Mother Sues D.C. Doctor Who Gave Kids COVID Vaccines Without Consent
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | March 6, 2023
The mother of two children who were given COVID-19 vaccines without the mother’s consent is suing the doctor who administered the vaccines.
An attorney representing NaTonya McNeil last week filed a lawsuit in Superior Court for the District of Columbia against Janine A. Rethy, M.D., M.P.H.
According to the complaint, on Sept. 2, 2022, McNeil took her two older children, ages 15 and 17, to the KIDS Mobile Medical Clinic/Ronald McDonald Care Mobile clinic, operated by Georgetown Hospital, to complete their required annual physical exam for the 2022-2023 school year.
The lawsuit alleges Rethy, director of the mobile clinic, held the children in the examination room longer than necessary for a regular check-up and vaccinated them against COVID-19 over their objections and without consulting their mother
In order to attempt to obtain the children’s consent — which they are not legally able to provide without a parent or guardian — the doctor falsely informed the children the COVID-19 vaccine was mandatory for school attendance and told them they could not lawfully decline it if they wanted to attend school.
The suit, filed by D.C. Attorney Matthew Hardin, seeks damages for false imprisonment, battery and fraud.
Children’s Health Defense (CHD) is financing the lawsuit because, according to CHD President and General Counsel Mary Holland, “CHD couldn’t just sit still and not allow this wrong to go unpunished and not bring this to the public’s attention.”
In an exclusive conversation with The Defender, McNeil explained why she is suing the the doctor:
“I just feel like people shouldn’t be able to do whatever they want to do to other people and especially not to children. As a mother, I feel like, ‘You all just took all my rights away from me to do what you wanted to do to my kids.’
“I do want justice to be done in this case. I feel like something needs to be done. This can’t just continue to happen.”
‘I feel violated’
According to the complaint, Rethy’s stated goal is to vaccinate all children against COVID-19. The complaint quotes her statement to the press:
“Our goal is to increase vaccination rates in children here in D.C. . . . For more than 30 years our role has been to be in the community to help address the problem of health disparities, bringing families care where they are.
“For this particular effort, we are glad to be partnering with DC Health to provide both regular childhood vaccines and COVID-19 vaccines to all children.”
In addition to her role as director of the mobile clinic, Rethy is chief of MedStar Georgetown University Hospital’s Division of Community Pediatrics and assistant professor of pediatrics at Georgetown University School of Medicine.
McNeil said that when she took her older children to the clinic, she stayed outside the examination room to care for her infant. As soon as the children entered the doctor’s office, she called her daughter’s cellphone to let Rethy know she was just outside the door if the doctor needed to consult her for anything.
According to McNeil, the doctor did not ask or inform her about any vaccinations, and did not ask her to sign anything. At the end of the physical, Rethy came out to talk to her.
McNeil said the doctor explained her son’s asthma treatment plan, but that’s all they discussed.
As they were heading home, McNeil said she was shocked when her daughter complained that her arm hurt “pretty bad.” When McNeil asked her why it hurt, her daughter said she was given the COVID-19 shot, even though she told the doctor she didn’t want it.
When McNeil asked her why she allowed the doctor to administer the shot, her daughter said:
“When she had the needle in her hand and she was coming towards me, I backed up and I asked her what is that needle, and she said it was the COVID shot and I … told her I didn’t want it and she said, ‘Well it is mandatory, you have to get it in order to go to school.’”
Rethy allegedly administered the shot to her daughter, and then to her son. McNeil said:
“He’s 14 and he said they didn’t even ask him if he wanted it or not, but when they gave it to him, he said he thought he had to get it because his sister got it.”
According to the complaint, both children received the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, authorized for emergency use, and the meningococcal vaccine. Her son was also injected with TDaP.
Both children were upset and angry they had been coerced into vaccination, the complaint says.
No school mandate, despite what clinic and doctor alleged
When she got home, McNeil said she called the doctor’s office, and asked them why they vaccinated her children without her consent.
“I would have never consented to you all vaccinating my children,” she said. “I’m not vaccinated and I’m not getting vaccinated and my kids were never supposed to be vaccinated for COVID period, under no circumstances.”
She said the person on the phone said they were supposed to get them for school.
After hanging up, McNeil said she was “so irritated I even started crying” because she couldn’t believe “they put this poison” into her children’s bodies.
In July 2022, D.C. public schools imposed a vaccine mandate for schoolchildren ages 12 and up for the 2022-2023 school year. But on Aug. 26, just weeks after imposing the mandate, officials walked it back, postponing it until 2023.
That means when McNeil’s children saw the doctor, there was no school vaccine mandate in place, despite what the Rethy allegedly told the children.
The age of consent
The District of Columbia in March 2021 enacted the D.C. Minor Consent for Vaccination Amendment Act of 2020 (D.C. Minor Consent Act), allowing children 11 and older to consent to the administration of any vaccine — including COVID-19 shots — recommended by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) — without parental knowledge or consent if the medical provider believed “the minor is capable of meeting the informed consent standard.”
The law also required healthcare personnel to provide accurate immunization records to the Department of Health and to the student’s school, but not to parents with religious exemptions.
CHD and Parental Rights Foundation filed a lawsuit seeking a court order to declare the D.C. Act unconstitutional.
A judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on March 18, 2022, granted a preliminary injunction prohibiting the D.C. mayor, Department of Health and public schools from enforcing the law.
That means at the time McNeil’s children visited the clinic, they could not legally provide consent to be vaccinated without their mother’s consent.
McNeil said:
“To do that to my little children, my innocent children. They took her rights. When she backed away from you [the doctor] and said she didn’t want it, that should have been the end of it.
“Or you [the doctor] should have called me on the phone to find out what I feel about the situation. But you [the doctor] basically told my child a lie so you [she] could do what you [she] wanted to do to my kid.”
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Virgin Australia flight from Adelaide to Perth forced to make emergency landing as First Officer suffered heart attack 30 minutes after departure
By Dr. William Makis MD | COVID Intel | March 7, 2023
Two days ago I wrote about pilots and fight attendants suffering cardiac arrests in-flight and then dying suddenly.
One of my readers kindly wrote in the comments section about a very recent incident on a Virgin Australia flight. This is that incident and now we have more information.
“Virgin Australia flight from Adelaide to Perth was forced to make an emergency landing after the First Officer reportedly suffered a heart attack just 30 minutes after departure. (click here)
The incident occurred on March 3, 2023, and resulted in the Airbus A320 being forced to return to Adelaide, where emergency responders were waiting to transport the sick pilot to the hospital.
