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Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh Agree on Ceasefire Through Coordination of Russian Peacekeepers – MoD

Sputnik – 20.09.2023

Azerbaijan and representatives of the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh have agreed on a complete cessation of hostilities through the mediation of Russian peacekeepers, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Wednesday.

“Through the mediation of the command of the Russian peacekeeping contingent, an agreement was reached between the Azerbaijani side and representatives of Nagorno-Karabakh on a complete cessation of hostilities. The implementation of these agreements will be carried out in coordination with the command of the Russian peacekeeping contingent,” the ministry said in a statement.

The Russian peacekeeping contingent in Nagorno-Karabakh is in contact with both Yerevan and Baku, discussing the prevention of bloodshed in the region, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Wednesday.

“The command of the Russian peacekeeping contingent is in close contact at the appropriate level with the Azerbaijani and Armenian sides, representatives of Nagorno-Karabakh. The prevention of bloodshed, compliance with the norms of humanitarian law in relation to the civilian population, as well as ensuring the safety of the Russian peacekeeping contingent are discussed,” the ministry said in a statement.

Russian peacekeepers continue to perform their duties in Nagorno-Karabakh in aggravated conditions, the ministry said, adding that 2,261 civilians, including 1,049 children, are currently located in a base camp of peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh.

On Tuesday, Baku announced the launch of “local-level anti-terrorist activities” in Nagorno-Karabakh aimed at “restoring the constitutional order.” It also said Azerbaijani forces only targeted military objects in Nagorno-Karabakh, while Armenian state media reported multiple casualties among civilians as a result of Azerbaijani strikes. Yerevan described the operation as aggression and reiterated that it had no military presence in the disputed region.

In 1923, the region was granted the status of an autonomous area called the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO) within the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic.

In 1988, a movement for reunification with Armenia began in Nagorno-Karabakh. On September 2, 1991, it declared independence from Azerbaijan and changed its name to the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. From 1992 to 1994, Azerbaijan attempted to regain control over the self-declared republic, resulting in full-scale military hostilities in which up to 30,000 people lost their lives.

In 1994, the parties agreed to a ceasefire, but the status of the republic remained undetermined. In late September 2020, hostilities resumed in Nagorno-Karabakh. On the night of November 10, Azerbaijan and Armenia, with Moscow’s support, reached a comprehensive ceasefire agreement, maintaining their respective positions and exchanging prisoners of war and the bodies of the deceased. Russian peacekeepers were deployed in the region, including the Lachin Corridor.

In 2022 with the mediation of Russia, the United States, and the European Union, Yerevan and Baku began discussing the terms of a future peace agreement. In late May of this year, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan declared that Yerevan was ready to recognize Azerbaijan’s sovereignty within its Soviet-era borders, including Karabakh.

In September 2023, Russian President Vladimir Putin noted that the Armenian leadership had essentially recognized Azerbaijan’s sovereignty over Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijani leader Ilham Aliyev said that Azerbaijan and Armenia could sign a peace agreement by the end of the year if Yerevan did not change its stance.

September 20, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Lavrov’s claim that America is at war with Russia is no ‘exaggeration’

By Drago Bosnic | September 20, 2023

Since the start of Russia’s special military operation (SMO) against NATO’s crawling encroachment on its borders, the United States has been adamant that it’s “not a party to the conflict” and that it supposedly “doesn’t want escalation with Moscow“. However, time proved both of these statements to be patently false. According to the claims of the Neo-Nazi junta itself, the US controls the targeting of every long-range weapon deployed by the Kiev regime forces. On the other hand, the falsehood of the laughable claim that Washington DC “doesn’t want war” is painfully obvious to anyone remotely familiar with its neverending escalation aimed against Russia.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is certainly aware of all this, although basic diplomatic etiquette prevented him from stating the obvious in the past. And yet, after well over a year and a half of being exposed to the blatant hypocrisy of the political West, it seems that even the usually reserved Lavrov has stopped holding back, as trying to follow diplomatic protocols when dealing with someone who openly breaks them is simply futile and ultimately self-defeating. Namely, in recent remarks for the press, the Russian Foreign Minister said that the US is waging war against Russia. Strong statement, one might say, but who could possibly refute it given the ongoing events?

Even if we don’t count statements made by top-level US officials, including Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin’s admission that Washington DC wants to see a “strategic defeat” inflicted on Russia and President Joe Biden’s Freudian slip that “Putin cannot stay in power“, the evidence that supports Lavrov’s claim is simply overwhelming and we’re seeing it every single day. He also pointed out the fact that the US is not only transferring enormous amounts of so-called “lethal aid” to the Neo-Nazi junta (worth hundreds of billions at this point), but is actually controlling these weapons through direct decision-making while maintaining plausible deniability.

Lavrov himself also reiterated Austin’s admission that this is because the belligerent thalassocracy wants to inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia. The statements about US belligerence were given while he was speaking on the sidelines of the Eastern Economic Forum on the morning of September 17, where he pointed out that “no matter what it says, it [the US] controls this war, it supplies weapons, munitions, intelligence information, data from satellites, it is pursuing a war against us”. Lavrov also stated that Ukraine is simply being used as a springboard to achieve American strategic goals, as it was being prepared for the ongoing conflict years in advance.

“There is a real plot around the topic of the so-called (peace) negotiations, as well as attempts to turn everything upside down through pseudo diplomacy,” he said just two days prior, adding: “The West has been saying for months that this ‘peace formula’ is the only basis for negotiations. It starts from innocent topics … and then comes to the purpose for which it was concocted – inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia, to restore the borders of Ukraine as they were in 1991, court-martial the Russian leadership, force Russia to pay reparations, and then ‘mercifully’ agree to sign a peace agreement.”

Lavrov made the said comments on September 15, referring to the abortive Saudi-hosted “peace talks” and added that this pattern of double standards and hypocrisy is also used when dealing with most other countries.

“These are exactly the dirty methods that the West uses not only in relation to Ukraine but in many other areas of global politics,” he stated.

The recent direct endorsement US Secretary of State Antony Blinken gave for the Kiev regime’s long-range strikes on targets within Russia is yet another proof of Lavrov’s claims. Namely, during an interview with ABC News on September 10, Blinken stated that it was supposedly “up to Ukraine” whether or not it should target Russia proper with US-made long-range weapons. The idea that the Kiev regime could ever make such a decision on its own is beyond laughable, which means that it’s the belligerent thalassocracy itself that ordered the Neo-Nazi junta to target areas deeper within Russia in order to inflict maximum damage with minimal investment or risk for itself.

