Are We Losing Free Speech in America?
Israel is the catalyst for a major loss of freedom
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • JANUARY 4, 2024
There is little appreciation inside the United States for the grave damage being inflicted on our country by President Joe Biden’s foreign policy being conducted through the mechanism of starting or sustaining a new war every year. The justifications provided by the White House, State Department and Pentagon are so vacuous that they have succeeded in creating a new low standard for the art of government lying. The country is burdened by unsustainable debt yet we have the so-called Secretary of the Treasury Janice Yellen declaring in October that another war beyond Ukraine, presumably to directly intervene supporting Israel in destroying Gaza, can “certainly” be afforded. And with the current US military build-ups near China and in the Middle East to confront Iran there presumably is enough gas in the tank to pick up on another conflict or two before Genocide Joe stands for reelection later this year.
But in spite of the damage to our economy, which is quite real, some of the gravest threats come from within, from the attacks delivered by special interest groups directed against our fundamental liberties. The most significant assaults have of late been directed against the First Amendment, freedom of speech, which is the bedrock of all the rights and which is currently being assailed continuously by that most protected of all protected groups, America’s Jewish and Israeli Lobby.
Hardly a minute of the day passes without a new article in the mainstream media about “surging antisemitism.” The journalists involved, most of whom are Jewish, hardly ever observe that Israel’s slaughtering of 30,000 Gazans, mostly women and children, just might have something to do with how the public is beginning to regard the behavior of the Jewish state and its leaders. What actually fuels public outrage that groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) choose to regard as antisemitism is Israel slaughtering ten thousand children under a flag displaying the Star of David and stating its intention to continue the massacre until all the Palestinians have fled to other countries or been killed. We are talking of 2 million plus people but Israel’s friends in the US regard them as little more than “sub-humans” or “terrorists.”
The Jewish/Israel lobby in America does not forgive and forget. Witness the continuing attacks on America’s universities for not rolling over and purging all suspected antisemites among faculty and students. Liz Magill, the President of the University of Pennsylvania, resigned almost immediately after being interrogated by the US Congress and the multiple attacks began. Poor Claudine Gay, president of Harvard, hung on but eventually also resigned after she was subjected to near continuous harassment by Israel’s friends, including in the US Congress, because she, like her presidential colleagues, had not accepted that nearly all criticism of Israel in the context of Gaza is based on Jew-hatred, which she was apparently expected to assert. To no one’s surprise, in her resignation letter she was not even honest about who had brought her down, blaming it instead mostly on racism. The letter did not even include the words “Congress” or “Gaza” or “antisemitism” or even “Israel.” To be sure, Gay is not a top level academic and probably was an affirmative action hire but has anyone ever heard of a Congressional committee going after an academic for the sin of plagiarism before? The involvement of the phony claims of antisemitism and the desire to protect Israel are what has made the difference in this case and led to the intensity and persistence of the attacks.
Indeed, the ADL’s revolting director Jonathan Greenblatt is demanding that there be more “consequences” for “antisemites on campus” and the media is hot on the story. Sally Kornbluth, President of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who has not resigned after the ridiculous encounter of the three presidents with Congress is still being hotly pursued by that body. Also engaged in the hunt are the many US Government entities whose sole task is to root out antisemites and holocaust deniers. The Department of Justice, headed of course by Jewish Attorney General Merrick Garland nee Garfinkel, is reportedly investigating a number of leading universities including Tulane and Rutgers for failure to “protect the civil rights of Jewish students.” It is a typical pattern where Jewish officials investigate alleged crimes against other Jews and come up with a predictable conclusion.
The universities are scrambling to comply with the government demands to get tough with alleged antisemites. At Columbia University, for example, certain slogans and chants used by Palestinian students have been banned and blocked, but there is no corresponding interference with Jewish student activities. Professor Rashid Khalidi has written a response to the university administration saying:
“Our deans state that the Columbia community should acknowledge ‘that hearing chanted phrases such as ‘by any means necessary,’ ‘from the river to the sea,’ or calls for an ‘intifada’—irrespective of intentions and provenance—is experienced by many Jewish, Israeli, and other members of our community as antisemitic and deeply hurtful. They have thus unilaterally decided that no one should rise up [the actual meaning of ‘intifada’] against 56 years of illegal military occupation; that Palestine should remain unfree from the river to the sea; and that the oppressed should take permission from the oppressor as to the means to relieve their oppression. They have come to this decision because hearing otherwise is ‘antisemitic and deeply hurtful’ to some. This statement amounts to a new norm that prohibits using or learning about these terms and their histories, in favor of the privileging of a politics of feeling. While perhaps appropriate to a kindergarten, it is hard to imagine an approach more contrary to the most basic idea of a university. This statement is characteristic of a university that picks a task force nearly devoid of expertise on antisemitism and on Palestine/Israel (much of which exists among the faculty), but packed with outspoken advocates for Israel, a university that has decided that faculty expertise on freedom of speech or on language to be proscribed should be rigorously excluded from deliberations on such issues. With complete disregard for the principle of faculty governance, crucial matters like these are being decided upon by administrators, presumably with hefty input from trustees, donors and politicians, who have negligible expertise, but robust and one-sided opinions.”
Khalidi might also have observed how pro-Israel groups at colleges are compiling and blacklisting names of student-critics of the Gaza situation so they can be denied jobs after they graduate. And beyond the damage done to freedom of speech and critical thinking at the universities there are already plenty of other possible consequences for those who are choosing to speak up about the atrocities that are underway but they only appear to apply to Palestinian and antiwar groups that are demonstrating against Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Gazans. Ambitious politician wannabe Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida was one of the first to respond, banning Palestinian groups at all state universities due to their alleged “antisemitism.” He did not ban or even criticize a single Jewish group for cheerleading the slaughter of the Palestinians. And this has been the pattern elsewhere with the banning or denying of facilities to Palestinian and antiwar groups, but leaving Hillel and other Jewish groups alone no matter what they do. Is that freedom of speech? Of course not, but it is a measure of who has power in the United States and who does not. Speak ill of whomever you choose but leave Israel alone or you will be in real trouble!
And protecting Israel also extends to the punishing of supporters of completely nonviolent action, like boycotting or divesting from Israeli products to put pressure on the Benjamin Netanyahu regime. If you belong to a group that opposes Israeli policies you could be denied goods and services for that fact alone. In more than thirty states one can be compelled, for example, to sign an agreement not to support any action against Israel if one wants a job or government services. This special arrangement is unique to Israel and there are also special trade missions often manned by American Jews or Israelis, including in my state Virginia, which create special investment opportunities for Israel that do not exist for any other country.
But perhaps the most insidious attempt to complete America’s falling under the control of Israel-thinks is what is taking place in lower-to-mid level public education. Many school districts and even state educational boards require courses in the horrors of antisemitism and the so-called holocaust. The courses are, of course, being pushed most ardently by Jews and by select Evangelicals who are sitting around waiting for the Second Coming, a prophecy that involves in their minds the return of Jews to the Holy Land as a prerequisite. Senator Jacky Rosen of Nevada, who is, of course, Jewish, has just introduced legislation called the “Never Again Education Act,” which has an impact nationwide. The “Never Again Education Act” was first introduced in July of 2019 before passing in the House in January 2020 with 300 co-sponsors and in the Senate in May 2020. As it is set to expire in 2025, Senator Rosen is looking to have the Act reapproved to extend it to 2030 to “provide funding for training and lessons on the ethnic cleansing of Jews.”
The problem with the Act is that it rests on a contrived narrative that is essentially political in nature, including as it does many non-historical and even fabricated assertions about what took place in the 1930s and 1940s. The Act is intended to bestow on Jews a special victimhood that in turn conveys on them and on Israel exemption from normal rules regarding their behavior. It, of course, is part of the narrative that is giving Netanyahu and his rogues a more-or-less free pass from the US for their crimes against humanity against the Palestinians.