The First Officer became incapacitated after suffering a heart attack. The Captain of the flight declared an emergency and successfully landed the aircraft around 70 minutes later.”
Aero Inside reports:
“A VARA Virgin Australia Regional Airlines Airbus A320-200, registration VH-VNB performing flight VA-717 from Adelaide, SA to Perth, WA (Australia), was enroute at FL320 about 240nm westnorthwest of Adelaide about 30 minutes into the flight when the first officer suffered a heart attack and became incapacitated. The captain declared PAN PAN and returned the aircraft to Adelaide for a safe landing on runway 23 about 70 minutes later.”
Here is additional information (thank you to @AirBo55):
Mainstream media pushing for one pilot in cockpit…
I have not seen any mainstream media reporting of this frightening incident. However, I have seen many articles from the media pushing for one pilot in the cockpit instead of two.
CNN – Why airplanes might soon have just one pilot
CBS News – Airlines are lobbying for a change to federal regulations that could put one pilot in the cockpit
Forbes – Airlines Move To Have One Pilot, Not Two, In Cost-Cutting Solution
“In a move to save costs and ease staff shortages, many countries are asking the UN body that controls global aviation safety rules, to move to a one-pilot model in commercial flights, instead of two.”
My Take…
As I’ve written before, I fear that we are getting closer and closer to a major airline crash due to pilot and or co-pilot incapacitation, as a result of COVID-19 vaccine injuries.
In the meantime, the mainstream media are aggressively pushing the concept of only one fully COVID-19 vaccinated pilot in the cockpit. Almost as if they want a major airline crash to take place. Would such an incident bring about a crackdown on flying in general? To fight climate change? And for our safety, of course?
I am currently working on a substack about small plane crashes and helicopter crashes in the past year where there was no obvious evidence of mechanical problems. As you can imagine, there are many of them.
Dr. Kirk Moore Insists He Did NOT Sell Fake COVID-19 Vaccine Cards
Utah doctor claims federal indictment contains fundamental falsehood
By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | March 7, 2023
A week ago I reported the story of Dr. Kirk Moore—a plastic surgeon who was recently indicted by a federal grand jury in Utah for conspiracy to defraud the US; conspiracy to convert, sell, convey, and dispose of government property; and conversion, sale, conveyance, and disposal of government property and aiding and abetting.
The government’s indictment and mainstream media are highlighting the assertion that Dr. Moore and his colleagues received $50 per procedure in which they disposed of a COVID-19 vaccine dose instead of injecting it into the patient, and then issued a fake vaccine card to the patient. This is deemed to prove that Dr. Moore—a plastic surgeon by trade—”benefitted” from his actions.
I initially assumed the federal investigators and prosecutors involved in the case must have found evidence to support their assertion in the indictment that Dr. Moore had “benefitted” from these transactions—that is, that HE received all or part of the $50 per procedure.
However, shortly after I posted my essay, I was contacted by people familiar with the matter who claimed that the indictment’s assertion is false. To check their assurance, I contacted Dr. Moore and conducted a long interview with him.
Dr. Moore insists that never received a single dollar for administering early treatments to COVID-19 patients or for issuing COVID-19 vaccine cards to patients who feared the mRNA gene transfer injections are not safe. A plastic surgeon by trade, he insists he administered early treatment and issued the cards solely as a charitable endeavor—that is, to help the sick stay out of hospital and to help his fellow citizens who were mandated to receive the injections in order to retain their student and job positions.
In other words, according to Dr. Moore, the federal indictment’s assertion that HE benefitted from the $50 per procedure is FALSE. Because most patients expressed their desire to pay him at least some fee for his invaluable service, he adopted the practice of instructing each to make a $50 donation to a medical freedom charity from which he received no funds. He assumed that keeping this practice strictly charitable would protect him from the charge that he received financial benefits for his actions. He claims the evidence presented in his forthcoming trial will prove that he received no benefit.
An especially intriguing detail he related in my interview is the strange fact that—though he knew he was under investigation because HHS and DHS agents visited him at his office and served him a search warrant to seize his cell phone—he was NOT subsequently served with notice that a federal prosecutor had impanelled a grand jury and secured an indictment.
He only learned about this alarming action in a press report, from which he also learned the date and time of his arraignment.
We encourage our Substack readers to learn more about Dr. Moore’s case by visiting his website: https://www.standformoore.com
CDC’s Attempt Get Mainstream Media to Spread False Information
CDC Falsely Claims To Major Media Outlet That the 7.7% Medical Care Figure Was Wrong!
By Aaron Siri | Injecting Freedom | March 6, 2023
After ICAN obtained the v-safe data and published to the world that 7.7% of v-safe users sought medical care (and that the CDC hid this number from the public for two years), Reuters reached out to my firm stating it had received comment from the CDC regarding this figure.
Incredibly, CDC told Reuters that the 7.7% figure was grossly inflated because it claimed there were 10 million records in v-safe, not 10 million users. Here is the exact email I received from Reuters:
“CDC says v-safe has 10 million records, not 10 million users, and that one person could submit multiple records of seeking medical care for the same adverse event. Which makes the 7.7% statistic problematic… Is that something ICAN was aware of or able to adjust for?”
Based on the CDC’s claim, the major news outlet asked if ICAN would be modifying its claim of 7.7%. But it was the CDC’s claim that was categorically false!
ICAN was correct: there were 10 million v-safe users, not 10 million records; and the 7.7% also did not double-count because it was the number of unique v-users who submitted one or more reports of seeking medical care.
The CDC was plainly pushing the major news to declare ICAN’s claim false and, hence, characterize it as misinformation.
Had Reuters just accepted the CDC’s claim, as typically occurs, it likely would have published a story declaring ICAN’s 7.7% figure to be false information.
Luckily, to its credit and because one of its reporters proceeded objectively and with integrity, this news outlet did not just take the CDC’s word for its claim. It actually gave us an opportunity to respond to this claim. (Albeit not by asking if ICAN believed it was wrong but by asking if it would adjust the figure it published.)
CDC Proven Wrong
Showing that the CDC was wrong was simple. All we had to do was use the CDC’s own data it provided to ICAN!
The data the CDC provided to ICAN clearly and without any doubt showed that ICAN was using the precise and correct number of v-safe users and the number of unique v-safe users who reported needing medical care. Meaning, the 7.7% was absolutely accurate – without any doubt.
