types of lone wolves.

We may say that the lone nut’s story is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (Macbeth). Since the tale signifies nothing, there is no need to look for rational motives, patterns, or links to groups and institutions.

The anthrax attacks had, during their early days, been blamed on insane (fanatical, suicidal, erratic) foreign Muslims. The shift was made, after the failure of this narrative, to an insane domestic individual. It was Ivins’ misfortune to have had mental health problems and to have been chosen for the role of perpetrator.

I have argued at length in my book that the anthrax operation was not carried out by a lone nut but by a rational group, and, without repeating that argument here, let me suggest we experimentally put the lone nut in storage and look for both connections and motive.

Restoring the Missing Connections

I will be content here to make one simple point: There was overlap in personnel in the 9/11 and anthrax operations. Because of this overlap it is clear that the two operations were planned by a single group.

Here are two sets of evidence of overlapping personnel:

(1) Locations^[11]

There was a 71-mile strip along the coast of Florida where 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were active. Robert Stevens, the first anthrax victim, died in the middle of this strip.

If this fact were insignificant we would expect this to become clear as we examined the situation closely. We find the reverse. Connections come to light that cannot be accidental.

Anthrax victim Stevens was employed by a tabloid in Boca Raton called the Sun. The editor-in-chief of this tabloid, Mike Irish, had a wife, Gloria Irish, who was a real estate agent. In her professional capacity she had, in the summer of 2001, found apartments for two of the 9/11 hijackers, Marwan al-Shehhi and Hamza al-Ghamdi.

Al-Shehhi is the man who supposedly piloted United Airlines 175 into the South Tower. He is said to have been a close friend of Mohamed Atta, his fellow martyr.

Gloria Irish had driven al-Shehhi and al-Ghamdi around town numerous times, and she remembered them well. Interviewed by the press, she said: “I mean, Marwan called me all the time.” She said they had a joking and friendly relationship.

But Gloria Irish had known anthrax victim Robert Stevens for 25 years and had helped him purchase a house. She was, therefore, the real estate agent of the first anthrax victim and of men alleged to have carried out the 9/11 attacks.

Indeed, the hijacker-real estate connection went beyond al-Shehhi and al-Ghamdi. The apartment Irish found for them became home to four of the hijackers.

The links between Gloria Irish, the hijackers, and the anthrax attacks were reported in the media in October 2001.

In Florida, The St. Petersburg Times noted, when speaking of the apartment Gloria Irish had found for the hijackers:

“The Delray apartment is central to a massive federal investigation into the terrorist attacks. Investigators trying to piece the puzzle together created a diagram that includes photos of the 19 hijackers who seized control of four airplanes on Sept. 11.”

The journalist continued: “It is clear that the apartment was a meeting ground for terrorists, authorities say. Now they must determine whether unit 1504 was also a hatching ground for the anthrax attacks.”

Reporting all of this openly was not only permitted at the time but, I believe, encouraged.

This is because the insiders responsible for the anthrax attacks were then assuming the attacks would successfully be pinned on al-Qaeda and Iraq. Revealing the anthrax attacks to have been perpetrated by the parties responsible for 9/11 was part of the plan.

We were all to have followed the trail of gigantic breadcrumbs and concluded that the connected sets of 2001 attacks were the result of a collaboration between al-Qaeda and its sponsor, Iraq.

Though few remember the Florida connections today, they have not gone away. And if we choose to ignore them we are extremely poor sleuths.

(2) Crop-dusters^[12]

On September 23-24, 2001, all crop-duster planes in the U.S. were grounded.

Attorney General John Ashcroft explained to Congress that crop dusters could be used to “distribute chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction.” He added that the ubiquitous Mohamed Atta “had been compiling information about crop-dusting before the Sept. 11 attacks.”

But there was more. Groups of “Middle Eastern men” had apparently visited an airport in Belle Glade, Florida—“about an hour’s drive from Delray Beach, the coastal community where some of the alleged hijackers are believed to have lived”—to inspect and inquire about crop dusters.

Willie Lee, “general manager of South Florida Crop Care,” said the men described themselves as flight students. The apparent leader of the group was especially visible and aggressive. Employee James Lester identified this man as Mohamed Atta.

“I recognized him because he stayed on my feet all the time. I just about had to push him away from me,” Lester said.

[Source: steven-war-ran.blogspot.com]

Atta supposedly visited twice more over the following months, while a variety of other Middle Eastern men came back repeatedly, taking photographs and video footage of the planes. To say they made themselves visible and unforgettable is to understate the case. Willie Lee said, “They were asking the types of questions that other people didn’t ask.” They were such a pain in the neck that Lee asked the police to “run them off.”

As with the related tale of Atta’s visit to the office of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Florida, we are offered a trail of breadcrumbs.

But what is the significance of crop-dusters? If they played a role in the theater of 2001, what do they signify? The answer is that they signified anthrax, and anthrax signified Iraq.

Iraq had possessed, at one time, an anthrax program, and it had experimented with aerial dispersion. The program had been shut down after the 1991 Gulf War and the materials destroyed, but U.S. planners were able to befog the issue and keep alive the fear of aerial dispersion by Iraq. One Western news story revealingly referred to crop dusters—a kind of poor man’s aerial dispersion technology—as Saddam Hussein’s “doomsday option.”^[13]

During his spectacularly deceptive performance for the UN Security Council in 2003, preparing the world for the U.S.-led assault on Iraq, Colin Powell covered all the bases.^[14]

He held up a vial of simulated anthrax, talked about how an equivalent amount of anthrax had closed down the Hart Senate Office Building in 2001, discussed Iraq’s anthrax program, and showed photos of Iraqi aerial dispersion planes.

He thereby narratively (not evidentially) connected anthrax to aerial dispersion and therefore WMD, to Iraq, and to the 2001 anthrax attacks on the U.S. homeland and Congress. There was little work to be done to lasso crop dusters into the field of guilt.

The crop-duster stories of the time remain extremely important today for sincere researchers, even though they are largely forgotten. They reveal the anthrax-9/11 connection.

They also, of course, show the false links being made to Iraq. Crop-duster stories were but one of the methods of implicating Iraq in the anthrax attacks. The idea that the anthrax in the attacks had come from Iraq was pushed vigorously in the media in the weeks after the first anthrax diagnosis.

The phrase repeatedly used in the press was (with some variations): “they aren’t making this stuff in caves.” What this meant was: al-Qaeda foot soldiers evidently have delivered this material, but these guys could not have manufactured such a sophisticated bioweapon in caves in Afghanistan—they must have had a state supplier.

And that supplier, went the story, was Iraq. ABC News went so far as to claim repeatedly that the spores in the attack letters had been coated in bentonite—the Iraqi method of weaponization.^[15]

But this was just more fiction: The claims went up in smoke when unbought scientists examined the spores. Far from being weaponized with bentonite, they were weaponized (here I speak of the sophisticated spores sent to the senators) in a far more complex way that had the signature of U.S. domestic military/intelligence labs.

There were other Iraq tales circulated. One of the most famous was the tale of Mohamed Atta meeting in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence agent.^[16] The story was supposed to support the idea that Iraq had sponsored al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks, but it was also used to suggest that Atta was arranging to get chemical or biological weapons from Iraq.

“Some federal officials have wondered whether chemical or biological weapons might have been a subject of discussion when Mohamed Atta, one of the Sept. 11 hijackers, met last year with an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague. Iraq is known to have worked on the development of such weapons.”

Widely spread by the media, this story turned out to be yet another piece of misinformation. No such meeting ever took place.

To sum up: The story promoted in the fall of 2001 was that the hijackers allegedly responsible for the 9/11 attacks were, in the lead-up to that event, also preparing to attack the U.S. with anthrax. Being simple fellows with limited technological expertise, they were exploring the idea of using U.S. crop-dusters, and in the end they chose an even more crude method—sending the spores in letters. But the anthrax spores were not their own preparation: They came from Iraq, al-Qaeda’s sponsor.

Thus were two military invasions, that of Afghanistan and that of Iraq, simultaneously justified in advance.

Restoring the Missing Motives

The lone nut may have no rational motive, but the group of insiders who planned the two-part psychological operation of the fall of 2001 were definitely rational, and many of their motives are easily discerned.

As just indicated, they wished to lay the foundation for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. More broadly, however, they wished to supersede (not entirely replace, but temporarily supersede) the Cold War with the Global War on Terror.

Remember that each of these global conflict formations, the Cold War and the Global War on Terror, was designed to force nations, and even individuals, to make a choice between two antithetical positions.

Each global conflict formation supported numerous specific hot wars, high military spending, a drastic diminution in the sophistication of human thinking, and the overall health of the war system with its primitive and outgrown moral foundations.

The chief method of recruiting people to the Global War on Terror was fear. The anthrax attacks contributed mightily, being used to evoke anxiety and panic.^[17]

“Anthrax Anxiety at Home,” “Widespread Anxiety in New York,” “Anxiety Grows in South Florida,” “Anxiety over Bioterrorism Grows” are a few of the headlines of the time. Immediately after the death of Robert Stevens, The Washington Post reported that “jittery” citizens were “on their knees begging for drugs.”

By October 15 we were told that the “anthrax scare” was spreading around the world. By October 18 we were informed that “the fear of anthrax has become inescapable,” and shortly before the congressional votes on the USA PATRIOT Act, Americans were said to be suffering “primordial terror” in “a national anxiety attack.”

The 9/11 attacks were more dramatic but the anthrax attacks were more intimate. Anyone, anywhere in the country, could innocently pick up their daily mail and get pulmonary anthrax.

We should not assume, of course, that Americans, or people of the world in general, were really experiencing the level of fear reported by the media. Who knows? What is obvious is that such fear as existed was to a great extent the result of inflammatory media coverage.

This fear was the soil in which Islamophobia was cultivated. If the false narratives of the fall of 2001, as well as the spread of fear by the mass media, are left unmentioned, the term “Islamophobia” is no more than a distraction.

Although the Global War on Terror was sketched broadly enough to include non-Muslim individuals and nations when necessary (North Korea was the main case), it was aimed chiefly at Muslims.

The fear evoked in the fall of 2001 was a fear of Islam and the “craziness” or “nuttiness” that supposedly led Muslims to unleash violence on the United States.

This was a deliberate propaganda campaign fueled by a two-part psychological operation that initiated what may be called the Crazy Muslim franchise, a narrative series that will continue as long as there is an interested audience and profits to be made.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak explained it all on BBC television about 11:28 AM on 9/11, shortly after the attacks in new York and Washington:^[18]

“The world will not be the same from today on. It’s an attack against our whole civilization … I believe that this is the time to deploy a globally concerted effort led by the United States, the UK, Europe and Russia against all sources of terror.”

Notwithstanding the complete absence of evidence, Barak, repeatedly given air time by the BBC during the day, did not hesitate to name specific nations (Iran, Iraq, and so on) as targets of the new “globally concerted effort.”

The use of fear in such psychological operations is typically meant to support a powerful clenching of the in-group, where the group that feels attacked draws together in tight formation to defend itself against the dangerous Other.

And this clenching results not merely in striking out against the alleged foe but squeezing out domestic civil rights. Freedom to think for oneself, to debate, to dissent is in these cases increasingly regarded with suspicion, and legislation is passed by intimidated legislatures that cast dissenters into the outer darkness.

These processes, starkly visible in the medical martial law forced on the world as I write these lines, were prefigured in the 2001 two-part operation.

The attack on Congress in the anthrax attacks, an obvious part of the plan to discipline U.S. civil society and its representatives, is well known, but I can add some flesh to the bones that are our usual fare.^[19]

By the time anthrax fears began spreading in the U.S., Congress was already reeling from the 9/11 attacks. Concrete barriers blocked road access to Congress, while senators and representatives were discouraged from wearing congressional pins or displaying distinctive license plates lest their identities be known and they become targets.

But the possibility remained that members of Congress would recover their senses and begin to resist the legislation that had been placed before them—the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, or USA PATRIOT Act. Only if Congress remained frightened and intimidated would it remain obedient to those in the Executive branch fighting for rapid passage of the Act.

During the intense days of September 2001, Attorney General Ashcroft repeatedly harangued the Democrats in the Senate to pass the USA PATRIOT Act quickly.

As Daschle later put it, Ashcroft “attacked Democrats for delaying passage of this bill. In this climate of anxiety the attorney general was implicitly suggesting that further attacks might not be prevented if Democrats didn’t stop delaying.”

The Republicans had a generous majority in the House that would do the Executive’s bidding and pass the bill but, in the Senate the Democrats had a majority of one. A slim majority, but potentially enough to block the new bill.

Patrick Leahy, a Democratic senator, was Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, a key body in the process of considering and approving the USA PATRIOT Act. While Leahy was generally supportive of the bill, he drew the line on October 2: He insisted he would not support the bill without changes.

Daschle was Senate Majority Leader and was the most powerful Democrat in the Senate. His support of the bill was essential to its passage. Although he had signaled in various ways his indignation at the 9/11 attacks and had offered the President his support, he was not ready to give Bush carte blanche either to attack any nation he wished or to bully the USA PATRIOT Act through Congress.

While he had been willing to introduce the resolution on the use of force that gave the President legal cover for war (September 14, 2001), Daschle did so only after toning down the astonishingly imperial version of the resolution written by the White House.

On October 2 he supported Leahy in resisting immediate passage of the new USA PATRIOT bill.

But Vice President Cheney had chosen October 5 as the date by which he wanted the bill passed. Due to the stubbornness of these two Democratic senators, Cheney’s schedule was now unachievable.

Some time between October 6 and 8, two anthrax letters were put in the mail. They were addressed to Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy.

The event was embellished with a spectacular case of mass media precognition. On October 15, Roll Call, a Washington newspaper that reported Capitol Hill news, headlined its issue with:

“HILL BRACES FOR ANTHRAX THREAT.”

Right on schedule, later that day Grant Leslie, an intern of Senator Tom Daschle, opened a letter to find a hand-printed threat accompanied by shockingly aerosolized anthrax spores. The spores floated out of the envelope, contaminating not just Leslie but the entire Hart Senate Office Building, which had to be closed and sanitized.

Here is the text of the letter:^[20]

I hold that this text, considered with the text sent to Tom Brokaw, is one of the most important documents of the 21^th century. (My assertion is based on an interpretation of the text that takes into account the spores that accompanied the text as well as the 9/11 attacks to which the text of the letter makes a clear reference.)

The Daschle and Brokaw letters indicate that their implied authors:

(1) are identical with, or related to, the crew responsible for the 9/11 attacks (“09-11-01” at the top of the letter)

(2) are bent on homicide (“you die now”)

(3) are, because of their 9/11 connection, also prepared to commit suicide

(4) are crude (the printing) and stupid (in the Brokaw letter “penicillin” is spelled wrong, indicating the authors are not bright enough to use a dictionary or spell-check.)

(5) are Muslim (“Allah is Great”)

(6) regard the United States and Israel as of comparable importance and as forming a unified target (“Death to America. Death to Israel.”)

(7) are determined to achieve their goals through fear (“Are you afraid?”)

(8) are taunting the U.S. Congress as powerless (“You can not stop us”)

(9) are prepared to use a weapon of mass destruction on the U.S. Congress (the spores are weaponized and the letters are addressed to Senators Daschle and Leahy).

(10) are in a position to access some of the most sophisticated weaponized anthrax ever seen, presumably from their state sponsor (this we conclude from an analysis of the spores).

This is a message that loses none of its importance when we realize that its real authors, who are entirely different from its implied authors, are domestic groups within the U.S. Military-Industrial-Intelligence-Complex, possibly assisted by counterparts in one or more allied countries.

When we are awake to the deception practiced here, we can read these letters as a charter of the Global War on Terror spelled out in childish block printing.

The attacks on Congress were, of course, successful. Congress was disciplined and meekly passed the Act.

George W. Bush signs the USA PATRIOT Act [Source: Britannica.com]

The mass media reported excitedly on the associated anxiety and panic.^[21]

“A handful of anthrax particles sent through the mail to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D- S.D.) has sent Capitol Hill into an orbit of jitters and confusion …”

Or again:

“the perpetrators of the anthrax terror hit pay dirt in Washington. They’ve managed to accomplish what the British tried to generate with their burning of the White House, the Capitol and other government buildings in 1814—what Lee Harvey Oswald couldn’t deliver in 1963—and what the Pentagon attackers sought to but couldn’t provoke on Sept. 11: a sense of vulnerability and danger so great that it disables and fundamentally alters the way the nation’s capital does its business.”

Headline conveying fear resulting from anthrax attacks. [Source: steven-war-ran.blogspot.com]

When we look with clear eyes at the connections and motives noted above, having dismissed the lone nut theory and the Crazy Muslim theory, we see that the United States was subjected to a domestically produced two-part psychological operation of overwhelming importance in the fall of 2001.

Breadcrumbs and Blockheads

I have chosen not to attempt in this article to relate the 2001 anthrax attacks to our current nightmare—briefly, the endeavor to establish a global “reset” through what I believe is a weaponized virus^[22] accompanied by injections that are unneeded, ineffective and very dangerous.^[23]

Many lines of continuity between the 2001 anthrax attacks and the current deception have been pointed out by researchers.^[24] But I would add that attention must also be paid to discontinuities. The 2001 attacks had specific geopolitical aims, the stigmatizing of specific nations, cultures and states, and the establishment of a particular global conflict framework that would revitalize the war system in a way that would favor particular parties. It is not yet clear to me how the transition has been made to the different aims that appear to drive the current operation.

In any case, the 2001 anthrax attacks remind us that a trail of monstrous breadcrumbs is effective in leading us to the perpetrators’ desired endpoint only as long as we are blockheads.

When we make the decision to be intelligent, critical adults, the breadcrumbs become much worse than useless for the perpetrators’ ends: now they lead us to the den of the true criminals. I am confident that the researchers who have taken on the puzzle of connecting the two-part 2001 operation to the current operation will, by critically following the recent trail of breadcrumbs, be able to solve this puzzle.

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Prof. Graeme MacQueen, author and distinguished professor of religious studies, Hamilton, Ont. Canada. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Notes

1. “Face to Face with a Terrorist—Worker Recalls Atta Seeking Funds Before 9/11,” ABCNEWS.com, June 6, 2002. 
2. Graeme MacQueen, The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy(Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 2014), 78. 
3. Ibid., 72 ff. 
4. Ibid., 77 ff. 
5. Ibid., Chapter 5. 
6. UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF TENNESSEE. April 2, 2015. Richard L. Lambert Plaintiff Pro Se. 
7. Ibid. 
8. The Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry, Inc., “Before the Congress of the United States: Petition Pursuant to the First Amendment of the United States Constitution Seeking Redress for Government Misconduct Concerning the Post-9/11 Anthrax Attacks of 2001.” October 15, 2020.https://www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org/lawyers-committee-anthrax-petition/ 
9. Lisa Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2018), p. 413. 
10. MacQueen, The 2001 Anthrax Deception, Chapter 5. 
11. Ibid., 134 ff. 
12. Ibid., 154 ff. 
13. Ibid., 159-160. 
14. Ibid., 166-168. 
15. Ibid., 80-81. 
16. Ibid., 84-85. 
17. Ibid., pp. 44 ff. 
18. Barak’s remark was made at about 11:28 a.m. See BBC News archives, accessible at:https://archive.org/details/911/day/20010911 
19. MacQueen, The 2001 Anthrax Deception, 49 ff. 
20. Consult the FBI website:http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/history/famous-cases/anthrax-amerithrax/amerithrax-investigation 
21. MacQueen, The 2001 Anthrax Deception, p. 57. 
22. See lawyer Reiner Fuellmich’s interview with Dr. David Martin:https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x82untb 
23. There are many experts who agree on these points. As an example, consult the website of Doctors for COVID Ethics: http://doctors4covidethics.org/ 
24. For example: Whitney Webb and Raul Diego, “All Roads Lead to Dark Winter,” The Unz Review, April 1, 2020, and Richard Ramsbotham, “Interlocking Histories, 9/11, the Anthrax Attacks and Covid-19,” New View, Issue 100, Summer 2021. 

Featured image: The letter that started the anthrax scare: Laboratory technician holding the anthrax-laced letter addressed to Senator Leahy after safely opening it at the U.S. Army’s Fort Detrick bio-medical research laboratory in November 2001. [Source: fbi.gov] 

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This article was first published on Global Research in August 2021.

I sat in Court 4 in the Royal Courts of Justice in London yesterday with Stella Moris, Julian Assange’s partner. I have known Stella for as long as I have known Julian. She, too, is a voice of freedom, coming from a family that fought the fascism of Apartheid. Today, her name was uttered in court by a barrister and a judge, forgettable people were it not for the power of their endowed privilege.

The barrister, Clair Dobbin, is in the pay of the regime in Washington, first Trump’s then Biden’s. She is America’s hired gun, or “silk”, as she would prefer. Her target is Julian Assange, who has committed no crime and has performed an historic public service by exposing the criminal actions and secrets on which governments, especially those claiming to be democracies, base their authority.

For those who may have forgotten, WikiLeaks, of which Assange is founder and publisher, exposed the secrets and lies that led to the invasion of Iraq, Syria and Yemen, the murderous role of the Pentagon in dozens of countries, the blueprint for the 20-year catastrophe in Afghanistan, the attempts by Washington to overthrow elected governments, such as Venezuela’s, the collusion between nominal political opponents (Bush and Obama) to stifle a torture investigation and the CIA’s Vault 7 campaign that turned your mobile phone, even your TV set, into a spy in your midst.

WikiLeaks released almost a million documents from Russia which allowed Russian citizens to stand up for their rights. It revealed the Australian government had colluded with the US against its own citizen, Assange. It named those Australian politicians who have “informed” for the US. It made the connection between the Clinton Foundation and the rise of jihadism in American-armed states in the Gulf.

There is more: WikiLeaks disclosed the US campaign to suppress wages in sweatshop countries like Haiti, India’s campaign of torture in Kashmir, the British government’s secret agreement to shield “US interests” in its official Iraq inquiry and the British Foreign Office’s plan to create a fake “marine protection zone” in the Indian Ocean to cheat the Chagos islanders out of their right of return.

In other words, WikiLeaks has given us real news about those who govern us and take us to war, not the preordained, repetitive spin that fills newspapers and television screens. This is real journalism; and for the crime of real journalism, Assange has spent most of the past decade in one form of incarceration or another, including Belmarsh prison, a horrific place.

Diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, he is a gentle, intellectual visionary driven by his belief that a democracy is not a democracy unless it is transparent, and accountable.

Yesterday, the United States sought the approval of Britain’s High Court to extend the terms of its appeal against a decision by a district judge, Vanessa Baraitser, in January to bar Assange’s extradition.  Baraitser accepted the deeply disturbing evidence of a number of experts that Assange would be at great risk if he were incarcerated in the US’s infamous prison system.

Professor Michael Kopelman, a world authority on neuro-psychiatry, had said Assange would find a way to take his own life — the direct result of what Professor Nils Melzer, the United Nations Rapporteur on Torture, described as the craven “mobbing” of Assange by governments – and their media echoes.

Those of us who were in the Old Bailey last September to hear Kopelman’s evidence were shocked and moved. I sat with Julian’s father, John Shipton, whose head was in his hands. The court was also told about the discovery of a razor blade in Julian’s Belmarsh cell and that he had made desperate calls to the Samaritans and written notes and much else that filled us with more than sadness.

Watching the lead barrister acting for Washington, James Lewis — a man from a military background who deploys a cringingly theatrical “aha!” formula with defence witnesses — reduce these facts to “malingering” and smearing witnesses, especially Kopelman, we were heartened by Kopelman’s revealing response that Lewis’s abuse was “a bit rich” as Lewis himself had sought to hire Kopelman’s  expertise in another case.

Lewis’s sidekick is Clair Dobbin, and yesterday was her day. Completing the smearing of Professor Kopelman was down to her. An American with some authority sat behind her in court.

Dobbin said Kopelman had “misled” Judge Baraister in September because he had not disclosed that Julian Assange and Stella Moris were partners, and their two young children, Gabriel and Max, were conceived during the period Assange had taken refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

The implication was that this somehow lessened Kopelman’s medical diagnosis: that Julian, locked up in solitary in Belmarsh prison and facing extradition to the US on bogus “espionage” charges, had suffered severe psychotic depression and had planned, if he had not already attempted, to take his own life.