Blinken’s statement came only a day after ABC News reported that the US would provide the ATACMS to the Kiev regime. The range of these missiles, while hardly groundbreaking, is enough to jeopardize not only Russian supply lines, but also civilian infrastructure hundreds of kilometers behind the frontlines. And yet, this isn’t the only danger Lavrov pointed out thus far, as back in early June, he warned that nuclear-capable F-16 fighter jets could lead to an uncontrollable escalation that Russia will certainly not tolerate. He stressed that Moscow would be forced to respond militarily, meaning that NATO would also be held directly responsible in that case.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

September 20, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

Unrest grows in US-occupied Syria after Kurdish proxy hikes fuel prices by 300 percent

The Cradle | September 19, 2023

Syrians living under the de-facto rule of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) in Hasakah governorate have launched mass demonstrations and a general strike to oppose a fuel price hike of over 300 percent for public transport and industrial vehicles.

The unprecedented protests have grown in scope after Kurdish authorities announced that reversing the decision is “almost impossible,” citing the country’s deteriorating economic situation. While fuel prices for vehicles were hiked from 525 to 2,050 Syrian pounds, the fuel price for heating, agriculture, and electric generators remains the same.

Protesters have been blocking roads and shutting down businesses for several days in the towns of Qamishli, Rumailan, and Mabada, accusing the US-backed authorities of plundering Syria’s wealth for their own benefit. Demonstrations have also been called in the regions of Raqqa, Manbij, and Ain al-Arab, which could lead to significant economic repercussions in all areas under the control of the AANES and its official military force – the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

“The people went out to express their rejection of the policies of AANES, which aim to impoverish the people and push them to migrate,” a demonstrator in Qamishli told Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar.

“There was a consensus to provide and improve the quality of diesel in exchange for increasing its prices,” the head of the AANES fuel management authority, Abeer Khaled, recently told reporters, adding that “it is difficult to retract or modify the decision to increase [considering that] raising prices will contribute to reducing fuel smuggling operations outside areas under the control of AANES.

In 2021, AANES reversed a similar decision to hike fuel prices after intense clashes between locals and the SDF left several dead.

The territory occupied by the SDF and the US army in Syria’s northeast houses the country’s largest oil and gas fields, as well as vast wheat fields.

Washington’s forces regularly smuggle these resources via convoys to their bases in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region (IKR), where the oil and gas are sold to fund the operations of US proxy militias and de facto authorities.

The protests in Hasakah come as armed operations continue in neighboring Deir Ezzor governorate by Syrian Arab tribes who have been staging a rebellion against Kurdish forces. While heavy clashes have subsided for the most part, the region is still seeing sporadic attacks targeting the SDF.

September 19, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Illegal Occupation | , , | Leave a comment

Biden’s ‘age’ is now becoming an issue

Leave it to The Washington Post to come up with a ridiculous euphemism designed to conceal the real story

BY BILL RICE, JR. | SEPTEMBER 19, 2023

The spin-producing talents of our nation’s most prominent mainstream media “journalists” leave me dumbfounded.

The Washington Post would be at the top of the list of “news” organizations that excel in covering up real news and, when its editors feel they have to run an embarrassing story, concocting outlandish euphemisms to conceal the real story.

The Post just published a big story stating that President Biden’s “age” is making many political leaders wonder if he should not run for re-election.

This long story never once mentioned the words “dementia” or “cognitive decline,” proving once again that the press knows which giant elephants it can’t mention in a news article – especially if this elephant is a Democrat donkey.

A few excerpts from the article should give readers a greater appreciation of the talents of the Post’s wordsmiths.

Here’s the lede paragraph:

“A growing number of polls are showing voters concerned about President Biden’s age and energy … Prominent commentators have ruminated on whether he should drop out of the presidential race.”

“… Parts of the Democratic Party (now) fret about whether the man who helped oust Donald Trump from the White House may not have the vitality, at 80, to successfully prevent a return …”

“Supporters and critics alike suggested that Biden’s prospects may hinge on whether he can find a way to overcome a persistent and growing feeling in the electorate that his advanced age is his defining characteristic.”

Deep into the story, we get one sentence where Post editors come as close as they as they can to broaching the real truth:

When asked what word came to mind when they thought of Biden, more than a quarter of (poll) respondents mentioned age, with another 15 percent using words like “slow” or “confused.”

Readers could also read between the lines with this passage:

“Biden’s gait can be stiff, and his physical and verbal stumbles have at times given his critics material. “

My comment: Biden’s verbal stumbles don’t happen only “at times;” they happen every single day, every time he opens his mouth and tries to read the teleprompter remarks written for him by aides.

The real story is of course not being told …

While The Post frames this story with the question of whether Biden will step down because of his “age,” increasing numbers of Americans now understand the real story is the growing realization that our national “watchdog” press corp is completely captured.

An army of pack-thinking journalist clones are basically acknowledging their most important job is the daily effort to protect the person who was selected to implement their favorite country-destroying causes.

Clear-thinking adults now know the press corps will always eschew important journalism if said stories embarrass them or might lessen the likelihood key items from their agenda are brought to fruition.

Think about what we’re really seeing here.

The Washington Post has hundreds of journalists, including a platoon of journalists who cover only the White House and the president. Each of these journalists and editors have multiple sources in the White House and probably shoot the bull with these White House aides over drinks after work.

For four years, they’ve known Biden has textbook dementia, which was obvious three years ago, but has gotten worse every week since.

If they wanted to, these alleged journalists could have “broken” the “Biden has dementia” story years ago, including anecdotes that would make even the most loyal Democrat proclaim, “Good God.”

I’m a freelance journalist in Troy, Alabama and I know from common sense that 50 White House staffers must be working 24-7 to produce the cue cards, teleprompter speeches and recruiting Easter Bunny interns, all of whom are working feverishly to get the leader of the free world through another day without the Mother of All “gaffes” playing out for the world to see.

None of this would matter if this was our retired grandfather battling this affliction, but this happens to be a man who can start World War III and signs “emergency orders” that affect hundreds of millions of citizens.

Needless to say, if Donald Trump had been experiencing the same cognitive decline while he was president, this alarming mental condition would have – correctly – been exposed in one week.

We all know why the dementia story’s been covered up for years. 

If it was exposed, this would mean all those Biden “critics” referenced in the Post article … had been right all along. It would mean that everyone would know that America’s news-gathering journalists actually exist to conceal important news.

And more people are starting to reach this conclusion as well: If 98 percent of the most-important journalists in the world are concealing obvious truths about the president’s dementia, what else have they been concealing or refusing to investigate?

The answer:  Everything important.