We sent this proof and asked Reuters to please ask that CDC substantiate with actual proof, not just conclusory assertions, how ICAN was supposedly wrong and spreading misinformation. And again, to Reuter’s credit, because it demanded proof from the CDC, the CDC eventually relented!
The CDC finally conceded that v-safe did in fact have approximately 10 million users and, hence, the 7.7% figure of those who reported seeking medical care was accurate.
With that, I expected that interaction would be one heck of a story in and of itself! I foresaw a Reuters story that disclosed this CDC behavior – here was the CDC trying to get a major news outlet to publish false information! It was trying to get it to write that the 7.7% figure was incorrect.
That should have been its own major story. And although Reuters did publish a story about v-safe, thus far, these behind-the-scenes communications have not been published. I expect they never will, other than in this article.
CDC Asks Reuters to Ask ICAN for a Copy of CDC’s V-Safe Data
It gets even worse. Making plain that the CDC officials communicating with Reuters were not concerned about the facts, and instead were focused solely on pushing their “safe and effective” mantra which is typically not questioned, they further revealed the agency’s disfunction: the CDC officials asked Reuters if it could get a copy of the v-safe data from ICAN and send it back to the CDC representatives Reuters were dealing with so they can review that data. If that sounds nutty, it is because it is.
Just so you don’t think you misread the foregoing, let me repeat: CDC asked Reuters to get the v-safe data that CDC had given to ICAN days before, and then send that data back to the CDC to review.
You can’t make this stuff up. Mind you, the data had already all been made public on ICAN’s website.
What this shows is that these CDC officials were driving forward to push a major news outlet to claim to the world that ICAN’s claim of 7.7% was false without actually looking at the data to assure their claim was accurate. It also shows an incredible level of disfunction at the CDC; instead of getting the data internally, they had to ask a news outlet to get its own data produced to ICAN to then send it back to CDC.
And these are the folk that have effectively dictated what level of civil and individual rights most Americans would have over the last three years!
CDC Seeks to Deceive Again
When the foregoing gambit by the CDC did not work, it had a new gambit. It tried to get Reuters to publish that the 7.7% figure was misleading by claiming to Reuters that “[i]n the first week after vaccination, reports of seeking any medical care … range from 1-3% (depending on vaccine, age group and dose).”
But as we explained to Reuters, even this is not true. For example, 3.36% of those younger than 3 years old reported receiving medical care within one week of receiving the Moderna vaccine.
Even if all combinations of vaccine, age group, and dose resulted in between 1% to 3% of infants, children, or adults seeking medical care within one week, that is not necessarily an insignificant figure! Why is this somehow comforting? Especially in the context of vaccinating the entire country.
And why should the reports of medical care on days 14 or 21 or 28 be ignored? Is it because the CDC thought it was not relevant information? And, if so, why in the world ask v-safe users to submit this information on these days? Or is it because the CDC did not like what the numbers showed? I will let you be the judge.
As noted above, and a sad irony, when medical care is sought during the first seven days, the CDC presumably attributes that to expected reactogenicity and tells the public to not be concerned. And if it occurs beyond seven days, it pretends as if that data does not exist – even though harms from COVID-19 vaccines, as the CDC well knows, can occur well after the first seven days, as discussed in depth in part 7 of this v-safe substack series.
Also, here, we are talking about a novel medical product, hence heightening the need for assessing its long-term safety – certainly beyond 7 days post-vaccination.
This shows how the sausage is made in mainstream media. But for the actual tenacity – I would even say courageous – pushback from a Reuters reporter, the story around ICAN’s v-safe claims could have ended very differently.
The real story I can only imagine this reporter would have liked to publish, the one I told above, however, would no doubt be a step too far for Reuters as an organization – at least for now, until brave journalists become the typical journalist.
Will Pakistan defy US sanctions to complete ‘Peace Pipeline’ with Iran?
By F.M. Shakil | The Cradle | March 7, 2023
Islamabad has formed a diplomatic channel to convince Washington to ease sanctions on Iran, which would finally allow for the completion of a crucial pipeline project to bring cheap Iranian natural gas to Pakistan.
Iran has vowed to take the matter to arbitration if Pakistan does not complete its portion of the pipeline by March 2024, as stipulated in an agreement between the two West Asian countries.
Discussions on constructing the massive pipeline project began almost 29 years ago, in 1994 – then called the Iran-India-Pakistan pipeline – which originally envisioned moving Iranian gas to Pakistan, Bangladesh, and China. The focus later shifted to constructing a pipeline between Pakistan and Iran only, but the project has never been completed.
According to the terms of the IP-GSPA (Gas Sales Purchase Agreement) signed between Iran and Pakistan, each country was obligated to construct the portion of the pipeline on its own territory, and the first flow of Iranian gas to Pakistan was to start January 1, 2015. The agreement stipulated Pakistan would pay Iran $1 million per day in exchange for 750 million cubic feet of gas daily, with a contract lasting 25 years.
Iran completed its portion of the pipeline in 2011, however, Pakistan has failed to construct its portion, largely due to difficulties caused by US economic sanctions imposed on Iran for the country’s alleged nuclear weapons program. US sanctions block Pakistan from purchasing Iranian gas, and this geopolitical risk has made Pakistani banks unwilling to finance the project.
Because of US foreign policy pritiorites, therefore, Pakistan continues to rely on more expensive liquified natural gas (LNG) to meet its burgeoning energy needs, which has greatly limited Pakistani economic growth and exposed the country to crises during periods of volatile LNG price spikes.
Due to these difficulties, Pakistan’s Inter-State Gas Systems (ISGS) and the National Iranian Gas Company (NIGC) signed a revised agreement in 2019 to allow Pakistan more time to complete its segment of the pipeline. The agreement stipulated that neither Iran nor Pakistan will take the other to court for delays or impose fines until 2024.
But US sanctions have continued to make Pakistan’s completion of the project difficult, and Iran is now threatening to sue Islamabad for $18 billion in fines if it breaks the agreement and fails to complete construction by the 2024 cutoff date.
Financial straits or US pressure
As Asif Durrani, a former Pakistan ambassador to Iran, tells The Cradle:
“Pakistan needs roughly $3 billion to lay a pipeline stretching over a radius of 781 kilometers inside the country. The question is who will finance this project, and secondly, the US sanctions on Iran, which took the air out of this project as far as Pakistan is concerned, need a revisit by the US authorities to protect the faltering economies of the region.”