For her part, Judge Baraitser saw no contradiction. The full nature of the relationship between Stella and Julian had been explained to her in March 2020, and Professor Kopelman had made full reference to it in his report in August 2020. So the judge and the court knew all about it before the main extradition hearing last September. In her judgement in January, Baraitser said this:

[Professor Kopelman] assessed Mr. Assange during the period May to December 2019 and was best placed to consider at first-hand his symptoms. He has taken great care to provide an informed account of Mr. Assange background and psychiatric history. He has given close attention to the prison medical notes and provided a detailed summary annexed to his December report. He is an experienced clinician and he was well aware of the possibility of exaggeration and malingering. I had no reason to doubt his clinical opinion.

She added that she had “not been misled” by the exclusion in Kopelman’s first report of the Stella-Julian relationship and that she understood that Kopelman was protecting the privacy of Stella and her two young children.

In fact, as I know well, the family’s safety was under constant threat to the point when an embassy security guard confessed he had been told to steal one of the baby’s nappies so that a CIA-contracted company could analyse its DNA. There has been a stream of unpublicised threats against Stella and her children.

For the US and its legal hirelings in London, damaging the credibility of a renowned expert by suggesting he withheld this information was a way, they no doubt reckoned, to rescue their crumbling case against Assange. In June, the Icelandic newspaper Stundin reported that a key prosecution witness against Assange has admitted fabricating his evidence. The one “hacking” charge the Americans hoped to bring against Assange if they could get their hands on him depended on this source and witness, Sigurdur Thordarson, an FBI informant.

Thordarson had worked as a volunteer for WikiLeaks in Iceland between 2010 and 2011. In 2011, as several criminal charges were brought against him, he contacted the FBI and offered to become an informant in return for immunity from all prosecution. It emerged that he was a convicted fraudster who embezzled $55,000 from WikiLeaks, and served two years in prison. In 2015, he was sentenced to three years for sex offenses against teenage boys. The Washington Post described Thordarson’s credibility as the “core” of the case against Assange.

Yesterday, Lord Chief Justice Holroyde made no mention of this witness. His concern was that it was “arguable” that Judge Baraitser had attached too much weight to the evidence of Professor Kopelman, a man revered in his field. He said it was “very unusual” for an appeal court to have to reconsider evidence from an expert accepted by a lower court, but he agreed with Ms. Dobbin it was “misleading” even though he accepted Kopelman’s “understandable human response” to protect the privacy of Stella and the children.

If you can unravel the arcane logic of this, you have a better grasp than I who have sat through this case from the beginning. It is clear Kopelman misled nobody. Judge Baraitser – whose hostility to Assange personally was a presence in her court – said that she was not misled; it was not an issue; it did not matter. So why had Lord Chief Chief Justice Holroyde spun the language with its weasel legalise and sent Julian back to his cell and its nightmares? There, he now waits for the High Court’s final decision in October – for him, a life or death decision.

And why did Holroyde send Stella from the court trembling with anguish? Why is this case “unusual”? Why did he throw the gang of prosecutor-thugs at the Department of Justice in Washington – — who got their big chance under Trump, having been rejected by Obama – a life raft as their rotting, corrupt case against a principled journalist sunk as surely as Titantic?

This does not necessarily mean that in October the full bench of the High Court will order Julian to be extradited. In the upper reaches of the masonry that is the British judiciary there are, I understand, still those who believe in real law and real justice from which the term “British justice” takes its sanctified reputation in the land of the Magna Carta. It now rests on their ermined shoulders whether that history lives on or dies.

I sat with Stella in the court’s colonnade while she drafted words to say to the crowd of media and well-wishers outside in the sunshine. Clip-clopping along came Clair Dobbin, spruced, ponytail swinging, bearing her carton of files: a figure of certainty: she who said Julian Assange was “not so ill” that he would consider suicide. How does she know?

Has Ms. Dobbin worked her way through the medieval maze at Belmarsh to sit with Julian in his yellow arm band, as Professors Koppelman and Melzer have done, and Stella has done, and I have done? Never mind. The Americans have now “promised” not to put him in a hellhole, just as they “promised” not to torture Chelsea Manning, just as they promised ……

And has she read the WikiLeaks’ leak of a Pentagon document dated 15 March, 2009? This foretold the current war on journalism. US intelligence, it said, intended to destroy WikiLeaks’ and Julian Assange’s “centre of gravity” with threats and “criminal prosecution”. Read all 32 pages and you are left in no doubt that silencing and criminalising independent journalism was the aim, smear the method.

I tried to catch Ms. Dobbin’s gaze, but she was on her way: job done.

Outside, Stella struggled to contain her emotion. This is one brave woman, as indeed her man is an exemplar of courage.

“What has not been discussed today,” said Stella, “is why I feared for my safety and the safety of our children and for Julian’s life. The constant threats and intimidation we endured for years, which has been terrorising us and has been terrorising Julian for 10 years. We have a right to live, we have a right to exist and we have a right for this nightmare to come to an end once and for all.”

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John Pilger is an Australian-British journalist and filmmaker based in London. Pilger’s Web site is: www.johnpilger.com. In 2017, the British Library announced a John Pilger Archive of all his written and filmed work. The British Film Institute includes his 1979 film, “Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia,” among the 10 most important documentaries of the 20^th century. 

Featured image is from 21st Century Wire

Bombshell Document Dump on Pfizer Vaccine Data

By Global Research, December 11, 2021

This Confidential Pfizer Report released as part of a Freedom of Information (FOI) procedure provides data on deaths and adverse events recorded by Pfizer from the outset of the vaccine project in December 2020 to the end of February 2021, namely a very short period (at most two and a half months).

57 Top Scientists and Doctors Release Shocking Study on COVID Vaccines and Demand Immediate Stop to All Vaccinations

By Dr. Roxana Bruno, Dr. Peter McCullough, and et al., December 12, 2021

Since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, the race for testing new platforms designed to confer immunity against SARS-CoV-2, has been rampant and unprecedented, leading to emergency authorization of various vaccines.

Special Report: Two Ivermectin Success Stories

By Joel S. Hirschhorn, December 12, 2021

Ivermectin has been attacked by pro-vaccine interests despite it being a cheap, safe and proven medicine for COVID treatment and prevention.  Despite a mountain of clinical and test evidence showing that it really works, Big Media, Big Pharma and Big Government have stubbornly fought its use.

Joe Biden and the Rape of Democracy. Cold War Rhetoric. Obedience to the US

By Marc Vandepitte, December 12, 2021

The Cold War was the greatest ideological propaganda campaign in modern world history. In that propaganda battle of more than 40 years, human rights and democracy were the two main battlefields. With the Summit for Democracy, President Biden reverts to Cold War rhetoric.

The US-NATO War of Aggression against Yugoslavia

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, December 12, 2021

Twenty-two years ago in the early hours of March 24, 1999, NATO began the bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. “The operation was code-named “Allied Force ” – a cold, uninspired and perfectly descriptive moniker” according to Nebosja Malic.

Journalism, Assange and Reversal in the UK High Court. The Extradition Procedure

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, December 12, 2021

From the outset, extradition proceedings utilising a First World War US statute – the Espionage Act of 1917 – should have sent legal eagles in the UK swooping with alarm.  17 of the 18 charges Assange is accused of have been drawn from it.

What Are the Truly Verifiable Facts Surrounding COVID-19?

By David Skripac, December 11, 2021

Contrary to what many medical and government officials tell us, there is no evidence to support the claim that face masks—whether N95, surgical, or cloth—protect the wearer from any virus. These so-called “medical experts” usually reference a purportedly scientific publication to support their claim.

Inside the Military’s Secret Undercover Army

By William M Arkin, December 11, 2021

The largest undercover force the world has ever known is the one created by the Pentagon over the past decade. Some 60,000 people now belong to this secret army, many working under masked identities and in low profile, all part of a broad program called “signature reduction.”

Colossal Financial Pyramid: BlackRock and The WEF “Great Reset”

By F. William Engdahl, December 12, 2021

How the world’s largest “shadow bank” exercises this enormous power over the world ought to concern us. BlackRock since Larry Fink founded it in 1988 has managed to assemble unique financial software and assets that no other entity has.

Introduction to “The Real Anthony Fauci”: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr, December 11, 2021

I wrote this book to help Americans—and citizens across the globe—understand the historical underpinnings of the bewildering cataclysm that began in 2020. In that single annus horribilis, liberal democracy effectively collapsed worldwide. The very governmental health regulators, social media eminences, and media companies that idealistic populations relied upon as champions of freedom, health, democracy, civil rights, and evidence-based public policy seemed to collectively pivot in a lockstep assault against free speech and personal freedoms.

Important Study: mRNA COVID Vaccines Dramatically Increase Endothelial Inflammatory Markers and Acute Coronary Syndrome (ACS) Risk as Measured by the PULS Cardiac Test: A Warning

By Steven R Gundry, December 11, 2021

Our group has been using the PLUS Cardiac Test (GD Biosciences, Inc, Irvine, CA) a clinically validated measurement of multiple protein biomarkers which generates a score predicting the 5 yr risk (percentage chance) of a new Acute Coronary Syndrome (ACS).

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Japan’s health ministry has listed inflammation of the heart muscle and of the outer lining of the heart in younger males as possible serious side effects of the Moderna and Pfizer COVID vaccines.

It says that as of November 14, out of every one million males who had the Moderna vaccine, such side effects were reported in 81.79 males aged 10 to 19 and 48.76 males in their 20s.

The figures were 15.66 and 13.32 respectively for those who had the Pfizer vaccine.

The ministry held a panel of expert on Saturday and proposed warning of the risk by printing “serious side effects” on the documents attached to the vaccines.

It will also require hospitals to report in detail incidents involving people who developed the symptoms within 28 days after being vaccinated, according to the law.

The plan was approved by the panel, and the ministry will notify municipalities.

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After having listed heart problems in the follow-up of a million jabbed Japanese, a group of experts brought together by the Ministry of Health insisted on adding the mention “serious side effects” on the documents attached to the anti-Covid vaccines.

The Japanese Ministry of Health has listed myocarditis and pericarditis – inflammations of the heart muscle and the outer wall of the heart – in young men as possible serious side effects of the Covid Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, NHK reported on December 4.

As of November 14, out of one million men who received the Moderna vaccine, such side effects were reported in more than 81 adolescent men and 48 men in their twenties.

Those numbers were 15 and 13, respectively, for those who had received the Pfizer vaccine. The ministry, which convened a group of experts on December 4 on the issue, proposed to warn of the risk by printing the words “serious side effects” on documents attached to vaccines.

It will also require hospitals to report in detail incidents involving people who developed symptoms within 28 days of their vaccination, according to the law. The plan has been approved by the expert panel and the ministry will notify municipalities of this new measure.

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Featured image: Central Government Office, Tokyo, Japan. Flikr

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Austria is threatening stiff fines on citizens who do not comply with the country’s new COVID-19 vaccine mandate. Austria will fine people up to $16,000 a year if they remain unvaccinated.

This week, the Austrian government became the first European country to announce it would implement a general vaccine mandate. Effective Feb. 1, all Austrian residents aged 14 and older are required to get vaccinated against coronavirus.

Health Minister Wolfgang Mückstein said that there would be exemptions for pregnant women, those who can’t get vaccinated for medical reasons, and for people who have recovered from COVID-19 in the previous six months. The government will create a central vaccination register to track those who are exempt and unvaccinated individuals.

The COVID-19 vaccination register will be checked every three months. The first deadline will be March 15.

The Austrian government will issue fines of up to about $4,000 on people who are not vaccinated and who do not qualify for an exemption. Fines can be imposed every three months. Legal proceedings will be dropped if people provide proof of vaccination in the meantime.

“People’s income and other financial obligations will be taken into account in calculating fines,” ABC News reported. “Alternatively, officials can opt to impose a fine of up to [about $680] in shortened proceedings.”

“Around 68% of Austria’s population of 8.9 million is vaccinated, a comparatively low rate for Western Europe,” Fox News reported. “Neighboring Germany, where the rate is just over 69%, also is eyeing the introduction of a general vaccine mandate early next year, though plans have yet to be drawn up and officials say they will let lawmakers vote according to their conscience rather than along party lines.”

Karoline Edtstadler – the Cabinet minister responsible for constitutional issues – said the government has “an obligation and a need to increase vaccination coverage so that we don’t go from lockdown to lockdown, next year as well.”

“There are still well over a million Austrians who aren’t vaccinated. That is too many,” Edtstadler added. “I say very clearly that we don’t want to punish the people who aren’t vaccinated. We want to bring them along, we want to convince them of this vaccination and we want them to show solidarity with everyone so that we can regain our freedom.”

There have been just over 13,000 COVID-19 deaths in Austria since the pandemic started.

Last Saturday, over 40,000 people marched through Vienna to protest against COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates, according to Reuters.

In #Austria, thousands have gathered to protest the mandatory vaccination passports. Take a look.pic.twitter.com/Wb3f1MePMm

— Steve Hanke (@steve_hanke) December 4, 2021

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Ugur Sahin, the CEO of BioNTech (Pfizer’s “vaccine” partner), has announced plans to start selling a three-dose injection regimen specifically for the “Omicron” (Moronic) variant of the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19).

This new three-injection series is in addition to the two-dose regimen already available from Pfizer-BioNTech as the regular vaccine, as well as the subsequent “booster” shot. This means that at least six shots will now be pushed to “cure” Chinese Germs.

“It is very clear our vaccine for the Omicron variant should be a three-dose vaccine,” Sahin stated, citing “the data coming from the Omicron variant” as proof to back his claims.

BioNTech has set a target date of March for the initial rollout of the shots, with another Moronic-specific booster shot to come six months after that (for a total of seven shots?).

Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech’s competitor, says it is also developing an Omicron-specific shot at warp speed to participate in the profit-fest that will ensue from all of these additional injections.

“For recent mRNA compliant individuals, this could mean some 6 mRNA shots over the course of a year’s time,” warns The Burning Platform about the sheer number of shots BioNTech and Pfizer have planned for people’s bodies over the next year.

WHO amplifies Moronic fears to boost Big Pharma profits

Various government entities and international “health” groups, including the World Health Organization (WHO), are already on board with the plan. The WHO actually seems thrilled about the idea of endless injections going into people’s arms for the rest of time.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom recently delivered a speech in which he fearmongered about the Moronic variant, suggesting it will have a “major impact on the course of the pandemic.”

Even though only “fully vaccinated” people are contracting it, not to mention the fact that it is just the common cold, the Moronic variant is rapidly shaping up to be the next catalyst that drives another stake into the heart of freedom and liberty.

Keep in mind that prior to the plandemic, neither Moderna nor BioNTech had successfully produced a single commercially available product. Then, with the arrival of the Fauci Flu, suddenly they were both at the forefront of the pharmaceutical cartels, raking in billions of dollars of ill-gotten profits.

On his Substack, Jordan Schachtel posted data showing that the more people get vaccinated, the more disease spreads. This runs contrary to the promises and claims made by people like Joe Biden, Tony Fauci and Rochelle Walensky, all of whom promised that the plandemic would be cured once most people got injected.

Well, most people are supposedly now injected and the disease is running wild like never before. How can this be unless the shots themselves are fraudulent and are actually causing disease and death?

“Talk about injecting a dead horse,” wrote one commenter at The Burning Platform. “What happens when the revenue doesn’t pan out because everyone is dead?”

“Wow, and all this for a bad flu with a high survival rate, and ‘vaccines’ that absolutely DO NOT WORK.”

Another responded that it is not about the money, at least not in the way many people think.

“After a third to half of the world is killed off, the financial system will collapse and even gold and silver will have little or no value,” another person suggested.

“It’s about the die-off, or more apropos the kill-off, of large swaths of humanity in a measured fashion. And the sterilization of most of whomever is left in a diabolical plan to create a ‘build back better’ dystopian world.”

There will never be an end to the number of Fauci Flu shots that are pushed on the public. To keep up with the latest, visit Vaccines.news.

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The Senate is considering a bill that would green-light hundreds of millions of funding for government vaccination databases, which medical freedom advocates are warning would lead to a “monumental invasion” of civil liberties.

The Immunization Infrastructure Modernization Act (IIMA), or HR 550, sets aside more than $400 million to expand data systems used by public health departments to collect information about Americans’ vaccination history.

The bill would also promote the exchange of vaccination data between state and local agencies and the federal government and would require government entities to adopt data standards set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as a condition of funding.

New Hampshire Democrat Rep. Annie Kuster, who authored HR 550, noted in a statement that her legislation could be used to “remind patients when they are due for a recommended vaccine and identify areas with low vaccination rates.” HR 550 would boost funding to vaccine providers while enhancing “real-time” reporting of vaccination data, she boasted.

“What this bill would create is more access for CDC for your immunization data, and the need for states to follow CDC recommendations or get cut off from federal funding,” medical freedom group Stand for Health Freedom warned.

“This bill has everything to do with mandates and digital health passes,” the group added. “It is the legal infrastructure, so to speak, for the digital infrastructure.”

“H.R. 550 it would lead to a monumental invasion of our rights as American citizens,” Children’s Health Defense said. “It would set a dangerous precedent and could lead to more vaccine mandates, and more restrictions of services and healthcare for the unvaccinated.”

Despite the bill’s price tag and implications for privacy rights, it nevertheless cleared the House last week with significant GOP support.

Eighty Republicans joined all present Democrats to send HR 550 to the Senate in a 294-130 vote Tuesday, LifeSiteNews reported. Republicans who backed the bill include House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy, Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, and four who signed on as co-sponsors. A vote has not yet been scheduled in the Senate.

“Based on a reading of the bill, and a knowledge of the history of the federal efforts for an immunization infrastructure, the Republicans who voted yes on this bill are either recklessly uninformed, or knew exactly what they were doing and are now selling the public an Orwellian bill of goods,” Stand for Health Freedom said. “Neither is good.”

One hundred thirty House Republicans opposed HR 550, including Rep. Mary Miller of Illinois, who told Breitbart that the legislation is “clearly a legislative tool to enforce vaccine mandates” and “Orwellian rules” for the unvaccinated.

“This bill would allow the government to collect, study, and share your private health data. There are endless ways the government could potentially use that information against you,” she said.

“This legislation would unnecessarily appropriate millions of taxpayer funds intended to expand bureaucracy in Washington,” Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida concurred. “A database solely created to record and collect confidential vaccination information of Americans explicitly encroaches upon individuals’ fundamental right to medical privacy.”

It’s not clear whether HR 550 will have enough votes to make it out of the evenly-split Senate. Every Republican senator sponsored a resolution that passed Wednesday to repeal the Biden’s vaccine mandate for private businesses. Two Democrats, Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Jon Tester of Montana, supported the measure.

Senate Republicans had backed another amendment last week authored by Republican Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas and Sen. Mike Lee of Utah to block funding and enforcement of each of Biden’s vaccine mandates, though it failed without any Democratic support.

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***

A terrible wrong is happening in Afghanistan. Climate breakdown is one cause of the famine beginning there. The other cause is the deliberate policy of the government of the United States.

Last week Christina Goldbaum of the New York Times reported from Shah Wali Kot in Kandahar province. “One by one, women poured into a mud brick clinic, the frames of famished children peeking out beneath the fold of their pale gray, blue and pink burqas.

“[They] were desperate for medicine to pump life back into their children’s shrunken veins. For months, their once-daily meals had grown more sparse as harvests failed, wells ran dry and credit for flour from shopkeepers ran out.”

Download a free copy of Jonathan Neale’s book Fight the Fire now.

Starvation

She added: “Reality was setting in. Their children might not survive the winter. ‘I’m very afraid, this winter will be even worse than we can imagine,’ said Laltak, 40.”

The Red Cross and other aid groups are warning that the unfolding famine could kill more than a million children this winter. This would be more than the total number of adults and children who died in twenty years since the American and NATO invasion in 2001.

Let us hope that they are exaggerating. Let us hope that it will only be hundreds of thousands of children.

First, climate breakdown. The rains first failed in Afghanistan in 1965. When they failed again in 1970-72, there was famine across the northwest and center of the country.

The rains and the harvests have failed many times since. Many went hungry or lost their land or flocks. But each time some form of international aid prevented generalised starvation. Not this time.

Crop

There is little doubt that this is climate breakdown. The rains have not simply failed. When they do come, they fall at the wrong time of the year. The downpours are heavy, so the soil cannot absorb the water.

But Afghan farmers do not mainly rely on rainfall. Snowfall in the mountains matters more. In the spring and summer the snow and ice melt, and rivers and irrigation channels carry the water down to the crops.

As climate breakdown raises temperatures, there is more rain and less snow.

Globally, temperatures have risen by one degree centigrade in the last fifty years. In Afghanistan they have risen by two degrees.

The droughts grow worse. The drought this year is worse than the last one, in 2018. Nationally, between 25 percent and 40 percent of the wheat crop, the main staple, has been lost.

Rains

But the crop failure is not even across the country. In some parts of the country, especially in the northwest, west and south, most of the harvest has failed.

About half of the total population, roughly 23 million people, are at risk of malnutrition and starvation. This does not mean that 23 million will die. But many will.

The problem is not just one year’s crops, however. In droughts, farmers have to eat the whole crop, and save nothing for planting in the spring.

There are perhaps as many as two million pastoral nomads in Afghanistan as well, most of them with flocks of sheep. When there is no pasture and little water, the flocks die. And in the next year, the pastoral nomads have very few, or no animals.

There were hopes that the snow would come this winter, and the rains would come afterwards. The early indications are that this is not happening. It now looks probable that the winter of 2022-23 will be therefore be much worse than this winter.

Bankers

The drought in Afghanistan is part of a much wider climate disaster that is affecting all of Central Asia, and as in Afghanistan, has been growing across the region for decades.

Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world. Nine-tenths of the land is so arid it cannot be farmed. The Afghans have done nothing – nothing – to bring the climate crisis down upon humanity.

Yet the Afghans are among those who will suffer most from the climate crisis.

Pause and think for a moment. Imagine what it is like to live through 43 years of war. Then to hope for peace and to find yourself plunging into famine.

Climate breakdown is one of the two causes of this unfolding famine. The other is the deliberate policy of the US government. Or to be more precise, of American politicians, generals, diplomats and bankers.

Sanctions

The Taliban victory in Afghanistan was a major humiliation for the US government and military. Desperately poor people in sandals had defeated the greatest military power in the world.

The United States has form in how they react to such losses. After their defeat in the Vietnam War, the US introduced sanctions that isolated the country and hurt the economy for a quarter of a century.

They have done the same to Iran, and did the same to Iraq after the First Gulf War. They have done it to Cuba for 60 years. And now they are doing it to Afghanistan.

As soon as the Taliban won in Afghanistan, the Federal Reserve Bank in the US confiscated the entire reserves of the Afghan government.

And the US cut off all aid. The World Bank did the same. Washington announced that there would be sanctions against any bank which moved money into or out of Afghanistan.

Epidemic

The Afghan financial system collapsed. The government could not pay doctors, nurses, teachers, civil servants or police.

During the occupation, foreign aid had paid 75 percent of the government budget. Now that was gone, and the economy collapsed.

In previous droughts, international charities and NGOs played the central role in disturbing food. Now they cannot get money into or out of the country. That means they cannot pay people to distribute or move the food.

Moreover, hospitals and clinics are running out of supplies and nurses and doctors are not being paid. This matters because in many famines the main killer is not direct starvation, but the effect of disease on weakened and malnourished bodies.

And of course there is also a covid epidemic raging in Afghanistan.

Humanitarian

None of this is a secret. It is happening in plain sight. The New York Times, the Guardian, Al-Jazeera and much of the rest of the media are reporting this.

Indeed, the point of sanctions is always to make a show of power after a defeat, so that people in other countries are afraid to defy a super-power.

Senior staff in many international aid agencies and the Red Cross and Red Crescent have gone to the media, protesting desperately about US government policy.

This has had an impact. Many countries have pledged substantial sums in aid.

The US government announced that they would contribute to humanitarian aid. They would also make specific exceptions, case by case, for banks to be allowed to move money in or out of Afghanistan for humanitarian reasons.

Punish

But the food and medical supplies are not appearing on the ground. The economy remains in free fall.

The staff at the aid agencies say that the banks still won’t allow them to move money. The bankers tell the agencies that they dare not. In spite of the more recent statements by Washington, they fear the US government will punish them.

The bankers are probably right. As far as the aid workers can tell, the US government is saying one thing in public, and is implacable in private.

This terrible wrong is being committed in the full view of the world. Like me, many readers of The Ecologist care passionately about climate breakdown. We have marched for the climate, protested and feared the future.

That future is upon us. The Afghans are at the cutting edge of something that is beginning all over the world. We should help them, not punish them.

Bones

It is time to raise our voices. If enough people protest, in enough countries, some charities, some banks and some governments will have the courage to break the sanctions. Even Washington and Biden can be shamed if the outbreak is loud enough.