The Washington Post could also detonate all the Covid lies and cover-ups … in about two weeks – if its editors wanted to do this and were given permission to do so from their controllers.

They could have easily broken the Hunter Biden/Joe Biden influence peddling scandals … years ago.

The real story is  the public is never going to get any real stories from this batch of sycophants and professional propaganda writers.

If some rogue journalists stunned us and decided to practice important investigative journalism, their editors and publishers wouldn’t let them because this would prove this news organization spiked important stories for years.

People might say, “Wow. This expose is great … but why did it take you three years to figure this out or authorize these investigations?”

The fear of publishers is the public would belatedly learn the most important lesson – that all those wacko and dangerous critics were … right all along.

Not only were all the experts wrong – not only were all the key narratives fiction – plenty of journalists must have suspected this; they simply knew they weren’t allowed to prove this.

So what’s the work-around?

As we can see from this article, there’s now no denying President Biden has major mental issues (even though the story never mentions “mental issues.”) It’s a coin toss whether “Joe Biden” can make it through the primaries, much less four years of a second term.

Even with mail-in ballots and rigged elections, the Powers That Be are no doubt wondering if Biden’s dementia will cost the Democrats four more years in the White House.

From Climate Change initiatives to central bank digital currency to the WHO treaty to future mRNA vaccines (and to cover-up past crimes against humanity), it’s imperative their guy remain in the White House.

Gavin Newsom, an awful governor of a state that’s coming apart at the seams, seems to be the betting favorite as the best politico Democrats can find to fill in for their current leading man … who will exit stage left not because of dementia … but because of “age.”

Apparently, this is the only story they’ve got and they’re going to stick to it.

Disinformation by Omission

For the last four years, disinformation has become a buzz word of our times. Biden himself (reading from his teleprompter) said this, and so has everyone who works for the federal government.

The Washington Post says it too. But most of the world doesn’t understand the key way the most important disinformation is spread. What we have is Disinformation by Omission. Don’t talk about all those giant pachyderms in the room. Don’t tell your readers our Emperor has no Brain.

When “don’t investigate this” might no longer work, society’s elite communicators simply spun another narrative – The poor man is simply getting up there in age and is beginning to lose some of his previous “vitality.”

They even spin the poll questions. This particular story was picked up by msm.com, which included one of its requisite reader polls at the end of the article:

“How concerned are you about the age of President Biden?”

I don’t answer narrative-manipulating poll questions and I’m not really concerned about Biden’s “age.” For that matter, I’m no longer worked up about his dementia, which I detected four years ago. Plus, I’ve known for years that “Joe Biden” isn’t making the big decisions.

The question that should have been asked is this:

How concerned are you that our nation’s leading “news” organizations are completely captured?

My answer: Pretty damn concerned.

September 19, 2023 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

Why I Blew Up My Life to Campaign Against Gender Identity Ideology

BY DR HELEN JOYCE | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | SEPTEMBER 19, 2023

This is the text of a speech Dr. Helen Joyce gave at Ireland Uncensored, a one-day conference in Dublin on September 16th to rally opposition to the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill, a new law that will impose more speech restrictions in Ireland than anywhere else in Europe. The conference was organised by Free Speech Ireland and Gript.

Five years ago, I was working as the Economist’s International editor. One fateful day in 2017, the editor asked me: “Why do kids keep coming home and say, ‘Such and such is trans’?” I replied that I didn’t know, but would look into it. Though I had no idea about that at the time, that conversation changed my life.

I ended up writing an article about it – an only semi-satisfactory article, because it was so hard to get a handle on what people were talking about. Many potential interviewees I reached out to either didn’t reply or brushed me off with platitudes. They seemed to think I was doing something very wrong simply by asking obvious questions – the sorts of questions journalists ask of all sorts of people, all the time. Basics like: what does ‘trans’ mean? What is ‘transition’? Do people feel better afterwards? Why do some people say they ‘feel like’ members of the opposite sex? And the big one: should those feelings give them licence to use facilities restricted to that sex?

The difficulty of getting facts, the science-denial that was universal among proponents of ‘trans rights’ and the circularity of their core mantra, namely that ‘trans women are women’ all kept bothering me. I became seriously concerned that grave harms were being done in the name of this ideology: harms to women, who were losing single-sex spaces, services and sports; children, who were being taught that one’s sex is a matter of feelings; and lesbians, who were being pressured to include men who identified as women in their dating pools.

I started thinking about writing a book about it. By now I knew that women were losing jobs and facing death threats for expressing the slightest scepticism about so-called ‘trans inclusion’. But I worried I wasn’t the right person – and if I’m honest also about the toll it would take.

And then, in late 2018, I met a group of detransitioners. A half-dozen young women, all of whom now identified as women, and as lesbian. All had been gender non-conforming in childhood; most had suffered mental-health issues, including anxiety, bulimia and self-harm. Doctors had diagnosed them with gender dysphoria (a fancy word for distress), and given them testosterone, which left them with permanently lowered voices, thick facial and body hair and distressing changes to their genitals. Some had had double mastectomies; one, at age 21, had had her uterus and ovaries removed.

That night, for the first time, I articulated the thought I’d been circling around for months: “They’re sterilising gay kids.” My hesitations vanished. As a journalist, you’re supposed to run towards the news. A scandal that is being suppressed for political convenience isn’t the sort of story you should ignore.

Well, I wrote my book, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality (recently reissued as Trans: Gender Identity and the New Battle for Women’s Rights). And although my career at the Economist continued to flourish, I became increasingly convinced that the book alone wasn’t enough. I moved to work with Sex Matters, a non-profit human-rights campaign group co-founded by Maya Forstater, who lost her job at an American think-tank, the Center for Global Development, after tweeting about her concerns about ‘gender self-ID’ – the policy of allowing people to change their legal records to reflect the sex they want to be, rather than the sex they actually are.

I now believe that ‘gender-identity ideology’ – the claim that self-defined gender should trump sex when it comes to classifying humans – is far from the liberal, kind approach it is portrayed as. Indeed, it is quite the opposite: part of a generation-defining threat to liberalism and indeed rationalism; and also deeply cruel.

You can imagine that given that I think this, after years of thinking about it, I regard it as my moral duty to say so, as loudly as possible, as often as possible, in front of as many people as possible.

This is an ideology that is harmful to women, because women’s ability to play a full part in public life requires us to be able to draw boundaries, on occasion, that exclude men. That’s all men. Including the men who wish they weren’t men, and the men who think they’re not men, and the men who identify as women.