The sanctions, he adds, were primarily focused on the energy sector of Iran and set a cap of $10 million on investments in the Iranian oil and gas sector.
Durrani is not convinced that US sanctions make completion of the pipeline impossible, however.
“These are lousy arguments because, despite these restrictions, Iran supplies Turkiye with almost $10 billion annually in natural gas,” he argues, adding that India and China have also resisted US sanctions.
Durrani contends that Pakistan and Iran are neighboring nations and that neighbors must always conduct business with one another. He urges private sector participation in the IP gas project to accelerate the development phase of this huge project.
Now a senior fellow at the Islamabad Policy Research Institute (IPRI), the former Pakistani envoy to Tehran had in 2021 criticized the US for sabotaging the Iranian nuclear deal, claiming that Iran, as a Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) member, had the legal right to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.
Dr. Muhammad Abdul Muqtedar Khan, an Indian-American academic and a professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Delaware concurs with Durrani’s logic, telling The Cradle that too many countries in this region tend to yield to US pressure unnecessarily.
India, he says, disregarded US outrage over the Russian oil issue and refused to capitulate, unlike Pakistan which is still in a state of vacillation. In the same way, Pakistan could proceed with the Iran gas pipeline project, citing its energy and resource constraints in the face of pressure from Washington.
“In 1990, India, China, and even Bangladesh showed interest in the peace pipeline – but, in 2008, as a result of the Indian nuclear accord with the US, New Delhi decided to withdraw. As the thing unfolded, Iran has already installed the pipeline on their side of the border, but Pakistan is still dilly-dallying about it because of the US pressure and lack of the financial means to begin construction,” Khan adds.
He says Iran has spent a considerable amount of money constructing its section of the pipeline and would want compensation for the resulting commercial loss. “Iran has granted sufficient time for the pipeline’s development, and if Pakistan begins building its gas infrastructure, it could gain some cushion to reduce its import bill.
Pakistan is hedging its bets
Pakistan’s Secretary of Petroleum, Ali Raza Bhutta, disclosed in a meeting of the country’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) that Pakistan has spoken to the US about the gas project, seeking relief in sanctions on Iran to press ahead with the construction of the pipeline.
Islamabad’s top energy official went on to add that since there was a ban on importing gas from Iran, the government has conveyed to the US ambassador to either grant Islamabad permission to go ahead with the project, or compensate Iran for the penalty imposed for opting out of the project.
As Noor Alam Khan, Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, tells The Cradle:
“I did not convene this meeting specifically for the IP gas project, the focus was only on the audit paras of the petroleum ministry, and I suggested during the meeting – not the secretary – that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs should approach the US to let them know how serious the situation is.”
When informed that the secretary of petroleum had briefed the committee on the IP gas project and that media had quoted him saying that either the US should pay the damages or permit the country to continue with the IP gas project under the terms of the Iran agreement, Khan, a member of a breakaway faction of former president Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf party, became irritated, said it was nonsense, and hung up the phone.
The Pakistan National Assembly’s Foreign Affairs Committee also discussed this matter last week. The committee’s chairman, Mohsin Dawar, raised fears about the fact that several nations in the region have received waivers for importing Iranian oil even though Iran is under sanctions.
Pakistan, however, was unable to secure such a waiver to conduct such lucrative oil and gas business with Iran. He pressed the appropriate ministries to examine opportunities for receiving exemptions for the IP gas pipeline with Iran, much as India and China had done for Iranian oil imports.
IP Gas Pipeline in perspective
The plan for the IP Gas Pipeline, which is also called the “Peace Pipeline,” dates back to 1994, when India was also part of the project.
The 1,700-mile (2,735 km), $7.5 billion project planned to move gas from the South Pars Gas Fields to India through the western part of Pakistan, Balochistan. Since its inception, the project has encountered numerous obstacles that have caused repeated delays in the execution of a natural gas project that was badly needed by energy-starved Pakistan.
In 2008, the three nations were close to reaching an agreement before India opted to pursue an alternative project, the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline (TAPI). The US pressure and sanctions on Iran appear to have impacted India’s decision to withdraw from the IP gas pipeline agreement and pursue an alternative that excluded Iran.
Then, in 2010, a 25-year-long Gas Sale and Purchase Agreement (GSPA) was signed, to construct a pipeline stretching across Pakistani territory from the Iranian border to Nawabshah, a distance of 781 kilometers.
Approximately 665 kilometers will travel through Balochistan while 115 kilometers will run through Pakistan’s Sindh province. The length of the Iranian portion of the pipeline is 1,100 kilometers. It begins in the energy economic zone of Pars and goes to Iranshahr and Bushehr. The route then continues through Fars, Kerman, Hormozghan, and Sistan-Baluchistan.
From the Pakistani border to Nawabshah, the pipeline will stretch around 781 kilometers. After completion, the IP gas pipeline was projected to supply 750 million cubic feet of gas per day to Islamabad from Iran. According to the deal, gas supplies from Iran would start in 2014. But, this assumption turned out to be a pipe dream and has not been realized during the past nine years.
A panacea for Pakistan’s economic woes
“Pakistan’s issue with foreign reserves would progressively get worse if it were unable to achieve a deal with Iran because years were spent in negotiations between Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey to create a close economic relationship for significant infrastructure projects, but the US sanctions and pressure shattered all these dreams,” Muqtedar Khan maintains.
He believes that Pakistan is currently dealing with a protracted foreign exchange problem that cannot be remedied by borrowing money from China, Saudi Arabia, or the International Monetary Fund (IMF) because Pakistan would still have to pay back the initial debt.
“Strangely, Pakistan and Iran have failed to create a mutual understanding despite their common Islamic background. As an alternative to US dollars, they may conduct business in their own currencies. Even though they are neighbors, it would be a diplomatic failure if they did not restore a reciprocal trade relationship,” Muqtedar Khan concludes.
The Cold War Racket Is Back
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | March 7, 2023
Chinese leader Xi Jinping has issued a direct critique against the U.S. government’s policy of containment when it comes to China. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, the critique is unusual in that it comes directly from China’s leader rather than indirectly through governmental spokespersons.
The Journal article quotes Shirley Martey Hargis, fellow at the Washington think tank Atlantic Council, who suggests that Xi might just be shifting the blame for economic problems in China. “It’s either take the blame or shift it,” she said.
Notwithstanding China’s economic problems, however, the fact is that Xi is right. There is no denying that U.S. national-security establishment, led by the Pentagon and the CIA, have been pursuing a Cold War policy of containment against China, with the aim of renewing its old Cold War racket.