So the America we once knew is under siege. Free speech is being eroded and will soon be subject to criminal penalties if one says the wrong thing about Israel. This is intolerable and one prays that the American people will have its own “intifada” and wake up to the new infamy and put an end to it.
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.
Israeli family of key case in NY Times report refutes story of alleged rape by Hamas fighters
Press TV – January 4, 2024
The Israeli family of a key case in the New York Times report on alleged sexual violence by Hamas fighters on October 7 renounces the published story, saying reporters have manipulated them.
On December 28, the New York Times published a story, claiming that fighters of the Palestinian Hamas resistance group allegedly committed a pattern of gender-based violence against Israeli women when the group carried out the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity on October 7.
Authors of the report – Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Jeffrey Gettleman, along with Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella – claimed that they had compiled the story based on over 150 interviews they conducted with purported victims or their families, mainly repeating October 7 testimonies that have been previously published and already debunked and discredited.
A third of the report, however, was devoted to the Abdush family, a working-class Mizrahi Jewish family who lost their daughter, Gal, known as “the woman in the black dress”, back then and how she was allegedly raped during the Hamas attack.
The report focused on footage that was captured on October 8 by a woman called Eden Wessely, who published it on her social media accounts. According to the report by the New York Times, “The video went viral, with thousands of people responding, desperate to know if the woman in the black dress was their missing friend, sister or daughter.”
A day after the report was published, the Israeli Ynet news site conducted an interview with Gal’s parents, who stressed that there is no proof she was raped, and that the paper’s reporters interviewed them under false pretenses, saying that they knew nothing about the sexual assault issue until the piece in the American daily was published. Furthermore, Gal’s sisters also strongly denied allegations of rape.
On January 1, Nissim Abdush, Nagi’s brother-in-law, repeatedly denied that his sister-in-law was raped in an interview with Israeli Channel 13.
Hamas has strongly rejected Israel’s allegations of rape and sexual assaults against its fighters, saying the regime is striving to demonize the resistance by such fabricated stories.
“We reject the Israeli lies about raping, which aim to distort the resistance and tarnish our humane and moral treatment of captives,” Hamas said in a statement in early December.
The Israeli regime waged the war on Gaza on October 7 after Hamas launched its operation against the occupying entity in response to the Israeli regime’s atrocities against Palestinians.
Since the start of the US-backed offensive, the Israeli regime has killed at least 22,300 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured over 57,000 others. Thousands more are also missing and presumed dead under the rubble.
Israel’s Gaza withdrawal, a prelude to full-out war
By Hasan Illaik | The Cradle | January 4, 2024
At the start of the new year, Israel’s occupation army began implementing the withdrawal of a large portion of its forces from the northern Gaza Strip.
This withdrawal did not mean the end of the war on Gaza, and it certainly did not suggest calm on the Lebanese-Israeli front. On the contrary, reducing the pace of the war in the Gaza Strip increases the possibilities of an Israeli war on Lebanon.
The battles taking place between the occupation army and Hezbollah along the southern Lebanese border since 8 October, in support of the resistance in Gaza, have been increasing in intensity day after day.
Washington and Tel Aviv have sought to maximize pressure on Hezbollah by warning of the possibility of a large-scale war between Israeli forces and the Lebanese resistance. These tactics were in effect long before the assassination of Hamas’ Deputy Head of the Political Bureau Saleh Al-Arouri on 2 January by an Israeli air strike in Dahiyeh, the southern suburb of Beirut. The killing of Al-Arouri now increases the chance of the war expanding.
The third stage is coming
The first stage of Tel Aviv’s war was the mass destruction and occupation of northern Gaza; the second stage is the occupation of key points in the south of the Gaza Strip, where Palestinian civilians have flocked for safety. The current troop withdrawal from the territory’s north means that the Israelis are cementing their southern plans and preparing to move on to phase three: the long, low-intensity war.
As it enters the third stage, the occupation army intends to maintain a geographical buffer surrounding the northern Gaza Strip. It also plans to continue occupying the Gaza Valley area (central Gaza), while completing its operations in Khan Yunis in the south.
The fate of the Philadelphia axis – or Salah ad-Din Axis – a strip of land on the border between Gaza and Egypt which Israel wants to control, will be left to deliberations between Tel Aviv and Cairo. This is to ensure that incidents do not occur that lead to tension between the two parties, as well as to guarantee that refugees do not flow from the south of the Gaza Strip towards Sinai.
Israel’s ground withdrawal from northern Gaza is taking place primarily because the occupation army’s target bank has been depleted. All targets prior to the start of the war have been destroyed, and all new operational targets have been bombed.
Despite this, the Palestinian resistance continues to carry out operations against Israeli forces. These organizations remain relatively unscathed in the entire area of the northern Gaza Strip, which will increase the ability of the resistance to inflict losses on occupation ranks, now and in the future.
This clear Israeli loss – in terms of Tel Aviv’s stated war objectives – has been made evident by two basic factors: First, that the occupation army cannot ‘cleanse’ the northern Gaza Strip house by house or tunnel by tunnel, because this process will take years, expose more of its soldiers to danger, and cannot be implemented without further displacing the entire population of northern Gaza or massacring them. It should be noted, despite Israeli attempts to portray matters otherwise, that hundreds of thousands of civilians are still present in the north.
Second, the Israeli government needs to gradually re-inject reserve soldiers into the country’s economy to jump-start it, and to ensure that the productive sectors are not exposed to damage from which recovery will take a long time. This, despite the fact that the US and much of Europe appear ready to assist Israel’s economy, if necessary.
These measures are being taken because Israel has patently failed to achieve the two main goals of its war, namely, eliminating the Hamas-led resistance in Gaza, and liberating the Israeli prisoners captured by the resistance on 7 October.
There remains a basic motive that must be noted: The Israeli army is currently putting all its efforts into implementing a US decision to push the war from its first and second phases into the third phase before the end of January 2024. This requires the war to be managed at a slower boil, drawing less attention to Israeli carnage and the mass suffering of Palestinians.
After three months of brutalities, Washington has assessed the Israeli army as unable to eliminate the resistance or the possibilities of regional escalation, and has noted the significant harm caused to the US administration of Joe Biden as he enters the presidential primary season.
An escalation with Lebanon
As the Israeli occupation army moves to focus its operations on the southern Gaza Strip, the intensity of military operations along the Lebanese border between Hezbollah and the Israeli army has also been ratcheted up.
Hezbollah increased its targeting of occupation soldiers, both in their visible locations and inside the settlements of northern Palestine.
The information capabilities of Hezbollah have developed in both sophistication and accuracy during the past months. The Lebanese resistance fighters have employed missile types not previously utilized, which have a greater range and better destructive capacity than previous generations.
On the other hand, Tel Aviv has doubled the firepower it used in southern Lebanon. The Israelis continue to limit their operations to the area south of the Litani River, and are not expanding their scope except to target resistance groups that carry out strikes across the border. In recent weeks, the occupation army’s destructive power has risen dramatically since the early days of the battle.
By increasing its strikes, Israel’s leadership seeks to inflict the greatest possible number of losses among the ranks of the resistance fighters, as well as to spread panic among southern Lebanese residents – displacing more of them, and destroying the largest possible number of homes. This places a burden on both Hezbollah and the Lebanese state in the reconstruction process after the end of hostilities.
But there is a longer-term goal to this Israeli military performance. The government in Tel Aviv, according to its official statements, wants Hezbollah to withdraw from the south of the Litani, to ensure the security of Israeli settlers in northern Palestine who abandoned their homes, either voluntarily or under evacuation orders from their army. By some estimates, the number of Israelis fleeing their settlements in occupied north Palestine has reached more than 230,000 people.