It’s harmful to children, because children believe what adults tell them. The idea that you can really be a member of the opposite sex is a seductive one for quite a lot of them. Disproportionately the ones who are going to grow up gay, the ones who have autistic-spectrum disorders, the anxious or self-harming or depressed ones, the ones who are being abused.

And it’s harmful to gay people for two reasons. The first is that without a meaningful definition of sex, there cannot be sexual orientation. What does it mean to be same-sex attracted, if ‘sex’ is a matter of self-identification? The second is that gay adults are disproportionately likely to have been gender non-conforming in early youth. Now those children are being told that their atypicality makes them ‘really’ members of the opposite sex. This lie starts some of them on a pathway towards cross-sex hormones, genital surgery – and eventual sterility.

All of what I’ve said till now is deeply unpopular speech with some people. Because it punctures dearly held beliefs about people’s identities, some of whom experience what I say as unkind, even hateful. I don’t revel in being unkind, still less ‘hateful’. I’m not someone who seeks controversy for its own sake. But neither do I shy away from it. And on this subject I speak to prevent harm, and to prevent unkindness.

What happens if you base public policy on substituting subjective, self-declared gender identity for the objective material reality of sex?

For women, it means men in rape crisis centres, rapists in women’s prisons, men winning women’s sporting prizes.

Barbie Kardashian – a man who was recently jailed for four and a half years for threatening to torture, rape and murder his own mother, and who is “legally female” and universally called a woman in Ireland’s self-satisfied, corporatist mainstream media – was until recently held in Ireland’s sole women-only prison in Limerick. He is being moved to a men’s prison only because the staff in Limerick don’t feel safe having to handle him – no one seems to give a toss about the female inmates.

For children, this ideology means telling them lies about their bodies and the material reality of being a member of this evolved mammalian species. This creates mental distress and confusion. We’re telling them that if they don’t fit into the pink or blue box designated for their own sex, they should declare they are the opposite sex so they can fit back in. This is the very opposite of progressive. It’s cruel.

As for gay people, once sex becomes a matter of self-identification, so does sexual orientation. It’s lesbians who bear the brunt of it: lesbian friends tell me that a quarter to a third of the profiles on lesbian dating apps are now of men, and that if they make it clear in their own profiles that they will only consider partners who are really female, as opposed to pretend-female, they are banned for ‘hate’.

———

There is no material reality to the notion of gender identity; it’s a belief that a minority of people have about themselves, given life by utterances and nothing else. A person declares their gender, declares their pronouns, and everyone else is supposed to ignore the evidence of their own senses, their own understanding of the nature of humans, and accept that ‘people are who they say they are’.

So it is no coincidence that the draconian, Orwellian, Hate Crime Bill Ireland is considering enshrines within it a circular, non-reality-based definition of ‘gender’ or ‘gender identity’:

‘Gender’ means the gender of a person or the gender which a person expresses as the person’s preferred gender or with which the person identifies and includes transgender and a gender other than those of male and female.

This is tautology – circular gobbledegook. It’s not a definition at all.

As for hate, I know what it feels like to be its target. I’ve experienced serious death threats, some from men who identify as women who have serious criminal records, and who express their threats in gruesome, sexualised, personalised ways. On September 11th in Manchester, as I walked peacefully along the road after a teach-in on equality and human-rights law, I was followed by masked, flag-waving protesters shouting the usual idiotic slogans, with the addition of “Fuck Helen Joyce, my body my choice” and “There are many, any more of us than you”.

It makes some sense to call that hateful – though to be clear, I don’t think we need any new laws to handle this, just better policing. It’s a public-order offence. Me saying that men are men, that no man can become or be a woman, that a man who ‘feels like a woman’ is having an entirely male experience, albeit an atypical one – that’s not. Those statements are not just true, but in some situations essential to say in order to uphold other people’s human rights.

Irish legislators are considering passing a law that will criminalise ‘hate’ –undefined. Which protects ‘gender’, defined circularly – that is, undefined.

This law could criminalise mere possession of the book I blew up my life to write. There’s a ‘safety clause’ that excuses works of scientific or artistic merit – but please. The people who call me a Nazi, genocidal, antisemitic, racist, homophobic and so on, and who follow me down the street bellowing Fuck Helen Joyce, don’t think my work has scientific or artistic merit. That clause isn’t going to stop them going after me.

The problem isn’t so much that I might actually be charged and found guilty. It’s that I can’t be sure I won’t be. This is the so-called chilling effect.

I hear from my fellow thought criminals all the time. And I’ve seen the public polling. Most people agree with me entirely on issues of sex and gender.

But they don’t dare say so.

Well, I do, and I’m not going to stop saying it. I don’t do it for fun, I do it because everyone’s human rights depend upon it. I am going to keep saying the following true and important things:

• Being a man or woman is entirely a matter of biology and not at all a matter of identity.
• Men can’t be women. None of them, no matter how much they want to.
• Children shouldn’t be given puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones. They shouldn’t be told they can change sex. They shouldn’t be told that their feelings define their identities.
• No men, and that includes men who say they are women, should be allowed into women’s spaces or sports.

And so, if Ireland, my home country, does pass this dumb new law, I’m willing to go there and say all this again, because I feel a moral imperative. And even if you don’t feel the same urgency on this particular subject, I hope you will support me. My free speech is your free speech. You don’t know what unpopular thing you may one day feel a moral imperative to say.

Dr. Helen Joyce is the author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality and the Director of Advocacy at Sex Matters.

September 19, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

YouTube Is Wiping Safety Content on COVID-19 Vaccines

Study Finds Platform is Cleansing Side Effect Information and Promoting Unbridled Use of Experimental Products

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | September 19, 2023

YouTube is the most utilized video platform in the world. Many of my patients ask “doctor, why don’t we hear about vaccine side effects?” People feel blind-sided when they develop myocarditis, stroke, blood clots, or other common vaccine side effects but can can find no information on them with standard Google searches landing on YouTube.

Ng and colleagues performed a rigorous analysis of YouTube COVID-19 vaccine content and found that the platform is having effective content moderation. This means when you do a search, they are wiping vaccine safety information off the platform as “anti-vaccine” and replacing it with either irrelevant health information or pro-vaccine content.

Ng YMM, Hoffmann Pham K, Luengo-Oroz M Exploring YouTube’s Recommendation System in the Context of COVID-19 Vaccines: Computational and Comparative Analysis of Video Trajectories J Med Internet Res 2023;25:e49061 doi: 10.2196/49061PMID: 37713243

The authors declare this a “success” of content moderation. Others would say this is censorship of valuable health information replaced with propaganda promoting novel, experimental unsafe, ineffective, genetic vaccines. What YouTube is doing is very scary, the authors self-expressed virtuosity is even more alarming.

Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

President, McCullough Foundation

www.mcculloughfnd.org

Ng YMM, Hoffmann Pham K, Luengo-Oroz M Exploring YouTube’s Recommendation System in the Context of COVID-19 Vaccines: Computational and Comparative Analysis of Video Trajectories J Med Internet Res 2023;25:e49061 doi: 10.2196/49061 PMID: 37713243

September 19, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Biden Regime Awards Over $4 Million In Grants To Programs That Target “Misinformation”

Millions of taxpayer dollars being spent on programs that target speech

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | September 19, 2023

Since the start of September, the Biden administration’s National Science Foundation (NSF) and State Department have awarded grants totaling more than $4 million to programs, studies, and other initiatives that target “misinformation” — a term that the Biden admin has used to demand censorship of content that challenges the federal government’s Covid narrative.

The NSF has awarded the following nine grants since September 1:

The State Department has awarded the following five grants since September 1:

These awards were granted as the Biden admin faces a major lawsuit for pressuring Big Tech to censor content that it deems to be misinformation.

An appeals court recently stated that the Biden regime violated the First Amendment when pushing social media platforms to censor and in an Independence Day ruling on this case, a judge described the Biden admin’s actions as “Orwellian.” The Supreme Court is now considering whether to hear the case.

While some of the grants focus have been awarded to non-American organizations, whose misinformation targeting efforts don’t fall under the scope of the First Amendment, these types of programs can result in the speech of Americans being targeted.

For example, Biden’s State Department has previously funded foreign think tanks that created “disinformation” blacklists. These blacklists were used to target American conservative media outlets.

Both of the agencies that awarded these grants have been involved in prior censorship controversies.

In addition to funding groups that created disinformation blacklists, Biden’s State Department has flagged thousands of accounts to Twitter, now known as X, for censorship.

Meanwhile, the NSF has been accused of funding programs that develop tech that targets vaccine dissent and has funded research on correcting “false beliefs” online.

September 19, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

Ukrainian Buk Missile Caused DPR Market Tragedy, US Media Report Affirms

By Svetlana Ekimenko – Sputnik – 19.09.2023

As Volodymyr Zelensky arrives in the United States for a second time to plead for more aid, a US media report has unveiled a detailed investigation that debunks vehement assertions made by Ukraine’s President a few weeks ago.

Ukrainian President Zelensky’s visit to the US to attend the UN General Assembly meeting in New York, visit the White House, and meet with congressional leaders, comes against a sobering backdrop. Ukraine’s much-hyped counteroffensive has been stuttering, while skepticism is mounting over endlessly propping up the Kiev regime among some Republican lawmakers.

On the eve of Zelensky’s arrival, the New York Times published an investigative piece into a missile strike on a marketplace in the town of Konstantinovka, in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), that occurred earlier in the month.

The strike on September 6 had killed 15 people and left over 30 people wounded, according to Ukrainian officials. Zelensky was quick to describe it as a “Russian” attack on “a regular market and shops,” with numerous Western media outlets parroting the claim and Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal vowing “fair retribution” for it. The strike occurred on the same day when US Secretary of State Antony Blinken made a surprise visit to Ukraine, announcing millions in new aid to Kiev.

However, evidence suggests it was a Ukrainian missile released from a Buk surface-to-air system that caused the market tragedy, as per the US report. A long hard look at eyewitness accounts, social media posts, analysis of video and weapon fragments, along with satellite imagery, “strongly suggests the catastrophic strike was the result of an errant Ukrainian air defense missile fired by a Buk launch system,” write the journalists.

Ukraine’s authorities had initially tried “to prevent journalists with the Times from accessing the missile debris and impact area in the strike’s immediate aftermath,” according to the report. However, they subsequently managed to reach the scene of the strike, talk to witnesses, and gather fragments of the projectile itself.

Ukrainian artillery fire had been reported in the area, according to a local Telegram group, minutes before the strike on the marketplace, the media report underscored. The missile strike on Konstantinovka came from the direction of Ukrainian-held territory, not from Russian lines, according to security camera footage seen by the journalists.

Furthermore, they claim that “at least four pedestrians appear to simultaneously turn their heads toward the incoming sound” – in the direction of Ukrainian-held territory – when the missile approached. A reflection of the missile itself, coming in from the northwest, is visible in the cited footage, passing over parked cars.

Further analysis shows that the crater and point of detonation are also “consistent” with a missile traveling from the northwest. According to the media outlet’s reporters who were in the nearby town of Druzhkovka at the time of the missile strike on Konstantinovka, minutes before the attack, Ukraine’s military had launched two surface-to-air missiles toward the Russian front line.

The Ukrainian missile launches were also purportedly mentioned by the residents of Druzhkovka at the specified time in a local social media group. Witnesses that reporters interviewed also confirmed they saw the missiles being fired, and traveling in the direction of Konstantinovka.

“The timing of these launches is consistent with the time frame for the missile that struck the market in Kostiantyn[o]vka, around 2:04 p.m. [local time]” say the outlet.

Missiles had been launched from fields outside Druzhkovka, another witness stated, adding that it had been used by the Ukrainian military to station air defense systems. After reporters themselves visited the site in question, they “saw indications that it had recently been used by the military, including trenches, trash pits and wide tracks consistent with a large military vehicle.” Satellite imagery showed fresh scorch marks around the trenches on the day of the missile strike, in an indication the area could have been used to launch missiles, the investigation revealed.

While the Ukrainian authorities have claimed that Russia had fired a missile from an S-300 air defense system at Konstantinovka, such a missile has a “different warhead” from the one that exploded in the market on September 6, the report pointed out. It added that the measurements of the holes in the facades of the buildings closest to the strike are “consistent in size and shape” with a 9M38 missile, fired by a Buk antiaircraft vehicle, used by Ukraine. The same conclusions were reportedly made by independent military bomb-disposal experts: damage at the missile strike site in Konstantinovka was “most consistent with an 9M38.”

The Kiev regime staged a false flag in the DPR’s Konstantinovka based on the same scheme as in Bucha, Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vassily Nebenzia said at a meeting of the UN Security Council on September 8. Referring to the strike on the town in the part of the DPR controlled by Ukraine’s forces, he called it a terrible tragedy, adding:

“It’s just that, we are sure you’ll soon forget and cover up this incident, as in the case of the attack on Kramatorsk in April last year.”

Western mainstream media has been eager to echo the Kiev regime’s falsehoods, such as accusing Russia of deliberately striking civilian targets. The developments in the city of Kramatorsk, and in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), are another case in point.