The Ecologist is published in Britain, my home too. Let us not forget that our government, and the banks in the City of London, are utterly complicit too in a policy to punish the Afghan population for ridding themselves of foreign occupation.

The United States and Britain and other governments, say that they don’t want to recognize or aid the Taliban because their policies are opposed to the rights of women.

The majority of the dead, though, will be women and children, because the majority of Afghans are women and children. Those who now carry the small coffins and wail beside the small graves are mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers.

Christina Goldbaum in the New York Times again: “At Mirwais Regional Hospital in Kandahar this fall, children suffering from malnutrition and disease crowded onto the pediatric ward’s worn metal beds.

“In the intensive care unit, an eerie silence filled the large room as children too weak to cry visibly wasted away, their breath labored and skin sagging off protruding bones.”

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Jonathan Neale is a climate activist, novelist and nonfiction writer, on twitter @JonathanNealeA1. Fight the Fire is also available in paperback from Resistance Books. Jonathan also blogs on climate, politics and gender with Nancy Lindisfarne at Anne Bonny Pirate. 

Featured image is from UNICEF/ UN0562525/ Alessio Romenzi

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***

Since a US-backed coup toppled Mel Zelaya in 2009, Honduras has faced a clampdown on democracy and serious human rights abuses. But the election of socialist Xiomara Castro is a chance to break the cycle.

What appeared impossible has been achieved: the people of Honduras have broken the perpetuation, through electoral fraud and thuggish violence, of a brutal, illegal, illegitimate, and criminal regime.

By means of sheer resistance, resilience, mobilisation, and organisation, they have managed to defeat Juan Orlando Hernandez’s narco-dictatorship at the ballot box. Xiomara Castro, presidential candidate of the left-wing Libre party (the Freedom and Refoundation Party, in its Spanish acronym), obtained a splendid 50+ percent—between 15 to 20 percent more votes than her closest rival candidate, Nasry Asfura, National Party candidate, in an election with historic high levels of participation (68 percent).

The extraordinary feat performed by the people of Honduras takes place under the dictatorial regime of Hernandez (aka JOH) in an election marred by what appears to be targeted assassinations of candidates and activists. Up to October 2021, 64 acts of electoral violence, including 11 attacks and 27 assassinations, had been perpetrated. And in the period preceding the election (11-23 November) another string of assassinations, mainly of candidates, took place.

None of the fatal victims were members of Hernandez’s National Party. The aim seems to have been to terrorise the opposition, and particularly their electorate, into believing that it was unsafe to turn out to vote—and that even if they did, they would again steal the election through fraud and violence, as they have done twice already, in 2013 and 2017.

Commentators correctly characterise this as the ‘Colombianisation’ of Honduran politics—that is, a ruling gang in power deploys security forces and paramilitary groups to assassinate opposition activists. In Honduras, the most despicable act was the murder of environmental activist, feminist, and indigenous leader Berta Caceres by armed intruders in her own house, after years of death threats.

She had been a leading figure in the grassroots struggle against electoral fraud and dictatorship, and had been calling for the urgent re-founding of the nation, a proposal that has been incorporated into the programme of mass social movements such as the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH). Since 2009, hundreds of activists have been assassinated at the hands of the police, the army, and paramilitaries.

The Colombianisation analogy does not stop at the assassination of opponents. Last June, the Washington Post explained the extent of infiltration by organised crime: ‘Military and police chiefs, politicians, businessmen, mayors and even three presidents have been linked to cocaine trafficking or accused of receiving funds from trafficking.’

US Judge Kevin Castel, who sentenced ‘Tony’ Hernandez, JOH’s brother, to life in prison after being found guilty of smuggling 185 tons of cocaine into the US, said: ‘Here, the [drug] trafficking was indeed state-sponsored’. In March 2021, at the trial against Geovanny Fuentes, a Honduran accused of drug trafficking, the prosecutor Jacob Gutwillig said that President JOH helped Fuentes with the trafficking of tons of cocaine.

Corruption permeates the whole Honduran establishment. National Party candidate Nasry Asfura has faced a pre-trial ‘for abuse of authority, use of false documents, embezzlement of public funds, fraud and money laundering’, and Yani Rosenthal, candidate of the once-ruling Liberal party, a congressman and a banker, was found guilty and sentenced to three years in prison in the US for ‘participating in financial transactions using illicit proceeds (drug money laundering).’

The parallels continue. Like Colombia, Honduras is a narco-state in which the US has a host of military bases. It was from Honduran territory that the Contra mercenaries waged a proxy war against Sandinista Nicaragua in the 1980s, and it was also from Honduras that the US-led military invasion of Guatemala was launched in 1954, bringing about the violent ousting of democratically elected left-wing nationalist president Jacobo Arbenz. Specialists aptly refer to the country as ‘USS Honduras’.

So cocaine trafficking and state terrorism, which operates as part of the drug business in cahoots with key state institutions, is ‘tolerated’ and probably supported by various US agencies ‘in exchange’ for a large US military presence—the US has Soto Cano and 12 more US military bases in Honduras—due to geopolitical calculations like regional combat against left-wing governments. This criminal system’s stability requires the elimination of political and social activists.

Thus many US institutions, from the White House all the way down the food chain, turn a blind eye to the colossal levels of corruption. In fact, SOUTHCOM has been actively building Honduras’ repressive military capabilities by funding and training special units like Batallion-316, which reportedly acts as a death squad, ‘guilty of kidnap, torture, and murder’. ‘Between 2010 and 2016, as US “aid” and training continued to flow, over 120 environmental activists were murdered by hitmen, gangs, police, and the military for opposing illegal logging and mining,’ one report explains.

The legacy left by right-wing governments since the violent ousting of Mel Zelaya in 2009 is abysmal. Honduras is one the most violent countries in the world (37 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, with 60 percent attributable to organised crime), with staggering levels of poverty (73.6 percent of households live below the poverty line, out of which 53.7 percent live in extreme poverty), high levels of unemployment (well over 12 percent), and even higher levels of underemployment (the informal sector of the economy, due to the effects of Covid-19, grew from 60 to 70 percent). Its external debt is over US$15 billion (57 percent of its GDP), and the nation suffers from high incidences of embezzlement and illegal appropriation of state resources by this criminal administration.

The rot is so pronounced that back in February this year, a group of Democrats in the US Senate introduced legislation intended to cut off economic aid and sales of ammunition to Honduran security forces. The proposal ‘lays bare the violence and abuses perpetrated since the 2009 military-backed coup, as a result of widespread collusion between government officials, state and private security forces, organised crime and business leaders.’ In Britain, Colin Burgon, the president of Labour Friends of Progressive Latin America, issued scathing criticism of the British government’s complicity for ‘having sold (when Boris Johnson was Foreign Minister no less) to the Honduran government spyware designed to eavesdrop on its citizens, months before the state rounded up thousands of people in a well-orchestrated surveillance operation.’

To top it all off, through the ZEDES (Special Zones of Development and Employment) initiative, whole chunks of the national territory are being given to private enterprise subjected to a ‘special regime’ that empowers investors to establish their own security bodies—including their own police force and penitentiary system—to investigate criminal offences and instigate legal prosecutions. This is taking neoliberalism to abhorrent levels, the dream of multinational capital: the selling-off of portions of the national territory to private enterprise. Stating that the Honduran oligarchy, led by JOH, is ‘selling the country down the river’ is not a figure of speech.

It is this monstrosity, constructed since the overthrow of President Mel Zelaya in 2009 on top of the existing oligarchic state, that the now victorious Libre party and incoming president Xiomara Castro need to overcome to start improving the lives of the people of Honduras. The array of extremely nasty internal and external forces that her government will be up against is frighteningly powerful, and they have demonstrated in abundance what they are prepared to do to defend their felonious interests.

President-elect Xiomara’s party Libre, is the largest in the 128-seat Congress, and with its coalition partner, Salvador, will have a very strong parliamentary presence, which will be central to any proposed referendum for a Constituent Assembly aimed at re-founding the nation. Libre has also won in the capital city Tegucigalpa, and in San Pedro Sula, the country’s second largest city. More importantly, unlike elections elsewhere (in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia), the National Party’s candidate, Asfura, has conceded defeat. Thus, Xiomara has a very strong mandate.

However, in a region dominated by US-led ‘regime change’ operations—the coup in Bolivia, the coup attempt in Nicaragua, the mercenary attack against Venezuela, plus a raft of violent street disorders in Cuba, vigorous destabilisation against recently elected President Castillo in Peru, and so on ad nausea—Honduras will need all the international solidarity we can provide, which we must do.

The heroic struggle of the people of Honduras has again demonstrated that it can be done: neoliberalism and its brutal foreign and imperialist instigators can be defeated and a better world can be built. So, before Washington, their Honduran cronies, their European accomplices, and the world corporate media unleash any shenanigans, let’s say loud and clear: US hands off Honduras!

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Francisco Dominguez is head of the Research Group on Latin America at Middlesex University. He is also the national secretary of the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign and co-author of Right-Wing Politics in the New Latin America (Zed, 2011).

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First published by  Global Research on november 19, 2021

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“The silence of so many Cardinals and Bishops, along with the inconceivable promotion of the vaccination campaign by the Holy See, represents a form of unprecedented complicity that cannot continue any longer. It is necessary to denounce this scandal, this crime against humanity, this satanic action against God.

With every passing day, thousands of people are dying or are being affected in their health by the illusion that the so-called vaccines guarantee a solution to the pandemic emergency.

The Catholic Church has the duty before God and all of humanity to denounce this tremendous and horrible crime with the utmost firmness, giving clear directions and taking a stand against those who, in the name of a pseudo-science subservient to the interests of the pharmaceutical companies and the globalist elite, have only intentions of death.

His Excellency Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano

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A video has surfaced from what appears to be January 2021 of World Bank President David Malpass explaining that Pfizer is “hesitant” to distribute its vaccine in countries which refuse to grant legal indemnity from liability for adverse events. He says:

The immediate problem is indemnification. Pfizer has been hesitant to go into some of the countries because of the liability problems, they don’t have a liability shield. So we work with the countries to try to do that. But I think also some of the other vaccine manufacturers may be able to go into countries because they’re operating through subsidiaries. This is all something that we’re exploring, and our goal, my goal, is to have vaccines available throughout the developing world based on what their countries decide. We’ve got financing available but the countries need to choose systems and then begin buying or receiving the vaccines.

"Pfizer has been hesitant to go into some of the countries because of the liability problems, they don’t have a liability shield" – World Bank President David Malpass pic.twitter.com/Ze49ylDejP

— Belvoir (@BelvoirPLC) December 3, 2021

If Pfizer is so confident that its vaccine has been proven safe in rigorous trials, why is it unwilling to take responsibility for any problems?

And if it is unwilling to take the risk with its own product, how is that going to persuade the vaccine-hesitant to take the risk themselves?

The Pfizer vaccine has been linked with 388,618 adverse events in the UK to date, including 628 deaths.

Taiwan has halted its use in teenagers due to concerns about the risk of myocarditis.

Yet a cloak of secrecy has been thrown over the approvals process and the company has come under fire for “war profiteering” by making huge profits during the pandemic.

Pharmaceutical companies are profit-driven entities and rules on transparency and liability exist to keep them honest and ensure only safe, effective drugs are provided to the public. It may turn out to be a big mistake to have allowed them to avoid this scrutiny and accountability just because many were desperate for a medical way out of the pandemic.

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Ivermectin has been attacked by pro-vaccine interests despite it being a cheap, safe and proven medicine for COVID treatment and prevention.  Despite a mountain of clinical and test evidence showing that it really works, Big Media, Big Pharma and Big Government have stubbornly fought its use.  Its use in a number of countries, notably India, has proven its effectiveness against COVID.  Here are recent stories of its successful use worthy of serious attention.

Story 1. Hospitalized Patients

Most work on IVM has been on its early use when a person first gets COVID, because of its positive impact on the initial virus replication stage of the infection.  If you get stricken with COVID and are seriously ill your doctor and hospital will not provide ivermectin.  But several cases have shown that courts can force hospitals to allow IVM use.

As the following examples show it has been found life-saving for critically ill, hospitalized patients with little chance of survival when government approved protocols are used.  Yet hospitals have stubbornly refused to use IVM even when patients or family members have strongly requested its use as patients face probable death.  In response to this awful situation, some gutsy people have used the judicial system to get hospitals to do what is justified by medical science, save lives by using IVM.

In Illinois it took a court to force a hospital to capitulate to family demands to give a very sick elderly patient IVM.  The hospital used the approved ways to treat the patient without success.  These included the proven unsafe and very expensive drug remdesivir, intubation and ventilator use for a month in the ICU.  None of it worked and the patient was given only a 10 to 15% percent chance of surviving.

Sun Ng, 71, who was visiting the United States from Hong Kong to celebrate his granddaughter’s first birthday.  He became ill with COVID-19 and within days was close to death.  He was hospitalized on Oct. 14 at Edward Hospital, in Naperville, Illinois.

Recognizing that her father was facing death, Ng’s only child, Man Kwan Ng, with a doctoral degree in mechanical engineering, did her own research and decided that her father should take IVM.  But the hospital refused to administer IVM and denied access to a physician the family located who was willing to administer it.  This is typical of virtually all US hospitals.

Frustrated and seeing her father near death, the daughter went to court on her father’s behalf and on Nov. 1 Judge Paul M. Fullerton of the Circuit Court of DuPage County granted a temporary restraining order requiring the hospital to allow IVM be given to the patient.  And just like many other cases in the country, this hospital refused to comply with the court order.  But the daughter and her attorney refused to give up.  At a subsequent court hearing on Nov. 5, Fullerton said one physician who testified described Sun Ng as “basically on his death bed.”  The judge was informed IVM can have minor side effects such as dizziness, itchy skin, and diarrhea at the dosage suggested for Ng.  And the judge said that the “risks of these side effects are so minimal that Mr. Ng’s current situation outweighs that risk by one-hundredfold.”

The judge issued a preliminary injunction that day directing the hospital to “immediately allow … temporary emergency privileges” to Ng’s physician, Dr. Alan Bain, “solely to administer Ivermectin to this patient.”  As of several months ago, Dr. Bain had treated over 40 patients with IVM.  But the hospital resisted the order on Nov. 6 and 7, denying Bain access to his patient.  But the fight continued.

An emergency report was filed with the court on Nov. 8 and Fullerton heard from both sides. The judge admonished the hospital and restated that it must allow Bain inside over a period of 15 days to do his job.  Then the hospital filed a motion to stay the order but judge Fullerton denied it, again directing the hospital to comply.

The hospital finally gave in.  Ng showed signs of improvement almost immediately.  He passed a breathing test that he hadn’t been able to pass in the prior three weeks, looked more alert and aware.  The first dose of IVM showed immediate results and he got it from Nov. 8 through Nov. 12.  He recovered from COVID-19 and was discharged by the hospital on Nov. 27, some six weeks after admission.

The drug “most definitely” saved the elderly patient’s life “because his condition changed right immediately after he took ivermectin,” said the attorney.  Also recommended was that family members “find ivermectin themselves” and have it on hand “and use it when someone starts to develop symptoms.”  Great advice.

The attorney in this case was Kirstin M. Erickson of Chicago-based Mauck and Baker.

Ivermectin was also at the center of three successful court cases in three upstate counties of New York involving hospitalized COVID patients – 65, 80 and 81 years old.  All were given the drug under court order and recovered and were discharged.  They were against hospitals in Buffalo, Rochester, and Batavia, N.Y.  As in the Illinois case, the three patients were in ICUs and on ventilators when given IVM and had little chance of living.

The attorney for these cases was Ralph Lorigo.  Not surprisingly, as he has helped many families, with about 40 similar cases nationwide, he was the subject of an article titled “Ralph Lorigo has built a potentially lucrative brand as the go-to guy for desperate people willing to buck science in the pandemic’s fourth wave.  Now doctors are speaking out.”  As he has succeeded in getting courts to overcome hospital stubbornness, some physicians have spoken out against him.  A law website said this: “Hospitals reeling from surging Covid-19 cases are facing a new pandemic battle: lawsuits from guardians of patients on ventilators demanding treatment with ivermectin.”

Lorigo has become a much in-demand attorney for people across the country desperate to force hospitals and doctors to give dying loved ones IVM to do what the approved protocols have failed to do, namely save the lives of extremely ill COVID patients.  In courts he has had to combat the mistaken beliefs of doctors and hospitals that IVM is not effective against COVID.  The situation is stacked against lawyers but sometimes courts have gone against the medical establishment.

Lorigo said his cases were the result of “legitimate disputes” between hospitals, doctors and families, and called hospitals “arrogant” in the matter. “They only stick to their protocols,” he said. “It’s like they think they’re gods. They wear white coats, but they’re not God.”  Absolutely correct.

The attorney has not always succeeded in saving lives with IVM.  A Texas case sadly had a 74-year-old man die amid his family’s push for the hospital to give him IVM.  Pete Lopez’s family said he was previously prescribed IVM at a VA hospital, but was admitted before he was able to take it.  The family sought a court order against Memorial Hermann in Sugar Land, Texas.  Lopez had battled his COVID infection for almost a month and was put on a ventilator.  His family won a court order for the hospital to treat him with IVM but the hospital refused to administer the drug.  And so, Lopez died.  In this pandemic, hospitals to a large extent are killing machines.

Lorigo and other attorneys have to fight the notion that IVM is “unproven.”  But medical science is on their side.  There really is a mountain of medical evidence that lawyers can use in courts.  One important example is a published medical 2021 study of patients hospitalized with confirmed severe acute COVID respiratory syndrome at a four-hospital consortium in South Florida.  There were 280 patients with 173 treated with ivermectin and 107 in the usual care group.  Analysis showed statistically significant lower mortality rates in the group treated with IVM as compared with the group treated with usual care: 15.0% vs 25.2%, respectively.  That is a big reduction in deaths.  The article noted: “Interpretation: Ivermectin was associated with lower mortality during treatment of COVID-19 patients, especially in patients who required higher inspired oxygen or ventilatory support.”  Mortality was even lower for a subgroup of patients with severe pulmonary involvement (what most court cases are): 38.8% vs. 80.7% for IVM and usual care, respectively, a very significant result.  The study emphasized: “We showed that ivermectin administration was associated significantly with lower mortality among patients with COVID-19, particularly in patients with more severe pulmonary involvement.”

All this explains why good judges have made the correct decision to give dying COVID patients a chance of surviving by letting them get IVM.  Perhaps judges are paying attention to the huge number of COVID deaths of Americans, now approaching 800,000.  Sounds like the medical establishment is not doing all that good.

Story 2. Early treatment with IVM

Here is what radio host and author Wayne Allyn Root said very recently: “Yes, it’s true. I beat COVID-19 in 48 hours with ivermectin.”  He had a big wedding where he said: “Here’s the best story yet.  I was healthy and strong at my wedding because of ivermectin.  I caught COVID-19 for the first time a few weeks ago.  I beat COVID-19 in 48 hours with ivermectin and massive doses of vitamins, including intravenous vitamin C.  Ivermectin is truly a miracle drug.  I had had COVID-19 for a day when I decided to take it.  The virus was gone in 24 hours.  Yes, ivermectin and vitamins turned the deadly, run-for-your-life, lock-down-the-economy, mask-up-for-life, vaccinate-or-die COVID-19 into a minor common cold.  And then it was gone in a day.  Ivermectin made my bout of COVID-19 so mild, I never missed a day of work.”

“And lest you think I got a mild case, on the first day I had a fever, chills, a bad cough, mucus filling my lungs, awful pain in every muscle of my body, terrible exhaustion, and I lost my sense of taste.  Sound familiar?  It’s every symptom of COVID-19.  I took two tests just to be certain.  I tested positive twice.  One day of ivermectin and it was gone. No one ever knew.  Until now.”

He also noted: “My treatment was pretty much exactly the same as that used by Joe Rogan and NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers.  Ivermectin plus mega doses of vitamins.  The outcomes were the same, too.  Ivermectin works like magic.  It’s inexpensive.  I never experienced any side effects.  I thank God for ivermectin and mega doses of vitamin C, D3, zinc, quercetin, selenium, lysine, melatonin, garlic, liquid silver and probiotics.”

He added this: “No one has to fear COVID-19.  No one has to be forced to take an experimental vaccine.  No one ever has to choose between the vaccine and his job ever again.  We have a miracle drug and a wonderful vitamin regimen that works fantastically.  I’m exhibit A.  Hey, liberals, are you listening?  Have your heads exploded yet?  Ivermectin works.  It’s cheap, it’s effective and it has no side effects.  India used it to make the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the world disappear almost overnight.”

On the political side he asked the reasonable question: “So why are President Joe Biden, the Democratic Party, Anthony Fauci and the CDC trying to hide the truth?  Ivermectin can save millions of Americans from both COVID-19 and the risks of the COVID-19 vaccine.  Ivermectin can save our economy.  Ivermectin can save millions of jobs. Ivermectin can save trillions of dollars in costs from missed work, vaccines, hospitalizations and deaths.  I’m playing the role of Paul Revere. ‘The ivermectin is coming, the ivermectin is coming.’ I want the whole world to know.”

IVM is not just coming; it is here and some great front-line doctors are using it successfully, including successful protocols of Dr. George Fareed and Dr. Brian Tyson.  But most of the medical and public health establishment refuses to follow medical science and keeps letting hundreds of thousands of Americans die from COVID unnecessarily.  Their government approved protocols and mindless advocacy for vaccines, that clearly have not worked well enough, spell death for very ill COVID patients.  And it keeps many people from using IVM as an early treatment and preventive medicine.

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This article was originally published on Pandemic Blunder Newsletter.

Dr. Joel S. Hirschhorn, author of Pandemic Blunder and many articles, podcasts and radio shows on the pandemic, worked on health issues for decades. As a full professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, he directed a medical research program between the colleges of engineering and medicine.  As a senior official at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the National Governors Association, he directed major studies on health-related subjects; he testified at over 50 US Senate and House hearings and authored hundreds of articles and op-ed articles in major newspapers.  He has served as an executive volunteer at a major hospital for more than 10 years.  He is a member of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, and America’s Frontline Doctors.

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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The Cold War was the greatest ideological propaganda campaign in modern world history. In that propaganda battle of more than 40 years, human rights and democracy were the two main battlefields. With the Summit for Democracy, President Biden reverts to Cold War rhetoric. Whoever had thought that world peace would be better served with Biden than with Trump might be disappointed.

On 9 and 10 December, Joe Biden organized a virtual summit for democracy. Representatives of 110 countries were invited to this summit. Among them were many Western heads of government.

The purpose is, so to speak, promoting “democracy” and “universal human rights” around the world. But if you zoom in on some of the invited countries, you will quickly see that a completely different agenda is at stake here. Some examples.

Strange democracies

Colombia is the second most dangerous country in the world for defenders of human rights or the environment. In 2020, more than 250 indigenous leaders, rights activists, environmentalists or former Farc fighters[i] were assassinated. In the first half of this year, that number already exceeded 350. In street protests that began in April 2021, at least 44 people have been killed and another 500 ‘disappeared’.

Another invited country is India, the so-called ‘largest democracy’ in the world. Some 29 percent of parliamentarians have been indicted for crimes or offences serious enough to merit five years in prison. Camps have been built in the north of the country to intern two million illegal immigrants. By the way, you may have to wonder why you haven’t heard about that yet. The contrast with the coverage of the Uyghurs in China is quite striking.

Human rights organizations are tackled more and more in India. That is why Amnesty International left the country last year.

And what about Brazil? Jair Bolsonaro, the country’s president, is a fan of Chilean dictator Pinochet, who “did what had to be done”. It does not bother Bolsonaro that some 3,000 political opponents were killed and tens of thousands were tortured. His government includes more than 100 active or retired military personnel, including several ministers and a vice president. When his position was threatened in 2020, Bolsonaro raised the prospect of military intervention.

His culture minister had to resign because he had quoted Goebbels.[ii] More than 60,000 Brazilians are killed by firearms every year. “A cop who doesn’t kill is not a cop,” the president said.

No authority 

We could also refer to the Philippines, Israel, Poland, Georgia, etc. Or to the US itself. Almost a year ago a mob stormed parliament there. There is a substantial chance that the instigator of this failed raid will be president again within three years.

The US is the largest arms supplier to a whole series of brutal dictatorships. In Guantánamo, it has kept a concentration camp open for nearly twenty years, where 780 people have been detained and tortured without trial so far.

US attempts to install democracy in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria or Libya have turned into humanitarian catastrophes. In any case, Washington has no authority to give lessons on democracy or human rights.