In parallel with the public statements, messages began arriving in Beirut, from the US and from European capitals, demanding what they call ‘the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701,’ meaning Hezbollah’s withdrawal from the south of the Litani River.
According to emerging information, Tel Aviv is betting that Hezbollah will be deterred, as the 2019 economic collapse from which Lebanon has not yet recovered and the country’s long-running internal tensions are factors that will ultimately prevent Hezbollah from waging war.
Israel is therefore hoping that Hezbollah will yield to pressure and meet its demands regarding the withdrawal of its fighters from the border area with occupied Palestine.
The Israeli assessment of Lebanese affairs preceded its assassination of Al-Arouri in Beirut on 2 January. But in the same way that Israel military commanders and politicians have under-estimated and dismissed armed Palestinian resistance initiatives within occupied lands prior to 7 October, they continue to cling to a dated Israeli calculus that Hezbollah will never fully retaliate, or that it will only do so in a way that stops short of war.
Granted, Hezbollah does genuinely seek to limit the scope of the military confrontation, and has often pushed for a Gaza ceasefire to end hostilities throughout the region. Hezbollah is equally concerned about not disrupting the lives and livelihood of southern residents.
But while Hezbollah takes into account the complex political and economic Lebanese reality, it is not prepared to make concessions. Sources in the resistance axis say that Israel, as Hezbollah sees it, is not in a position to go to war with Lebanon when it cannot even compensate or digest the massive strategic losses it has incurred from Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
Despite its desire to not expand the war, Hezbollah has already begun to prepare for it. Hezbollah’s party statement, issued after the assassination of Al-Arouri, indicates this, and field measures and developments will begin to appear in time.
What Israel was unable to achieve in Gaza (restoring deterrence) while facing the tight ranks of the region’s Axis of Resistance, it will most certainly not be allowed to gain in Lebanon.
The first signs of this will appear in the plans that Hezbollah is expected to carry out in response to Israel’s 2 January raid on Dahiyeh to assassinate Al-Arouri – the first of its kind since August 2006 – and to which its Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah had previously threatened he would respond.
The bottom line is that Tel Aviv’s assessment of a war with Lebanon is based on its reading that Hezbollah wishes to prevent a major confrontation at any cost. Not only is this calculus wrong, but it has also muddled Israeli minds to the point where this may itself lead to the outbreak of a destructive war between the two sides.
A Lesser “Grade” of Human
Will the more than 100 Iranians killed by terrorist bombs today be mourned in the West as victims of terrorism? Certainly not.
By Michael Hoffman | Revelation of the Method | January 3, 2024
Will the more than 100 Iranians killed by terrorist bombs today be mourned in the West as victims of terrorism? Certainly not. Allied doctrine has it that the killing of Israeli or American civilians is a crime of cosmic proportions, while shedding the blood of “enemy” women and children is perfectly acceptable; indeed commendable.
The West does not memorialize the hundreds of thousands of civilians bombed by the U.S. in Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan and every major German city 1943-1945. America’s fire-bombing of the city of Tokyo by General Curtis LeMay in March 1945 was followed by Harry Truman’s atomic incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of that year. Truman never had a moment of doubt or regret over the murder of more than a 100,000 Asian children, mothers and non-combatant boys and men. It was business as usual for the “noble” Allies during the “Good War.”
In the West human rights signifies passionate concern only for civilians designated as truly human: Israelis first, then Americans and British, followed by their satraps.
This inhumanity is the legacy of Talmudic ideology, beginning with tractate Sanhedrin 57a from 400 A.D., concerning liability for capital punishment: “If a Jew murders a gentile, he is exempt.”
This teaching of contempt was reiterated in the dogma of Chabad Lubavitch founder Rabbi Shneur Zalman in the 18th century:
“In the Tanya of Zalman we encounter the doctrine that the souls of the gentiles contain no good whatsoever: Tanya Likutei Amarim I: ‘This law is taught: in the case of Israel, this soul of the kelipah is derived from kelipat nogah, which also contains good, as it originates in the esoteric ‘Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.’ The souls of the nations of the world (gentiles) however, emanate from the other, unclean kelipot which contain no good whatever.”
The unbroken chain of this dogmatic hate speech was continued by the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook in the 1920s. Kook weaponized the Talmud by uniting it with war-Zionism. He took the racism of the Talmud and “married” it to the Herzl/Ben Gurion ideology. Kook reiterated the Talmud’s ancient hostility to gentiles. He declared:
“The difference between the Israelite soul… and the souls of all the nations (gentiles), in their various grades, is greater and deeper than the difference between the soul…of man and the soul of animals. For between the latter there is only a quantitative difference, while between the former there exists a qualitative, essential difference.”
[Source: David Dishon,“The Beauty of Yefet in the Tents of Shem-Gentiles and Jews in the Thought of Rav Kook,” in Havruta: A Journal of Jewish Conversation. Shalom Hartman Institute. 1 (2): 80–89.]
Talmudic Zionist delegation to New York, 1924. Jerusalem Chief Rabbi Kook is on the right. Mayor John Hylan is at center.
The Cryptocracy clandestinely reverences the Talmud and the Kabbalah as the holiest books of Western civilization. This esteem has emerged in public in “Conservative” circles in the US and Britain, where Talmudism is hailed as an integral pillar of western civilization, an assertion which is unsustainable from the point of view of historiography, but a fervent article of faith on the Right, in that the Right wing believes that its agenda can’t prevail against the winds of woke without swearing fealty to this myth.
Influential Conservative Pastor Douglas Wilson advances his pro-nationalist views on the coattails of Talmudist philosopher Yoram Hazony of the Jerusalem Herzl Institute. I’m probably on safe ground in supposing that Rev. Wilson would never do the same partnered with an exponent of the Quran. Wilson, in spite of being acutely aware of the hate speech and blasphemous contents of the Talmud, offers a qualified “two cheers” for it in his new book, American Milk and Honey.
The august Acton Society, which bills itself as a paladin in the revival and restoration of our civilization, last month virtually canonized Lord Jonathan Sacks, the late Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth. Their gushing paean, brimming with rapture for Sacks’ life work, cited his mentor, the late Zionist Grand Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson of Chabad-Lubavitch, disciple of the aforementioned racist Shneur Zalman.
“It was the Lubavitcher Rebbe, as Schneerson is known, who inspired Sacks to pursue his rabbinic ordination and dedicate himself to the Jewish people. These encounters would influence Sacks’ intellectual sensibility and approach to Jewish institutional leadership for the rest of his career.
“… Sacks delivered the Erasmus Lecture, hosted by First Things magazine in New York… under the auspices of Pope Francis, Sacks delivered the keynote address at the Vatican’s International Colloquium on ‘The Complementarity of Man and Woman.”
The Talmudic content of Rabbi Sacks’ teaching is not mentioned by the Acton institute. In a review of Jonathan Rosen’s book, The Talmud and the Internet, Chief Rabbi Sacks wrote:
“Rosen loves, as I do, the extraordinary moment in the Talmud in which God is outvoted on a point of Jewish law and celebrates the fact that his children have defeated him. In the world of the rabbis not only do men study the Word of God, God studies the word of men.”
Rabbi Lord Sacks was referring to tractate BT Bava Metzia 59b in which Rabbi Yehoshua contradicts God by declaring that the law is rightfully decided on earth by the rabbis, not in heaven. The Talmud has God admit he was wrong. It puts these words into God’s mouth: “My sons have defeated me! “My sons have defeated me!”