As for Bucha, the Ukrainian authorities and Western media had spread gruesome footage purportedly showing murdered civilians lying along a road in the suburb of Kiev, citing it as evidence of “Russian war crimes.” Moscow dismissed the footage as a false flag provocation, pointing out that the bodies appeared days after Russian troops had withdrawn.

Russia has repeatedly reiterated that its armed forces do not attack civilian facilities.

September 19, 2023 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

Biden repeats ‘unforgivable’ remark about Putin

RT | September 19, 2023

US President Joe Biden has described Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “dictator,” claiming that his main political opponent, former President Donald Trump, would “bow down to” him if elected in 2024. The Democrat also touted himself as a defender of US democracy.

Speaking to supporters during a fundraiser at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater in New York City on Monday, Biden said, “I will not side with dictators like Putin. Maybe Trump and his MAGA friends can bow down, but I won’t.”

The incumbent president claimed that “Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans are determined to destroy American democracy,” whereas he would always “protect and fight” for it.

This recent comment made by the US head of state about President Putin is not the first instance of him referring to another foreign leader as a dictator.

Last March, Biden told attendees of the annual Friends of Ireland Luncheon that the US and its allies were standing together against a “murderous dictator, a pure thug who is waging an immoral war against the people of Ukraine.” A day prior, the US president said he considered Putin a “war criminal.”

Commenting on Biden’s remarks at the time, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told TASS news agency that Moscow deemed “unacceptable and unforgivable such rhetoric from a head of state whose bombs have killed hundreds of thousands of people around the world.” He noted that the US leader had resorted to “personal insults,” a level that President Putin, a “thoughtful and wise leader,” would never stoop to.

Last month, several US media outlets also quoted President Biden as alleging that China is run by “bad folks.” In June, he described Chinese President Xi Jinping as a “dictator,” which Beijing characterized as a “political provocation.”

September 19, 2023 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite | , | Leave a comment

‘Of Course He Was Paying’: Former Ukrainian Business Leader Accuses Top Zelensky Adviser of Bribery

By Fantine Gardinier – Sputnik – 19.09.2023

A top adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is facing renewed corruption allegations after an exiled Ukrainian business leader claimed the man worked for him for years as a go-between handling payments to Ukrainian officials.

“Tatarov used to solve all issues with law enforcement” – that’s what Oleh Maiboroda, the former executive director of Ukrbud Development, one of Ukraine’s largest construction companies, told Western media on Tuesday about Oleh Tatarov.

Once a lawyer, Tatarov now serves as Zelensky’s top adviser on law enforcement and security agencies, a position he’s held since 2020. However, according to Maiboroda, Tatarov was running bribes for him for the five years before he took the job for Zelensky.

The lawyer’s connections across the Ukrainian legal system, from police officials to judges and prosecutors, made him the perfect man to smooth over the approval processes for Ukrbud’s many promising construction projects.

“Of course he was paying,” Maiboroda said. “He was giving them money so these arrangements were done … He knew about law enforcement and warned us to be careful about saying almost anything on the phone.”

The former Ukrainian business leader showed to Western media a list of bribes allegedly paid by Tatarov, totaling some $1.8 million.

Maiboroda has himself fled Ukraine and currently lives in Vienna, where he hopes to stay safe from corruption charges against him in Kiev.

Tatarov is no stranger to such accusations, either: a previous case, brought by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and Anti-Corruption Action Center’s (AntAC), claimed he had bribed a forensic expert on behalf of Ukrbud, even going so far as to publish the WhatsApp conversation in which Tatarov agreed to the bribe. However, the case was closed in April 2022 on procedural grounds.

“The discussion on the incumbent president’s values is over,” Vitaly Shabunin, the head of AntAC’s executive board, said in 2021. “Volodymyr Zelensky shares Tatarov’s values. This means that Zelensky … doesn’t see any problems in Tatarov’s corruption-related crimes.”

Zelensky has stood by his man through the tribulations, refusing to fire or even to condemn Tatarov despite citizen petitions like the one AntAC organized, with more than 25,000 signatories.

Kiev, which hopes to join the European Union and NATO, has struggled with endemic corruption that promises to not just frustrate its admission hopes, but which endangers the flow of Western weapons and financing to Ukraine as well. To that end, Zelensky has made statements condemning corruption and pledging to crack down, and sweeping firings have “cleaned house” across bureaus such as the Defense Ministry, where the firings have reached the highest ranks.

Last month, Zelensky fired all 24 of Ukraine’s regional military recruitment offices, which are awash with accusations of corruption, including that dozens of recruitment officers have accepted bribes to exempt eligible men from being drafted into the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Earlier this month, Oleksiy Reznikov was fired as defense minister, and on Monday, Zelensky fired all six deputy defense ministers. Reznkov’s replacement, Rustem Umerov, is himself under investigation for what NABU calls “gross violation of labor laws” and that he and his deputies “took actions aimed at concealing the facts of theft of state property” while he was head of the State Property Fund (SPF).

No accusations of corruption have been brought against any of the former ministers, but the AntAC spoke of the terminations as a “positive step” toward cracking down on corruption and improving accountability.

“The ministry of defense is one of the least reformed ministries in our country, and it is not able to cope with the challenges of the war,” AntAC executive director Daria Kalenyuk told a US newspaper on Monday, adding it was timed to coincide with Zelensky’s trip to Washington, DC, where the president hopes to shore up US support for his government.

A small but growing faction of the Republican Party is openly questioning US support for Ukraine in its conflict with Russia. While some have demanded audits and better accountability for the tens of billions of dollars in aid flowing to Kiev, others have demanded the support halt entirely, especially in light of the disastrous Ukrainian counteroffensive this past summer.

“Many countries are sending major resources to Ukraine, and rightly so, but governments and populations will soon lose patience for that if there are not signs that the government is serious about fighting corruption,” an anonymous Western diplomat in Kiev told British media.

September 19, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | | Leave a comment

Emails Show Decade of Hunter Biden Spinning Journalists on Foreign Business Deals

The Hunter Biden laptop archive shows years of careful efforts to manipulate media outlets, a rare window into the DC spin cycle.

BY LEE FANG | SEPTEMBER 19, 2023

Speaker Kevin McCarthy, announcing that the House of Representatives will pursue an impeachment inquiry, suggested that the probe will hinge in part on deceiving the American public about Hunter Biden’s foreign business ventures.

“President Biden did lie to the American people about his own knowledge of his family’s foreign business deals,” McCarthy said at a press conference. GOP lawmakers, he added, have “uncovered credible allegations into President Biden’s conduct.”