New Cold War?

This summit is clearly not about democracy. It is about power and about bloc formation. After the Second World War, the US strived for absolute dominance. “Preponderant power must be the objective of US policy”, it said in 1952. This has been the official doctrine ever since.

For the US, the issue is not whether the country or world peace is under threat, it is about being able to impose its will on others. Due to China’s rapid economic and technological development, the US is now in danger of losing its supremacy. Biden wants to avoid that at all costs.

To continue to impose this unipolar world led by the US, the White House needs more and more support from other countries. That is why it is trying to form a bloc. The countries invited to the summit are not chosen because of their democratic credentials but because of their obedience to the US.

Bloc formation was characteristic of the Cold War, as was the rhetoric of ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’. Precisely at a time when the world needs unity and a joint approach to the climate or to combat a pandemic, Biden is pushing for bloc formation.

Instead of uniting the world, he is pushing for division, for a new Cold War. It is up to us to unmask this and not to allow ourselves and our countries to be dragged into it.

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Marc Vandepitte is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

[i] Farc means Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia–Ejército del Pueblo, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. This guerrilla movement has been active from the 1960s. In 2016, a peace agreement was reached with the government. The rebels surrendered their weapons and transformed their army into a political party.

[ii] Joseph Goebbels was propaganda minister of Hitler.

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British justice is advertised by its proponents as upright, historically different to the savages upon which it sought to civilise, and apparently fair.  Such outrages as the unjust convictions of the Guilford Four and Maguire Seven, both having served time in prison for terrorist offences they did not commit, are treated as blemishes.

In recent memory, fewer blemishes can be more profound and disturbing to a legal system than the treatment of Australian citizen and WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange.  The British legal system has been so conspicuously outsourced to the wishes of the US Department of Justice and the military-industrial complex Assange did so much to expose.  The decision of the UK High Court, handed down on December 10, will go down in the annals of law as a particularly disgraceful instance of this.

From the outset, extradition proceedings utilising a First World War US statute – the Espionage Act of 1917 – should have sent legal eagles in the UK swooping with alarm.  17 of the 18 charges Assange is accused of have been drawn from it.  It criminalises the receipt, dissemination and publication of national security information.  It attacks the very foundations of the Fourth Estate’s pursuit of accountability and subverts the protections of the First Amendment in the US constitution.  It invalidates motive and purpose.  And, were this to be successful – and here, the British justices seem willing to ensure that it is – the United States will be able to globally target any publisher of its dirty trove of classified material using an archaic, barbaric law.

It should also have occurred to the good members of the English legal profession that these lamentable proceedings have always been political.  Extraditions are generally not awarded on such grounds.  But this entire affair reeks of it.  The US security establishment wants their man, desperately.   With the coming to power of President Donald Trump, one counterintelligence officer, reflecting on Assange’s plight, made the pertinent observation that, “Nobody in that crew was going to be too broken up about the First Amendment issues.”

The original decision by District Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser was hardly grand.  It was chastising and vicious to journalism, cruel to those revealing information that might expose state abuses and an offense to the sensibility of democratic minded persons.  The point was made that security and intelligence experts, however morally inclined or principled, were best suited to assessing the merits of releasing classified information.  Journalists should never be involved in publishing such material.  Besides, thought the Judge, Assange was not a true journalist.  Such people did not purposely go out to disclose the identities of informants or propagandise their cause.

The only thing going for that otherwise woeful judgment was its acceptance that Assange would well perish in the US legal system.  Noting such cases as Laurie Love, Baraitser accepted that the prosecution had failed to show that Assange would not be placed in a position where he could be prevented from taking his own life.  Should he be sent across the Atlantic, he would face Special Administrative Measures and conclude his life in the wretched cul-de-sac of the ADX Florence supermax.  Any extradition to such conditions of sheer baroque cruelty would be “oppressive” given “his mental condition”.

The prosecution had no qualms trying to appeal and broaden the arguments, citing several propositions.  Contemptibly, these focused on Assange the pretender (suicidal autistics cannot give conference plenaries or host television programs), expert witnesses as deceivers (neuropsychiatrist Michael Kopelman, for initially “concealing” evidence from the court of Assange’s relationship with Stella Moris and their children), and the merits of the US prison system: matronly, saintly, and filled with soft beds and tender shrinks.  Why, scolded the prosecutor James Lewis QC in October, had the good judge not asked the US Department of Justice for reassurances?  Assange would not face the brutal end of special administrative measures.  He would not be sent to decline and moulder in ADX Florence.  He could also serve his sentence in Australia, provided, of course, the Department of Justice approved.

In reversing the decision to discharge Assange, the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales Ian Burnett, and Lord Justice Timothy Holroyde were persuaded by two of the five grounds submitted by the prosecutors.  Sounding astonishingly naïve (or possibly disingenuous) at points, the justices accepted the prosecution’s argument that undertakings or assurances could be made at a later stage, even during an appeal.  Delays by a requesting state to make such assurances might be tactical and stem from bad faith, but not entertaining such assurances, even if made later, might also result in “a windfall to an alleged or convicted criminal, which would defeat the public interest in extradition.”

Judge Baraitser should have also been mindful of seeking the assurances in the first place, given how vital the issue of Assange’s suicide risk and future treatment in US prisons was in making her decision against extradition.

It followed that the justices did “not accept that the USA refrained for tactical reasons from offering assurances at an earlier stage, or acted in bad faith in choosing only to offer them at the appeal stage.”  Diplomatic Note no. 74 contained “solemn undertakings, offered by one government to another, which will bind all officials and prosecutors who will deal with the relevant aspects of Mr Assange’s case now and in the future.”

This meant that Assange would not be subjected to SAMs, or sent to ADX Florence, and that he would receive appropriate medical treatment to mitigate the risk of suicide.  (The justices erred in not understanding that the assurance to not detain Assange ADX “pre-trial” was irrelevant as ADX is a post-conviction establishment.)  He could also serve his post-trial and post-appeal sentence in Australia, though that would be at the mercy of DOJ approval.  All undertakings were naturally provisional on the conduct of the accused.

As the original judgement was premised upon Assange being subjected to the “harshest SAMs regime”, and given the significance of the evidence submitted by Kopelman and Dr Quinton Deeley on Assange’s suicide risk in “being held under such harsh conditions of isolation”, the justices were “unable to accept the submission that the judge’s conclusion would have been the same if she had not found a real risk of detention in those conditions.”

Such narrow reasoning served to ignore the ample evidence that such diplomatic assurances are unreliable, mutable and without legal standing.  In terms of solitary confinement, the US legal system is filled with euphemistic designations that all amount to aspects of the same thing.  If it is not SAMs, it is certainly something amounting to it, such as Administrative Segregation.

Previous diplomatic assurances given by US authorities have also been found wanting.  The fate of Spanish drug trafficker David Mendoza Herrarte stands out.  In that case, a Spanish court was given an assurance that Mendoza, if extradited to the US to face trial, could serve any subsequent prison sentence in Spain.  When the application to the US Department of Justice was made to make good that undertaking, the transfer application was refused.  The pledge only applied, it was claimed, to allow Mendoza to apply for a transfer; it never meant that the DOJ had to agree to it.  A diplomatic wrangle between Madrid and Washington ensued for six years before the decision was altered.

And just to make such undertakings all the more implausible, the “solemn assurances” were coming from, as Craig Murray pointedly remarked, “a state whose war crimes and murder of civilians were exposed by Julian Assange.”

The justices also failed to consider the murderous elephant in the room, one that had been submitted by the defence at both the extradition hearing and the appeal: that US government officials had contemplated abducting and assassinating the very individual whose extradition they were seeking.  This was a view that held sway with former US Secretary of State and CIA chief Mike Pompeo.

In the United States, talking heads expressed their satisfaction about the glories of the US justice and prison system.  Former Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill told MSNBC that, “This was really a guy who just violated the law”.  Concerns by Assange’s defence team that his “safety in [US] prison” would be compromised showed that “they really don’t have perspective on this”.

It is fittingly monstrous that this decision should be handed down the same day the Nobel Peace Prize was being awarded to two journalists, Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov.  Or that it should happen on Human Rights Day, which saw US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s boast that “we will continue to promote accountability for human rights violators.”  Except one’s own.

Inevitably, these cruel, gradually lethal proceedings move to the next stage: an appeal to the Supreme Court.  As the paperwork is gathered, Assange will muse, grimly, that the entire period of his discharge never saw him leave Belmarsh Prison.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

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The latest statistics from South Africa reveal that intensive care admissions for the Omicron Covid variant are running at just a third of what they were at the same point in the country’s Delta wave. The figures come following the chair of the South African Medical Association (SAMA) reporting that Omicron’s symptoms are mostly “very, very mild” and could be treated at home. With even US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci now admitting the new variant is “almost certainly” not more severe than Delta, the question that urgently needs to be asked is a very simple one: why is global tension being raised to a state of panic?

Reports from South Africa’s Gauteng province, the center of the Omicron outbreak, suggest that around two weeks after the new variant’s detection there were a total of 139 patients being cared for in hospital ICUs. By comparison, two weeks into the province’s Delta wave there were already 393 patients in its ICUs. While the Omicron variant is suspected to be more transmissible than Delta, Gauteng hospitals have confirmed that the symptoms displayed by patients are “far milder” than those seen during the first three waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most patients are said to not require oxygen or ICU treatment.

But as promising as these signs are, Western political leaders and their allies appear not to have noticed. Instead, they are ramping up what can only be described as a global state of panic. In a policy seen by some as having colonial undertones, their first move was to implement blanket travel bans to southern African countries. With this effectively resulting in the international isolation of this already economically challenged region, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa echoed the thoughts of many when he complained that his country was being punished for having discovered the new variant.

Threatening mandatory vaccinations

Brussels EU Commission head Ursula von der Leyen responded to the discovery of the variant by saying it was time to consider making vaccination against COVID-19 mandatory in Europe. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson later made a similar statement, saying there would be a “national conversation” in his country on the way forward. With Europe being home to 8 of the top 10 pharmaceutical exporting countries, both leaders will no doubt be greedily eyeing the skyrocketing shareholder profits that could result if mandatory vaccination was enforced worldwide.

US President Joe Biden used the emergence of Omicron as an excuse to push for 100 million Americans to submit to so-called ‘booster shots’ as soon as possible. In words that will be interpreted by many as a veiled threat, he also stated that “this pandemic will not end until we have global vaccinations.” Along with Europe, the US is one of the top pharmaceutical exporting countries. Between them, the American pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Moderna are already expected to rake in more than $93 billion in COVID-19 vaccine sales next year. Revealingly, therefore, and as we shall examine next, the profits bonanza presented by the pandemic coincidently arrived at the precise moment when the pharma industry was facing terminal decline.

Why the pharma industry needed COVID-19

Written in November 2017 and May 2018, blog posts by Dr. Kelvin Stott, Director of Portfolio Management at the Novartis drug company in Basel, Switzerland, caused widespread alarm among pharma investors. Asserting that the entire pharmaceutical industry was “on the brink of terminal decline,” Stott described how research and development (R&D) returns in drug development had fallen to just 3.2 percent and could potentially reach zero by the year 2020. To put it simply, this meant that each dollar spent on R&D by drug companies would merely result in an income of a dollar. In other words, the pharma industry would no longer be a profitable concern. According to business website Forbes, Stott’s data correlated “with the observation of virtually every serious researcher who has looked at the industry.” As I wrote at the time, the implication of this was that the beginning of the end for the pharmaceutical investment business may soon have been within sight.

Acknowledging the failings of the pharma business model, Stott explained how it depends on a positive return on investment. This confirmed what Dr. Rath and our Foundation have been saying for years now, namely that the pharma industry isn’t a health industry, it’s an investment industry driven by the profits of its shareholders. Describing how the return on investment in pharma R&D was rapidly declining, Stott stated that the reasons for this included decreasing success rates in new drug development, rising clinical trial costs, a tougher regulatory environment, and increasing competition from generic manufacturers who disruptively make cheaper copies of existing drugs after the original patents have expired.

Putting all this together, Stott predicted that falls in the average return on investment would result in the entire pharma industry beginning to contract within the following two to three years. By the year 2040 the annual value of the industry’s total global sales may have fallen back to what it was in 1990. This would represent a catastrophic reduction in revenue of around 90 percent. Tellingly, therefore, Stott described the pharma business model as “broken,” adding that it was “entering a vicious cycle of negative growth and terminal decline as its fundamental business model has run out of steam.” He concluded that the industry would “not be around forever” and that it must “adapt or die.”

In his most revealing statement of all, emphasizing the desperate nature of the situation that drug companies had found themselves in, Stott wrote that the pharma industry needed “a major breakthrough right now, in 2018.” Even then, however, he said it would still face “a period of significant contraction before any recovery,” and that “anything less [than an immediate breakthrough] would be too little, too late to save the industry from terminal decline.”

In what can only therefore be described as an incredible stroke of good fortune for pharmaceutical investors, a mere 18 months after Stott wrote these words, the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China, provided the answer to the drug industry’s prayers. As a result, the worldwide mandatory use of experimental vaccines is being positioned as the ‘major breakthrough’ to rescue the industry’s business model.

Pharma in a desperate battle for survival

Only time will tell where all this leads, and whether there may be even more to the lab-leak theory than is currently suspected. But whatever happens next, one thing is already certain: the pharmaceutical investment business is engaged in a desperate battle for its survival.

By targeting the micronutrient deficiencies that Dr. Rath’s scientific discoveries have proven are the primary cause of diseases, nutrition and Cellular Medicine therapies offer the tantalizing opportunity to effectively, safely, and affordably save millions of lives from cardiovascular disease, cancer, pandemics, and other diseases alike. This, more than anything else, is what will ultimately ensure the final demise of the drug industry.

Viewed in this light, it can be seen that forcing the entire world to submit to experimental pharmaceutical vaccines is a last desperate throw of the dice by the drug industry’s key political stakeholders. It is in all of our interests to ensure that they don’t succeed.

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This article was originally published on Dr. Rath Health Foundation.

Executive Director of the Dr. Rath Health Foundation and one of the coauthors of our explosive book, “The Nazi Roots of the ‘Brussels EU’”, Paul is also our expert on the Codex Alimentarius Commission and has had eye-witness experience, as an official observer delegate, at its meetings.

Prior to joining the Foundation, Paul’s background was in the music industry, where he worked as a keyboard player and programmer with artists including Paul McCartney, Bryan Ferry, Bill Withers, the Verve, Texas, and Primal Scream.

He first became interested in natural health after falling ill with a chronic fatigue syndrome-related disorder in 1991 and subsequently making a full recovery through the use of natural health therapies. After meeting Dr. Rath and Dr. Niedzwiecki at an anti-Codex rally in Berlin in 2002, Paul was inspired to make a life-changing decision to leave the music industry to work for the Foundation and help defend the right of patients worldwide to have free access to natural health approaches.

You can find Paul on Twitter at @paulanthtaylor

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Below is the Introductory Chapter of  “The Real Anthony Fauci by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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I wrote this book to help Americans—and citizens across the globe—understand the historical underpinnings of the bewildering cataclysm that began in 2020. In that single annus horribilis, liberal democracy effectively collapsed worldwide. The very governmental health regulators, social media eminences, and media companies that idealistic populations relied upon as champions of freedom, health, democracy, civil rights, and evidence-based public policy seemed to collectively pivot in a lockstep assault against free speech and personal freedoms.

Suddenly, those trusted institutions seemed to be acting in concert to generate fear, promote obedience, discourage critical thinking, and herd seven billion people to march to a single tune, culminating in mass public health experiments with a novel, shoddily tested and improperly licensed technology so risky that manufacturers refused to produce it unless every government on Earth shielded them from liability.

Across Western nations, shell-shocked citizens experienced all the well-worn tactics of rising totalitarianism—mass propaganda and censorship, the orchestrated promotion of terror, the manipulation of science, the suppression of debate, the vilification of dissent, and use of force to prevent protest. Conscientious objectors who resisted these unwanted, experimental, zero-liability medical interventions faced orchestrated gaslighting, marginalization, and scapegoating.

American lives and livelihoods were shattered by a bewildering array of draconian diktats imposed without legislative approval or judicial review, risk assessment, or scientific citation. So-called Emergency Orders closed our businesses, schools and churches, made unprecedented intrusions into privacy, and disrupted our most treasured social and family relationships. Citizens the world over were ordered to stay in their homes.

Standing in the center of all the mayhem, with his confident hand on the helm, was one dominating figure. As the trusted public face of the United States government response to COVID, Dr. Anthony Fauci set this perilous course and sold the American public on a new destination for our democracy.

This book is a product of my own struggle to understand how the idealistic institutions our country built to safeguard both public health and democracy suddenly turned against our citizens and our values with such violence. I am a lifelong Democrat, whose family has had eighty years of deep engagement with America’s public health bureaucracy and long friendships with key federal regulators, including Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, and Robert Gallo.

Members of my family wrote many of the statutes under which these men govern, nurtured the growth of equitable and effective public health policies, and defended that regulatory bulwark against ferocious attacks funded by industry—and often executed by Republican-controlled congressional committees intent on defunding and defanging these agencies to make them more “industry friendly.” I built alliances with these individuals and their agencies during my years of environmental and public health advocacy. I watched them, often with admiration. But I also watched how the industry, supposedly being regulated, used its indentured servants on Capitol Hill to systematically hollow out those agencies beginning in 1980, disabling their regulatory functions and transforming them, finally, into sock-puppets for the very industry Congress charged them with regulating.

My 40-year career as an environmental and public health advocate gave me a unique understanding of the corrupting mechanisms of “regulatory capture,” the process by which the regulator becomes beholden to the industry it’s meant to regulate. I spent four decades suing the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and other environmental agencies to expose and remedy the corrupt sweetheart relationship that so often put regulators in bed with the polluting industries they regulated. Among the hundreds of lawsuits I filed, perhaps a quarter were against regulatory officials making illegal concessions to Big Oil, King Coal, and the chemical and agricultural polluters that had captured their loyalties. I thought I knew everything about regulatory capture and that I had armored myself with an appropriate shield of cynicism.

But I was wrong about that. From the moment of my reluctant entrance into the vaccine debate in 2005, I was astonished to realize that the pervasive web of deep financial entanglements between Pharma and the government health agencies had put regulatory capture on steroids. The CDC, for example, owns 57 vaccine patents[1] and spends $4.9 of its $12.0 billion-dollar annual budget (as of 2019) buying and distributing vaccines.[2][3] NIH owns hundreds of vaccine patents and often profits from the sale of products it supposedly regulates. High level officials, including Dr. Fauci, receive yearly emoluments of up to $150,000 in royalty payments on products that they help develop and then usher through the approval process.[4] The FDA receives 45 percent of its budget from the pharmaceutical industry, through what are euphemistically called “user fees.”[5] When I learned that extraordinary fact, the disastrous health of the American people was no longer a mystery; I wondered what the environment would look like if the EPA received 45 percent of its budget from the coal industry!

Today many of my liberal chums are still crouched in a knee jerk posture defending “our” agencies against Republican slanders and budget cuts, never quite realizing how thoroughly the decades of attacks succeeded in transforming those agencies into subsidiaries of Big Pharma.

In this book, I track the rise of Anthony Fauci from his start as a young public health researcher and physician through his metamorphosis into the powerful technocrat who helped orchestrate and execute 2020’s historic coup d’état against Western democracy.

I explore the carefully planned militarization and monetization of medicine that has left American health ailing and its democracy shattered. I chronicle the troubling role of the dangerous concentrated mainstream media, Big Tech robber barons, the military and intelligence communities and their deep historical alliances with Big Pharma and public health agencies. The disturbing story that unfolds here has never been told, and many in power have worked hard to prevent the public from learning it. The main character is Anthony Fauci.

During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Fauci, who turned 80 that year, occupied center stage in a global drama unprecedented in human history. At the contagion’s beginnings, the US still enjoyed its reputation as the universal standard-bearer in public health. As the world’s faith in American leadership dwindled during the Trump era, the singular US institutions that were seemingly immune from international disillusionment were our public health regulators; HHS—and its subsidiary agencies CDC, FDA, and NIH—persisted as role models for global health policies and gold standard scientific research. Other nations looked to Dr. Fauci, America’s most powerful and enduring public health bureaucrat, to competently direct US health policies, and rapidly develop countermeasures that would serve as state-of-the-art templates for the rest of the world.

Dr. Anthony Fauci spent half a century as America’s reigning health commissar, ever preparing for his final role as Commander of history’s biggest war against a global pandemic. Beginning in 1968, he occupied various posts at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), serving as that agency’s Director since November 1984.[6] His $417,608 annual salary makes him the highest paid of all four million federal employees, including the President.[7] His experiences surviving 50 years as the panjandrum of a key federal bureaucracy, having advised six Presidents, the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, foreign governments, and the WHO, seasoned him exquisitely for a crisis that would allow him to wield power enjoyed by few rulers and no doctor in history.

During the epidemic’s early months, Dr. Fauci’s calm, authoritative, and avuncular manner was Prozac for Americans besieged by two existential crises: the Trump Presidency, and COVID-19. Democrats and idealistic liberals around the globe, traumatized by President Trump’s chaotic governing style, took heart from Dr. Fauci’s serene, solid presence on the White House stage. He seemed to offer a rational, straight-talking, science-based counterweight to President Trump’s desultory, narcissistic bombast. Navigating the hazardous waters between an erratic President and a deadly contagion, Dr. Fauci initially cut a heroic figure, like Homer’s Ulysses steering his ship between Scylla and Charybdis. Turning their backs to the foreboding horizon, trusting Americans manned the oars and blindly obeyed his commands—little realizing they were propelling our country toward the desolate destination where democracy goes to die.

Throughout the first year of the crisis, Dr. Fauci’s personal charisma and authoritative voice inspired confidence in his prescriptions and won him substantial—though not universal—affection. Many Americans, dutifully locked in their homes in compliance with Dr. Fauci’s quarantine, took consolation in their capacity to join a Tony Fauci fan club, chillax on an “I heart Fauci” throw pillow, sip from an “In Fauci We Trust” coffee mug, warm cold feet in Fauci socks and booties, gorge on Fauci donuts, post a “Honk for Dr. Fauci” yard sign, or genuflect before a Dr. Fauci prayer candle. Fauci aficionados could choose from a variety of Fauci browser games and a squadron of Fauci action figures and bobbleheads, and could read his hagiography to their offspring from a worshipful children’s book. At the height of the lockdown, Brad Pitt performed a reverential homage to Dr. Fauci on Saturday Night Live,[8] and Barbara Streisand surprised him with a recorded message during a live Zoom birthday party in his honor.[9] The New Yorker dubbed him “America’s Doctor.”[10]

Dr. Fauci encouraged his own canonization and the disturbing inquisition against his blasphemous critics. In a June 9, 2021 je suis l’état interview, he pronounced that Americans who questioned his statements were, per se, anti-science. “Attacks on me,” he explained, “quite frankly, are attacks on science.”[11]

The sentiment he expressed reminds us that blind faith in authority is a function of religion, not science. Science, like democracy, flourishes on skepticism toward official orthodoxies. Dr. Fauci’s schoolboy scorn for citation and his acknowledgement to the New York Times that he had twice lied to Americans to promote his agendas—on masks and herd immunity—raised the prospect that some of his other “scientific” assertions were, likewise, noble lies to a credulous public he believes is unworthy of self-determination.[12][13]

In August 2021, Dr. Fauci’s acolyte—CNN’s television doctor, Peter Hotez—published an article in a scientific journal calling for legislation to “expand federal hate crime protections” to make criticism of Dr. Fauci a felony.[14] In declaring that he had no conflicts, Dr. Hotez, who says that vaccine skeptics should be snuffed out,[15] evidently forgot the millions of dollars in grants he has taken from Dr. Fauci’s NIAID since 1993,[16] and more than $15 million from Dr. Fauci’s partner, Bill Gates, for his Baylor University Tropical Medicine Institute.[17][18]

As we shall see, Dr. Fauci’s direct and indirect control—through NIH, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust of some 57 percent of global biomedical research funding[19]—guarantees him this sort of obsequious homage from leading medical researchers, allows him to craft and perpetuate the reigning global medical narratives, and can fortify the canon that he, himself, is science incarnate.

High-visibility henchmen like Hotez—and Pharma’s financial control over the media through advertising dollars—have made Dr. Fauci’s pronouncements impervious to debate and endowed the NIAID Director with personal virtues and medical gravitas supported by neither science nor his public health record. By the latter metric, his 50-year regime has been calamitous for public health and for democracy. His administration of the COVID pandemic was, likewise, a disaster.