This is what Sacks “loves.” What does Mr. Sacks’ rabbinic megalomania have to do with the gospel of Jesus, or the literature of Augustine, Aquinas or Shakespeare? Nothing. In fact, it is profoundly inimical to it: the Talmudic mentality boasts of contradicting God. The Talmud of Mystery Babyon is an occult dictatorship emanating from the Torah sheBeal peh (the counterfeit “Torah” founded upon “the traditions of men” — cf. Mark 7 and Matthew 15).
The grandaddy of the farcical campaign to associate Talmudism with Christian law and society was Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, an ardent promoter of the “Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University.” Scalia worked to apply Talmudic halacha to the American judicial system. (Cf. “A Supremely Talmudic Supreme Court Justice,” in The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome [2017], pp. 352-353 and 588-593).
The bipolar contradictions evident in the promotion of the demonstrably false legend of the West’s civilizational debt to Orthodox rabbinic theology carry the seeds of the downfall of the Conservative movement.
Meanwhile, Muslims in Iran today, and Arab civilians both Muslim and Christian in Gaza, die under the bombs of Western-enabled terrorists. This bloodshed is privately applauded in the salons and think tanks of America and Britain, given that the victims have been judged “qualitatively” and “essentially” to be a lesser “grade” of human.
Michael Hoffman manages the podcast, Revisionist History®. He is the author of the banned 2008 textbook Judaism Discovered (1,102 pages), and nine other volumes of history and literature, as well as 122 issues of the periodical, Revisionist History®. He is a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press and a former consultant to the news department of the New York Times. His books have been published in translation in Japan and France. He resides with his family in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
Revisionist History® is a registered trademark of Independent History and Research, Box 849, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho 83816. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright©2023 by Independent History and Research
A New Year’s Resolution Worth Keeping
By Ron Paul | January 2, 2024
In the closing days of 2023, the Biden Administration once again announced a large military aid package for Ukraine, this time a “mere” quarter of a billion dollars. Without a new authorization of funds from Congress, it is said to be the last bit of money left over from the more than $100 billion already authorized by Congress for the proxy war with Russia through Ukraine.
President Biden’s request for an additional $100 billion to spread around Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan was rejected by a Congress eager for its winter break, and with each passing day it looks like it’s going to be harder to push it through. Poll after poll show that Americans are increasingly opposed to more of their money being spent on the neocon’s lost-cause war to overthrow Putin in Russia.
For example, a recent Fox News poll revealed that more than 60 percent of Republican voters do not want any more money sent to Ukraine. As we enter an election year, it’s probably safe to predict that Republican candidates will be wary of crossing the wishes of the clear majority of voters.
That is why the Biden Administration has been desperately trying to re-frame its request for more Ukraine war money as anything but a request for more Ukraine war money. For example, they even brought back the old discredited “domino theory” used to justify US actions in the Vietnam war. If we don’t stop Putin in Ukraine, Biden said in December, then he will keep going into western Europe where we will be forced to fight him there.
On the one hand, supporters of the Ukraine war warn that Russia is about to reconstitute the Soviet empire in Europe, while at the same time the same people tell us Russia is out of missiles and on its last leg. One more infusion of US money will end the “Russian threat” once and for all. Both of these things cannot be true at once. In fact, neither of them is true.
But still the Administration, much of Congress, and an insatiable military-industrial complex keep selling the lies.
Last month Secretary of State Antony Blinken inadvertently revealed what exactly all the spending for war is about when he stated that as much as 90 percent of the aid for Ukraine is actually spent in the United States. The money is used “to the benefit of American business, local communities, and strengthening the US defense industrial base,” he said in an interview. In other words, the money “for Ukraine” is actually a massive welfare program for well-connected military contractors back home.
As we begin the year 2024, we need to home in on the real threat to the United States. It is not Russia or China or Iran. The true threat is closer to home: it is a corrupt system that bleeds the country dry to fight imaginary enemies while enriching the military-industrial complex.
For the New Year, Congress should resolve to end the stranglehold of the military-industrial complex by reining in out-of-control military spending. Members should simply vote “no” on military spending bills until they are drafted to benefit the American people rather than the Beltway elite. I don’t hold out much hope of this happening in the short run, but it only takes a few dedicated Members to make a real difference.
US and South Korea Conduct Training Simulating Assassination of Kim Jong Un
By Kyle Anzalone | The Libertarian Institute | January 3, 2024
A top South Korean defense official said Washington and Seoul have considered assassinating the North Korean leader. The simulations have gone as far as joint special operations training missions.
South Korean Defense Minister Shin Won-sik explained to reporters last month that the deployment of US nuclear weapons or the assassination of North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un were options being discussed between Washington and Seoul.
“While it is difficult to openly discuss decapitation, the ROK-US special operation forces are… conducting training,” Won-sik said. “This training is for aerial maneuvers, raids on key facilities, and indoor mop-up.”
The Daily Beast first reported the US and South Korea would conduct the decapitation war games in August 2022.
Since President Joe Biden took office, tensions have risen sharply on the Korean Peninsula. The current administration has abandoned the Donald Trump-era diplomacy with Pyongyang. Biden has deployed some of America’s most advanced weapons to the region and ramped up military engagements with South Korea.
Pyongyang has responded to Washington’s provocations by stepping up its military capabilities. North Korea has conducted several missile tests, including with intercontinental ballistic missiles. Pyongyang successfully placed a military satellite into orbit in 2023 and plans three more this year.
Kim and other top North Korean officials warned several times last year that the US and South Korean military activities have put the Peninsula on the brink of a nuclear war. During a major address, Kim explained Pyongyang would further its nuclear weapons program during the coming year.
Why are so Many Californians Dying?
By Thomas Buckley | Brownstone Institute | January 3, 2024
Covid has claimed about 105,000* lives in the state since 2020.
In that same time period, 82,000 more Californians died from everything else than is typical.
Adjusted for the decline in population, that non-Covid “excess death” figure becomes even more concerning as the state has seen its population drop to about the same it was in 2015.
In 2015 – obviously there was no Covid – 260,000 of the then 39 million Californians died. In 2023, not including November and December, 240,000 people died not from Covid (6,000 additional people died of Covid.).
Extrapolating the year-to-date figures for 2023 creates a final year-end figure of 280,000 – 20,000 more people than died in 2015. That’s a non-Covid, population-neutral jump of 8%.
In other words, despite the protestations of certain officials, the state’s death rate has NOT returned to “pre-Covid” levels – in 2019 the year before the pandemic, 270,000 people died with a population at least 400,000 greater than today.
Why?
Dr. Bob Wachter, medical chair at UC-SF and ardent supporter of tight pandemic restrictions, did not respond to an email from the Globe (away for work the auto-response said) but he did recently tell the San Jose Mercury News that in “(T)he last three years, not only were there a lot of deaths from Covid, there were a lot of additional deaths from non-Covid causes, which are probably attributable to people not receiving the medical care that they normally would have received’ when ERs were overflowing with Covid patients (note – the truth of that ER assertion has not been verified), Wachter noted.”
In other words, the pandemicist Wachter admitted the pandemic response itself at least contributed to a significant number of excess deaths, a fact that was aggressively and roundly denied and – if mentioned – led to censoring and societal ostracization (and in many cases job losses) by the powers that be during the pandemic.
A second admission along these lines was recently made by former National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins – Tony Fauci’s boss.
In this video clip, Collins – who once called for a “devastating takedown” (see above) of those who questioned the hard pandemic response – said his DC and public health blinders, well, blinded him to the problems his pandemic response caused and is still causing:
If you’re a public health person, and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is, and that is something that will save a life. Doesn’t matter what else happens, so you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never might quite recover from. Collateral damage. This is a public health mindset. And I think a lot of us involved in trying to make those recommendations had that mindset — and that was really unfortunate, it’s another mistake we made.
(You can see Collins for yourself here.)