Of course, as the Russians will attest, the Pentagon and the CIA have been doing the same with them — doing everything they can to gin up their old Cold War racket against Russia, just as they are doing against China.
Take a look at this map. You might be shocked, or maybe not. It displays the number of U.S. military bases near China. Tom Orsag, a freelance leftist journalist, points out that “China is effectively encircled by US bases all across the Pacific.” Orsag adds, “The U.S. is the biggest bully in the Pacific, with rings of military bases blocking and threatening China.”
Now, take a look at this map. It depicts the number of Chinese military bases near the United States. Number? Zero! In fact, according to an article at Eurasia Times entitled “Over 750 Military Bases Across 80 Countries: How US Military Overshadows China In Projecting Power Overseas,” China has the grand total of one foreign military base — in Djibouti, which is more than 7,000 miles away from the United States.
Take a look at this map. It shows the number of U.S. military bases near both Russia and China.
Now, take a look at this map again. It shows the number of Russian military bases near the United States. Number? Zero!
Let’s just imagine that the situation was reversed. Let’s assume that the United States had no military bases overseas whatsoever and had a non-empire, non-interventionist foreign policy. And let’s imagine that the United States was encircled by the same number of Russian and Chinese military bases that the Pentagon and the CIA have encircling Russia and China.
What do you think would be the reaction of U.S. officials? My hunch is that they would be going ballistic and directly objecting to China’s and Russia’s policy of encircling and containing the United States, just as Russia and China are currently objecting to U.S. encirclement and containment of their countries.
Are China and Russia justified in their concern over the Pentagon’s encirclement of their nations? Martin Luther King, whose birthday U.S. officials honor each year with a federal holiday, pointed out that the United States was the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. And that was before the U.S. invasions and wars of aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq! Given such, why wouldn’t China and Russia be concerned about being encircled and contained by the Pentagon and the CIA?
The Wall Street Journal article cited above quotes Jessica Chen Weiss, a Cornell University professor and former State Department advisor, saying in response to the escalating tensions between China and the U.S., “The current tit-for-tat spiral serves no one.”
Is Weiss really that innocent and naive? Serves no one? Are you kidding me? It serves the entire U.S. national-security establishment, including its army of “defense” contractors who eat out our substance by feeding voraciously at the public trough. The current tit-for-tat gives the U.S. national-security establishment its old — and extremely lucrative — Cold War racket back.
China warns of ‘critical juncture’ in Ukraine conflict
RT | March 7, 2023
The conflict in Ukraine will spin of control if a peace process does not start soon, Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang has said.
The fighting between Russia and Ukraine has reached a “critical juncture,” Qin stated during his annual press conference in Beijing on Tuesday.
“There will either be cessation of hostilities, restoration of peace and a move towards political settlement, or fuel will be added to the fire, the crisis will expand, and the situation will get out of control,” he warned.
The diplomat pointed out that now is the time for “calmness, sanity and dialogue,” insisting that talks “should start as soon as possible.”
“The legitimate security concerns of all parties should be respected” during the negotiations, as this is the only way to achieve long-term peace and stability in Europe, he said.
Qin also expressed regret that previous attempts to launch a peace process to end the conflict had been “repeatedly undermined.”
“There is an ‘invisible hand’ pushing the conflict towards escalation and trying to use the Ukrainian crisis to serve a certain geopolitical agenda,” he said.
Moscow has repeatedly said the conflict in Ukraine is a “proxy war” waged against Russia by the US and its NATO allies, which provide Kiev with weapons, funds and intelligence.
Last week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov reiterated that Moscow was ready to consider peace proposals “that are made out of sincere desire to find a political solution” to the crisis. However, Lavrov pointed out that there haven’t been any such serious peace offers coming from either Kiev or its Western backers since last March. On the contrary, “Ukraine is being persuaded to continue the fighting,” he said.
During his press conference, Qin also spoke about the significance of relations between Russia and China. Over the past year, Beijing resisted Western pressure to condemn and sanction Moscow, while consistently calling for a peaceful resolution of the crisis.
“The more turbulent the world is, the more steadily the Chinese-Russian relations should move forward,” the Chinese FM said.
Cooperation between Beijing and Moscow will “provide impetus for multipolarization of the world and democracy in international relations; global strategic balance and stability will be assured through it,” he stated.
What they are talking about on the Russian talk shows today: full war mobilization!
By Gilbert Doctorow | March 7, 2023
A month ago I was asked by a retired U.S. lieutenant colonel in a private email correspondence whether Vladimir Putin would be announcing general mobilization in his State of the Union address on 21 February. I answered with full confidence that this was unfounded speculation, that the Russian war effort was going well in the estimation of the Kremlin, that they expect the imminent capture of Artyomovsk (Bakhmut), opening the way for Russia to assume full possession of the Donbas.
Indeed, the fighting in and around Artyomovsk today continues to favor the Russians, notwithstanding the latest dispatch of 10,000 or more Ukrainian army forces to keep open supply lines to their comrades in the nearly surrounded city, who number perhaps 20,000.
Meanwhile, the United States and its NATO allies have come to agreement on what further heavy equipment they can ship to Ukraine in support of Kiev’s planned counteroffensive later this spring. Several Leopard tanks have already been delivered by Poland; more are on their way from other countries. And, as Russian television has been showing for the past 24 hours, there is an enormous stock of American armored personnel carriers, self-propelled artillery, HIMARS launchers and other equipment now stored on the quays of the Polish port of Gdansk awaiting delivery to Ukraine.
In this context, the discussion in Washington and European capitals over how far they can go without crossing Russia’s red lines and triggering a hot war between Russia and NATO is being bypassed by events. As the latest editions of prime news and discussion programs Sixty Minutes and Evening with Vladimir Solovyov indicate, Russia’s political elites consider that these lines have been crossed, with or without delivery of the F-16 fighter jets requested by Zelensky; with or without the latest version of the Leopards or the Abrams tanks promised by the USA. The Russians also speak openly on television about the Polish, French and Italian ‘mercenaries’ whom their troops in Donbas are overhearing daily on the front lines, and there is no question but that these are in effect NATO officers, not volunteers from the street.
The ‘fog of war’ distortions and blatant propaganda over the status of the Ukraine war that we see daily in mainstream electronic and print media in the West are being cleared away by very realistic assessments of the intentions and capabilities of the sides that I now see on the aforementioned talk shows. The information being broadcast is coming from war correspondents in the field, from front line commanders themselves and from expert analysts-Duma members of various parties, as well as from among academics and think tank directors.