As the world watched, Tony Fauci dictated a series of policies that resulted in by far the most deaths, and one of the highest percentage COVID-19 body counts of any nation on the planet. Only relentless propaganda and wall-to-wall censorship could conceal his disastrous mismanagement during COVID-19’s first year. The US, with 4 percent of the world’s population, suffered 14.5 percent of total COVID deaths. By September 30, 2021, mortality rates in the US had climbed to 2,107/1,000,000, compared to 139/1,000,000 in Japan.

Anthony Fauci’s Report Card

After achieving these cataclysmicly awful results, “Teflon Tony’s” media savvy and his skills for deft maneuvering beguiled incoming President Joe Biden into appointing him as the new administration’s COVID Response Director.

Blinded by generously stoked fear of deadly disease against which Dr. Fauci seemed the only reliable bulwark, Americans failed to see the mounting evidence that Dr. Fauci’s strategies were consistently failing to achieve promised results, as he doggedly elevated Pharma profits and bureaucratic powers over waning public health.

As we shall see from this 50-year saga, Dr. Fauci’s remedies are often more lethal than the diseases they pretend to treat. His COVID prescriptions were no exception. With his narrow focus on the solution of mass vaccination, Dr. Fauci never mentioned any of the many other costs associated with his policy directives.

Anthony Fauci seems to have not considered that his unprecedented quarantine of the healthy would kill far more people than COVID, obliterate the global economy, plunge millions into poverty and bankruptcy, and grievously wound constitutional democracy globally. We have no way of knowing how many people died from isolation, unemployment, deferred medical care, depression, mental illness, obesity, stress, overdoses, suicide, addiction, alcoholism, and the accidents that so often accompany despair. We cannot dismiss the accusations that his lockdowns proved more deadly than the contagion. A June 24, 2021 BMJ study[22] showed that US life expectancy decreased by 1.9 years during the quarantine. Since COVID mortalities were mainly among the elderly, and the average age of death from COVID in the UK was 82.4, which was above the average lifespan,[23] the virus could not by itself cause the astonishing decline. As we shall see, Hispanic and Black Americans often shoulder the heaviest burden of Dr. Fauci’s public health adventures. In this respect, his COVID-19 countermeasures proved no exception. Between 2018 and 2020, the average Hispanic American lost around 3.9 years in longevity, while the average lifespan of a Black American dropped by 3.25 years.[24]

This dramatic culling was unique to America. Between 2018 and 2020, the 1.9 year decrease in average life expectancy at birth in the US was roughly 8.5 times the average decrease in 16 comparable countries, all of which were measured in months, not years.[25]

“I naïvely thought the pandemic would not make a big difference in the gap because my thinking was that it’s a global pandemic, so every country is going to take a hit,” said Steven Woolf, Director Emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University. “What I didn’t anticipate was how badly the US would handle the pandemic. These are numbers we aren’t at all used to seeing in this research; 0.1 years is something that normally gets attention in the field, so 3.9 years and 3.25 years and even 1.4 years is just horrible,” Woolf continued. “We haven’t had a decrease of that magnitude since World War II.”[26]

Cost of Quarantines—Deaths

As Dr. Fauci’s policies took hold globally, 300 million humans fell into dire poverty, food insecurity, and starvation. “Globally, the impact of lockdowns on health programs, food production, and supply chains plunged millions of people into severe hunger and malnutrition,” said Alex Gutentag in Tablet Magazine.[27] According to the Associated Press (AP), during 2020, 10,000 children died each month due to virus-linked hunger from global lockdowns. In addition, 500,000 children per month experienced wasting and stunting from malnutrition—up 6.7 million from last year’s total of 47 million—which can “permanently damage children physically and mentally, transforming individual tragedies into a generational catastrophe.”[28]

In 2020, disruptions to health and nutrition services killed 228,000 children in South Asia.[29] Deferred medical treatments for cancers, kidney failure, and diabetes killed hundreds of thousands of people and created epidemics of cardiovascular disease and undiagnosed cancer. Unemployment shock is expected to cause 890,000 additional deaths over the next 15 years.[30][31]

The lockdown disintegrated vital food chains, dramatically increased rates of child abuse, suicide, addiction, alcoholism, obesity, mental illness, as well as debilitating developmental delays, isolation, depression, and severe educational deficits in young children. One-third of teens and young adults reported worsening mental health during the pandemic. According to an Ohio State University study,[32] suicide rates among children rose 50 percent.[33] An August 11, 2021 study by Brown University found that infants born during the quarantine were short, on average, 22 IQ points as measured by Baylor scale tests.[34] Some 93,000 Americans died of overdoses in 2020—a 30 percent rise over 2019.[35]

“Overdoses from synthetic opioids increased by 38.4 percent,[36] and 11 percent of US adults considered suicide in June 2020.[37] Three million children disappeared from public school systems, and ERs saw a 31 percent increase in adolescent mental health visits,”[38][39] according to Gutentag. Record numbers of young children failed to reach crucial developmental milestones.[40][41] Millions of hospital and nursing home patients died alone without comfort or a final goodbye from their families. Dr. Fauci admitted that he never assessed the costs of desolation, poverty, unhealthy isolation, and depression fostered by his countermeasures. “I don’t give advice about economic things,”[42] Dr. Fauci explained. “I don’t give advice about anything other than public health,” he continued, even though he was so clearly among those responsible for the economic and social costs.

Economic Destruction and Shifting Wealth Upward

During the COVID pandemic, Dr. Fauci served as ringmaster in the engineered demolition of America’s economy. His lockdown predictably shattered the nation’s once-booming economic engine, putting 58 million Americans out of work,[43] and permanently bankrupting small businesses, including 41 percent of Black-owned businesses, some of which took generations of investment to build.[44] The business closures contributed to a run-up in the national deficit—the interest payments alone will cost almost $1 trillion annually.[45] That ruinous debt will likely permanently bankrupt the New Deal programs—the social safety net that, since 1945, fortified, nurtured, and sustained America’s envied middle-class. Government officials have already begun liquidating the almost 100-year legacies of the New Deal, New Frontier, the Great Society, and Obamacare to pay the accumulated lockdown debts. Will we find ourselves saying goodbye to school lunches, healthcare, WIC, Medicaid, Medicare, university scholarships, and other long standing assistance programs?

Enriching the Wealthy

Dr. Fauci’s business closures pulverized America’s middle class and engineered the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history. In 2020, workers lost $3.7 trillion while billionaires gained $3.9 trillion.[46] Some 493 individuals became new billionaires,[47] and an additional 8 million Americans dropped below the poverty line.[48]

The biggest winners were the robber barons—the very companies that were cheerleading Dr. Fauci’s lockdown and censoring his critics: Big Technology, Big Data, Big Telecom, Big Finance, Big Media behemoths (Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, Viacom, and Disney), and Silicon Valley Internet titans like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Larry Ellison, and Jack Dorsey.

The very Internet companies that snookered us all with the promise of democratizing communications made it impermissible for Americans to criticize their government or question the safety of pharmaceutical products; these companies propped up all official pronouncements while scrubbing all dissent. The same Tech/Data and Telecom robber barons, gorging themselves on the corpses of our obliterated middle class, rapidly transformed America’s once-proud democracy into a censorship and surveillance police state from which they profit at every turn.

CEO Satya Nadella boasted that Microsoft, by working with the CDC and the Gates-funded Johns Hopkins Center for Biosecurity, had used the COVID pandemic to achieve “two years of digital transformation in two months.”[49]

Microsoft Teams users ballooned to 200 million meeting participants in a single day, averaged more than 75 million active users, compared to 20 million users in November 2019,[50] and the company’s stock value skyrocketed. Larry Ellison’s company, Oracle, which partnered with the CIA to build new cloud services, won the contract to process all CDC vaccination data.[51]
Ellison’s wealth increased by $34 billion in 2020; Mark Zuckerberg’s wealth grew by $35 billion; Google’s Sergey Brin by $41 billion; Jeff Bezos by $86 billion; Bill Gates by $22 billion[52] and Michael Bloomberg by nearly $7 billion.[53]

Ellison, Gates, and the other members of this government/industry collaboration used the lockdown to accelerate construction of their 5G network[54] of satellites, antennae, biometric facial recognition, and “track and trace” infrastructure that they, and their government and intelligence agency partners, can use to mine and monetize our data, further suppress dissent, to compel obedience to arbitrary dictates, and to manage the rage that comes as Americans finally wake up to the fact that this outlaw gang has stolen our democracy, our civil rights, our country, and our way of life—while we huddled in orchestrated fear from a flu-like virus.

With fears of COVID generously stoked, the dramatic and steady erosion of constitutional rights and fomenting of a global coup d’état against democracy, the demolition of our economy, the obliteration of a million small businesses, the collapsing of the middle class, the evisceration of our Bill of Rights, the tidal wave of surveillance capitalism and the rising bio-security state, and the stunning shifts in wealth and power going to a burgeoning oligarchy of high-tech Silicon Valley robber barons seemed, to a dazed and uncritical America, like it might be a reasonable price to pay for safety. And anyway, we were told, it’s just for 15 days, or maybe 15 months, or however long it takes for Dr. Fauci to “follow the data” to his answer.

Failing Upward

Dr. Fauci’s catastrophic failure to achieve beneficial health outcomes during the COVID-19 crisis is consistent with the disastrous declines in public health during his half-century running NIAID. For anyone who might have assumed that federal and public health bureaucrats survive and flourish by achieving improvements in public health, Dr. Fauci’s durability at NIAID is a disheartening wake-up call. By any measure, he has consistently failed upward.

The “J. Edgar Hoover of public health” has presided over cataclysmic declines in public health, including an exploding chronic disease epidemic that has made the “Fauci generation”—children born after his elevation to NIAID kingpin in 1984— the sickest generation in American history, and has made Americans among the least healthy citizens on the planet. His obsequious subservience to the Big Ag, Big Food, and pharmaceutical companies has left our children drowning in a toxic soup of pesticide residues, corn syrup, and processed foods, while also serving as pincushions for 69 mandated vaccine doses by age 18—none of them properly safety tested.[55]

When Dr. Fauci took office, America was still ranked among the world’s healthiest populations. An August 2021 study by the Commonwealth Fund ranked America’s health care system dead last among industrialized nations, with the highest infant mortality and the lowest life expectancy. “If health care were an Olympic sport, the US might not qualify in a competition with other high-income nations,”[56] laments the study’s lead author, Eric Schneider, who serves as Senior Vice President for Policy and Research at the Commonwealth Fund.

Following WWII, life expectancy in the US climbed for five decades, making Americans among the longest-lived people in the developed world. IQ also grew steadily by three points each decade since 1900. But as Tony Fauci spent the 1990s expanding the pharmaceutical and chemical paradigm—instead of public health— the pace of both longevity and intelligence slowed. The life expectancy decrease widened the gap between the US and its peers to nearly five years,[57] and American children have lost seven IQ points since 2000.[58]

Under Dr. Fauci’s leadership, the allergic, autoimmune, and chronic illnesses which Congress specifically charged NIAID to investigate and prevent, have mushroomed to afflict 54 percent of children, up from 12.8 percent when he took over NIAID in 1984.[59]

Dr. Fauci has offered no explanation as to why allergic diseases like asthma, eczema, food allergies, allergic rhinitis, and anaphylaxis suddenly exploded beginning in 1989, five years after he came to power. On its website, NIAID boasts that autoimmune disease is one of the agency’s top priorities. Some 80 autoimmune diseases, including juvenile diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis, Graves’ disease, and Crohn’s disease, which were practically unknown prior to 1984, suddenly became epidemic under his watch.[60][61][62] Autism, which many scientists now consider an autoimmune disease,[63][64] [65] exploded from between 2/10,000 and 4/10,000 Americans[66] when Tony Fauci joined NIAID, to one in thirty-four today. Neurological diseases like ADD/ADHD, speech and sleep disorders, narcolepsy, facial tics, and Tourette’s syndrome have become commonplace in American children.[67]

The human, health, and economic costs of chronic disease dwarf the costs of all infectious diseases in the United States. By this decade’s end, obesity, diabetes, and pre-diabetes are on track to debilitate 85 percent of America’s citizens.[68] America is among the ten most overweight countries on Earth. The health impacts of these epidemics—which fall mainly on the young—eclipse even the most exaggerated health impacts of COVID-19.

What is causing this cataclysm? Since genes don’t cause epidemics, it must be environmental toxins. Many of these illnesses became epidemic in the late 1980s, after vaccine manufacturers were granted government protection from liability, and consequently accelerated their introduction of new vaccines.[69]

The manufacturer’s inserts of the 69 vaccine doses list each of the now-common illnesses—some 170 in total—as vaccine side effects.[70] So vaccines are a potential culprit, but not the only one. Other possible perpetrators—or accomplices—that fit the applicable criterion—a sudden epidemic across all demographics beginning in 1989—are corn syrup, PFOA flame retardants, processed foods, cell phones and EMF radiation, chlorpyrifos, ultrasound, and neonicotinoid pesticides.

The list is finite, and it would be a simple thing to design studies that give us these answers. Tracing the etiology of these diseases through epidemiological research, observational and bench studies, and animal research is exactly what Congress charged Dr. Fauci to perform. But Tony Fauci controls the public health bankbook and has shown little interest in funding basic science to answer those questions.

Is this because any serious investigation into the sources of the chronic disease epidemic would certainly implicate the powerful pharmaceutical companies and the chemical, agricultural, and processed food multinationals that Dr. Fauci and his twenty-year business partner, Bill Gates, have devoted their careers to promoting? As we shall see, his capacity to curry favor with these merchants of pills, powders, potions, poisons, pesticides, pollutants, and pricks has been the key to Dr. Fauci’s longevity at HHS.

Is it fair to blame Dr. Fauci for a crisis that, of course, has many authors? Due to his vast budgetary discretion, his unique political access, his power over HHS and its various agencies, his moral authority, his moral flexibility, and his bully pulpit, Tony Fauci has more power than any other individual to direct public energies toward solutions. He has done the opposite. Instead of striving to identify the etiologies of the chronic disease pandemic, we shall see that Dr. Fauci has deliberately and systematically used his staggering power over Federal scientific research, medical schools, medical journals, and the careers of individual scientists, to derail inquiry and obstruct research that might provide the answers.

Dr. Phauci’s Pharmanation

While some Republicans bridled warily at Dr. Fauci’s accumulating power and seemingly arbitrary pronouncements, the alchemies of political tribalism and the relentlessly stoked terror of COVID-19 persuaded spellbound Democrats to close their eyes to the damning evidence that his COVID-19 policies were a catastrophic and dangerous failure.

As an advocate for public health, robust science, and independent regulatory agencies—free from corruption and financial entanglements with Pharma—I have battled Dr. Fauci for many years. I know him personally, and my impression of him is very different from my fellow Democrats, who first encountered him as the polished, humble, earnest, endearing, and long-suffering star of the televised White House COVID press conferences. Dr. Fauci played a historic role as the leading architect of “agency capture”—the corporate seizure of America’s public health agencies by the pharmaceutical industry.

Lamentably, Dr. Fauci’s failure to achieve public health goals during the COVID pandemic are not anomalous errors, but consistent with a recurrent pattern of sacrificing public health and safety on the altar of pharmaceutical profits and self-interest. He consistently priortized pharmaceutical industry profits over public health. Readers of these pages will learn how in exalting patented medicine Dr. Fauci has, throughout his long career, routinely falsified science, deceived the public and physicians, and lied about safety and efficacy. Dr. Fauci’s malefactions detailed in this volume include his crimes against the hundreds of Black and Hispanic orphan and foster children whom he subjected to cruel and deadly medical experiments and his role, with Bill Gates, in transforming hundreds of thousands of Africans into lab rats for low-cost clinical trials of dangerous experimental drugs that, once approved, remain financially out of reach for most Africans. You will learn how Dr. Fauci and Mr. Gates have turned the African continent into a dumping ground for expired, dangerous, and ineffective drugs, many of them discontinued for safety reasons in the US and Europe.

You will read how Dr. Fauci’s strange fascination with, and generous investments in, so-called “gain of function” experiments to engineer pandemic superbugs, give rise to the ironic possibility that Dr. Fauci may have played a role in triggering the global contagion that two US presidents entrusted him to manage.

You will also read about his two-decade strategy of promoting false pandemics as a scheme for promoting novel vaccines, drugs and Pharma profits. You will learn of his actions to conceal widespread contamination in blood and vaccines, his destructive vendettas against scientists who challenge the Pharma paradigm, his deliberate sabotaging of patent-expired remedies against infectious diseases, from HIV to COVID-19, to grease the skids for less effective, but more profitable, remedies. You will learn of the grotesque body counts that have accumulated in the wake of his cold-blooded focus on industry profits over public health.

All his strategies during COVID—falsifying science to bring dangerous and ineffective drugs to market, suppressing and sabotaging competitive products that have lower profit margins even if the cost is prolonging pandemics and losing thousands of lives—all of these share a common purpose: the myopic devotion to Pharma. This book will show you that Tony Fauci does not do public health; he is a businessman, who has used his office to enrich his pharmaceutical partners and expand the reach of influence that has made him the most powerful—and despotic—doctor in human history. For some readers, reaching that conclusion will require crossing some new bridges; many readers, however, intuitively know the real Anthony Fauci, and need only to see the facts illuminated and organized.

I wrote this book so that Americans—both Democrat and Republican—can understand Dr. Fauci’s pernicious role in allowing pharmaceutical companies to dominate our government and subvert our democracy, and to chronicle the key role Dr. Fauci has played in the current coup d’état against democracy.

*

Our thanks to the Unz Review

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Notes

[1] Google Patents, Assignee: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
https://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=pts&hl=en&q=vaccine+inassignee:centers+inassignee:for+inassignee:disease+inassignee:control&tbs=,ptss:g&num=100

[2] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, President’s Budget FY 2020, 2019 Enacted Column, 2020, https://www.cdc.gov/budget/documents/fy2020/fy-2020-detail-table.pdf

[3] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dept. of HHS FY 2020 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-Justification of Estimates for Appropriation Committees- FY 2019 Enacted, 2020, p. 42-43, https://www.cdc.gov/budget/documents/fy2020/fy-2020-cdc-congressional-justification.pdf

[4] Cornell Law School, Legal Information Institute, 15 U.S. Code § 3710c—Distribution of royalties received by Federal agencies, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/3710c

[5] FDA, Fact Sheet: FDA at a Glance, FDA (Nov. 18, 2020), https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/fda-basics/ fact-sheet-fda-glance

[6] Anthony S. Fauci, MD, Biography, NIAID https://www.niaid.nih.gov/about/anthony-s-fauci-md-bio

[7] Adam Andrezejewski, “Dr. Anthony Fauci: The Highest Paid Employee in the Entire U.S. Federal Government,” FORBES (Jan. 25, 2021),
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ adamandrzejewski/2021/01/25/dr-anthony-fauci-the-highest-paid-employee-in-the-entire-us-federalgovernment/?sh=5ed2512386f0

[8] Saturday Night Live, “Dr. Anthony Fauci Cold Open—SNL, YOUTUBE” (Apr. 25, 2020), https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=uW56CL0pk0g

[9] Zack Budryk, “AIDS activists recruit Barbra Streisand for surprise Fauci birthday party on Zoom,” THE HILL (Dec. 24, 2020, 5:36 PM),
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/531636-aids-activistsrecruit-barbra-streisand-for-surprise-zoom-birthday-party

[10] Michael Specter, “How Anthony Fauci Became America’s Doctor,” The New Yorker (Apr. 10, 2020),
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/20/how-anthony-fauci-became-americas-doctor

[11] Peter Sullivan, “Fauci: Attacks on me are really also ‘attacks on science,’” The Hill(Jun. 9, 2021),
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/557602-fauci-attacks-on-me-are-really-also-attacks-on-science

[12] Donald G. McNeil Jr., “How Much Herd Immunity Is Enough?” New York Times(Dec. 24, 2020, updated Apr. 2, 2021),
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/health/herd-immunity-covidcoronavirus.html

[13] Tiana Lowe, “Fauci lies about lying about the efficacy of masks,” MSN (Jun. 21, 2021),
https://www. msn.com/en-us/health/medical/fauci-lies-about-lying-about-the-efficacy-of-masks/ar-AALhCrp

[14] Peter Hotez, “Mounting antiscience aggression in the United States,” PLOS BIOLOGY (Jul. 28, 2021),
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3001369

[15] Peter Hotez, “Will an American-Led Anti-Vaccine Movement Subvert Global Health?” Scientific American (Mar. 3, 2017),
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/will-an-american-led-antivaccine-movement-subvert-global-health/

[16] National Institutes of Health, National Institutes of Health Awards by Location and Organization, (2021),
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/citation/niaid-grants-to-baylor-by-year-since-1993/

[17] Philanthropy News Digest, “Sabin Institute Receives $12 Million From Gates Foundation to Develop Hookworm Vaccine” (Jul 1, 2011),
https://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/sabin-institute-receives12-million-from-gates-foundation-to-develop-hookworm-vaccine

[18] Vipul Naik, “Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donations made to Baylor College of Medicine,”
https://donations.vipulnaik.com/donorDonee.php?donor=Bill+and+Melinda+Gates+Foundation&donee=Baylor+College+of+Medicine

[19] Rebecca G. Baker, “Bill Gates Asks NIH Scientists for Help in Saving Lives And Explains Why the Future Depends on Biomedical Innovation,” THE NIH CATALYST(Jan-Feb, 2014), https://irp.nih.gov/catalyst/v22i1/bill-gates-asks-nih-scientists-for-help-in-saving-lives

[20] Statista, Coronavirus (COVID-19) deaths worldwide per one million population as of September 30, 2021, by country (Oct. 6, 2021), https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deathsworldwide-per-million-inhabitants/

[21] Reported Cases and Deaths by Country or Territory, WORLDOMETER (Oct. 4, 2021), https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

[22] S H Woolf, et al, “Effect of the covid-19 pandemic in 2020 on life expectancy across populations in the USA and other high income countries: simulations of provisional mortality data,” BMJ 2021;373:n1343 (June 24, 2021), https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1343

[23] Jemima Kelly, “Covid kills, but do we overestimate the risk?” Financial Times(Nov. 20, 2020), https://www.ft.com/content/879f2a2b-e366-47ac-b67a-8d1326d40b5e

[24] S H Woolf et al, “Effect of the covid-19 pandemic in 2020 on life expectancy across populations in the USA and other high income countries: simulations of provisional mortality data,” BMJ 2021;373:n1343 (June 24, 2021) https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1343

[25] Kaitlin Sullivan, “U.S. Life Expectancy Decreased by an ‘alarming’ amount during pandemic,” NBC NEWS ( Jun. 23, 2021),
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/u-s-life-expectancydecreased-alarming-amount-during-pandemic-n1272206

[26] Ibid.

[27] Alex Gutentag, “The War on Reality,” TABLET MAGAZINE (June 28, 2021), https://www. tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-war-on-reality-gutentag

[28] Lori Hinnant and Sam Mednick, “Virus-linked hunger tied to 10,000 child deaths each month,” AP (Jul. 27, 2020),
https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-africa-ap-top-news-understanding-theoutbreak-hunger-5cbee9693c52728a3808f4e7b4965cbd

[29] BBC News, “Covid-19 disruptions killed 228,000 children in South Asia, says UN report, BBC (Mar. 17, 2021), https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56425115

[30] Megan Henney, “COVID’s economic fallout could elevate US mortality rate for years, study shows,” FOX BUSINESS (Jan. 5, 2021), https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/economic-fallout-fromcoronavirus-pandemic-could-elevate-us-mortality-rate-for-years

[31] Francesco Bianchi, Giada Bianchi, and Dongho Song, “The Long-term Impact Of The Covid-19 Unemployment Shock On Life Expectancy And Mortality Rates,” National Bureau of Economic Research (Dec. 2020, rev. Sep. 2021), https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28304/w28304.pdf

[32] Ohio State University, “A third of teens, young adults reported worsening mental health during pandemic,” OSU Press Release (Jul 12, 2021),
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/545757

[33] CDC, Emergency Department Visits for Suspected Suicide Attempts Among Persons Aged 12–25 Years Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic—United States, January 2019–May 2021, (Jun. 18, 2021), https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7024e1.htm

[34] Sean CL Deoni et al, Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Early Child Cognitive Development: Initial Findings in a Longitudinal Observational Study of Child Health,medRxiv 2021.08.10.21261846; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.08.10.21261846

[35] Bill Chappell, Drug Overdoses Killed A Record Number Of Americans In 2020, Jumping By Nearly 30%, NPR (Jul. 14, 2021),
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/14/1016029270/drug-overdoses-killed-arecord-number-of-americans-in-2020-jumping-by-nearly-30

[36] CDC Health Alert Network, Increase in Fatal Drug Overdoses Across the United States Driven by Synthetic Opioids Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic, CDC (Dec. 20, 2020), https://emergency.cdc.gov/han/2020/han00438.asp

[37] Andrea Petersen, Amid Pandemic, More U.S. Adults Say They Considered Suicide, (Aug. 13, 2020 7:42 pm),
https://www.wsj.com/articles/amid-pandemic-more-u-s-adults-say-they-consideredsuicide-11597362131

[38] Rebecca T. Leeb et al, Mental Health–Related Emergency Department Visits Among Children Aged <18 Years During the COVID-19 Pandemic — United States, January 1–October 17, 2020, CDC (Nov. 13, 2020), https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6945a3.htm

[39] Alex Gutentag, The War on Reality, TABLET MAGAZINE (June 28, 2021), https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-war-on-reality-gutentag

[40] Id.