Needless to say there is not even a half-hearted apology involved. And Collins is/was wrong in the approach to public health he apparently subscribes to, as throughout modern history it has involved a cost/benefit analysis and a weighing of the impact on society.
Public health, practiced properly, does not – and never before has – attached “zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never might quite recover from.”
“We had the exact wrong people in charge at the exact wrong time,” said Stanford professor of medicine (and one of the people Collins tried to “take down”) Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. “Their decisions were myopically deadly.”
To remind Collins of the ramifications of his decision beyond the excess deaths:
Massive educational degradation. Economic devastation, by both the lockdowns and now the continuing fiscal nightmare plaguing the nation caused by continuing federal overreaction. The critical damage to the development of children’s social skills through hyper-masking and fear-mongering. The obliteration of the public’s trust in institutions due to their incompetence and deceitfulness during the pandemic. The massive erosion of civil liberties. The direct hardships caused by vaccination mandates, etc. under the false claim of helping one’s neighbor. The explosion of the growth of Wall Street built on the destruction of Main Street.
The clear separation of society into two camps – those who could easily prosper during the pandemic and those whose lives were completely upended. The demonization of anyone daring to ask even basic questions about the efficacy of the response, be it the vaccines themselves, the closure of public schools, the origin of the virus, or the absurdity of the useless public theater that made up much of the program. The fissures created throughout society and the harm caused by guillotined relationships amongst family and friends.
The slanders and career chaos endured by prominent actual experts (see the Great Barrington Declaration, co-authored by Bhattacharya) and just plain reasonable people like Jennifer Sey for daring to offer different approaches; approaches – such as focusing on the most vulnerable – that had been tested and succeeded before.
Nationally, pandemic “all-cause” deaths spiked, for obvious reasons, but they remain stubbornly higher than normal to this day.
There could be mitigating factors to California’s numbers, specifically the issue of drug overdoses. Since 2018, the overdose death rate has doubled. The last overall figures available are from 2021 which showed 10,901 people dying of an overdose. While not specifically broken out for which drug, the vast majority are from opioid overdoses and the vast majority of those involve fentanyl. In 2022, there were 7,385 opioid-related deaths with 6,473 of those involving fentanyl.
But the overdose death increase would account for only about 25% of the total increase in “excess deaths,” meaning it has an impact but cannot explain the whole story.
There is also the issue of homeless deaths. Homeless people die at a far higher rate than the rest of the population and California has had a burgeoning homeless population for the last few years, despite the money being spent on the issue. However, at least a portion of that increase can – as with overdoses – be attributed to fentanyl and is therefore difficult to separate out as discrete numbers.
Those two increases, however, may explain the fact that the “all-cause” excess death rate for those in the 25-to-44 year age bracket (it has comparatively higher overdose death and homelessness figures) have remained – except for two very recent weeks – above the typical historical range.
The increase in overdose (and alcohol-related deaths) has been directly tied to the pandemic response previously. In California, there were about 3,500 more alcohol-related deaths during the pandemic response than before: 5,600 in 2019 (pre-pandemic,) 6,100 in 2020, 7,100 in 2021, 6,600 in 2022, and 2023 is on pace to see about 6,000.
That still leaves roughly half of the excess deaths unaccounted for, raising questions about the safety of the Covid shot (a shot, not a vaccine) itself. The CDC lists 640 deaths in California directly from the shot and an increase in “adverse effects” from the shot compared to many other actual vaccines. The Covid shot “ adverse” rate was one in a thousand, while, for comparison, it’s about one in a million for the polio vaccine.
That means a person was more than 9 times as likely to die from the Covid shot as any other vaccine and 6.5 times to be injured by it in some fashion.
Still that is – according to state figures – not enough to explain the increase.
There are three other issues to note: first, many of the counting questions around dying “from” Covid versus “with” Covid remain, meaning the Covid death numbers could be elevated if the “withs” are lumped in with the “froms.”
Second, there is the simmering matter of “iatrogenic” deaths – i.e. deaths caused by the treatment. Early on in the pandemic response, a push was made to “ventilate” patients mechanically. From the above article (no caps in the original):
here’s an unsettling comparison: in NYC area, mortality rate for all COV ICU patients was 78%. in stockholm, the SURVIVAL rate was over 80%. this is a staggering variance. the key difference: ventilators. NYC used them on 85% of patients, sweden used them sparingly
Combined with the placing of Covid patients in nursing homes, the number of actual “only” or “natural” (for lack of a better term) Covid deaths, again, may be elevated.
The state Department of Public Health declined to comment on the matter.
Which brings us back to the Wachter and Collins oblique, nearly accidental admissions that the response itself may have caused significant and ongoing damage across numerous personal and public sectors.
Comparing California to other states also shows a concerning trend, specifically when considering the aftermath of the pandemic response. While increasing in population, for example, Florida’s excess death rate increase was/is lower than California’s as was its Covid death rate, a fact Gov. Gavin Newsom has been lying about for years.
During the pandemic itself, the nation saw an “all-cause” – including Covid – death rate increase of about 16% above normal. Using that metric, as it is clear the response itself had knock-on effects – California’s was 19.4% and Florida’s was 16.7%, despite the wildly different pandemic responses.
Imagine, if you will, you own a baseball team and you have two shortstops, one that earns $10 million a year and one that earns $1 million. And it turns out that both are equally talented – errors, batting stats, etc. – and that maybe the cheaper one is actually even a bit more talented it turns out. Which shortstop was the better deal for the team? The less expensive one, of course.
That is an apt analogy for states choosing how to respond to the pandemic – Florida cut the $10 million player while California kept him. In other words, the two states got the same-ish performance but at wildly different societal costs.
This pattern seems to be borne out by many of the figures. Obviously, various states that ended up lower than the national average took very different approaches: North Dakota and New Jersey saw roughly the same all-cause mortality numbers, as did Washington (state) and South Dakota.
This is true on the “high side” as well: California and Montana, Oregon and Arkansas are two pairs that had similar numbers with different approaches.
All of this raises a deeper question in that there appears to be little if any direct causative resultant difference between a draconian pandemic response and a softer touch.
And that should not at all be the case: the lockdowns, the masks, the shots, the social distancing, the closing of schools and stores and churches and parks, and everything else should have produced a clear and distinct difference – if the pandemicists were right.
If they were right, the difference in results should be stark and obvious to the naked eye. Miami should look like Genoa after the plague ships arrived while Los Angeles should seem like a New Eden. If the much-maligned Swedish “soft” model was as dangerous as the pandemicists said, Stockholm should be a ghost town.
But that’s not at all true and that’s why the pandemicists are/were so evidently wrong: the harshest methods had little impact on the end results.
While there were differences between states, they cannot necessarily be directly tied to a specific policy construct (save Hawaii, which can be discounted considering their isolated geography). Hard or soft pandemic response, in the long run it didn’t seem to matter much in the Covid death tolls.
Where it did – and still does – matter is the immediate and long-lasting damage the more tyrannical responses had on society as a whole.
And – if California’s excess death numbers are an indicator – the pandemic response itself is still killing people.
And that, too, definitely shouldn’t be happening – if the pandemicists were right.
It is even more problematic – and even more ethically abhorrent – if the Covid death figures are inflated; the number of Covid deaths of 105,000 is only about 20% higher than the other non-Covid excess death figure of 82,000.
In other words, the net “from Covid” deaths may not be terribly different from the “from the Covid response” death count.
And that possibility is the most terrifying of all.
* All numbers used are rounded for simplicity and come from state and federal sources.
Thomas Buckley is the former mayor of Lake Elsinore, Cal. and a former newspaper reporter. He is currently the operator of a small communications and planning consultancy.