The Financial Times may be just a sounding board for the Zelensky regime. Sixty Minutes and the Solovyov show are far more nuanced, self-critical and helpful for the broad Russian public to understand the challenge their country is facing as it goes up against the entire U.S.-led West in economic and military warfare.
These programs are unquestionably preparing the Russian public for mobilization of the economy to a full war footing and for further call-ups of reservists and recruits to join the fight. At the same time, I see demands that the government adopt a much more repressive policy at home to purge the country of fence-sitters, implementing a policy well-known to Americans from the time of President George W. Bush: ‘you are either with us or you are against us.’
The recent cases of sabotage and attempted political assassinations within Russia perpetrated by treasonous Russian nationals or by teams of Ukrainians who passed through the porous border have given rise to demands to ‘get tough’ and follow the practices put in place by Stalin, namely summary execution of saboteurs and ‘enemies of the people.’
It must be stressed that until now the Russian government has been lenient towards its domestic critics and enemies. Western talk of an ‘authoritarian’ or ‘autocratic’ Kremlin has just been libelous propaganda. However, by encouraging the Kiev regime to deploy every kind of despicable attack on Russia up to and including use of chemical and biological weapons on the field of battle, as the Russians now report is the case, Washington is making a mockery of international law and inviting Russia to wage all-out war.
In this regard, I point to the remarks of Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko before and during his visit to Beijing a week ago: he remarked that the present moment should not be lost, that all sides should be pressuring the warring parties to declare a cease-fire and enter into peace negotiations. Lukashenko argued that Russia had not yet unleashed its military potential, had not yet mobilized its economy and its society for total war, but that was sure to come if the conflict is allowed to proceed and thus to escalate further.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023
How Could Western Intelligence Have Got It Wrong, Again? They Didn’t. They Had Other Purposes
By Alastair Crooke | Strategic Culture Foundation | March 6, 2023
Larry Johnson, an ex-CIA analyst, writes “I no longer hold clearances and have not had access to the classified intelligence assessments. However, I have heard that the finished intelligence being supplied to U.S. policymakers continues to declare that Russia is on the ropes – and their economy is crumbling. Also, analysts insist that the Ukrainians are beating the Russians”.
Johnson responds that – lacking valid human sources – “western agencies are almost wholly dependent today on ‘liaison reporting’” (i.e., from ‘friendly’ foreign intelligence services), without doing ‘due diligence’ by cross-checking discrepancies with other reporting.
In practice, this largely means western reporting simply replicates Kiev’s PR line. But there does occur a huge problem when marrying Kiev’s output (as Johnson says) to UK reports – for ‘corroboration’.
The reality is UK reporting itself is also based on what Ukraine is saying. This is known as false collateral – i.e., when that which is used for corroboration and validation actually derives from the same single source. It becomes – deliberately – a propaganda multiplier.
In plain words however, all these points are ‘red herrings’. Bluntly, so-called western ‘Intelligence’ is no longer the sincere attempt to understand a complex reality, but rather, it has become the tool to falsify a nuanced reality in order to attempt to manipulate the Russian psyche towards a collective defeatism (in respect not just to the Ukraine, but to the idea that Russia should remain as a sovereign whole).
And – to the extent that ‘lies’ are fabricated to accustom the Russian public to inevitable defeat – the obverse edge clearly is intended to train the western public towards the ‘groupthink’ that victory is inevitable. And that Russia is an ‘unreformed evil Empire’ which threatens all Europe.
This is no accident. It is highly purposeful. It is behavioural psychology at work. The ‘head-spinning’ disorientation created throughout the Covid pandemic; the constant rain of ‘data-driven’ model analysis, the labelling of anything critical of the ‘uniform messaging’ as anti-social disinformation – enabled western governments to persuade their citizens that ‘lockdown’ was the only rational answer to the virus. It was not true (as we now know), but the ‘pilot’ behavioural nudge-psychology trial worked better – better even than its own architects had imagined.
Professor of Clinical Psychology, Mattias Desmet, has explained that mass disorientation does not form in a vacuum. It arises, throughout history, from a collective psychosis that has followed a predictable script:
Just as with lockdown, governments have used behavioural psychology to instil fear and isolation to mass large groups of people into herds, where toxic sneering at any contrariness cold-shoulders all critical thinking or analysis. It is more comfortable being inside the herd, than out.
The dominant characteristic here is remaining loyal to the group – even when the policy is working badly and its consequences disturb the conscience of members. Loyalty to the group becomes the highest form of morality. That loyalty requires each member to avoid raising controversial issues, questioning weak arguments, or calling a halt to wishful thinking.
The ‘Groupthink’ allows some self-imagined reality to detach; to drift further and further from any connection to reality, and then to transit into delusion – always drawing on like-minded peer cheerleaders for its validation and extended radicalisation.
So, it’s ‘goodbye’ to traditional Intelligence! And ‘welcome’ to western Intelligence 101: Geo-Politics no longer revolves around a grasp on Reality. It is about the installation of ideological pseudo-realism – which is the universal installation of a singular groupthink, such that everyone lives passively by it, until it is far too late to change course.
Superficially, this may seem clever new psyops – even ‘cool’. It is not. It is dangerous. By deliberately working on deeply ingrained fears and trauma (i.e. the Great Patriotic War for Russians (WW2)), it awakens a type of multi-generational existential plight within the collective unconscious – that of total annihilation – which is a danger that America has never faced, and towards which there is zero American empathetic understanding.
Perhaps, by resurrecting long, collective memories of plague in European countries (such as Italy) western governments have found that they were able to mobilise their citizens around a policy of coercion, that otherwise ran wholly against their own interests. But nations have their own distinct myths and civilisational mores.
If that were the purpose (to acclimatise Russians to defeat and ultimate Balkanisation), Western propaganda has not only failed, but it has achieved the converse. Russians have coalesced closely together against an existential western threat – and are prepared to ‘go to the wall’, if necessary, in defeating it. (Let those implications sink in.)
On the other hand, falsely promoting a picture of inevitable success for the West inevitably has raised expectations of a political outcome that is not only not feasible, but which recedes further into the far horizon, as these fantastical claims of Russian setbacks persuade European leaders that Russia can accept an outcome in line with their constructed false reality.