[41] Amarica Rafanelli, Growing Up in a Pandemic: How Covid is Affecting Children’s Development, DIRECT RELIEF (Jan. 19, 2021, 10:41 AM),
https://www.directrelief.org/2021/01/growing-up-inthe-midst-of-a-pandemic-how-covid-is-affecting-childrens-development/

[42] James Freeman, The Limits of Anthony Fauci’s Expertise, WALL STREET JOURNAL (May 13, 2020 1:52 pm) https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-limits-of-anthony-faucis-expertise-11589392347

[43] Nigel Chiwaya & Jiachuan Wu, Unemployment claims by state: See how COVID-19 has destroyed the job market, NBC NEWS (Apr. 14, 2020, updated Aug.27, 2020), https://www.nbcnews.com/ business/economy/unemployment-claims-state-see-how-covid-19-has-destroyed-job-n1183686

[44] Anne Sraders & Lance Lambert, Nearly 100,000 establishments that temporarily shut down due to the pandemic are now out of business, FORTUNE (Sep. 28, 2020), https://fortune.com/2020/09/28/ covid-buisnesses-shut-down-closed/

[45] Deficit Tracker, BIPARTISAN POLICY (Sept. 20, 2021), https://bipartisanpolicy.org/report/deficittracker/

[46] Viral Inequity: Billionaires Gained $3.9tn, Workers Lost $3.7tn in 2020, TRT WORLD (Jan. 28, 2021),
https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/viral-inequality-billionaires-gained-3-9tn-workers-lost-37tn-in-2020-43674

[47] Chase Peterson-Withorn, Nearly 500 People Became Billionaires During The Pandemic Year, FORBES (Apr. 6, 2021),
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2021/04/06/forbes-35th-annual-worldsbillionaires-list-facts-and-figures-2021/?sh=4c7b81775e58

[48] Heather Long, Nearly 8 million Americans have fallen into poverty since the summer, WASHINGTON POST (Dec. 16, 2020),
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/12/16/poverty-rising/

[49] Jared Spataro, 2 Years of Digital Transformation in 2 Months, MICROSOFT (Apr. 30, 2020),
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/04/30/2-years-digital-transformation-2months/

[50] Id.

[51] Oracle Cloud Manages COVID-19 Vaccination Program in the United States, ORACLE PRESS RELEASE (Dec. 15, 2020),
https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/oracle-cloud-managescovid-19-vaccination-program-121520.html

[52] Chase Petersen-Withorn, How Much Money America’s Billionaires Have Made During The Covid-19 Pandemic, FORBES (Apr. 30, 2021),
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2021/04/30/ american-billionaires-have-gotten-12-trillion-richer-during-the-pandemic/?sh=461b1067f557

[53] Samuel Stebbins and Grant Suneson, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk among US billionaires getting richer during coronavirus pandemic, USA TODAY, (Dec 1, 2020).
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/12/01/american-billionaires-that-got-richer-during-covid/43205617/

[54] Sue Halpern, The Terrifying Potential of the 5G Network, THE NEW YORKER (Apr. 26, 2019),
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communications/the-terrifying-potential-of-the-5gnetwork

[55] Recommended Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule for ages 18 years or younger, United States, 2021, CDC, https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/imz/child-adolescent.html

[56] Joseph Guzman, Stunning new report ranks US dead last in health care among richest countries-despite spending the most, THE HILL (Aug. 6, 2021),
https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/longevity/566715-stunning-new-report-ranks-us-dead-last-in-healthcare

[57] Kaitlin Sullivan, U.S. Life Expectancy Decreased by an ‘alarming’ amount during pandemic, NBC NEWS ( Jun. 23, 2021),
ttps://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/u-s-life-expectancydecreased-alarming-amount-during-pandemic-n1272206

[58] Dr. Robert Gorter, Dr. Joseph Mercola, et al., “Why are IQ scores declining over the previous 20 years?,” The Gorter Model, (Jul. 1, 2018),
http://www.gorter-model.org/iq-scores-declining-previous20-years/

[59] Could Goldman Sachs Report Be Exposing Pharma’s Real End Game of Drug Dependency vs. Curing Disease, CHD (Apr. 18, 2018),
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/news/could-goldman-sachs-reportbe-exposing-pharmas-real-end-game-of-drug-dependency-vs-curing-disease/

[60] Lana Andelane, Autism may be an autoimmune disorder – study, NEWSHUB, )Oct 20, 2019).
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/lifestyle/2019/10/autism-may-be-an-autoimmune-disorder-study.html

[61] Children’s Health Defense, Campaign to Restore Child Health, CHILDREN’S HEALTH DEFENSE, (2018).
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/campaign-restore-child-health/

[62] Gianna Melillo, Study Highlights Prevalence of Comorbid Autoimmune Diseases, T1D in Pediatric Populations, AJMC, (Sep 9, 2020).
https://www.ajmc.com/view/study-highlights-prevalence-ofcomorbid-autoimmune-diseases-t1d-in-pediatric-populations

[63] J.B. HANDLEY, HOW TO END THE AUTISM EPIDEMIC, (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018).

[64] Elizabeth Edmiston, et al, Autoimmunity, Autoantibodies, and Autism Spectrum Disorder, BIOLOGICAL PSYCHIATRY, (Mar 1, 2017).
https://www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/ S0006-3223(16)32739-1/fulltext

[65] Heather K. Hughes et al, Immune Dysfunction and Autoimmunity as Pathological Mechanisms in Autism Spectrum Disorders, FRONTIERS IN CELLULAR NEUROSCIENCE, (Nov 13, 2018). https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncel.2018.00405/full

[66] THOMAS F. BOAT & JOE T. WU, ED., MENTAL DISORDERS AND DISABILITIES AMONG LOW-INCOME CHILDREN, 241 National Academies Press, (Oct. 28, 2015),
https:// www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK332896/

[67] Elizabeth Mumper, MD, Increasing Rates of Childhood Neurological Illness, THE INSTITUTE FOR FUNCTIONAL MEDICINE, (2017).
https://www.ifm.org/news-insights/increasing-rateschildhood-neurological-illness/

[68] Adela Hruby and Frank B. Hu, The Epidemiology of Obesity: A Big Picture,PHARMACOECONOMICS, (Jul 1, 2016). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/ PMC4859313/

[69] Michael E. McDonald and John F. Paul, Timing of Increased Autistic Disorder Cumulative Incidence, ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY, (Feb 16, 2010).
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es902057k

[70] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Table 1. Recommended Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule for ages 18 years or younger, United States, 2021,(2021), https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/downloads/child/0-18yrs-child-combined-schedule.pdf

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***

Song Lyrics

The story goes you’re gonna make it if you try,
And if you don’t may your life waste away ‘cause its your fault

Like the sheen of a rotting fish, The glitter just dazzles,
For everyone who’s filthy rich, A million must suffer,
So start your climb up the money tree, The best slaves are those who think they’re free,

Oh say can you see Rome is Burning, Oh how it burns, Oh feel the burn,

As life unfolds people struggle to make ends meet,
Look around, what you see, the hunger, the homeless, the powerless streets

On your mind the need for change, channel your pain and your rage,
Stand up and link your arms for strength, Shout it out to the police state,
I can’t breathe that’s why I take a knee, We won’t take your new form o’slavery,

Oh say can you see Rome is Burning, Oh how it burns, oh feel the burn,
Oh how it burns, Oh feel the burn

Make no mistake, racism starts with the state,
To divide and rule the working class to keep us broken, not building the new

Lessons of history revealed, Organize or be displaced,
The rulers have no solutions, Only violence, wars and jails,
Stick together and fight for your just claims, Workers united will prevail,

Oh say can you see Rome is over, Oh build the New, Oh build the New!
Oh build the New, Oh build the New!, Oh build the new, Oh build the New!

Video: Click the “Watch on Youtube”

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Featured image is a screenshot from the video

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GR Editor’s Note

Some Definitions quoted in this important study

ACS: Acute coronary syndrome

Acute coronary syndrome is a term used to describe a range of conditions associated with sudden, reduced blood flow to the heart.

One such condition is a heart attack (myocardial infarction) — when cell death results in damaged or destroyed heart tissue. Even when acute coronary syndrome causes no cell death, the reduced blood flow changes how your heart works and is a sign of a high risk of heart attack.   Mayo Clinic

PULS TEST: Protein unstable lesions

***

Abstract

Our group has been using the PLUS Cardiac Test (GD Biosciences, Inc, Irvine, CA) a clinically validated measurement of multiple protein biomarkers which generates a score predicting the 5 yr risk (percentage chance) of a new Acute Coronary Syndrome (ACS).

The score is based on changes from the norm of multiple protein biomarkers including IL-16, a proinflammatory cytokine, soluble Fas, an inducer of apoptosis, and Hepatocyte Growth Factor (HGF)which serves as a marker for chemotaxis of T-cells into epithelium and cardiac tissue, among other markers. Elevation above the norm increases the PULS score, while decreases below the norm lowers the PULS score.The score has been measured every 3-6 months in our patient population for 8 years.

Recently, with the advent of the mRNA COVID 19 vaccines (vac) by Moderna and Pfizer, dramatic changes in the PULS score became apparent in most patients.

This report summarizes those results. A total of 566 pts, aged 28 to 97, M:F ratio 1:1 seen in a preventive cardiology practice had a new PULS test drawn from 2 to 10 weeks following the 2^nd COVID shot and was compared to the previous PULS score drawn 3 to 5 months previously pre- shot. Baseline IL-16 increased from 35=/-20 above the norm to 82 =/- 75 above the norm post-vac; sFas increased from 22+/- 15 above the norm to 46=/-24 above the norm post-vac; HGF increased from 42+/-12 above the norm to 86+/-31 above the norm post-vac. These changes resulted in an increase of the PULS score from 11% 5 yr ACS risk to 25% 5 yr ACS risk. At the time of this report, these changes persist for at least 2.5 months post second dose of vac.

We conclude that the mRNA vacs dramatically increase inflammation on the endothelium and T cell infiltration of cardiac muscle and may account for the observations of increased thrombosis, cardiomyopathy, and other vascular events following vaccination.

emphasis added

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Featured image:  A hand holding an mRNA vaccine vial. (Spencer Davis / Unsplash)

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***

With renewed interest to uproot French influence, Russia has ultimately began its inroads into the Sahel region, an elongated landlocked territory located between north Africa (Maghreb) and west Africa region, and also stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea. While it remains largely underdeveloped and greater part of the population impoverished, terrorist organizations including Boko Haram and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) are operating and have contributed to the frequent violence, extremism and instability in this vast region.

As usually referred to as the G5 Sahel, it consists of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger. Besides the instability, these countries are engulfed with various socio-economic problems primarily due to the system of governance and poor policies toward sustainable development. There are, in addition, rights abuse and cultural practices that affect development.

In July 2020, the United States raised concerns over growing number of allegations of human rights violations and abuses by state security forces in entire Sahel. The US response came after the released documents by Human Rights Watch regarding the same in early July. France, former colonial power, still attempts at dominating the region. France has announced the pulling out of the military force, abruptly ending its terrorism operations and thus creating a huge vacuum.

For fear and concerns about the new rise of terrorism, the Sahel-5 are turning to Russia. Last year after the political change on August 18 in Mali, a former French colony with the fractured economy and breeding field for armed Islamic jihadist groups, Russia offered a tremendous assistance. By showing support for the military government in Mali, Russia has utterly ignored or violated the protocols for implementing the “Silencing the Guns” agenda in West Africa, a flagship programme of the Africa Union’s Agenda 2063. Now Russia is capitalizing on this loophole opportunity, Chad and Mali as conduits, to penetrate into the Sahel.

Russia has lined up Foreign Ministers of these countries in the Sahel, the latest was the Minister of Foreign Affairs, African Integration and Chadians Abroad of the Republic of Chad, Cherif Zene Mahamat, who paid a working visit on December 6‒8. Prior to that, Malian Foreign Minister Abdoulaye Diop went in November. Both meetings discussed most extensively consolidating military assistance to fight growing terrorism, and review efforts to strengthen the political dialogue and promote some kind of partnerships relating to trade and the economy in the region.

In the middle of November, Chairperson of the African Union Commission, Moussa Faki Mahamat, together with Sergey Lavrov agreed on terms of helping with necessary equipment, weapons and ammunition in the Sahel. Lavrov referred to this in his opening remarks as “military and technical cooperation” with AU’s Chairperson Faki Mahamat – “a worthy representative in this high position of pan-regional importance.”

On December 7, Lavrov held diplomatic meeting with Chadian Cherif Mahamat.

“We discussed African affairs at length: the difficult situation in the Sahara-Sahel zone that was destabilized after NATO’s aggressive attack on Libya. This was followed by an inflow of terrorists, smugglers, and volumes of illegal weapons from the north to the south of Africa. These criminals were particularly attracted to this area and the Lake Chad region,” Lavrov told the media conference following the closed-door meeting.

In the process, it is necessary to mobilize all available resources of the Africans themselves and the international community for fighting terrorist groups. Nevertheless, it is also necessary for Russia’s efforts to maintain the joint forces of the Sahel Five, according to Lavrov. He further assured “we will continue supporting it with supply of arms and hardware and personnel training, including peacekeepers, as it is very important to help put an end to this evil and other challenges and threats, including drug trafficking and other forms of organized crime.”

According to several narratives and reports, Russia has agreed to push the Wagner mercenaries into the entire Sahara-Sahel, including the G5 Sahel group of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger, which focused on combating terrorism. Many experts say Russia has set out to battle against neo-colonial tendencies of France, and stepping also to join what is often phrased “the scramble for resources” in Africa. In his remarks, Lavrov explicitly points to creating favorable conditions for the implementation of Russian projects in Chad, including in the field of energy and the extraction of mineral resources.

Further to the narratives, Russia has now embarked on fighting “neo-colonialism” which it considers as stumbling stone on its way to regain a part of the Soviet-era influence in Africa. Russia has sought to convince Africans over the past years of the likely dangers of neocolonial tendencies perpetrated by the former colonial countries and the scramble for resources on the continent. But all such warnings could largely fall on deaf ears as African leaders choose development partners with funds to invest in the economy.

It is necessary to acknowledge that neither France, Russia, the United States nor any colonizing force will truly solve the problems that confront Africa. Some African leaders sign non-transparent agreements, routinely ignore both the executive and legislative decisions on tendering national projects and natural resources. It has always been the case, such huge natural-resource projects given away without cabinet and parliament’s approval. Apparently, these resources extraction hardly deliver broad-based development dividends.

That however, there are vivid indications that Russia is broadening its geography of diplomacy covering poor African countries and especially fragile States that need Russia’s military assistance. Chad, Mali and Niger, for example, have appeared on its radar, Russia sees some potential there – as a possible gateway into the Sahel in Africa.

Russian Foreign Ministry has explained in a statement posted on its website, that Russia’s military-technical cooperation with African countries is primarily directed at settling regional conflicts and preventing the spread of terrorist threats and to fight the growing terrorism in the continent. Worth noting here that Russia, in its strategy on Africa is reported to be also looking into building military bases in the continent.

Over the past years, strengthening military-technical cooperation has been part of the foreign policy of the Russian Federation. Russia has signed bilateral military-technical cooperation agreement with many African countries. Researchers say it plans to build military bases as this article explicitly reported, among others.

Research Professor Irina Filatova at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow explains in an emailed discussion that “Russia’s influence in the Sahel has been growing just as French influence and assistance has been dwindling, particularly in the military sphere. It is for the African countries to choose their friends, but it would be better to deal directly with the government, than with (mercenaries of the Russian) Wagner group, whose connection with the government was barely recognized.”

In very particular cases, she unreservedly suggested: “If they wanted the Russians to come and fight Islamist groups, it would be much better to ask the government to send regular troops. Wagner’s vigilantes are not responsible to anybody, and the Russian government may refuse to take any responsibility for whatever they do in case something goes wrong.”

In another interview, Grigory Lukyanov, a Senior Researcher at the Russia’s Institute of Oriental Studies, explained that such relations are useful particularly in the field of resource extraction and security services, where Russia has competitive advantages.

According to foreign experts and researchers, the arrival of Russian mercenaries in the Sahel – of which thousands are estimated – would jeopardize other external commitment to fighting terrorism, and limit development assistance from international organizations. Reuters has reported that a possible contract could be worth US$10.8 million, or estimated more per month, depending on the contract, working with the Russian private military company Wagner Group.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has oftentimes spoken against such collaboration, the use of Russian mercenaries in Africa. Instead, he has suggested pursuing the creation and deployment of the G5 Sahel Joint-Force and the United Nations Integrated Strategy (UNIS) for the Sahel could bring tangible progress. The countries in the region are particularly encouraged to adopt, with support from international partners, the necessary measures to fully implement the support plan in developing the region.

The Sahel-Sahara, the vast semi-arid region of Africa separating the Sahara Desert to the north and tropical savannas to the south, is as much a land of opportunities as it is of challenges. Although it has abundant human and natural resources, offering tremendous potential for rapid growth, there are deep-rooted challenges – environmental, political and security – that may affect the prosperity and peace of the Sahel.

For this reason, the United Nations has come up with a unique support plan targeting 10 countries to scale up efforts to accelerate prosperity and sustainable peace in the region. Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, The Gambia, Guinea Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal. The creation and deployment of the G5 Sahel Joint-Force and the United Nations Integrated Strategy (UNIS) for the Sahel could bring tangible progress.

The best is to consider national and regional institutions, bilateral and multilateral organizations, the private sector and civil society organizations to work towards operationalizing and implementing the United Nations Security Council resolutions on the Sahel aim at attaining regional peace, and further to accelerate the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

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Kester Kenn Klomegah, who worked previously with Inter Press Service (IPS), is now a frequent and passionate contributor to Global Research. As a versatile researcher, he believes that everyone deserves equal access to quality and trustworthy media reports.

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***

Today, released Rwandan Prisoners living in a safe house in Tanzania were sent to Niger.

This Tribunal (ICTR) created by the west, mainly the USA was a major disaster for many reasons, as we all know.

One major failure is that it did not permit acquitted persons to rejoin their families, most of whom are in Europe, Canada, Britain and the USA. Europe, Britain and the USA: these former slave owning and slave trafficking countries and bloody colonizers of Africa (and elsewhere) set up the ICTR to judge the losing side of the RPF war of aggression on Rwanda. When men were acquitted, these countries refused to allow them to come and live with their families in Europe or Canada. Gros hypocrisy. Many men lost twenty years of their life, first in prison and then “held” in a safe house in Tanzania.

Some of these men were acquitted by the Tribunal, but some had been convicted on lesser charges and were released from prison after serving their sentences. The distinction between these men and the acquitted has some legal consequences even though we know they were all innocent of the charges trumped up against them by Kigali and the ICTR prosecutor. They all deserve our respect.

They were offered a chance to go to Niger and had to sign that they accepted the offer “freely”. But really, they had no choice since their housing, health care and support in Tanzania was being eliminated by the Mechanism/Tribunal.

They had to sign a document which includes terms such as “I express my desire and decision to be resettled in the Republic of Niger (tr.))” and that the decision was made “willingly and voluntarily, without coercion, inducement or threat from the Mechanism or any other person or entity (tr.)”

They will be housed for one year with an indemnity of 10,000$, with no health care, an identity card and a guarantee against extradition to Rwanda. Most of the men are rather old and need regular medical care. The Tribunal/Mechanism is washing its hand of all responsibility for the former prisoners. These men will be on their own.

Niger is very hot and dry and is infested with Islamic terrorists financed most likely by the Gulf allies/USA/Grande Bretagne/Europe. The city of Niamey is apparently safe. It is not an easy environment for Rwandans accustomed to a temperate climate.

We admire and thank the République de Niger for its generosity and openness. I personally visited Niger last October for a congress of the African Bar Association. We were well received, and this largely Muslim country made a good impression.

Future support

Rwandan prisoners in Africa may receive some welcome support. We have been informed of an effort by some Rwandans in Europe to intervene and support the Rwandan prisoners in Mali, Benin, Senegal and now in Niger. This is a good step, and we will support this effort if it materializes.

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First posted by Gr on November 16, 2021

Just a few months before the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) was publicly announced, scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced the completion of a Mark of the Beast “tattoo” technology for children to keep track of their vaccination records.

The microchip, which can be implanted directly into the skin, was designed with special invisible dye that can be picked up with a special mobile phone filter. That dye is not visible to the naked eye.

Lasting up to five years, this dye is detected using near-infrared light, which is shined onto the skin in the area where it was injected. It has already been tested on pigs and rats, and the presumable next step is to start injecting actual children with it.

Billionaire eugenicist Bill Gates called for this back in the early days of the plandemic, suggesting that digital jab “passports” for the Chinese Virus include people’s injection records.

“The system – which has not yet been tested in children – would provide quick and easy access to vaccination history, avoid the risk of clerical errors, and add little to the cost or risk of the procedure,” reported Scientific American, citing a study about the project that was published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Quantum dot tattoos to complete the Mark of the Beast system

Once again using the poor as an excuse to create an abomination like this, the scientists involved with the project claim that it will help developing countries to achieve better health outcomes in children.

“Especially in developing countries where medical records may not be as complete or as accessible, there can be value in having medical information directly associated with a person,” commented Mark Prausnitz, a bioengineering professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), who was not involved in the research.

“This, I think, is a pretty interesting way to accomplish those goals.”

It also accomplishes the prophetic goal of merging people’s identifying information into a microchip injection or tattoo that can be scanned for purposes of buying and selling, accessing restricted buildings, driving and engaging in social activities.

According to MIT bioengineers Robert Langer and Ana Jaklenec, small patches full of microneedles are first stamped on children’s skin to inject them with vaccines. After that, their proof of injection is stored on the other injectable components.

With the simple scan of the wrist, forehead, or wherever else these components are injected, the government can quickly check whether or not a child is “up to date” on the vaccine schedule, which now includes Fauci Flu shots.

“The team ended up using a technology called quantum dots, tiny semiconducting crystals that reflect light and were originally developed to label cells during research,” reported Scientific American. “The dye has been shown to be safe in humans.”

Not everyone is on board with the plan, as you might expect. Privacy experts say that there are risks involved with having people walk around with microchips in their bodies that contain all of their personal information.

“Different people and different cultures will probably feel differently about having an invisible medical tattoo,” added Prausnitz.

Not at all a surprise is the fact that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded this Mark of the Beast research. It was launched because of a “direct request” from Gates himself, who claims he wants these microchips inside people’s bodies for the purpose of “eradicating disease.”

“If we don’t have good data, it’s really difficult to eradicate disease,” Jaklenec added in support of Gates’ agenda.

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First posted on Global Research on December 4, 2021

***

There was a hidden gem in a blog post by Aaron Siri that nobody picked up. It was evidence that vaccinated people are 9X more likely to be admitted to the hospital than unvaccinated.

It is hard to get good, honest data out of hospitals nowadays for some reason. I have no clue as to why that is. You’d think things would be more transparent.

But Aaron Siri discovered someone who convinced their hospital to do something really unusual: track the vaccination status of each admitted patient to the hospital. Tracking was based on whether you got the vaccine or not, not “two weeks after you got the vaccine” which is a major definition difference. In short, honest tracking.

You’ll never guess what happened so I’ll tell you.

Siri wrote on his substack:

A concerned Physician Assistant, Deborah Conrad, convinced her hospital to carefully track the Covid-19 vaccination status of every patient admitted to her hospital.  The result is shocking.

As Ms. Conrad has detailed, her hospital serves a community in which less than 50% of the individuals were vaccinated for Covid-19 but yet, during the same time period, approximately 90% of the individuals admitted to her hospital were documented to have received this vaccine.