French Researchers Identify ‘Improbably High Rate of Deaths’ in Newborns Who Received New RSV Shot
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | January 2, 2024
French researchers identified possible safety signals in babies coinciding with the rollout of Beyfortus, a recently approved monoclonal antibody treatment for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) in newborns.
The discovery comes as public health authorities ramp up warnings about the spread of respiratory viruses and step up their promotion of the drug.
In interviews with The Defender, the researchers — French independent scientist and author Hélène Banoun, Ph.D., and French statistician Christine Mackoi — explained that data from France’s National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) indicates an improbably high rate of deaths of babies between 2 and 6 days old in France during September and October 2023.
INSEE is the authority that compiles official birth and death data in France.
This increase, the researchers said, coincides with the introduction of Beyfortus in French hospitals, which began on Sept. 15, 2023. In an interview with cardiologist Peter McCullough, M.D., MPH, Banoun said that over 200,000 newborn babies in France have been injected with Beyfortus since that date.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended Beyfortus in August 2023, while the European Medicines Agency (EMA) authorized the drug in September 2022.
Beyfortus was developed jointly by AstraZeneca and Sanofi.
The drug is offered as a “one-time shot for infants born just before or during the RSV season and for those less than 8 months old before the season starts,” and for some high-risk 8- to 19-month-old infants.
According to The Associated Press, “In the U.S., about 58,000 children younger than 5 are hospitalized for RSV each year and several hundred die.” CNBC reported that “RSV is the leading cause of hospitalization among infants in the U.S.” According to the CDC, nearly all children are infected with RSV before the age of 2.
But the French researchers and other medical experts who spoke with The Defender warned that no long-term studies have been conducted involving Beyfortus and newborns and that the administration of monoclonal antibodies on this population is unprecedented. They also pointed to data indicating RSV’s low risk to babies.
Dr. Meryl Nass, an internist, biological warfare epidemiologist and member of the Children’s Health Defense (CHD) scientific advisory committee, told The Defender, “Giving newborns any drug or biologic should be done with extreme caution, let alone a novel, injected monoclonal antibody. You cannot tell if the infant is damaged by the shot, when you don’t yet know how healthy the newborn is and how it normally behaves. This should be a huge red flag for manufacturers as well as parents.”
According to Banoun, “The French government is recommending that Beyfortus be injected into newborns before they leave the maternity ward, from Sept. 15, 2023, even though the product has not been tested on this age group,” Banoun said.
Nass pointed out that the CDC published a paper in 2021 on all U.S. RSV deaths over the preceding 12 years. The CDC reviewed death certificates, and found there were only 26 deaths per year with RSV, and only 17 deaths per year in the entire U.S. caused by RSV in babies under one year old.
According to McCullough, “Among the 22.4 million children under age 5 years, the annual risk of RSV hospitalization is well under 1%.”
Excess deaths among newborns ‘alarming,’ ‘disturbing’
Mackoi told The Defender, “There is an excess of deaths for the months of September and October. The excess deaths in October are very alarming. It is very worrisome that this happened in two consecutive months.”
According to Mackoi, the increase in these excess deaths coincides with the introduction of Beyfortus in France.
“There is a strong concomitance with the Beyfortus injection since Sept. 15, 2023,” she said. “In France, babies receive injections of Beyfortus before leaving the maternity hospital. They leave the maternity hospital three or four days after their birth … These excess deaths are abnormal.”
According to Mackoi, the data show “a 50% increase in deaths of babies between 2 and 6 days of life compared with what would be expected,” noting that “the reference is obtained by dividing the number of deaths by the total number of births in 2018 and 2019; the result is 0.69 deaths between 2 and 6 days per 1,000 births.”
In September, the observed mortality rate was 0.97 deaths per 1,000 births, and in October, it was 1.05 deaths per 1,000 births, Mackoi said. “It is anomalous that this very significant increase should be found two months in a row. It may well be due to the injection of Beyfortus since Sept. 15, 2023.”
“Although of no scientific value, I have received testimonials from relatives and via the internet from families of healthy babies who were hospitalized in intensive care with respiratory distress syndrome immediately after the injection,” Banoun added.
Mackoi said that using the official INSEE data, which she described as “reliable [but] underestimated,” she “calculated for each month, the rate of babies born the month in question and died between 2 and 6 days of life,” and used a Poisson distribution to identify abnormal mortality rates, compiling the findings on her website.
According to the INSEE data, 54 deaths were recorded for 55,489 births in France in September 2023, despite the average number of expected deaths being 38, based on historical averages.
For October 2023, the data showed 61 deaths out of 57,940 births, despite the average number of expected deaths being 40.
Mackoi said that the probability of the September 2023 death figure occurring by chance is 0.9%, while the probability of the increased mortality in newborns in October 2023 is even lower, at 0.1%. She also noted that “there are no excess deaths less than 48 hours after birth,” and that this is “one more indication” that Beyfortus is causing the deaths, because they are not receiving the monoclonal for the first 48 hours of life.
“The coincidence of Beyfortus injections with excess infant deaths is disturbing,” Mackoi said.
Monoclonal antibodies may exacerbate symptoms rather than prevent them
These revelations came as the White House announced on Dec. 14, 2023, that it would make 230,000 additional doses of Beyfortus available last month, in addition to 77,000 doses that were released in November 2023.
A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) on Dec. 28 concluded, “Nirsevimab protected infants against hospitalization for RSV-associated lower respiratory tract infection and against very severe RSV-associated lower respiratory tract infection in conditions that approximated real-world settings.”
The study was funded by AstraZeneca and Sanofi.
According to Banoun, official data do not indicate that Beyfortus is effective. The data do, however, indicate a high prevalence of adverse reactions — including bronchiolitis — even though the treatment is supposed to protect recipients from respiratory illness.
“The most frequently reported adverse events are upper respiratory tract infections, including bronchiolitis,” she said.
Banoun added that data from the French National Authority for Health (HAS) do not “support a possible impact of Beyfortus in terms of reduced length of hospital stay, transfer to intensive care units, and mortality.”
“According to HAS, in the trials, the absolute risk of RSV infection was reduced by 3.8% in the five months following injection, and the absolute risk of hospitalization was reduced by 1% to 2% over the same period,” she said.
Banoun said the trials were not conducted on newborns, whereas the French government recommends injection from the first days of life in the maternity ward.
According to EudraVigilance, as of Dec. 24, 2023, there were 64 adverse events related to Beyfortus in those 1 month old or younger, and 68 for those between 2 months and 2 years of age. One death, that of a baby below 1 month old, was recorded, as were 60 records containing the word bronchiolitis. And according to VigiAccess, there were 104 adverse events reported, including 57 infections and respiratory disorders.
Another study, concerning premature babies and newborns suffering from heart or lung disease that compared Beyfortus with monoclonal antibodies previously used on high-risk babies, recorded six deaths — five due to bronchiolitis. Of the six babies that died, five had been treated with Beyfortus.
Yet, “these bronchiolitis cases are not attributed to the treatment by the investigator, who is also the manufacturer of the products,” Banoun said. “All this suggests that nirsevimab [generic name for Beyfortus] could facilitate and aggravate bronchiolitis: these injections take place during periods when the virus is circulating.”
“Let’s not forget that this whole bronchiolitis ‘prevention’ campaign is supposed to avoid overcrowding hospitals with babies suffering from the disease,” Banoun said. “If this product doesn’t significantly reduce hospital admissions, what’s the point?”
According to NTD, “Monoclonal antibodies are copies of an antibody that seek out foreign material to destroy them,” but the treatments come with a “risk that the body might trigger a strong reaction to the antibodies.”
Complications may be serious and can include “acute anaphylaxis or life-threatening massive allergic reactions and cytokine release syndrome that can result in organ damage.” This phenomenon is one of the adverse effects of Beyfortus.