Such an investigation will likely force an examination of the public narrative regarding Hunter Biden’s consulting deals that go back at least a decade. During President Obama’s second term, then-Vice President Joe Biden was the administration’s point man on the nation’s policy toward Ukraine, a perch he used to urge the country to adopt sweeping ethics reforms to resist “the cancer of corruption” and enact sweeping ethics reforms.

At the time, some American journalists began to question whether the vice president’s stern message was undermined by his son Hunter Biden’s employment at the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, which was owned by a notorious local oligarch.

Emails on Hunter’s laptop reveal that the inquiries sparked an internal debate within his team of consultants and public relations agents. Ultimately, they devised a series of responses about Hunter’s work with Burisma that were, at best, misleading and, at worst, outright falsehoods.

The Biden team has constructed a careful image of Hunter Biden’s business ventures, sometimes employing a sophisticated myth-making operation aided by allies in the media who rarely challenged or investigated their false claims. The laptop emails show that the team closely monitored critical reporting and pushed to shape coverage with reporters from the New York Times, Time magazine, Wall Street Journal, and the Associated Press.

Their spin informed much of the ensuing coverage in the mainstream press, defusing the issue, even as President Trump and other Republicans insisted that Ukraine was a hotbed of Biden family corruption. Although he had no background in the energy field and little experience in corporate governance, Hunter Biden, who had a law degree, was appointed to the board of Burisma in May 2014.

It was revealed later that he was paid about $1 million per year – as was his business partner Devon Archer. In a press release announcing his appointment, Hunter Biden is quoted as saying, “I believe that my assistance in consulting the Company on matters of transparency, corporate governance and responsibility, international expansion and other priorities will contribute to the economy and benefit the people of Ukraine.”

That same month, journalist Michael Scherer reached out with questions about the arrangement.

Several consultants employed by Burisma, including Ryan Toohey of FTI Consulting and Heather King, a partner at the law firm Boies, Schiller, & Flexner, where Hunter worked as counsel, strategized over how to respond to Scherer, a reporter then with Time magazine who has since joined the Washington Post.

For the Scherer inquiry, laptop emails show, Hunter’s business associates settled on a strategy to deflect the most direct questions and obfuscate the true intent of Burisma’s attempts to sway U.S. government officials.

One of Hunter’s associates noted that they planned to respond to Scherer’s attempts to reach David Leiter, a former aide to then-Secretary of State John Kerry, hired to work for Burisma. The plan was to use an assistant to make Leiter “unavailable to comment, as opposed to some sort of statement that made it seem like we were unwilling or refusing to engage with the reporter.” Leiter, the emails show, was in fact available, but the public relations team wanted to keep him out of reach.

Scherer wanted to know why Burisma was on a hiring spree of well-connected American lobbyists, including Leiter and others. In response, Toohey planned to tell Scherer that the hired guns were simply working on issues related to energy independence, economic growth, as well as “transparency and good governance.”

In response to other questions posed by Scherer, Toohey prepared a statement claiming that Hunter Biden will “not be engaged with the U.S. government” on anything related to Burisma.

The response belied a detailed lobbying agenda spelled out in other emails.

Burisma had made clear that the company had hired Leiter, Hunter Biden, and other political operatives as part of a focused plan to obtain Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky a U.S. visa as well as to persuade American officials to intervene with Ukrainian government officials to drop an investigation of his business interests.

In a May 2014 email, Vadim Pozharskyi, a close adviser to Zlochevsky, explained to Hunter that he needed his “advice on how you could use your influence to convey a message/signal, etc. to stop what we consider to be politically motivated actions,” a reference to an ongoing investigation of Zlochevsky by Ukrainian prosecutors.

That month, Pozharskyi again wrote to Hunter, spelling out the “working plan for both FTI and David,” reiterating that he wanted the lobbyists to intervene against the “politically motivated proceedings initiated against us in Ukraine” and to overcome the “US entry ban” for the Burisma owner.

“The immediate plan is to reach out to the Energy and Ukraine desks, respectively, at State Dept,” wrote Heather King, the attorney working closely with Hunter Biden at the time. “That will include outreach to Carlos Pascual, he is the top US energy diplomat,” she added.

Scherer printed the denials, but to his credit, reported on the odd circumstances surrounding Biden’s hiring, at a time when Joe Biden was the Obama administration’s point person for Ukraine, with a special focus on energy policy in the region.

In many cases, Hunter Biden’s associates cast him as simply an auditor with a special focus on renewable energy sourced from geothermal vents. That was the strategy in response to an inquiry from Stephen Braun, a reporter for the Associated Press. “Mr. Biden will not lobby on behalf of Burisma. His role is to advise the company’s legal and compliance unit, including guidance on corporate governance standards.”

Behind the scenes, Hunter Biden’s team knew otherwise. In emails conferring over how to deal with Braun’s questions, Pozharskyi reiterated the plan to provide Braun with “minimum information.”

Like many other articles from this time, the AP story focused on the conflict of interest issues, noting the denials around any lobbying with a degree of skepticism:

A former Washington lobbyist, the vice president’s son is effectively exempt from most rules that would require him to describe publicly the legal work he does on behalf of Burisma.

Hunter Biden will not lobby for the company, said Lawrence Pacheco, an official with FTI Consulting, a Washington government affairs company recently hired by Burisma.

Pacheco did not say whether Biden might oversee or advise on any future Burisma lobbying strategy in the U.S. Pacheco said the company “does not take positions on political matters.”

Braun could not be reached for comment. Scherer declined an opportunity to comment on the Hunter Biden emails. Biden, Toohey, and King did not respond to a request for comment.

However, the emails clearly indicate that substantial resources were allocated to managing both Burisma and Hunter’s personal image. Pozharskyi pointed out that Burisma had retained American consultants to reach out to “the most reputable European and American journalists/newspapers, magazines, websites, blogs,” while assistance was required to handle Wikipedia, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other online platforms. Burisma, wrote Pozharskyi, sought a “detailed algorithm on how the Company should act in case of bad publicity.” The effort included scrubbing negative details from Hunter Biden’s Wikipedia, while bolstering the online credentials of Burisma, emails show.

A highly focused effort to monitor and shape news media coverage helped maintain the public profile. Even with relatively low visibility, independent media were closely watched. Hunter and his team monitored Vice News as well as the gadfly website ZeroHedge. In response to critical reporting from Vice, one colleague noted approvingly that the article was not being “reposted or republished” in Ukrainian media.

In July 2014, Toohey circulated an investigative piece I wrote for Salon about Hunter Biden’s hiring at Burisma, which noted that the vice president’s son had been retained amid a string of nepotistic hires likely aimed at influencing natural gas and energy policy.