These patients were admitted for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to COVID-19 infections.  Even more troubling is that there were many individuals who were young, many who presented with unusual or unexpected health events, and many who were admitted months after vaccination.

As you might expect, the hospital rewarded Deborah Conrad for her courage and leadership to expose the truth by firing her:

The message is clear: If you speak the truth, you will be pay the price. It is imperative that information that doesn’t align with the “narrative” be suppressed. This is why doctors don’t speak out. And it’s why I had to quit my job in high tech to speak out as well.

But here’s the part Aaron didn’t point out that needs to be stated very clearly:

The only way you can get those numbers is if vaccinated people are 9 times more likely to be hospitalized than unvaccinated

It is mathematically impossible to get to those numbers any other way. Period. Full stop. This is known as an “inconvenient truth.”

However, it’s important we don’t leap to quick conclusions. A good part of this effect could be due to a greater portion of vaccinated people among the elderly.

I’m in the process of getting a stratification by age to see just how serious this is. They noted in the article, “there were many individuals who were young.” So we’ll see what the data says.

It does seem odd that a retired high tech executive is the one doing this research. I’m just doing it because nobody else is.

You can’t have it both ways

What I find super-interesting is we are led to believe that the hospitals are filled with the unvaccinated. So according to the narrative, the age skew of the vaccinated doesn’t make a difference; it pales in comparison to the risk caused by those who are unvaccinated.

But now, when the evidence goes against them, the narrative changes that the reason there are so many vaccinated is the age skew.

Isn’t that amazing? According to the “experts,” no matter which way the data goes, the unvaccinated are the problem!

This of course is why I don’t trust the medical community or the three letter agencies. I’m more interested in what the data says.

Stay tuned…

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***

Global Research Editor’s Note

Below are excerpts of an important article by William Arkin, published by Newsweek in May 2021.

While the covid crisis is not addressed in this article, does this deployment of an undercover force of 60,000 people namely a “secret army” have a bearing on the complex decision making process underlying the lockdown, the vaccine mandate and the “Great Reset” ?  

William Arkin is an outstanding analyst. We have been featuring his writings on Global Research since 2005.  See also his analysis on the dangers of nuclear war.  William Arkin Archive 

Michel C., Global Research, December 11, 2021

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The largest undercover force the world has ever known is the one created by the Pentagon over the past decade. Some 60,000 people now belong to this secret army, many working under masked identities and in low profile, all part of a broad program called “signature reduction.” The force, more than ten times the size of the clandestine elements of the CIA, carries out domestic and foreign assignments, both in military uniforms and under civilian cover, in real life and online, sometimes hiding in private businesses and consultancies, some of them household name companies.

The unprecedented shift has placed an ever greater number of soldiers, civilians, and contractors working under false identities, partly as a natural result in the growth of secret special forces but also as an intentional response to the challenges of traveling and operating in an increasingly transparent world. The explosion of Pentagon cyber warfare, moreover, has led to thousands of spies who carry out their day-to-day work in various made-up personas, the very type of nefarious operations the United States decries when Russian and Chinese spies do the same.

Newsweek’s exclusive report on this secret world is the result of a two-year investigation involving the examination of over 600 resumes and 1,000 job postings, dozens of Freedom of Information Act requests, and scores of interviews with participants and defense decision-makers. What emerges is a window into not just a little-known sector of the American military, but also a completely unregulated practice. No one knows the program’s total size, and the explosion of signature reduction has never been examined for its impact on military policies and culture. Congress has never held a hearing on the subject. And yet the military developing this gigantic clandestine force challenges U.S. laws, the Geneva Conventions, the code of military conduct and basic accountability.

The signature reduction effort engages some 130 private companies to administer the new clandestine world. Dozens of little known and secret government organizations support the program, doling out classified contracts and overseeing publicly unacknowledged operations. Altogether the companies pull in over $900 million annually to service the clandestine force—doing everything from creating false documentation and paying the bills (and taxes) of individuals operating under assumed names, to manufacturing disguises and other devices to thwart detection and identification, to building invisible devices to photograph and listen in on activity in the most remote corners of the Middle East and Africa.

Special operations forces constitute over half the entire signature reduction force, the shadow warriors who pursue terrorists in war zones from Pakistan to West Africa but also increasingly work in unacknowledged hot spots, including behind enemy lines in places like North Korea and Iran. Military intelligence specialists—collectors, counter-intelligence agents, even linguists—make up the second largest element: thousands deployed at any one time with some degree of “cover” to protect their true identities.

Click here to read the full article published by Newsweek.

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***

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

We are living in a world and at a time when the creation of a new “life-saving” vaccine against the dreaded COVID-19 virus is actually acting as a force of division.

Pfizer, Astro Zeneca, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson “miracle cures” served nearly one full year after being first introduced to the public are now an instrument by which the “unvaccinated” are facing a form of apartheid. Now, unless you have been fully vaccinated, there are campuses you are no longer welcomed to attend university classes alongside the fully vaccinated. You can no longer be admitted into restaurants, gyms, theatres, bars, or public events. If you worked for the federal government and did not get the jab you will suddenly find yourself out of work with no compensation.

Worse, there are frequently marks of scorn in public opinion pages. If people are going to hospital because of COVID, it’s the “anti-vaxxers” fault. If vaccinated people end up in the hospital, it’s the “anti-vaxxers” fault. Why are we not done with this horrible illness? It’s being dragged on because of the damned “anti-vaxxers!”

Who knows? Before long we may even blame the “anti-vaxxers” for inflation and organized crime!

If we would only just take the vaccine, our troubles would all be over. The unvaccinated’s unwillingness to take a vaccine, even though it is an experimental vaccine with some pretty significant costs to some of the recipients, they are described as selfish, conspiracy theorists, and misguided by mis-information.

Beyond even these signals, it is hard even to get representatives of the two groups together to have a sane conversation. I have myself encountered the same gap just trying to find doctors or researchers from the “pro-Vaxx” (“pro-science” they prefer to call themselves) to engage in a civil conversation about COVID vaccination with people who, they say, have taken the “flat-earth society” position.

Divisions are so counter-productive and so unnecessary in our society, especially when the cause is so seemingly trivial. If at all possible, it would be advantageous to try to build some sort of a bridge connecting the growing chasm between rival families. And that is where this episode of the Global Research News Hour attempts to hail one person on the opposite end for a talk about our non-stopping pandemic.

Dr Tara Moriarty is active trying to serve Canadians by setting up ZOOM session to correspond with Canadians about the safety of these drugs and what she calls mis-information regarding claims to the contrary. Recently she engaged in a conversation with a so-called “vaccine hesitant” host just to see how she would react to some of the points we have been hearing about on this program. We leave it to listeners to listen to the facts and come to their own conclusions.

Dr Tara Moriarty is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto in the Faculty of Dentistry with cross appointment to the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology in the Faculty of Medicine. Dr. Moriarty is also the Principal Investigator in the Moriarty Lab, an infectious diseases research laboratory which studies several fundamental mechanisms underlying blood borne dissemination of bacterial pathogens. Dr. Moriarty co-founded COVID-19 Resources Canada, CanCOVID and #ScienceUpFirst, and is active in health misinformation responses and research.

(Global Research News Hour Episode 336)

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM out of the University of Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca .

Other stations airing the show:

CIXX 106.9 FM, broadcasting from Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. It airs Sundays at 6am.

WZBC 90.3 FM in Newton Massachusetts is Boston College Radio and broadcasts to the greater Boston area. The Global Research News Hour airs during Truth and Justice Radio which starts Sunday at 6am.

Campus and community radio CFMH 107.3fm in  Saint John, N.B. airs the Global Research News Hour Fridays at 7pm.

CJMP 90.1 FM, Powell River Community Radio, airs the Global Research News Hour every Saturday at 8am. 

Caper Radio CJBU 107.3FM in Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia airs the Global Research News Hour starting Wednesday afternoon from 3-4pm.

Cowichan Valley Community Radio CICV 98.7 FM serving the Cowichan Lake area of Vancouver Island, BC airs the program Thursdays at 9am pacific time.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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***

END GENOCIDE NOW is a campaign that aims to enlighten people about the mechanisms and manuscripts of tyranny, as well as the remedies for sovereignty. We have invited powerful voices in the freedom movement together in a series of interviews.

This is episode number 10: The Origin Of Violence

Have you ever sat down in self reflection and asked yourself, why do human beings kill each other? Today I get to speak with a man who has dedicated 14 years of his life in seclusion to explore that very question in depth.

Robert J. Burrowes is an author and world renown scholar and teacher of nonviolent action strategy, especially the Gandhian approach. He has spent 40 years actively researching and analysing the structure of violent elite dominance and applying his knowledge into organised strategic resistance.

In this interview, Robert shares his findings of where violence comes from and how we can best reclaim our freedom in this time of ever increasing oppression and surveillance.

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Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is [email protected] and his website is here. 

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is a screenshot from the video

Graphene COVID Kill Shots: Let the Evidence Speak for Itself

Dr. Ariyana Love, December 5 , 2021

Renowned Virologist Warns of ‘Collapse of Our Health System’ Due to Complications from COVID Vaccines

Patrick Delaney, December 7 , 2021

How to Detox from the COVID Shot

Makia Freeman, December 3 , 2021

Bombshell Document Dump on Pfizer Vaccine Data

The Election Wizard, December 5 , 2021

Video: Graphene Hydroxide in the mRNA Vaccine Vial: Assassination of Dr. Andreas Noack

Andreas Noack, December 5 , 2021

2,809 Dead Babies in VAERS Following COVID Shots as New Documents Prove Pfizer, the FDA, and the CDC Knew the Shots Were Not Safe for Pregnant Women

Brian Shilhavy, December 6 , 2021

Pfizer Smoking-gun “Secret Document”: Their Deadly COVID Vaccine

Jon Rappoport, December 8 , 2021

On the Heels of Austria and Germany Locking Down the Unvaccinated, EU Leader Calls for Throwing Out Nuremberg Code in Favor of Forced Vaccinating All Dissenters

Julian Conradson, December 6 , 2021

A Letter to the Unvaccinated

Dr. Angela Durante, December 4 , 2021

Research “Game-changer”: Spike Protein Increases Heart Attacks and Destroys Immune ​System

Mike Whitney, December 3 , 2021

The WHO Confirms that the Covid-19 PCR Test is Flawed: Estimates of “Positive Cases” are Meaningless. The Lockdown Has No Scientific Basis

Prof Michel Chossudovsky, December 6 , 2021

666 Cases of Heart Disease in 12 to 17-Year-Olds after COVID Shots – Less than 2 Cases Per Year Following All Vaccines for Past 30+ Years

Brian Shilhavy, December 6 , 2021

The Vaccine Death Report: Evidence of Millions of Deaths and Serious Adverse Events Resulting from the Experimental COVID-19 Injections

David John Sorensen, December 6 , 2021

The Covid-19 Pandemic Does Not Exist

Prof Michel Chossudovsky, November 29 , 2021

The Incidence of Cancer, Triggered by the Covid 19 “Vaccine”

Dr. Nicole Delépine, December 5 , 2021

FDA & CDC Ignore Damning Report 90+% of Hospital’s Admissions Were Vaccinated for COVID-19

Covert Geopolitics, December 8 , 2021

The Omicron Fraud. The WHO Now Says It’s “Super-mild”

Prof Michel Chossudovsky, December 8 , 2021

An Australian Horror Story

Jeremy Salt, December 4 , 2021

Vaccine Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (VAIDS): ‘We Should Anticipate Seeing this Immune Erosion More Widely’

Frontline Doctors, December 9 , 2021

“We are in Deep Trouble!” Following the Science behind the COVID Catastrophe

Michael Welch, December 3 , 2021

Fake Science, Invalid Data: There is No Such Thing as a “Confirmed Covid-19 Case”. There is No Pandemic

Prof Michel Chossudovsky, November 26 , 2021

If You Take the COVID Vax, You Can Never Achieve Full Immunity Again – Government Stats Unveil the Horrifying Truth

Ethan Huff, December 5 , 2021

Everyone Missed this One… Vaccinated People Are Up to Nine Times (9X) More Likely to be Hospitalized than Unvaccinated People

Steve Kirsch, December 4 , 2021

The World Gone Mad: The COVID Vaccine Derangement Syndrome. ” Fourth Covid-19 Shot. Many More to Come”

Vasko Kohlmayer, December 8 , 2021

Video: Digital Tyranny and the Rockefeller-Gates WHO “Vaxx-Certificate Passport”: Towards a World War III Scenario

Peter Koenig, November 28 , 2021

The Covid Outbreak: “Biggest Health Scam of the 21st Century.” Report by 1500 Health Professionals

United Health Professionals, December 4 , 2021

Australian Senator Who Opposes Vaccine Mandate Escorted to Quarantine Hotel: “This Has Been Premeditated”

The COVID World, December 6 , 2021

Video: Urgent: Dr. Peter McCullough Calls for Immediate Vaxx Halt

Dr. Peter McCullough, December 7 , 2021

Court-Ordered Pfizer Documents They Tried to Have Sealed for 55 Years Show 1223 Deaths, 158,000 Adverse Events in 90 Days Post EUA Release

Celia Farber, December 9 , 2021

Children Are the Faultline in the COVID Vaccine Narrative that Exposes the Fraud

Vasko Kohlmayer, December 6 , 2021

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

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***

The United States government has won an appeal at Britain’s High Court over the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Friday’s ruling, which overturns an earlier decision, means 50-year-old Assange may now be closer to being sent from London’s high-security Belmarsh prison to the US, where he would face spying charges over WikiLeaks’ publication of secret military documents a decade ago.

The court said that US assurances were enough to guarantee Assange would be treated humanely and directed a lower court judge to send the extradition request to the home secretary, Priti Patel, for review.

Patel, who oversees law enforcement in the United Kingdom, will make the final choice on whether to extradite Assange.

But the legal saga is far from over, with Assange’s legal team expected to contest the latest decision.

Assange’s partner, Stella Moris, said Friday’s ruling was a “grave miscarriage of justice”, and promised Assange’s legal team would “appeal this decision at the earliest possible moment”.

Assange watched the proceedings via video link, from Belmarsh prison.

Concerns for Assange’s mental health

A lower court in January this year had refused the US’s extradition request, saying that Assange’s mental health was too fragile to withstand the American judicial system.

Such concerns had been raised before. In late 2019, a group of 60 doctors from several countries wrote to Patel to express their worries for his mental and physical health, and later claimed that they had failed to receive any response.

In the January case, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser at the Old Bailey court in London said Assange was “a depressed and sometimes despairing man” who had the “intellect and determination” to circumvent any suicide prevention measures taken by prison authorities.

The US appealed, challenging that notion.

A lawyer working for the US, James Lewis, said Assange “has no history of serious and enduring mental illness” and does not meet the threshold of being so ill that he cannot resist harming himself.

High Court decision “Grave miscarriage of justice,” says Julian Assange’s fiancée after a UK court overturned an earlier decision blocking the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States #FreeAssangeNOW #AssangeCase
Link: https://t.co/xD0NDaxhHJ pic.twitter.com/IE5WLsy8Ku

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) December 10, 2021

US authorities have told British judges that if they agree to extradite Assange, he could serve any US prison sentence he receives in his native Australia.

US prosecutors have indicted Assange on 17 espionage charges and one charge of computer misuse over WikiLeaks’ publication of thousands of leaked military and diplomatic documents.

The charges carry a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison, although Lewis said, “the longest sentence ever imposed for this offence is 63 months.”

Click here to read the full article.

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***

Remember when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) asked a federal court to give the agency 55 years to fully release data on Pfizer-BioNTech’s Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) “vaccine?” Well, now the FDA wants 75 years.

The FDA had previously agreed to release 500 pages per month of the more than 59,000 pages of data that exist. However, the agency now says another 20 years are needed to fully pore through the data, which it had no problem rushing through in a matter of months to grant Pfizer-BioNTech emergency use authorization (EUA) for the experimental drug.

“That discovery, and a desire to make sure it can work on other Freedom of Information Act requests at the same time, prompted the fresh request to the judge to allow production of roughly 12,000 pages by Jan. 31, 2022, and 500 pages per month thereafter,” reported The Epoch Times, citing attorney Aaron Siri who is working on the case.

“If you find what you are reading difficult to believe – that is because it is dystopian for the government to give Pfizer billions, mandate Americans to take its product, prohibit Americans from suing for harms, but yet refuse to let Americans see the data underlying its licensure,” Siri wrote on his Substack blog.

FDA says its 10 staff members who work on FOIA cannot review, release Pfizer data until 2096

The case Siri is working on against the FDA was brought on behalf of Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency (PHMPT), a group that says the FDA has not been complying in a timely manner with its requests for data.

Dr. Carole Browner, a research professor at the University of California – Los Angeles’s David Geffen School of Medicine, is part of the group, as are Peter Doshi, an associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, and Dr. Harvey Risch, a professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health.

Since the FDA spent just 108 days supposedly reviewing the 59,000 pages in order to grant the Pfizer-BioNTech injection an EUA, there is no reason why it should take 75 years to release that very same data to the public so they, too, can review it.

This is especially true as millions of Americans are being told they must take these experimental injections in order to keep their jobs or to continue sending their children off to public school.

Even worse is the fact that the FDA has now granted full authorization to Pfizer’s “Comirnaty” injection, which is supposedly the same as the EUA version though there is much controversy over whether or not the two are materially and legally the same.

“The entire purpose of FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) is government transparency,” Siri says.

“In multiple recent cases, in upholding the FOIA’s requirement to ‘make the records promptly available,’ courts have required agencies, including the FDA, to produce 10,000 or more pages per month, and those cases did not involve a request nearly this important – i.e., the data underlying licensure of a liability-free product that the federal government requires nearly all Americans to receive.”

Siri went on to explain that time is of the essence and the FDA needs to respond immediately, not in 75 years when most of the people alive today will already be dead.

In its defense, the FDA says that its Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research only has 10 staff members, two of whom are new. This is apparently not enough for the agency to “process” the 59,000-page document before the year 2096.

To move any faster, the FDA further claims, would divert “significant resources away from the processing of other FOIA requests that are also in litigation.”

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***

Up until now, New Zealand GPs and hospitals have been provided with a fact sheet from Pfizer listing 21 possible adverse events as a result of vaccination.

All of these are minor, requiring little or no treatment other than rest, with the exception of severe allergic reactions, myocarditis and pericarditis (inflammation of the heart). As a result, most of the many thousands of New Zealanders reporting adverse effects post vaccination have been sent home with little more than advice to take an aspirin and rest. Some have been told that their conditions may be unrelated medical events, psychosomatic, or due to anxiety on their part.

Relying on the short official Pfizer fact sheet as a guide, Medsafe, our NZ medicines regulatory body, has only accepted one out of the 100+ deaths actually reported to them as related to vaccination. Most are listed as unrelated, under investigation, or unknowable. By contrast, the NZ Health Forum and other groups have collected unofficial reports of adverse effects and death proximate to vaccination. Out of 670+ reports of death compiled by the Forum, 270 have already been investigated by medical professionals and closely linked to known adverse effects. Following the publication of the new Pfizer document many more are expected to be connected with vaccination. Reports describe symptoms such as chest pain, brain fog, extreme fatigue, neurological symptoms, tachycardia, stroke, heart attacks, and many more. Collected data suggests that as many as two-thirds of adverse event enquiries made to medical staff by vaccine recipients have not been reported to CARM—the NZ system of adverse event reporting. Medsafe itself estimates in its Guide to Adverse Reaction Reporting that in NZ only 5% of adverse events are reported. As a result the NZ public is completely unaware of the extent of reported possible risks of vaccination.

The just released Pfizer document which is being circulated widely in the public domain and can downloaded from websites is entitled:

5.3.6 CUMULATIVE ANALYSIS OF POST-AUTHORIZATION ADVERSE EVENT REPORTS OF PF-07302048 (BNT162B2) RECEIVED THROUGH 28-FEB-2021

Therefore the reported side effects predate the vaccine rollout in New Zealand. The report itself was finalised by Pfizer on 30 April 2021. Did Pfizer supply this information to our government during the early days of our universal vaccination programme? If so the results should have been shared with our medical professionals, politicians, and the public. Many of the new 100+ listed new adverse event types now released by Pfizer in this 38 page document pose long term risks to health. Until very recently, the document was being withheld by Pfizer who maintained it should be kept confidential. There is a strong possibility that very large numbers of New Zealanders will suffer long term injury as a result.

How did this happen without anyone’s knowledge?

Even though the Pfizer vaccine had undergone very short trials and had provisional approval only, Medsafe did not update its CARM adverse event reporting system to make it mandatory rather than voluntary.

Medsafe did not advise GPs and Hospital staff to be on high alert for adverse events and report them rapidly and in detail.

The Government ignored the unprecedented numbers of adverse events being reported to Medsafe and circulating in the community and on social media.

The Government instituted a public relations, promotional, and media campaign advising the public that the Pfizer covid-19 mRNA vaccine was completely safe and free of serious side effects, giving the impression that there were no side effects—not even the known serious effects of heart inflammation that Pfizer had already admitted.

Unaccountably, conditions imposed by the contract that our Government signed with Pfizer for the supply of vaccines have not been made public. We suspect that the contract contains standard clauses similar to those used with drugs that have completed safety trials, such as a provision that public discussion of adverse events may only be undertaken in conjunction with the company supplying the drug. If this is the case, it will have hamstrung Medsafe and our Government in their approach to assessment and public discussion of adverse events.

What are the new risks of vaccination?

Anyone reading the new Pfizer adverse event report compilation will be staggered. The sheer density of the technical medical terms and disease names are nevertheless broken down into recognisable and serious categories of illness—kidney failure, stroke, cardiac events, pregnancy complications, inflammation, neurological disease, autoimmune failure, paralysis, liver failure, blood disorders, skin disease, musculoskeletal problems, arthritis, respiratory disease, DVT, blood clots, vascular disease, haemorrhage, loss of sight, Bell’s palsy, and epilepsy.

How has this affected New Zealand?

Whilst even the official Medsafe record of adverse effects and the unofficial lists show that the immediate risks of covid vaccination could be as much as 50 – 300 times greater than even the most risky of previous traditional vaccines (such as the smallpox jab), and whilst the long term effects are unknown, 90% of eligible New Zealanders have gone ahead with vaccination having accepted the assurances of safety and efficacy from the government, or having been forced to get vaccinated under threat of loss of employment and freedom of movement. Feeling the fear of covid that has been generated by reports in the international and local media, most people completing vaccination heaved a great sigh of relief—that is one huge worry off my mind, now I can get on with my life.

Those finding that no immediate insurmountable reaction had surfaced (the majority) understandably agreed with the government: “What is all the fuss about? Why shouldn’t everyone do this, or be made to do this? It is a social good that will protect everyone”

BUT there is a huge iceberg in the path of the good ship New Zealand hidden under the waves of relief. Thousands are quietly suffering debilitating illness, unacknowledged and in some cases untreated by their doctors. For those who survived vaccination without immediate injury this was not a problem because they didn’t know about it apart from one or two complaints from friends that might just be random coincidences.

This has brought about a division in New Zealand society which the government created in the name of public safety. Thousands of dedicated servants of the nation including teachers, health workers, and others are being stigmatised and forced out of their jobs in a manner horrifyingly reminiscent of the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany. The government did this despite knowing that the Pfizer vaccine was neither fully tested, safe, nor particularly effective. Judges handed down decisions in courts supporting the government mandates unaware of crucial mRNA vaccine safety data, all because Pfizer had withheld this information, and the government had not done its due diligence. Had the true position been known, the High Court’s NZ Bill of Rights analysis may well have been different and its provision which guarantees that every individual should be able to make their own medical choices might still be intact.

Pfizer’s conclusions

Pfizer concludes the released document with a statement “Review of the available data for this cumulative PM experience, confirms a favorable benefit:risk balance for BNT162b2.” PM stands for the Post Marketing data set they are evaluating of 42,086 reported adverse events. Pfizer makes this bald claim of benefit despite admitting that “the magnitude of underreporting is unknown”. This document contains no further substantive information in support of this claim of benefit:risk balance other than a mysterious reference to “the known safety profile of the vaccine”.

The benefit:risk argument is in essence saying: covid-19 is a serious illness and our calculations show that more people will be injured by the disease than are being injured by the vaccine, therefore there will be a net benefit. This argument falls over because of at least three very important factors: Firstly treatment options have improved and thereby the risk of serious illness and death from covid has been greatly reduced.