In his interview with Banoun, McCullough said, “Antibody-dependent enhancements [ADE] have always been something we’ve been worried about because if antibodies bind the virus but not very tightly, that means they don’t neutralize the virus. And then, [a] fragment [Fc] of the antibody binds to a cell receptor. In a sense, the antibody can bring the virus into the cell.”
McCullough told The Defender, “The antibodies will invariably affect the development of natural immunity with repeated exposures to RSV during childhood. Beyfortus-resistant strains can be expected with indiscriminate use.”
Banoun cited a study in which “two of the 25 subjects in the nirsevimab group with RSV … had an RSV isolate containing substitutions associated with resistance to nirsevimab,” while “No subject in the placebo group had an RSV isolate containing substitutions associated with resistance to nirsevimab.”
Banoun also referred to a September 2022 EMA report, which found that during failed RSV vaccine trials in the past, children died of severe bronchiolitis in the vaccinated groups, but none from the control groups died.
“This ADE is due to the deleterious effect of antibodies which, instead of neutralizing the virus, facilitate its entry into the cell via the receptor of the Fc fragment of immunoglobulins. And it’s precisely this Fc region of nirsevimab … that industry has seen fit to modify,” Banoun said.
“Manufacturers are looking for the beneficial effects of this phenomenon and are wary of deleterious effects, which is why they have investigated the risk of ADE with Beyfortus in animal models,” Banoun added. “They claim not to have detected it, but the EMA points out, unmoved, that no histopathological evaluation of rats was carried out after treatment and infection with RSV: This is the only recognized marker of ADE.”
On his Substack, McCullough wrote that this effect may be triggered by aerosolized RSV virions present in hospitals.
“This means as ambient aerosolized RSV virions are present in hospitals, clinics, and home, the monoclonal antibody may backfire and enable the inhaled virion to gain access to the bronchial epithelial lining and cause worse bronchiolitis than the baby would have with their own developing natural immunity,” he wrote.
Beyfortus administered on newborns despite being tested on older babies
During the clinical trial leading up to approval of Beyfortus by the CDC and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), a total of 12 infant deaths were recorded. However, the FDA claimed the deaths were “unrelated” to the antibody.
CNBC reported in June that of the 12 infants, “Four died from cardiac disease, two died from gastroenteritis, two died from unknown causes but were likely cases [of] sudden infant death syndrome, one died from a tumor, one died from COVID, one died from a skull fracture, and one died of pneumonia.”
“Fact-checkers” were quick to respond to any stories indicating that the infants’ deaths were related to Beyfortus, with factcheck.org writing in August 2023, “There isn’t evidence the [Beyfortus] shots have killed any babies, contrary to social media claims.”
But according to Banoun, “According to the HAS and EMA, 11 deaths were reported in the nirsevimab groups, one death in the pavilizumab (former equivalent drug) group and three deaths in the placebo groups. The FDA counted 12 deaths in all treated groups versus three in the placebo groups, not including the one that occurred after the follow-up period.”
“It should be noted that all deaths in the placebo groups concerned premature babies in the Griffin study,” Banoun said. “In trials involving full-term babies, all deaths involved treated subjects.”
Banoun said:
“The FDA has added one death in the placebo groups which occurred after the end of follow-up, but no mention is made of any deaths in the treated groups which occurred after this same period. Similarly, a significant number of babies are withdrawn from the trials and therefore no longer followed up after their withdrawal. This imbalance is therefore potentially more serious than published.”
Other studies also showed infant deaths connected to Beyfortus. McCullough told The Defender, “I am concerned about 3 versus 0 deaths with Beyfortus and placebo respectively in the MELODY trial published in NEJM, 2022.”
Nass pointed out another such anomaly in clinical trial results where “The deaths were said to be disproportionate between the placebo and nirsevimab groups.”
“I don’t trust the data as being reliable,” Nass said, “For instance, in this NEJM-published trial, 9.5% of babies who did not receive nirsevimab wound up with pneumonia and ‘lower respiratory tract’ RSV infections.”
“This seems awfully high,” Nass continued, “Especially when the CDC’s own study showed only 17 babies per year die from RSV. I find it hard to rely on the NEJM data.”
“The problem is that, with potentially billions of dollars riding on the outcome of a few clinical trials, there may be tremendous pressure to come up with the desired results. And there are many ways in which the desired results can be achieved,” she added.
Banoun also pointed out that while Beyfortus is administered to newborns, clinical studies tested the drug on older babies.
If we refer to the descriptions of the deceased babies, in the Domachowske study, “Only 1 was less than a month old at the time of injection (23 days), while all the others were between 1 and 7.5 months old,” she said. “We find the same panel of babies in all the other studies … in the Griffin study, the babies have a median age of over 6 months, in the Hammitt and Domachowske studies, only half the babies are under 3 months old … in the Hammitt study, the median age is 2.6 months (range 1.05 to 4.5 months).”
According to Banoun, public health authorities are aware of this discrepancy, noting that in the HAS Transparency Commission’s report on Beyfortus, Sylvie Chevret, M.D., Ph.D., professor of public health and biostatistics at France’s Université Paris Cité, said:
“In these trials, they included children who were essentially said to be in good health, so tomorrow, do you intend to give this drug to all newborns, bearing in mind that the studies did not include newborns?
“They included children who were less than three months old, of course, but up to more than 6 months.”
“The FDA and the American Association of Pediatrics jumped the gun in 2023 and were reckless in the approval and recommendation of Beyfortus for mass deployment in babies without carefully considering these issues,” McCullough told The Defender.
‘Expectant mothers should be prepared to resist’ Beyfortus for their babies
Despite these indications and possible safety signals, Banoun said that there has been no reaction so far from public health authorities in France or elsewhere.
“The only reaction to my posts was censorship and a video that was supposed to debunk my claims but actually confirmed them,” she said. “Like all critical scientists, I am censored: strict control over social networks, in particular Twitter, where we have been rendered virtually invisible since December 2023, when the European Digital Commissioner threatened Twitter with heavy fines.”
“When all debate is censored, all criticism discredited, even penalized and ostracized, can we still speak of ‘science’?” Banoun questioned, tying the censorship she’s experienced and the promotion of drugs such as Beyfortus to the concept of biopolitics.
Banoun explained that biopolitics was theorized by French philosopher Michel Foucault “to explain how power is exercised over human populations … on a global level” and “which, in our time, tends to impose health standards on all human populations [and] increasingly relies on vaccination as an alternative to care in infectiology.”
“Biopower today is exercised by an alliance of governments and health agencies with big industry. Biopolitics [also] concerns the control of populations in fields other than health: digital identity and climate,” she added.
For Banoun, financial interests are a key reason for this stance on the part of public health authorities and pharmaceutical companies.
“The market for bronchiolitis prevention will therefore represent several billion dollars for Big Pharma in the years to come. Why such a large market for a disease that is benign in the vast majority of cases? … The giants of the pharmaceutical industry are in permanent financial difficulty because of the fines and compensation they have to pay.”
“To compensate for these fines, manufacturers have to launch ‘blockbusters’ — highly profitable products that sell very well,” Banoun said, adding that the vaccine liability shield afforded to vaccines by laws such as the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 may be extended to treatments and drugs other than vaccines.
“It is feared that this exemption from liability will be extended to preventive therapies such as Beyfortus,” Banoun said, pointing out that U.S. and European authorities have mixed the classification of Beyfortus, considering it a vaccine in some instances and not in others.
In the U.S., the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended adding Beyfortus to the childhood vaccine schedule, providing its manufacturers with a waiver of liability, but also recommended coding it as a drug for insurance purposes and leaving it out of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP).