Another ‘own goal’: The West now faces the task of de-fusing the landmine of their own electorate’s conviction of a Ukraine ‘win’, and of Russian humiliation and decomposition. There will be anger and further distrust for the Élites in the West to follow. Existential risk ensues when people believe nothing the élites say.
Plainly put, this resort to clever ‘nudge theories’ has succeeded only in toxifying the prospect for political discourse. Neither the U.S. nor Russia can now move directly to pure political discourse :
Firstly, the parties inevitably must come to some tacit psychological assimilation of two quite dis-connected realities, now hyped into palpable, vital beings through these psychological ‘Intelligence’ techniques. There will be no acceptance by either side of the validity or moral rightness of the Other Reality’s, yet its emotive contents must be acknowledged psychically – together with the traumas underlying them – if politics is to be unlocked.
In short, this western exaggerated psyops perversely is likely to lengthen the war until facts-on-the ground finally grind the contrasting expectations closer to what may be the ‘new possible’. Ultimately, when perceived realities cannot be ‘matched’ and nuanced, war rubs one or the other into more emollient form.
The degeneracy in western intelligence did not start with the recent collective ‘excitement’ at the possibilities of ‘nudge-psychology’. The first steps in this direction began with a shift in ethos reaching back to the Clinton/Thatcher era in which the intelligence services were ‘neo-liberalised’.
No longer was the role of ‘devil’s advocate’ – of bringing ‘bad news’ (i.e. hard-edged Realism) to the relevant political leadership valued; instead what was inserted was a radical shift towards ‘Business School’ practice of services being tasked with ‘adding value’ to existing government policies, and (even) of creating ‘a market’ system in Intelligence!
The politician-managers demanded ‘good news’. And to make ‘it stick’, funding was tied to the ‘value added’ – with administrators skilled at managing bureaucracy moved into leadership jobs. It marked the end to classical Intelligence – which always was an art, rather than science.
In short, it was the outset to fixing the intelligence around policies (to add value), rather than the traditional function of shaping policies to sound analysis.
In the U.S., the politicisation of intelligence reached its apex with Dick Cheney’s initiation of a Team ‘B’ intelligence unit reporting personally to him. It was intended to furnish the anti-intelligence to combat the intelligence service output. Of course, the Team ‘B’ initiative shook confidence amongst the analysts, and by-passed the work of the traditional cadre – just as Cheney had intended. (He had a war (the Iraq war) to justify).
But there were separately other structural shifts. Firstly, by 2000, woke narcissism had begun to eclipse strategic thought –creating its own novel groupthink. The West just could not shake off the sense of itself at the centre of the Universe (albeit no longer in a racial sense, but via its awakening to ‘victim politics’ – requiring endless redress and reparations – and such woke values serendipitously seemed to anoint the West with a renewed global ‘moral primacy’).
In a parallel shift, U.S. neo-cons piggy-backed on this new woke universalism to cement the meme of ‘Empire matters primordially’. The unspoken corollary to this, of course, is that original values of the American Republic or of Europe, cannot be re-conceived and brought forward into the present, as long as ‘liberal’ Empire groupthink configures them as a threat to western security. This conundrum and struggle lies at the heart of U.S. politics today.
Yet the question remains just how can the intelligence being supplied to U.S. policymakers insist that Russia is imploding economically, and that Ukraine is winning – against what can be easily observed facts on the ground?
Well, no problem; Washington think-tanks have big, big finance from the Military Industrial World, with the preponderance of these funds going to the neo-cons – and their insistence that Russia is a small ‘gas-station’ posing as a state, and not a power to be taken seriously.
Neo-con claws tear at anyone gain-saying their ‘line’ – and think-tanks employ an army of ‘analysts’ to turn out ‘academic’ reports suggesting that Russia’s industry – to the extent it exists at all – is imploding. Since last March, western military and economic experts have been regularly-as-clockwork, predicting that Russia has run out of missiles, drones, tanks and artillery shells – and is expending its manpower throwing human-waves of untrained troops upon the Ukrainian siege lines.
The logic is plain, but again flawed. If a combined NATO struggles to supply artillery shells, Russia with the economy the size of a small EU state (logically) must be worse off. And if only we (the U.S.) threaten China hard enough against supplying Russia, then the latter will ultimately run out of munitions – and NATO supported Ukraine ‘will win’.
The logic then is that a war prolonged (until the money runs out) must deliver a Russia bereft of munitions, and NATO-supplied Ukraine ‘wins’.
This framing is entirely wrong because of conceptual differences: Russian history is one of Total War that is fought in a long, ‘all-out’, uncompromising engagement against an overwhelming peer force. But inherent to this idea, is its all-important grounding in the conviction that such wars are fought over the course of years, with their outcomes conditioned by the capacity to surge military production.
Conceptually, the U.S. shifted in the 1980s away from its post-war military-industrial paradigm, to off-shore manufacturing to Asia and to ‘just-in-time’ supply lines. Effectively, the U.S. (and the West) shifted in the opposite direction to ‘surge capacity’, whereas Russia did not: It kept alive the notion of sustainment which had contributed to saving Russia during the Great Patriotic War.
So, western intelligence services again got it wrong; they misread the reality? No, they didn’t get it ‘wrong’. Their purpose was different.
The few who got it right were mercilessly caricatured as stooges to make them seem absurd. And Intelligence 101 was re-conceived as the purposeful denialism of all off-Team thinking, whilst the majority of western citizens would live passively in the embrace the groupthink – until too late for them to awaken, and to change the dangerous course on which their societies were embarked.
Unverified Ukrainian reports (liaison reporting) served up to western leaders therefore is not a ‘glitch’ – it is a ‘feature’ of the new Intelligence 101 paradigm intended to confuse and dull its electorate.
US Foreign Policy Goes “Woke”?
Regime change in store for cultural conservatives?
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • MARCH 7, 2023
It is generally observed that imperial powers like the United States frequently interfere in foreign governments in support of economic or hard political reasons. To be sure, Washington has refined the process so it can plausibly deny that it is interfering at all, that the change is spontaneous and comes from the people and institutions in the country that is being targeted for change. One recalls how handing out cookies in Maidan Square in Kiev served as an incentive wrapped around a publicity stunt to bring about regime change in Ukraine in 2014 when Senator John McCain and the State Department’s Victoria Nuland were featured performers in a $5 billion investment by the US government to topple the friendly-to-Russia regime of President Viktor Yanukovych. Of course, change for the sake of a short-term objective might not always be the best way to go and one might suggest that the success in bringing in a new government acceptable to Nuland has not really turned out that well for Ukraine and the Ukrainian people, nor for those Americans who understand that the Biden Administration’s pledge to arm Ukraine and stay in the fight against Russia “as long as it takes” just might not be very good for the United States either.