Secondly the risk of covid is not evenly spread. People with comorbidities (other conditions) and the elderly are at very high risk. Most other people are at very low risk. Thus vaccination could subject people at low risk from covid to a higher risk from vaccination. Approaches to preventive health education can reduce the covid risk to people with comorbidities more than vaccination can. For example a study published in the BMJ found that people following a plant based diet have a 73% reduced risk of serious illness. Data from the UK Biobank has been analysed by researchers from Manchester and Oxford Universities and the West Indies who found that shift workers (who typically have disrupted bioclocks) have three times the risk of being hospitalised with covid. Preventive remedies include changes in diet such as the introduction of more fresh fruit, vegetables, and fibre, and reductions in known unhealthy habits such as smoking, excess alcohol consumption, an overly sedentary lifestyle, a predominance of ultra processed foods, and many more.

The third and most significant reason the benefit:risk argument falls over is the sheer range of adverse reaction types observed by Pfizer and kept hidden until now.

How could a single vaccine have such a wide range of effects?

The technical reasons why mRNA vaccines can have such broad effects on human health are understood by those working in gene therapy. Perfectly stable DNA function is critical to life. In turn, cell function integrity is critical to maintaining DNA. Individual cells contain mechanisms to repair their own DNA as many as 70,000 times a day. From this perspective, the in vitro laboratory study recently published in Viruses 2021, 13,2056, is indicative. It suggests a possible mechanism for vaccine harm. The study found that the spike protein localises in the nucleus and inhibits DNA damage repair by impeding access of key DNA repair proteins. The findings reveal a potential molecular pathway by which the covid spike protein might impede adaptive immunity. They underscore the potential side effects of the full-length spike-based mRNA vaccines.

Despite a degree of cellular autonomy, the nervous system and the physiology must and does function as a whole. The entire nervous system including the immune system is a ‘part and whole’ network. The whole is in every part, the DNA is in every cell, but cell function is also related to a generalised and interconnected genetic network—the holistic functioning of the physiological network is critical to its efficiency. Thus physiological network stability (health) can be impaired by the introduction of pieces of active genetic code (biologic instructions) like those contained in mRNA vaccines.

An analogy will make this clear. We are familiar with computer networks. A very common backbone of most commercial systems is produced by Microsoft. Each computer contains the Microsoft system and the network also runs under its system. The system is supported by computer code—a set of complex instructions written by Microsoft. Individual computers can perform standalone tasks and can communicate with other computers to keep the organisation running smoothly. This can be compared to our physiology. There are many systems in the body: immune system, circulatory system, digestive system, limbic system, homeostatic mechanisms, musculoskeletal structure, neural networks, and so on. They perform apparently stand alone functions, but all run on the basis of the same genetic code contained in our DNA and communicate with one another during the process of maintaining health. Back to our analogy: office staff sometimes send messages full of spelling errors to one another but this doesn’t harm the network. If however a computer virus written in code is sent by one computer it can overwhelm and crash network function because it affects the operating system. Some networks are protected by good firewalls and others are vulnerable. The Covid vaccine introduces a sequence of information written in genetic code into our physiology. It is no wonder that it could elicit such a very broad range of adverse effects, some of which are so serious as to be analogous to a computer network crash. Some individuals have strong immune systems and are little affected, others experience problems in one or other systems. The fact that a sequence of foreign code has been introduced into the physiology produces major risks to health, risks that those working in gene therapy for the last few decades are very familiar with.

The extremely broad range of adverse effects revealed by the Pfizer document is the physiological signature of a general control system failure, a failure of the body’s overall integration and function. It is not plausible to suggest otherwise. That is why experts in genomics, even as I write, are pondering fundamental questions about the action and safety of mRNA vaccines. They are also urging caution.

Conclusion

The NZ government agreed commercial terms with a single company for vaccine supply. It is possible that vital information was withheld. The public was kept in ignorance of known risks. This has divided our society and undermined our fundamental Kiwi tolerance on the basis of not only incomplete but misleading safety data. The government is asleep at the wheel. Knowing full well that safety trials were incomplete, the government apparently accepted information supplied by multinational commercial interests at face value. This should be a ‘never again’ moment. There are huge lessons to be learned and an apology owed to the whole population. The provisions of the NZ BIll of Rights should be given constitutional status. The vaccine mandates should be withdrawn and those affected by them compensated. The proposed vaccination of 5 -11 year olds should be stopped.

Our thanks to Daily Telegraph New Zealand for having brought this article to our attention

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The chairman and former Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of international news agency and “fact checker” Reuters is also a top investor and board member of Pfizer.

James C. Smith’s influential roles in both organizations “raises serious conflict of interest concerns,” the National Pulse remarked, because Reuters has not only given extensive coverage to Pfizer’s COVID-19 shot in particular, but it has overwhelmingly moved to “silence skeptics” of the Pfizer shots as well as other COVID-19 shots.

Smith’s roles raise added concern because Reuters, considered a leading international news source and boasting a reach of billions of people, brands itself as a news agency with “integrity” and “freedom from bias.” In fact, a 2021 article praises Reuters as one of the “Top 4 Unbiased Independent World News Sources.”

The National Pulse linked to a compilation of Reuters articles mentioning Pfizer, pointing to about 22,000 over “the last year alone.” Such articles portray Pfizer in an overal positive light, and at times Reuters aims to discredit Pfizer’s critics. The Pulse observed that articles mentioning Pfizer heavily outweigh those mentioning Moderna, which numbered about 8,200.

What gives Smith’s conflict of interest even greater weight is Reuters’ self-appointed role as “fact checker” of news. A survey of Reuters’ more recent fact checks shows the majority are dedicated to defending COVID-19 shots against questioning of their safety or efficacy, or of the motives behind their production and promotion.

For example, one recent “fact check” claims that “there is no evidence currently that COVID-19 vaccines are linked to an increase in sportspeople collapsing or dying due to heart issues such as myocarditis.” It made this claim despite its acknowledgement that “several studies do indeed suggest a link between myocarditis and the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines.”

Former Pfizer vice president Dr. Michael Yeadon has documented at least two dozen recent incidents of athletes collapsing, suffering injury, or dying, mostly from heart issues, noting that the rate of such occurrences has spiked in recent weeks.

However, more often than not, reports from people suffering injury after COVID-19 vaccination testify that doctors have either claimed their symptoms aren’t real or have dismissed out of hand the possibility of any link of those symptoms to COVID-19 jabs.

Other examples of such COVID jab-defending articles include “No evidence that Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine causes Alzheimer’s disease;” and “No evidence to support claim by ex-Pfizer scientist on COVID-19 vaccine safety in children,” referring to Dr. Yeadon’s declaration that “COVID-19 vaccines are ‘50 times more likely’ to kill children than COVID-19 itself.”

One would be hard pressed to find a Reuters “fact check” that admits any criticism of Pfizer COVID-19 shots, or COVID-19 shots in general, into its final analysis.

It is noteworthy that Smith also serves on the board of the World Economic Forum (WEF)’s Partnering Against Corruption Initiative and is a member of WEF’s International Business Advisory Boards of British American Business and the Atlantic Council.

Smith remains chairman of Reuters after having retired as president and CEO in February 2020, Pfizer’s website notes.

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Pfizer Chairman and CEO Albert Bourla said Wednesday “preliminary research” shows people may need a fourth COVID shot, as Fauci, CDC signal definition of fully vaccinated will change.

Pfizer Chairman and CEO Albert Bourla said Wednesday people may need a fourth dose of the COVID vaccine sooner than expected after preliminary research showed the Omicron variant can undermine antibody protection in people with only two doses.

Pfizer and BioNTech released results from their initial lab study showing a third dose was protective against the new variant, but the initial two-dose series dropped significantly in its ability to protect against the new strain.

The two-dose series may still offer protection against severe sickness from Omicron, the companies claimed.

“Three doses against Omicron are almost equivalent to the two doses’ effectiveness against … the original variant,” Bourla said in an interview with TODAY. “If we need a new vaccine … we will be able to have a very good one.”

Bourla said the preliminary study was based on a synthetic, lab-created copy of the variant, and more data is needed from tests using the actual virus. Real-world results will be more accurate and are expected in the next two weeks, he said.

“When we see real-world data, we will determine if the Omicron is well covered by the third dose and for how long,” Bourla told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “And the second point, I think we will need a fourth dose.”

Bourla previously predicted a fourth dose would be needed 12 months after the third dose, but said with Omicron, “we may need it faster.”

Studies published in October in the New England Journal of Medicine confirmed any immune protection offered by two doses of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine drops off after roughly two months.

Bourla said what’s most important is the rollout of third doses of its COVID vaccine. He said the booster and its antiviral pill, paxlovid, will help control COVID during the winter.

“A third dose will give very good protection I believe,” Bourla said, “and treatments such as Pfizer’s oral antiviral pill, paxlovid, will help prevent hospitalizations and control COVID during the winter.

Pfizer submitted its application to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for Emergency Use Authorization of paxlovid last month. The Biden administration purchased 10 million courses of the drug even though the FDA has not signed off on it.

Pfizer stocks rose Wednesday amid news the company’s COVID vaccine works against the Omicron variant after three doses.

“[There is] great news from Pfizer that a booster will work in adding solid protection against Omicron and stocks are celebrating,” said Peter Boockvar, chief investment officer of Bleakley Advisory Group.

As The Defender reported Tuesday, Global Justice Now released data showing “just eight top Pfizer and Moderna shareholders” and their CEOs made $10.31 billion since Omicron, emerged — despite reports, including by the doctor who discovered the variant, that it’s mild and may even be useful for achieving herd immunity.

Fauci: definition of ‘fully vaccinated’ will change to include third dose

It’s only a matter of time before the definition of fully vaccinated is changed to include a third dose, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Wednesday.

“Right now, I don’t see that changing tomorrow or next week,” Fauci said during an appearance on CNN, but added that in his opinion, “it’s going to be a matter of when not if.”

“Certainly, when you want to talk about what optimal protection is, I don’t think anybody would argue that optimal protection is going to be with a third shot,” Fauci said, but it’s a “technical, almost semantic definition, and it is the definition for requirements.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website, “fully vaccinated persons are those who are ≥14 days post completion of the primary series of an FDA-authorized COVID-19 vaccine.”

The term fully vaccinated refers to a person who has received two doses of Pfizer or ModernaCOVID vaccines or a single shot of Johnson & Johnson.

Fauci previously said changing the definition of what qualifies a person as fully vaccinated to include a booster shot was “on the table.”

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC — which determines the definition for fully vaccinated — said in October she was open to the possibility of changing the definition when the booster rollout began.

The definition has implications because it is used by those imposing vaccine mandates across the country, including federal mandates for healthcare workers, government contractors and private businesses with more than 100 employees.

Fauci said the timing of the change may be related to the ongoing cases. “It has implications for that, and that’s the reason why it matters,” Fauci said.

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Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.

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Many had anticipated the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse. The arbitrariness in the adjudication of self-defense and the question of jury’s and court’s objectivity within the context of the backlash of the anti-police brutality protest and efforts to address racism. However, rather than focus on the role that race and racism play in policing and the legal system, this article attempts to situate the Rittenhouse case within the larger context of the US imperialist-capitalist state.

A Social Structure of Violence

Kyle Rittenhouse was raised on a consistent diet of war, violence, and the allure of patriotic duty, ‘support the troops,’ ‘blue lives matter,’ which in most cases has been translated into an aspiration for honorific status. The aspirations for honorific status can be generalized to US society that has come to worship all things military^[i] or armed authority (i.e., the military and police organizations). Examples of an American diet are an abundance of the military, first-person kill video games, e.g., Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, and Battlefield, and Hollywood’s endless homage to war, killing, and their representations of heroism and retribution with an AR-15 or M4. These images are but part of a society whose social structure is structured in violence.

The US was founded on violence. From the pre-revolutionary days of 1776 to the founding of a new nation on the grounds of the indigenous people of North American, and a subsequent conquest, genocide, a system of slavery, and a long history of racial oppression and exploitation, which followed brutal repression of rebellions. This violence was not limited to contiguous lands because this imperialism spread to Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippines in the late 20th century. Imperialism is a permanent feature; the US engages in military coups, support of dictatorships, invasions, occupations, the assassination of democratically elected officials, and the political and economic domination of other nations has come to represent the US States. And more recently, the so-called ‘war on terror’ (read: the war against Arabs and Muslims). All these imperialist actions require a great deal of state-sanctioned violence.

A man holds a “Free Kyle” sign near Bradford High School during President Donald Trump’s visit on September 1, 2020. (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

Since World War II, the US has coordinated and solidified the interests of the political, corporate, and military elite into a permanent war economy in which its foreign and domestic policing are seen through the lens of military metaphysics (Mills 1954). Today, according to David M. Kennedy, the US military “wield unprecedented firepower and hold in their hands an almost incalculable capacity for focused violence. Not since the time of the Roman Empire have a single country’s arms weighed so heavily in the global scales” (2013:2).

As a result, the former US Army Colonel and historian, Andrew J. Bacevich wrote that

“Americans… have fallen prey to militarism, manifesting itself in a romanticized view of soldiers, a tendency to see military power as the truest measure of national greatness, and outsized expectations regarding the efficacy of force” (2013:2).

Militarism includes the entire colossus apparatus of coercive organizations, including policing and all aspects of the national security state. In addition, militarism comes with a high human and economic cost.

The US Social Character

David Riesman stated that “every society seems to get, more or less, the social character it needs” (1961:5). It is “simply the sum total of character traits to be found in the majority of the people in a given culture” (Fromm 1955:78). The point is that every society develops a particular social character that ensures the conformity of its members. The US has been no exception; its institutions of the state have socialized its social character. The dominant US social character has the beliefs and values that uphold the system of capitalism, such as excessive individualism and instrumental rationalism. And because of increased militarism, the social character also has a great tendency to accept violence and coercion as necessary to preserve their way of life. As a result, armed authority, the enforcers of capitalism, are regarded with the highest deference and fetishized. Just like imperialism is an integrative element of US capitalism at a macro-level, this is the fundamental essence of the US social character at the micro-level.

Fairly recent events have only further shaped the US social character. As David Harvey (2005) points out, the implementation of neoliberal policies that accelerated in the 1980s reduced the social welfare state, deregulated the economy, removed many tariffs and barriers, and weakened organized labor. Some of the consequences have been the displacement of manufacturing workers.

These changes also had their intended implications of increasing the profit margins of the capitalist class and reducing impediments that had prevented them from reaping enormous amounts of wealth. While some of the population was able to adapt, many were not. What followed was a series of social phenomena.

There was the deterioration of social conditions: a rise in unemployment, the underground economy, homelessness, and overall social malaise. The reduction of the welfare state and labor protections also occurred amid the backlash of the rise of social and revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s, resulting in a buildup in coercive organizations – e.g., policing and prison nexus (Parenti 1999).

In short, the implementation of neoliberal policies created the further need for more institutional violence and coercion (see Montes 2016) by policing the economic and racially dispossessed nationally and imposing neoliberal policies abroad.

A neoliberal ideology that negated the political-economic causes that explained crime, homelessness, and even alarming mental health crises became essential in sustaining these changes. This ideological change recast policing as honorific crime-fighting and not as enforcers of capitalism and racial order. Increased racial and gender diversity, with Hollywood adding intrigue and heroism increased its occupational prestige. The lack of secured employment opened the floodgates for applicants. In the end, quality of life and militarized policing works to readjust capitalism with its latest version – i.e., neoliberalism and further accelerate the imperialistic side of the US social character.

In addition, since the US is not in an ascending global position but is in a state of decline, with the loss of its manufacturing industry, which includes technological and science production, a nation in debt, the US relies more on its military might (Harvey 2003). It does not make or engage in the level of innovation of a rising nation. The only hand it can play is its military hand. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the global ‘War on Terror,’ its involvement in so-called regime changes are all testament to how US capitalism relies on imperialism.

The problem is that the above conditions have created too many young men and not-so-young men who want to be ‘in the shit’ of combat. They have itchy fingers and want a baptism of blood, with all the glory it is supposed to provide, but the US-imperialist state cannot accommodate them all in its military and the national security state. So, they join the ranks of local policing and become prison guards and jail deputies. Those who cannot join or develop their own paramilitary groups in which they attempt to recreate their military ‘tribe’ experience (Junger 2016) or to develop the bond of solidarity they imagined exist in a real combat unit.

The desire to create a ‘tribe’ or group solidarity is not unique to members and ex-members of armed authorities or those who aspire to be in one. This tendency is an attempt to struggle against egoistic (excessive individualism) and anomic (lack of normative regulation) tendencies in US capitalist society.^[ii] Max Weber described how capitalism was increasingly becoming an inescapable iron cage of rationalization (1958:182-183). As tradition and religious forces that once provided spiritual and moral guidance lose their hold, in their place is ends-means calculated, bureaucratic formal rationalism, resulting in the disenchantment of social life (Gerth and Mills 1946:50-51).

US Imperialism as Colorblind

The more excessive use of the white supremacy label works to distort and politicize within the parameters of the duopoly political party. For the Democratic Party and its supporters, white supremacy is a word used to describe the supporters of Trump, the participants of the capital protest, and the various right-wing groups that support Trump.

A message like ‘Make America Great Again’ and referring to people as either ‘rapists’ or ‘terrorists’ certainly invites this interpretation. This results in trickery, political manipulation, in which the mainstream media spins, distorts, misinforms to generate ratings, and propagates hatred and division.

However, the problem with using this label on individuals, a political party, and groups is not that it might not be true, but that it diverts our attention away from how white supremacy is central to the US imperialist state. When one political party accuses the other party of the state of acting racist, this displays the hypocrisy that pervades the US imperialist capitalist state.

The historical record bears out that US state operates within a racial hierarchy. One needs to only consider the following examples presented above: the conquest and genocide of the Indigenous people of the North American continent; the system of slavery and the subsequent de jure and de facto segregation and discrimination; war against national liberation movements, and the ‘war on terror’ (read: war on Arabs and Muslims).

Although imperialism is an integral part of US capitalism, capitalism is an equal opportunity system of exploitation and oppression.

Because wealth is based on the exploitation of other people’s labor and the extraction and privatization of lands and resources. Contrary to the system of capitalism being founded on the free market and free trade, many countries have experienced the violence and coercion of imperialism when it refuses to open their countries up to foreign markets, unfavorable trade, and direct foreign investments.

As a result, it is difficult to untangle imperialism from US capitalism. Therefore, capital (wealth) accumulation is directly correlated with the dispossession of people from the land, other means of production, and the fruits of their labor. In a capitalist society, there is a direct relationship between wealth and poverty.

Capitalism produces many victims, vectors, and points of resistance. One can see slave revolts, peasant revolts, anti-colonial, and worker’s rebellions all responding to the central problem of capitalism and its various manifestations of oppression, usurpation, and exploitation.

For example, the capitalist system has been destructive to many US whites living in urban, suburban, and rural parts of the United States. (One can also see this among European countries such as British colonialism of Ireland and the imperialist actions against Yugoslavia). The notion of white privilege, especially if many of them also find themselves a part of the permanent underclass, is offensive and obtuse. One can undoubtedly refer to the psychological wage of whiteness as a means to drive a wedge between white and black workers (Du Bois 1992), or Karl Marx’s “The Irish Question,” whose work reverberates how oppressed people are divided and conquered. The use of racial ideologies in the development of false political and class consciousness can also be seen in the development of the southern strategy, the ‘get tough on crime’ platforms of both the Republican and Democratic parties. These examples illustrate how animosity and scapegoats divide and disunite while providing political currency to the duopoly political party system.

A common denominator is found among imperialist powers and regimes, including the US, which uses some form of racial or cultural hierarchy, as was also operating in Nazi Germany. These powers were also highly skilled in integrating and inducing their citizens (including those with second-class status, resulting from their racial, economic, or gender oppression) to participate in the very machinations of the imperialist state. The political institutions, political parties, and legal systems, in most cases, did not operate in opposition to their political order. Perhaps, another way of looking at this is to understand that the US imperialist state retains its racial character, even as the perception of US nationalism as a racially diverse amalgamation of people. Yet, its racial character of a racial hierarchy continues to be dominant.

This is problematic because white supremacy is not just a ‘white racist thing,’ or exclusive to the Republic Party, Trump, and his supporters, or right-wing groups, but is organized in the social structure. In this context, one does not need to be a racist to support, pledge allegiance, or kill abroad or nationally. Neither does one need be a racist to protect the privilege of a few, suppress resistance from ‘insurgents,’^[iii] and carry out the biddings of an imperialist capitalist state, which is grounded in subtle and not so subtle racial ideologies, masked in diversity and nationalism. As pointed out above, US imperialist capitalism is not solely dependent on racial hierarchy. It has many vectors that are made hidden and are part of its false consciousness, which makes it easier to use the label of white supremacy within a narrow perimeter for political expediency.

War Against All and the Victimology of Self-Defense

The very birth of the United States, as a colonial settler’s state and the threats from the Indigenous people on the ‘frontier,’ slave revolts, workers’ strikes, a civil rights mobilization, and urban rebellion has historically created a narrative of how the good wholesome, law-abiding people were under attack by unprovoked people. For Michael Parenti, the role of the usurper and the usurped have been reversed by the representation of the paradigm of the wagon train versus the swarthy hordes (1989). The image is that it could be happening in the US wild west, Vietnam [Iraq, or a city or town in the United States], but the general scene is the same.

“There is a fort, or encampment, or a wagon train, and inside the encampment are the human beings. They are white, they are human, they are warm, they are attractive, they talk, and they are nice. Outside come the swarthy hordes, the savages. They can be Indians, they can be Bushman, they can be Arabs on camels…. They are subhuman and they are attacking the human beings. And the wagon forms a circle, and the human beings know what to do. They leveled their guns and began to knock off, shoot these screaming savages” (Parenti 1989).

We are never told why the ‘swarthy horde’ attack the human beings. We are never told that they are protecting their land, their people and way of life or that they are fighting against social injustices. If any of this is acknowledged, then we are told that protest is acceptable if it is nonviolent. Yet, the regular structured violence, which is necessary to maintain a particular ‘peace and stability’ is normalized and is never discussed.

This is the quintessential representation of victimhood because it denies the real victim the right to resist and fight back against the injustice of colonialism, exploitation, police brutality, racism, etc. What then is left is the narrative of those in power. Their innocence, and how they are just defending themselves against the ‘savages’ – also, read protester and the ‘rioter.’ The reason people protest and rebel, taking part in extra-parliamentary actions is never fully explained. However, the reason is apparent: it would illustrate the guilt of the US state, its duopoly political party system, and all its supporters and their role in creating the conditions in which people feel the need to resist usurpation and inequality. In this context, we should also understand how exploited and racially oppressed people attempt to seek shelter, reward, and honorific status as protectors of the encircled encampment, making them also culpable.

Enter Kyle Rittenhouse, Travis McMichael and Greg McMichael, and George Zimmerman (to name some of the most recent cases) who decided to enter the encircled encampment as so-called ‘defenders’ against the ‘swarthy horde,’ or dangerous classes and races of insurgents.

For them and the US imperialist state is in a war against all.

It is not just the supposed external threat (e.g., ‘the war on terror,’ China, and Russia) but the supposed internal threat of insurgents that are said to be bent on destroying ‘America’ and its status quote. A status quote that Howard Zinn argued is protected by guards (i.e., the armed authorities and the middle class), who will not develop a political class consciousness until they too realize that their lives are as expendable as the prisoners [the exploited working class and dispossessed] of the system (1995).

In addition, Barnard Harcourt (2018) reminds us that in any potential revolutionary situation, the population comprises roughly of 15% insurgents or revolutionaries, 70% of the passive majority, and 15% of the counterrevolutionaries (i.e., the government, its political parties, the courts, its armed authority, and their supporters). The objective of the insurgent and the counterrevolutionary is to win (gain the trust) of the passive majority. Historically, as well as currently, this has been no easy task. The complex and sophisticated US imperialist state’s ability to co-opt, confuse, and distract and misdirect our attention, resulting in more people lining up to join the counterrevolutionaries. The allure and worship of all things military or armed authority have become a dominant component in the US social character, especially in this period of the overall US global decline.

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Vince Montes is a lecturer in sociology at California State University – East Bay. He earned a Ph.D. in sociology and historical studies at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, New York, NY. His research includes US imperialism, capitalism, and political control.

Sources

Bacvich, Andrew J. 2005. The New American Militarism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

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Notes

^[i] See Greenwald 2012 for the use of this concept.

^[ii] See Emile Durkheim 1953 Suicide for the concepts of egoism and anomie.

^[iii] The US state perceives any group or individual who challenges the status quote as a threat is considered an insurgent (see Harcount 2018).