In addition to this liability shield, Banoun said that, in France, midwives and nurses reportedly “receive a bonus for each injection — Sanofi pays a sum to each hospital, which is then redistributed to the injectors.”
Experts advised parents and physicians to be wary of Beyfortus.
“Physicians and parents should be conservative in deciding on Beyfortus. I do not recommend it for parents who are expecting healthy newborns or babies without severe pulmonary disease,” McCullough told The Defender.
Banoun said “Expectant mothers should be prepared to resist,” noting the White House’s and CDC’s efforts to promote Beyfortus and pressure placed on new mothers in French hospitals, where “nursing staff insist on giving it to the mother up to four or five times during her stay in the maternity ward.”
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
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.
They Think We Are Stupid, Volume 4
By Aaron Kheriaty, MD | Human Flourishing | January 2, 2024
Happy New Year, dear readers! As always, this series of headlines is presented without commentary. It’s everything you need to know about our ruling class’s opinion of you.
Florida Surgeon General Calls for a Complete Halt on Pfizer and Moderna mRNA Vaccines
FDA, CDC Unable to Handle Dr. Ladapo’s Concerns.
By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | January 3, 2024
Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo is a Harvard-trained MD, PhD, and arguably one of the top experts on COVID-19 in the world. Prior to the Florida Surgeon General appointment, Dr. Ladapo was in academic practice at UCLA and published with myself, Dr. John McKinnon, and Dr. Harvey Risch on the efficacy of early hydroxychloroquine in acute COVID-19.
On December 6th 2023, State Surgeon General Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo sent a letter to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Dr. Robert M. Califf and Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Mandy Cohen regarding questions pertaining to the discovery of DNA process-related impurities found in the the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.
Ladapo’s concerns center around lipid nanoparticles laced with Simian Virus 40 (SV40) promoter/enhancer/origin of insertion DNA sequences widely distributed through the body. SV40 is a known promoter of proto-oncogenes.
The 2007, the FDA ‘Guidance for Industry: Considerations for Plasmid DNA Vaccines for Infectious Disease Indications (Guidance for Industry) outlines important considerations for vaccines that use novel methods of delivery regarding DNA integration, specifically:
- DNA integration could theoretically impact a human’s oncogenes – the genes which can transform a healthy cell into a cancerous cell.
- DNA integration may result in chromosomal instability.
- The Guidance for Industry discusses biodistribution of DNA vaccines and how such integration could affect unintended parts of the body including blood, heart, brain, liver, kidney, bone marrow, ovaries/testes, lung, draining lymph nodes, spleen, the site of administration and subcutis at injection site.
The FDA provided a written response on December 14, 2023, indicating the sponsors have NOT addressed risks outlined by the FDA itself in 2007. Because the FDA failed to handle these concerns, Dr. Ladapo has released the following statement:
The FDA’s response does not provide data or evidence that the DNA integration assessments it recommended itself have been performed. Instead, it pointed to genotoxicity studies – which are inadequate assessments for DNA integration risk. In addition, it obfuscated the difference between the SV40 promoter/enhancer and SV40 proteins, two elements that are distinct.
DNA integration poses a unique and elevated risk to human health and to the integrity of the human genome, including the risk that DNA integrated into sperm or egg gametes could be passed onto offspring of mRNA COVID-19 vaccine recipients. If the risks of DNA integration have not been assessed for mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, these vaccines are not appropriate for use in human beings.
Providers concerned about patient health risks associated with COVID-19 should prioritize patient access to non-mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and treatment. It is my hope that, in regard to COVID-19, the FDA will one day seriously consider its regulatory responsibility to protect human health, including the integrity of the human genome.
Ladapo called for a halt in Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccination. However, he did not recall the non-genetic, Spike-protein antigen Novavax vaccine. The Bio-Pharmaceutical complex does not promote Novavax largely because Weber Shandwick has a PR contract with the CDC vaccine office to promote only Pfizer and Moderna. Senator Rand Paul has called out this conflict of interest and obvious paid favoritism for mRNA over the safer but equally ineffective Novavax product.
I wonder if Pfizer and Moderna were halted, would our government switch to promotion of Novavax or would they continue to let the smaller company languish?
The Florida State Surgeon General’s announcement today is a milestone as more government officials join a chorus calling for recall of COVID-19 vaccines including myself (US Senate, multiple State Senates, EU Parliament, UK Parliament), 17,000 physicians representing the Global COVID-19 Summit, Australian scientists, the World Council for Health, and the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.
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“Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism!” The Science is Settled. Right?
ICAN urges the IACC to actually study infant vaccines and autism
By Aaron Siri | Injecting Freedom | March 16, 2026
On behalf of ICAN, we just sent a copy of chapter 11 of Vaccines, Amen to the newly appointed members of the federal Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC).
If you haven’t already read this chapter, you can read the whole thing in the attached letter. I trust that after you read it, you’ll see why the statement “vaccines do not cause autism” is a belief, not science!
IACC Public Comment Letter
1.53MB ∙ PDF file
Includes chapter 11 of Vaccines, Amen
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Washington’s War on Cuba Is Older Than You Think
- Daniel Davis: U.S. Military Options & War Narrative Collapse
- Protesters call on Brussels university to cut partnership with Israeli defense-linked firm
- Weapons makers cash in on Trump’s Iran war
- Why Trump’s anti-Iran naval coalition in Strait of Hormuz is doomed to fail
- IRGC says regional energy sites linked to US will be reduced to ashes
- Qatar condemns ‘dangerous’ Israeli attack on gas field
- Iran made ‘unexpectedly substantial’ offer during Geneva talks, US envoys ‘dragged’ Trump into war: Report
- Russia condemns Israel’s attack near Bushehr plant, files complaint
- Russia Strongly Condemns Actions Aimed at Harming Health of Iranian Leadership – Kremlin
- If Americans Knew
- How ignorance, misunderstanding and obfuscation ended Iran nuclear talks
- Israeli media reports grotesque settler attack in West Bank
- UK security adviser attended US-Iran talks and judged deal was within reach
- Tucker Carlson says ‘neocons’ will try to destroy Joe Kent over resignation
- Lebanon death toll exceeds 900, another assassination in Iran, bombing in Gaza – Not a ceasefire Day 159
- Trump’s counterterrorism chief, whose own wife was killed by ISIS, quits over Iran War saying Tehran posed ‘no imminent threat’
- Here’s what US could fund instead of Bibi’s war on Iran
- Israel Killed Over a Dozen Lebanese Paramedics in Three Days, Now Claiming That Ambulances Are “Hezbollah” Targets
- War on Iran: These are the heritage sites devastated by US and Israeli attacks
- Four news stories from Israeli media that illustrate Israeli “justice”
- No Tricks Zone
- Energy Expert: Germany’s Nuclear Phaseout Was A “500 Billion Euro Mistake”
- New Research: South Australia’s Mid-Holocene Sea Surface Temperatures Were 4°C Warmer Than Today
- Storing Green Energy To Last Germany 10 Days Would Require A 60-Million Tonne Battery
- New Studies: UK Sea Levels Were 4 Meters Higher Than Today During The Mid-Holocene
- Destructive Green New Deal: German Energy And Metal Group Warns Of Drastic Crisis
- New Study Documents A 20-Year Pause In Arctic Sea Ice Decline – Driven By Internal Variability
- Wake-up Call: Survey Shows Majority Of Germans Now Favor Postponing Climate Targets!
- Televised! Leading German Political Candidate Tells Schoolchildren CO2 Makes Sun Hotter!
- New Study: A Century Warming Of 1.1°C Is ‘Commonplace’ And ‘Not Unusual’ During This Interglacial
- New Study: ‘Internal Noise’ And Volcanic Forcing Can Trigger 10-15°C Warming Within Decades
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