And the United States continues to be at it, meddling in what was once regarded as something like a war crime, though it now prefers to conceal what it is up to by preaching “democracy” and wrapping the message in “woke-ish progressivism” at every opportunity. An interesting recent trip by a senior government official that was not reported in the mainstream media suggests that the game is still afoot in Eastern Europe. The early February visitor was Samantha Power, currently head of USAID, and a familiar figure from the Barack Obama Administration, where she served as Ambassador to the United Nations and was a dedicated liberal interventionist involved in the Libya debacle as well as various other wars started by that estimable Nobel Peace Prize recipient after he had received his award. The Obama attack on Syria has been sustained until this day, with several American military bases continuing to function on Syrian territory, stealing the country’s oil and agricultural produce.
USAID was founded in 1961 and it was intended to serve as a vehicle for nurturing democratic government and associated civic institutions among nations that had little or no experience in popular government. That role has become less relevant as nation states have evolved and the organization itself has responded by becoming more assertive in its role, pushing policies that have coincided with US foreign policy objectives. This has led some host nations to close down USAID offices. Within the US government itself, participants in foreign policy formulation often observe that USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) now are largely in the business of doing what the CIA used to do, i.e. interfering in local politics by supporting opposition parties and other dissident or even terrorist groups. Both organizations were very active in Ukraine in 2014 and served as conduits for money transfers to the opposition parties and those who were hostile to Russia’s influence for “democracy building.”
Samantha Power, who is married to another Democratic Party affiliated power broker, lawyer Cass Sunstein, traveled to Hungary on her diplomatic passport but took pains to cover her travel as a routine bureaucratic visit to an overseas post. Hungary is undeniably a democracy, is a member of the European Union, and also of NATO, but Power reportedly did not clear the travel with the Hungarian government and apparently did not meet with any government officials, even as a courtesy. She tweeted that her visit was to reestablish USAID in the Hungarian capital, “Great to be here in Budapest with @USAmbHungary where @USAID just relaunched new, locally-driven initiatives to help independent media thrive and reach new audiences, take on corruption and increase civic engagement.”
By “independent media” Power clearly meant that the US will be directly supporting opposition press that is anti-government and which embraces the globalist-progressive view currently favored by the White House. A US Embassy press release on the visit revealed that Power was in town as part of a project to relaunch seven USAID programs throughout Eastern Europe. It did not elaborate on the “corruption” that Power intended to address, which, of course, would have been a direct insult to the local governments wherever she intended to visit, nor did the document reveal that many of the groups that will be supported are likely to be affiliated with “globalist” George Soros.
In Budapest, Samantha Power did indeed meet with opposition political figures and civil organizations and groups, with particular emphasis on the homosexual community including “Joined @divaDgiV, @andraslederer, and @viki radvanyi for lunch in Budapest where we spoke about their work to advocate for LGBTQI+ rights and dignity in Hungary and around the world @budapestpride” as described in one of her tweeted messages after arrival. Power was also accompanied throughout by the highly controversial US Ambassador David Pressman, who is openly homosexual, of course, married to a man, and who has been highly critical of the conservative Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government, which was reelected in 2022 by a landslide margin in a vote that was considered free and fair. Orban is disliked by Joe Biden’s Washington because he is conservative and a nationalist, not because he is incompetent or dishonest while Pressman was and is a perfect example of the Biden State Department sending a terrible fit as ambassador to an extremely conservative country just to make points with the gay community in the US. Pressman has persisted in telling Hungarians how to behave not only on foreign policy but also on sexual diversity and cultural issues and, for his efforts, was finally told to “shut up” by Hungary’s Foreign Minister.
To be sure, Hungary’s undeniably democratic government, which is politically and economically tied to Washington, does not support the United States-led strategy to prolong and even escalate the Russia-Ukraine war and will not contribute to arming Ukraine. It does not accept “globalist” open immigration that seeks to challenge the established national culture, and also opposes same-sex marriage on religious grounds. It does not allow LGBTQ material to be presented to minors in state schools, which it considers to be morally correct anti-pedophilia legislation. For that reason, the time was clearly right, in the “woke” view of the Biden Administration, for Samantha Power to show up with a little dose of regime change in her portfolio. Hungarian officials had already expressed their concern over what they consider extreme pressure coming from the United States, largely because Hungary is a conservative country that values its culture and political independence. The visit by Power sent a signal to the Hungarian government and people that the pressure will likely increase and that Washington will not hesitate to use its embassies and overseas military bases to actively support groups that promote views that are not generally embraced by the local populations.
The Samantha Power story is of interest, to be sure, because it demonstrates that since the United States is the self-appointed enforcer of the “rules based international order” nothing in the world is off limits. Far too many US politicians and media pundits think that other states are not really sovereign and have to submit to US dictates in everything, and if they dare to step out of line they can be punished. If a conservative Christian country or leader – by which one might include Hungary, Russia or Brazil – believes that homosexuality or even abortion on demand are morally objectionable the US now believes that it has a mandate to use federal government resources to change that perception including by actively engaging with a foreign nation and its government on its own soil. To put it bluntly, the United States must certainly be considered the world leader in compelling all nations to conform to the political and moral values that it insists be adhered to.
So if one wants to learn why US Foreign Policy is so inept in terms of actually serving the interests of the American people, look no farther than was has happened and continues to roil in Ukraine as well as the implications of the Samantha Power visit to Hungary. For Foreign Service Posts, providing support for the agendas of the collection of freak shows that make up the Democratic Party has become manifestly as or even more important than promoting genuine national interests overseas or assisting American businesses and travelers.
What is perhaps most interesting is the way the “woke” foreign policy is being largely concealed from the American public and is being run as some kind of stealth operation. One initiative run by USAID in Macedonia in 2016 under President Obama included a $300,000 grant for “suitable” Macedonian applicants to “fund” a program entitled “LGBTI Inclusion” to counter how “Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) persons continue to suffer discrimination and homophobic media content, both online and offline… Considerable efforts are still needed to raise awareness of and respect for diversity within society and to counter intolerance.” How many American taxpayers would be happy to learn that their hard-earned money has been going to support programs run in nonconsenting foreign democracies to make them more “woke?” Of course, no one in the Biden Administration is telling the public about it, nor is the story likely to appear in the mainstream media, so presumably no one will know!
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.