In the article, I noted that Joe Biden had traveled to Ukraine to “announce a $50 million aid package that included technical support for increasing the country’s natural gas production – an investment that could bolster profits at Burisma Holdings, where his son is a director.” What was not known at the time, however, was that Hunter Biden was already working with a team of public affairs consultants to channel U.S. government technical assistance to his client.

The laptop emails show that even this relatively brief mention of Hunter Biden and a potential conflict of interest with his father raised concerns.

“All, please see below a piece that mentions Hunter’s appointment as part of a broader trend, mostly within the context of relatives of eleceds [sic] engaged to lobby for the energy industry,” wrote Toohey, attaching a copy of the text of my piece. But, he added, “This was a freelanced piece picked up in a number of web-based outlets including Salon, but nothing with significant reach.”

Pozharskyi replied that he had seen the piece earlier and “wanted to have a discussion in this regard.”

In some cases, the team celebrated media coverage that elevated its desired narrative. Politico reported Hunter’s hiring at Burisma and simply printed quotes from the company’s official statements:

“The company’s strategy is aimed at the strongest concentration of professional staff and the introduction of best corporate practices, and we’re delighted that Mr. Biden is joining us to help us achieve these goals,” Alan Apter, Burisma Holdings’ chairman of the board of directors, said in a statement, which was reported by The Moscow Times on Tuesday.

Biden, joining the board, will be in charge of the legal unit, the company said. He will also provide support for Burisma Holdings “among international organizations.”

Biden said the company will help strengthen Ukraine’s economy.

Pozharskyi circulated a link to the Politico article to Hunter and his associates, noting the “positive coverage.”

Hunter’s membership on the Burisma board received renewed attention in late 2015, as then-Vice President Biden was set to visit Ukraine where he planned to address the parliament on the need to adopt new reforms against a culture of corruption in the country. James Risen of the Times, among others, renewed inquiries directed toward Hunter and his associates about the rationale behind his appointment to the company, Burisma, and why the company appeared to be buying access to high levels of government.

In one email found on Hunter’s laptop, Risen asked, “What lobbying activities is the company engaged in the US?” among other questions to Hunter Biden. In response, a Burisma spokesperson straightforwardly claimed that “no one is lobbying on their behalf.”

The company’s lobbying efforts were not covered in the story ultimately published by the New York Times, which featured Risen’s piece on Dec. 8, 2015. The article included a statement from the Hunter Biden team, crafted by the strategy firm FTI Consulting, asserting that the company’s focus was on “corporate governance and transparency.”

Risen’s article did not address whether Hunter’s business career demonstrated such expertise or his lack of experience in the energy field. Although Risen identified Hunter as “a former Washington lobbyist,” he accepted the denial that no lobbying was involved.

In reality, just a month prior to the email exchange with the Times, Burisma, following Hunter Biden’s advice, had hired Blue Star Strategies, a Democratic lobbying firm, to influence the Obama administration. A copy of the agreement, belatedly filed with the Justice Department, reveals that the firm, which aided in lobbying State Department officials on Ukrainian energy policy, received a monthly retainer of $30,000.

Blue Star Strategies was even copied on the emails with the Hunter Biden team on its response plan to Risen.

Risen also allowed a Burisma spokesman to decline to state Hunter’s compensation while claiming it was not out of the ordinary for such board positions. It was later disclosed that he was paid about $1 million per year, which is far higher than the typical compensation. As a point of comparison, median annual compensation of board members at Fortune 500 companies is around $110,000.

Risen, now with The Intercept, did not respond to a request for comment.

Political operatives of all ideological backgrounds frequently manipulate public perception – often employing specialized “crisis communication” firms to suppress negative coverage and shape desired narratives. What is remarkable about the Hunter Biden episode is how successful it was, and how uncritically most media organizations treated this unorthodox relationship between a president’s son and a controversial foreign corporation.

In response to the Wall Street Journal, Toohey worked closely with Blue Star Strategies’ Sally Painter and Karen Tramontano to craft a message defusing questions around a conflicting message between Hunter and his father. They settled on a strategy of presenting the Ukrainian gig as perfectly “aligned” with an anti-corruption agenda, laptop emails show. The lobbyists suggested that they release a statement to the Journal claiming that Hunter’s work for the Ukrainian energy giant, to supposedly strengthen corporate governance, are “also goals the United States.”

The Journal printed the statement, attributing it to a spokesperson.

Such coverage – which suggested Hunter Biden had engaged in questionable but ultimately harmless behavior that did not involve, much less implicate, his father – set the narrative for most coverage in mainstream outlets. When President Trump told Ukraine’s president in 2018 that “there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son” and asked him to look into Joe Biden’s demand that the prosecutor looking into Burisma be fired, Democrats moved to impeach him.

The Biden spin continued even after the New York Post published the first articles based on material from Hunter’s laptop in October 2020. The Washington Post’s fact checker, Glenn Kessler, sought to discredit the New York Post’s reporting that Hunter Biden had arranged a dinner meeting between his Ukrainian associates at Burisma and his father when he served as vice president. At the time, the Biden presidential campaign claimed that it “reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time, and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.” Kessler reiterated this denial as though it were an established fact.

It turned out to be false. The July testimony by former Hunter Biden associate Devon Archer confirmed that Hunter Biden had arranged a secret dinner with his Ukrainian business partner and his father, as the New York Post had originally reported. The ongoing saga over the Washington Post’s role in covering up the Biden revelations was detailed last month by RealClearInvestigation’s Paul Sperry.

Last month, Kessler “updated” his article to acknowledge this.

Also last month, Washington Post columnist Philip Bump, who has dismissed any hint of scandal regarding Biden business dealings, appeared on Live at the Table, a podcast hosted by Noam Dworman, the owner of New York City’s Comedy Cellar. The show went viral as Dworman challenged Bump’s claims that there was “no evidence” of wrongdoing by Joe Biden.

In a heated exchange, Bump conceded that Hunter Biden’s text messages that claim, “unlike pop, I won’t make you give me half your salary,” was one form of “evidence.” Moments later, Bump ended the interview and walked off the set.

The interaction provided a rare moment of visible accountability for the establishment press, which has largely followed the Biden spin for an entire decade on this issue.

Yet the White House is still hoping it can still instruct journalists on how to cover the story. Shortly after McCarthy’s impeachment inquiry announcement, President Biden’s White House staff circulated a memo, instructing media outlets on how to cover the news. In bold type, the memo claimed that the entire Hunter Biden conflict of interest scandal had been “refuted” and “debunked” – language that was adopted in media reports about the inquiry in VoxNBC News and CNN.

September 19, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment