Utah Becomes First State to Ban Fluoride in Public Drinking Water
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | March 28, 2025
Utah became the first state to ban the addition of fluoride to public drinking water after Gov. Spencer Cox signed the law late Thursday night. The ban will take effect on May 7.
Rep. Stephanie Gricius, who sponsored the bill, said in an email to The Defender that she was thrilled the governor signed it. She said:
“The proper role of government is to provide safe, clean drinking water, not mass medicate the public. While we have banned it from being added to our water systems, we have also increased access to fluoride tablets through the pharmacies so any Utahn who wishes to take it may. But it will now be a decision each individual can make for themselves.”
The new law bans water fluoridation, but also gives pharmacists new authority to prescribe fluoride supplement pills. Typically, such pills can be prescribed only by a dentist or physician.
“What Utah has accomplished is historic, a huge step forward,” said Rick North, board member of the Fluoride Action Network (FAN), which won a landmark ruling in a lawsuit against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for the agency’s failure to appropriately regulate the chemical.
North said Utah’s law “is a milestone for public health in the country and part of a nationwide trend toward removing this toxin from our water.”
Cox signed the bill amid growing opposition to water fluoridation across the country, driven by new research published in top journals showing that fluoride exposure is linked to lowered IQ in children and other negative neuro-cognitive effects — even at fluoridation levels currently recommended by the public health agencies.
The research also indicates that water fluoridation has little to no effect on dental health.
Utah provided a ‘working scientific study’
Dentist Griffin Cole, conference chairman of the International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology, said Utah provided a “working scientific study” showing that fluoride had no positive effects on dental health because almost half the state already didn’t fluoridate its water.
“They were able to look at decay rates in areas that were fluoridated and areas that weren’t,” he said, “and there was no difference.”
Cox similarly pointed this out in comments to ABC4 Utah earlier this month.
“You would think you would see drastically different outcomes with half the state not getting it and half the state getting it,” Cox told ABC4. “I’ve talked to a lot of dentists. We haven’t seen that. So it’s got to be a really high bar for me if we’re going to require people to be medicated by their government.”
Kathleen Thiessen, Ph.D., who co-authored the 2006 National Resource Council study on fluoride toxicity, said she hopes more states will follow Utah’s example.
She added:
“The evidence over 20+ years indicates an increased risk to children’s health from exposure to fluoride prenatally and during infancy and early childhood, especially for neurodevelopment. Reduced IQ in children has been found for exposures in the range expected with community water fluoridation. Infants fed formula prepared with fluoridated tap water have some of the highest exposures in the population, at an extremely vulnerable developmental stage.”
Children’s Health Defense (CHD) CEO Mary Holland also said that she hoped that Utah’s new law would be a catalyst for further state removals of fluoride. “CHD applauds Utah on this momentous action to remove fluoride from water. As a result, we will likely see significant health improvements there.”
Brenda Staudenmaier, another plaintiff in the fluoride lawsuit, said she was glad to see states making moves to protect their citizens, “particularly the most vulnerable groups — developing fetuses and bottle-fed infants — who are at greatest risk of fluoride neurotoxicity.”
Staudenmaier said that focusing on fluoride for 80 years had “created blind spots with unintended consequences,” and she hopes that now dental associations will “use their large membership to focus on increasing Medicaid reimbursements, ensuring that low-income individuals have access to dental care.”
Staudenmaier added:
“They should advocate for reducing sugar in public school breakfast programs, promoting breastfeeding to support proper mouth development in children, raising public awareness about how mouth breathing impacts decay risk, and encouraging the use of xylitol gum after meals for children with sensory issues and vitamin D supplementation.”
Moms Against Fluoridation, another plaintiff whose mission is to ban fluoridation nationally, also celebrated the news: “By banning adding this ‘drug’ to the water, citizens in Utah have now reclaimed a real freedom — they can choose for themselves whether to take fluoride.”
“The peer reviewed science is now so clear and so abundant that drinking fluoridation chemicals injures health and fails to reduce tooth decay. Water fluoridation has joined the list that includes lead, asbestos and DDT,” the organization added.
FAN Executive Director Stuart Cooper said, “Government-funded science is clear that fluoridation is causing harm to our children on par with lead and arsenic. Utah is the first state to make the practice illegal, but they join Hawaii and 98% of Europe in rejecting the practice.”
CDC, AAP, ADA continue to support fluoridation despite new evidence
The growing body of research showing fluoride’s toxic effects gained national attention when a federal judge ruled in the lawsuit brought by FAN, Mothers Against Fluoridation, Food and Water Watch and others against the EPA that water fluoridation at current U.S. levels poses an “unreasonable risk” to children’s health and that the agency must regulate it.
U.S. District Judge Edward Chen’s 80-page decision outlined the scientific evidence that fluoride exposure is linked to reduced IQ in children. The EPA announced that it planned to appeal the ruling days before President Joe Biden left office.
Major medical associations and public health agencies — including the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the American Dental Association (ADA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — continue to support adding fluoride to drinking water on the grounds that it helps prevent cavities.
They are supported by the mainstream press, which typically refers to fluoride as a “naturally occurring mineral” and downplays the negative effects of fluoride on children’s health.
Fluoride does occur naturally, but the fluoride added to public drinking water is a byproduct of phosphate fertilizer production — as documents from the fluoride lawsuit confirmed — sold off to public water supplies.
Research that the ADA, AAP, and mainstream outlets cite to support their claim that fluoridation has a significant impact on dental health is outdated. An updated Cochrane Review published in October 2024 found that adding fluoride to drinking water provides very limited dental benefits, if any, especially compared with 50 years ago.
“Fluoridation was thought originally to work both systemically and topically,” said dental researcher Dr. Hardy Limeback, professor emeritus and former head of Preventative Dentistry at University of Toronto. “By swallowing a small amount of fluoride each day it would incorporate into developing teeth of growing children and act as a future reservoir for when the enamel was dissolved by the acid made by bacteria that cause cavities. But there was never enough fluoride to do that.”
Limeback added:
“Eventually researchers showed that fluoridation works topically by building up fluoride in dental plaque, which is then released during demineralization/remineralization cycles by cavity-causing bacteria. The CDC confirmed the topical mechanism was the main mechanism. But with the introduction of so many other sources of fluoride from the 1960s onward (toothpastes, mouthwashes, dental materials), fluoridation had less and less effect to the point that today it had almost no effect.”
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.
How To Claim Your Specialty Suffers From “Climate Change”
And get government money for your pain
By William M Briggs | March 26, 2025
I’ve told you innumerable times that scientists are good at finding evidence which supports their fancies, and just as lousy, or lousier because of their egos, than others when finding evidence which kills their darlings. As you know, the rage in grant-funded academia is “climate change”. Because of the evidence-finding powers of scientists and the great flow of your money, as I’ve shown many, many (many) times, scientists have “discovered” every evil thing is caused by “climate change”. Today the evil thing is lung disease.
The peer-reviewed NIH-grant-funded paper is “Global warming risks dehydrating and inflaming human airways” by Edwards and others in Nature Communications Earth & Environment. Abstract opens with these two contradictory sentences:
Global warming increases water evaporation rates from planetary ecosystems. Here, we show that evaporation rates encountered during human breathing in dehydrating atmospheres promote airway inflammation and potentially exacerbate lung diseases.
Global warming—a refreshing use of the old term, instead of the ill-defined “climate change”—is supposed to increase, not decrease, water vapor content of the atmosphere. Which would make the air wetter, not drier. Here is the old, pre-Trump nervous EPA on this:
Water vapor is another greenhouse gas and plays a key role in climate feedbacks because of its heat-trapping ability. Warmer air holds more moisture than cooler air. Therefore, as greenhouse gas concentrations increase and global temperatures rise, the total amount of water vapor in the atmosphere also increases, further amplifying the warming effect.7
Indeed, water vapor, i.e. humidity, at the surface was expected to increase, even in dry and semi-arid areas. Take, for example, the peer-reviewed paper “Increase in Tropospheric Water Vapor Amplifies Global Warming and Climate Change” by Patel and somebody with a name too long to retype. They say “Most regions show positive trends in the annual mean tropospheric water vapor,” etc. The troposphere is where you and I breathe, dear reader.
Yet, others say there hasn’t been any change in moisture. Here’s an article by NCAR (I spent a summer there in the late 1990s, working on climate model skill) with the laconic title “Climate change isn’t producing expected increase in atmospheric moisture over dry regions“.
The laws of thermodynamics dictate that a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor, but new research has found that atmospheric moisture has not increased as expected over arid and semi-arid regions of the world as the climate has warmed.
The findings are particularly puzzling because climate models have been predicting that the atmosphere will become more moist, even over dry regions. If the atmosphere is drier than anticipated, arid and semi-arid regions may be even more vulnerable to future wildfires and extreme heat than projected.
So one science authority says the air you breathe is growing wetter, and one says it isn’t. Nobody says it’s decreasing. Best I could find was one source saying there was a “weakened” increase. Which is still an increase. There seems to be more agreement that the moisture in the stratosphere, where nobody breathes (unaided), has decreased a bit.
How, then, did our authors get the dry air they needed? By simulating it. I kid you not. “The numerical simulations for urban/rural VPD are carried out using the Community Earth System Model (CESM) version 2.1.” And so on.
After blowing some words explaining how people breathe, and then harassing some poor mice by forcing them to breath extra-dry air to prove their point, Edwards and his pals write “Together with climate model simulations, these findings suggest that most of the United States will be at elevated risk of airway inflammation by the latter half of this century.”
Suggest. Suggest. Suggest.
You paid for this.
Now I am sure they are right, or right enough, about how dry air can cause airway irritation. The vivid red color of the inflamed trachea they use as an illustration is impressive. They even give us some math, and who doesn’t love a few good old-fashioned equations? Airway irritation is their specialty, and I would not want to take the glory from them over how throats crave moisture.
But they don’t know squat about the climate. Though they must have known their careers would be enhanced if they could tie their specialty to “climate change”, which they have been told to believe is bad, and therefore do believe.
A mere tying together of “climate change” and throats is not sufficient, though. If they wrote a paper that said “Climate change will improve breathing”, because moisture will increase, they’d be hounded from their offices. Maybe have some lunatic nitwit activists smearing paint on their cars or FOIAing their emails, which they’d probably have to turn over, given their work was government (i.e. you) funded: “A portion of this research was funded at UNC by NIH grants R01HL125280, P01HL164320, and P30DK065988.”
What makes it worse, is that if it’s true that dry areas are worse for man, then we should see a nice signal in actual data. Here, I don’t know what I don’t know, so I can’t say for sure chronic lower respiratory disease is related. I can say, given CDC’s tracking of mortality rates of it by state, that the death rates-humidity signal is far from clear. Hawaii, which is humid, has the smallest rate. Oklahoma, also humid, has the highest. Nevada and Arizona, both dry, are in the middle.
Pneumonitis, which is lung inflammation, doesn’t seem to be big enough to track, so I couldn’t find much on the geographic distribution of it. One paper in Japan said moister areas, not drier, are more common. Maybe there are better diseases to look for than pneumonitis.
Well, that’s not my job. It was the authors’. They owed us actual observations that show how people out in the world, and not mice hooked to tubes, are affected by drier and wetter air. Instead, they stuffed what they knew (which I don’t question) about lungs and what they hoped was true about the climate into models, ran the models, forgot that all models only say what they’re told to say, then declared the models showed them their worst fears were realized.
This is how it works. This is how your money is blown. This is why government funding of science has to end.
‘Almost everyone is onboard with the green agenda’
The 3-Step, Normative Pressure Manipulation Loop.
By Gary L. Sidley | Propaganda In Focus | March 28, 2025
There is a plethora of techniques deployed by the state to lever compliance with their globalist agendas; censorship, propaganda, the smearing of critical voices, and various forms of psychological manipulation, are all habitually used by government agencies to encourage the masses to think and behave in the ‘right’ ways. This article focuses on one specific behavioural science (‘nudge’) strategy – normative pressure – that is, at present, being widely deployed to convince ordinary people that there is a climate emergency.
What is a normative pressure nudge?
The psychological methods of persuasion emanating from the discipline of behavioural science often operate below people’s conscious awareness and frequently rely on inflating emotional unease as a means of changing the behaviour of those targeted. The normative pressure nudge (commonly referred to as ‘social proof’) exploits the fact that human beings tend to feel uncomfortable if they think themselves to be in a deviant minority – in contrast to believing one is at the centre of the herd, a view that generates a sense of safety and security. Therefore, awareness of social norms, the prevalent views and behaviours of our fellow citizens, can exert pressure on us to conform. If government actors can convince the sceptical target group that the majority of people are already onboard with state-approved beliefs and behaviours, this normative pressure nudge constitutes an effective weapon in their manipulation armoury.
Throughout the covid event, the normative pressure nudge was heavily relied upon to shape people’s behaviour in line with public health diktats – we will all remember politicians and their science experts asserting that, ‘The vast majority have complied with the rules’, and ’90 per cent of those eligible have already had the first dose of the vaccine’. Now the same strategy is ubiquitous in the outputs of the influencers who are striving to get us all to accept the – highly dubious – climate-Armageddon narrative. One aspect of this state-endorsed strategy is, what I have labelled, the ‘3-step, normative pressure manipulation loop’.
As way of illustration:
Step 1: Bombard the general public with fear-laden messaging about the purported climate emergency
Ordinary people have, for many years been exposed to fear-elevating information about the ‘climate crisis’, and the intensity of this assault is escalating. This comprehensive exercise in scaremongering is achieved through multiple channels. Examples include:
Announcements by high-profile political bodies
– The weather has become ‘a weapon of mass extinction … a code red for humanity… we are digging our own graves’ (Antonio Guterres, Secretary General of the United Nations).
– ‘Global warming has led and will lead to more extreme weather events … The risks of irreversible and catastrophic change could greatly increase’ (European Parliament).
– ‘The only way to protect future generations is by tackling the climate crisis’ (Ed Miliband, UK Energy Secretary).
Biased and misleading mainstream media outputs
– Television programming strategically designed to promote the green agenda, such as the 2021 collaboration between Sky TV and the Behavioural Insights Team (the ‘Nudge Unit’) that strives to ‘increase the salience of sustainability in plotlines, and make it emotionally engaging for better impact’, so as to ‘encourage viewers to take up pro-environmental action needed to save the planet’.
– Weather presenters and newspaper journalists enrolling on training courses to learn how to attribute – with maximum emotional impact – any extreme weather event to ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’; for example, the partnership between the Reuters Institute and University of Oxford.
Amplification of unreliable modelling studies
– The green lobby’s reliance upon unscientific modelling studies (rather than real-world observations) to produce scary headlines of imminent climate catastrophes, prophesies that have been repeatedly shown to be inaccurate.
The exploitation of medical professionals to promote the ‘climate emergency’ narrative
– The World Health Organization’s encouragement of doctors (as trusted sources of information) to become ‘powerful climate communicators’, a role eagerly endorsed by the Royal College of Physicians in their recommendation that its members ‘communicate with patients about climate change to help them understand how it will affect their health’.
Indoctrination of children
– Changing school curricula to include the assertion that climate change is the ‘biggest existential threat of our age’, despite a current context where over three-quarters of under-12-year-olds already suffer from ‘eco-anxiety’.
Step 2: Conduct a survey asking questions designed to get the ‘right’ answer
In the wake of this prolonged and multi-faceted drive to promote fear about a future climate catastrophe, the next stage of the manipulation loop is to measure the level of climate concern among the general population. This is accomplished by a survey – the ‘Public Attitudes Tracker’ – conducted four times each year on behalf of the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (DBEIS). For instance, a recurring question in this analysis is:
‘How concerned, if at all, are you about climate change, sometimes referred to as “global warming”?’
Two observations about this process support the assertion that the DBEIS’s primary intention is to elicit supporting evidence for the idea that the general public is greatly troubled by the potential impacts of climate change.
First, if you expose the population to a protracted period of indoctrination about the ‘existential threats’ posed by future weather conditions – cities submerged under rising sea levels, more droughts, increased frequency of extreme weather events, poorer health – it would be astonishing NOT to find that a lot of people acknowledge a degree of alarm about impending climate events; after all, who would wish to reveal disregard to anything that might jeopardise the lives of our children and grandchildren? Indeed, in the aftermath of this onslaught of fear, and the purported need to save the planet for the sake of future generations, a survey respondent would require unusually high levels of single mindedness – and a desire to conduct one’s own independent research – to openly reject perspectives supportive of the dominant climate-change narrative.
Second, the slant of the questions asked (and where the responses are subsequently amplified) is, inevitably, going to encourage the answers the DBEIS is seeking. By asking, ‘How concerned … are you about climate change/global warming?’, the wording implicitly legitimises the presence of ‘concern’ about future weather events; Furthermore, the generality of the question makes it more difficult to express contrary views. It is interesting to speculate as to how people would have responded to more specific (and differently slanted) survey questions, such as:
‘How concerned, if at all, are you that the green agenda will lead to a rise in energy prices?’
‘To what extent, if at all, do you believe that Western governments are exaggerating the negative impacts of climate change?’
My guess would be that such queries would suggest the presence of a sizable number of climate-change sceptics within the general population.
Step 3: Widely circulate the results of selected survey questions as a normative pressure nudge
Armed with the manufactured statistic that a high proportion of people who responded to the survey acknowledged concern about the future impacts of climate change, the final step in the manipulation loop is to repeatedly publicise this finding, thereby applying normative pressure on the sceptical minority to re-evaluate their existing perspectives. A prominent example of this nudge technique in action is provided by a 2023 document by the UK’s Behavioural Insights Team titled, ‘How to build a net zero society’. The executive summary of this publication leads with the definitive statement:
‘Tackling climate change … is backed by huge public support. The Government’s own data reveal high public concern for climate change (84%)’.
This publication contains multiple nudges of this kind, repeatedly announcing that 80%-plus of the general population are on board with various aspects of the green agenda. Another Behavioural Insight Team document – the collaboration with Sky TV, mentioned in Step 1 – also contains many normative pressure strategies citing survey findings.
Not content with heavily deploying this manipulative intervention in the text, the ‘How to build a net zero society’ document takes the process a stage further by including ready-made Tweets of these dubious survey findings to encourage readers to spread normative pressure nudges among their followers.
The ultimate aim of this 3-step (scare-survey-share) manoeuvre is to prompt those who remain appropriately sceptical of the climate-catastrophe narrative to relent and opt to join the (apparent) majority of believers, seduced into conformity by the anticipated comfort of being at the centre of the herd. It is one specific example of how government-funded influencers strive to promote ‘right-think’ among the general population.
As further illustration of the process, a normative-pressure informed mission to convince people that the earth is flat might look something like this:
Over several decades, expose children to ‘flat earth’ topics and educate them about ways to avoid falling off the edge of the world. Ensure the media pumps out numerous reports of ‘missing’ people/ships/aeroplanes that are all presumed to have succumbed to this fate. Habitually highlight ‘scientific discoveries’ that the earth is getting narrower, and the precipitous rim is getting ever closer, thereby justifying urgent future action to erect enormously expensive barriers along the earth’s perimeter, and other constraints on movement, to keep us all ‘safe’. Conduct surveys asking ‘how concerned’ people are about falling of the world’s edge, and widely circulate the results that inevitably show a high level of apprehension. Repeatedly refer to this widespread flat-earth anxiety to justify the imposition of further restrictions and hardships on the populace.
By highlighting this 3-stage manipulation loop, my main aim is to enable more people to recognise, and call out, this form of clandestine, state-sponsored persuasion. Visible dissent to our governments’ attempts to promote ‘right think’ in their citizens is essential if we are to stymie the authoritarianism that is stripping us of our rights and freedoms.
Finally – to end with a note of optimism – maybe the tide is turning: the winter 2024 version of the Public Attitudes Tracker found that the proportion of respondents concerned about climate change had fallen to 80% (as compared to 85% in 2021), a statistically significant reduction. Perhaps ordinary folk are becoming less inclined to accept the pronouncements of official, nudge-infused, communications? Let us hope so.
USAID and the Architecture of Perception
By Joshua Stylman | February 16, 2025
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has long portrayed itself as America’s humanitarian aid organization, delivering assistance to developing nations. With an annual budget of nearly $40 billion and operations in over 100 countries, it represents one of the largest foreign aid institutions in the world. But recent disclosures reveal its true nature as something far more systematic: an architect of global consciousness. Consider: Reuters, one of the world’s most trusted news sources, received USAID funding for ‘Large Scale Social Deception’ and ‘Social Engineering Defence.’ While there’s debate about the exact scope of these programs, the implications are staggering: a division of one of the world’s most relied-upon sources for objective reporting was paid by a US government agency for systemic reality construction. This funding goes beyond traditional media support, representing a deliberate infrastructure for discourse framing that fundamentally challenges the concept of ‘objective’ reporting.
But it goes deeper. In what reads like a Michael Crichton plot come to life, the recent USAID revelations show a staggering reach of narrative control. Take Internews Network, a USAID-financed NGO that has pushed nearly half a billion dollars ($472.6m) through a secretive network, ‘working with’ 4,291 media outlets. In just one year, they produced 4,799 hours of broadcasts reaching up to 778 million people and ‘trained’ over 9,000 journalists. This isn’t just funding – it’s a systematic infrastructure of consciousness manipulation.
The revelations show USAID funding both the Wuhan Lab’s gain-of-function research and the media outlets that would shape the story around what emerged from it. Backing organizations that would fabricate impeachment evidence. Funding both the election systems that facilitate outcomes and the fact-checkers that determine which discussions about those outcomes are permitted. But these disclosures point to something far more significant than mere corruption.
These revelations didn’t emerge from nowhere – they come from government grant disclosures, FOIA requests, and official records that aren’t even hidden, just ignored. As my old friend Mark Schiffer noted the other day, ‘The most important truths today cannot be debated – they must be felt as totalities.’ The pattern, once seen, cannot be unseen. Some may question DOGE’s methods or the rapid pace of these disclosures, and those constitutional concerns deserve serious discussion. But that’s a separate conversation from what these documents reveal. The revelations themselves – documented in official records and grant disclosures – are undeniable and should shock anyone who values truth. The means of exposure matter far less than what’s being exposed: one of the largest narrative control operations in history.
No domain is untouched – markets, tech, culture, health, and obviously, media – and you’ll find the same design. Intelligence agencies are deeply embedded in each domain because shaping how we perceive reality is more powerful than controlling reality itself
Just as fiat currency replaced real value with declared value, we now see the same pattern everywhere: fiat science replaces inquiry with predetermined conclusions, fiat culture replaces organic development with curated influence, fiat history replaces lived experience with manufactured narratives. We live in an era of fiat everything – where reality itself is declared, not discovered.. And just as they create artificial scarcity in monetary systems, they manufacture false choices everywhere else – presenting us with artificial binaries that obscure the true complexity of our world. As Schiffer wrote elsewhere, reality no longer requires consensus, only coherence. But there’s a crucial distinction: real coherence emerges naturally across multiple domains, reflecting deeper truths that cannot be fabricated. The coherence imposed by perception management isn’t truth – it’s a controlled discourse engineered for consistency, not discovery. The USAID receipts now provide concrete evidence of how this manufactured coherence is built: a scripted reality where the appearance of logic is more important than actual substance.
This isn’t just pattern matching – it’s pattern prediction. Just as algorithms learn to recognize and anticipate behavioral patterns, those who understand this system’s architecture can see its next moves before they’re made. The question isn’t whether something is “true” or “false” – it’s understanding how information flows shape consciousness itself.
To understand how deep this goes, let’s examine their methodology. As Dr. Sherri Tenpenny and others have meticulously documented through FOIA requests and government grant disclosures, the pattern emerges through two primary vectors of control:
Information Control:
- $34 million to Politico (which as Tenpenny notes, struggled to make payroll without this funding)
- Extensive payments to New York Times
- Direct funding to BBC Media Action
- $4.5 million to Kazakhstan to combat “disinformation”
Health and Development:
- $84 million to Clinton Foundation health initiatives
- $100 million for AIDS treatment in Ukraine
- Funding for contraceptive programs in developing nations
Cultural Programming:
- $20 million to Sesame Street in Iraq
- $68 million to World Economic Forum
- $2 million for sex changes and LGBT activism in Guatemala
- Global cultural initiatives (millions spread across LGBTQ programs in Serbia, DEI projects in Ireland, transgender arts in Colombia and Peru, and tourism promotion in Egypt)
What emerges is not just a list of expenditures, but a blueprint for global reality architecture: From Kazakhstan to Ireland, from Serbia to Peru, from Vietnam to Egypt – there isn’t a corner of the world untouched by this system. This isn’t merely a distribution of resources, but a strategic infrastructure of global influence. Each allocation—whether to media outlets, health initiatives, or cultural programs – represents a carefully placed node in a network designed to shape perception across multiple domains. First, control the flow of information through media funding. Then, establish legitimacy through health and development programs. Finally, reshape social structures through cultural programming. The end goal isn’t just to influence what people think, but to determine the boundaries of what can be thought – and to do so on a planetary scale.
For those who’ve been studying the architecture of censorship, like Mike Benz has been documenting for years, none of this comes as a surprise. It’s perfect symmetry: we knew about the censorship. Now we’re seeing the receipts. One hand feeds them talking points, the other hand feeds them our taxpayer dollars. This isn’t speculation; it’s documented fact. Even Wikipedia’s own funding database contains over 45,000 reports tied to USAID – many detailing corruption, media influence, and financial manipulation. The evidence has always been there, but it was ignored, dismissed, or buried under the very fact-checking apparatus USAID funds. These weren’t crackpot theories; they were warnings. And now, we finally have the receipts.
And it doesn’t stop at controlling information. USAID isn’t just shaping media portrayals – it’s funding the systems that enforce them. Last week, Benz broke a bombshell: USAID gives twice as much money ($27 million) to the fiscal sponsor of the group controlling Soros-funded prosecutors than Soros himself gives ($14 million). This isn’t about one billionaire’s influence – it’s about state-backed enforcement of scripted accounts. The same network that dictates what you can think is dictating who prosecutes crime, what laws are enforced, and who faces consequences.
USAID’s influence isn’t just about funding media control—it extends to direct political interference. It didn’t just send aid to Brazil – it funded censorship, backed left-wing activists, and helped rig the 2022 election against Bolsonaro.
Benz revealed that the agency waged a “holy war of censorship,” systematically suppressing Bolsonaro supporters online while bolstering opposition voices. Millions flowed to NGOs pushing leftist framing, including the Felipe Neto Institute, which received U.S. funding while Bolsonaro allies were deplatformed. USAID also bankrolled Amazon-based activist groups, financed media campaigns designed to manipulate public opinion, and funneled money into Brazilian organizations that pushed for stricter internet regulations.
This wasn’t aid—it was election interference disguised as democracy promotion. USAID used American tax dollars to decide Brazil’s future, and it likely deployed similar tactics in many other countries—all under the guise of humanitarian assistance.
And it’s not just abroad. While USAID’s defenders claim it’s a tool for charity and development in poor nations, the evidence suggests something much more insidious. It’s a $40 billion driver of regime change overseas – and now, evidence points to its involvement in regime change efforts at home. Alongside the CIA, USAID appears to have played a role in the 2019 impeachment of Trump – an illegal effort to overturn a U.S. election using the same tools of perception sculpting and political engineering it deploys abroad.
Left vs right, vaxxed vs unvaxxed, Russia vs Ukraine, believer vs skeptic (on any topic) – these false dichotomies serve to fragment our understanding while reality itself is far more nuanced and multidimensional. Each manufactured crisis spawns not just reactions, but reactions to those reactions, creating endless layers of derivative meaning built on artificial foundations.
The real power isn’t in manufacturing individual facts, but in creating systems where false facts become self-reinforcing. When a fact-checker cites another fact-checker who cites a “trusted source” that’s funded by the same entities funding the fact-checkers, the pattern becomes clear. The truth isn’t in any individual claim – it’s in recognizing how the claims work together to create a closed system of artificial reality.
Take the mRNA vaccine debate for example: The pattern manifests before the explanation – people passionately debate efficacy without realizing the entire framework was constructed. First, they fund the research. Then they fund the media to shape the narrative. Even skeptics often fall into their trap, arguing about effectiveness rates while accepting their basic premise. The moment you debate ‘vaccine efficacy,’ you’ve already lost – you’re using their framework to discuss what is, in reality, an experimental gene therapy. By accepting their terminology, their metrics, their framing of the discussion itself, you’re playing in their constructed reality. Each layer of control is designed not just to influence opinions, but to preemptively structure how those opinions can be formed.
Like learning to spot a staged photo or hearing a false note in music, developing a reliable bullshit detector requires pattern recognition. Once you start seeing how narratives are constructed – how language is weaponized, how frameworks are built – it changes the lens with which you view the whole world. The same intelligence agencies embedding themselves in every domain that shapes our understanding aren’t just controlling information flow – they’re programming how we process that information itself.
The recursive theater plays out in real time. When USAID announced funding cuts, BBC News rushed to amplify humanitarian concerns with dramatic headlines about HIV patients and endangered lives. What they didn’t mention in their reporting? USAID is their top funder, bankrolling BBC Media Action with millions in direct payments. Watch how the system protects itself: the largest recipient of USAID media funding creates emotional propaganda about USAID’s importance while obfuscating their financial relationship in their reporting.
This institutional self-defense illustrates a crucial pattern: organizations funded for reality construction protect themselves through layers of misdirection. When presented with evidence, the fact-checking apparatus funded by these same systems springs into action. They’ll tell you that these payments were for standard “subscriptions,” that programs promoting gender ideology are really just about “equality and rights.” But when USAID awards $2 million to Asociación Lambda in Guatemala for “gender-affirming health care” – which can include surgeries, hormone therapy, and counseling – those same defenders conveniently omit the details, blurring the line between advocacy and direct intervention. The very organizations funded for social architecture are the ones telling you there is no social architecture. It’s akin to asking the arsonist to investigate the fire.
Like characters in a grand production, I watch old friends still trusting in institutions like the New York Times. Even this exposition becomes a potential node in the system – the very act of revealing the mechanics of control might itself be anticipated, another layer of the recursive theater. In my earlier work on technocracy, I explored how our digital world has evolved far beyond Truman Burbank’s physical dome. His world had visible walls, cameras, and scripted encounters – a constructed reality he could theoretically escape by reaching its edges. Our prison is more sophisticated: no walls, no visible limits, just algorithmic containment that shapes thought itself. Truman only had to sail far enough to find the truth. But how do you sail beyond the boundaries of perception when the ocean itself is programmed?
Sure, USAID has done some good work—but so did Al Capone with his soup kitchens. Just as the infamous gangster’s charity work made him untouchable in his community, USAID’s aid programs create a veneer of benevolence that makes questioning their larger agenda politically impossible. Philanthropic window dressing has long been a tool for power players to shield themselves from scrutiny. Consider Jimmy Savile: a celebrated philanthropist whose charity work granted him access to hospitals and vulnerable children while he committed unspeakable crimes in plain sight. His carefully cultivated image made him beyond reproach for decades, just as institutional benevolence now serves as a protective layer for global influence operations. The true function of organizations like USAID isn’t just aid—it’s social architecture, mind shaping, and the laundering of taxpayer dollars through an intricate web of NGOs and foundations.
This layered deception is self-reinforcing – each level of manufactured reality is protected by another level of institutional authority. These institutions don’t just dictate stories; they shape the infrastructure through which narratives are disseminated. For what it’s worth, I believe most tools themselves are neutral. The same digital systems that enable mass surveillance could empower individual sovereignty. The same networks that centralize control could facilitate decentralized cooperation. The question isn’t the technology itself, but whether it’s deployed to concentrate or distribute power.
This understanding didn’t come from nowhere. Those who first sensed this artificiality were dismissed as conspiracy theorists. We noticed the coordination across outlets, the strange synchronicity of messaging, the way certain stories were amplified while others disappeared. Now we have the sales receipts showing exactly how that manipulation was funded and orchestrated.
I know this journey of discovery intimately. When I started understanding the dangers of mRNA technology, I went all in. I connected with the incredibly talented filmmaker Jennifer Sharp and helped with Anecdotals, her film about vaccine injuries. I was ready to tether my whole identity to this cause. But then I started zooming out. I began seeing how COVID might have been a financial crime designed to usher in central bank digital currency. The deeper I looked, the more I realized these weren’t isolated deceptions – it was part of a larger system of control. The very fabric of what I thought was real began to dissolve.
What disturbed me most was seeing how deeply programming relies on mimicry. Humans are imitative creatures by nature – it’s how we learn, how we build culture. But this natural tendency has been weaponized. I’d present friends with peer-reviewed studies, documented evidence, historical connections – only to watch them respond with verbatim talking points from corporate media. It wasn’t that they disagreed – it was that they weren’t even processing the information. They were pattern-matching against pre-approved chronicles, outsourcing their thinking to “trusted experts” who were themselves caught in the same web of manufactured perception. I realized then: none of us knows anything for certain – we’re all just mimicking what we’ve been programmed to believe is authoritative knowledge.
The challenge isn’t just seeing through any single deception – it’s understanding how these systems work together in complex, non-linear ways. When we fixate on individual threads, we miss the larger pattern. Like pulling a thread on a sweater and watching it unravel, eventually you realize there was no sweater in the first place – just an intricately woven illusion. Just as a hologram contains the whole image in each fragment, every piece of this system reflects the larger blueprint for reality construction.
Consider the $34 million to Politico – this isn’t just a funding stream, but a holographic reveal of the entire system. It’s not merely that Politico received money; it’s that this single transaction contains the entire blueprint of perception management. The payment itself is a microcosm: struggling media outlet, government funding, narrative control – each element reflects the whole. This recursive system protects itself through layers of self-validation. When critics point out media bias, fact-checkers funded by the same system declare it ‘debunked.’ When researchers question official accounts, journals funded by the same interests reject their work. Even the language of resistance – ‘speaking truth to power,’ ‘fighting disinformation,’ ‘protecting democracy’ – has been co-opted and weaponized by the very system it was meant to challenge.
The COVID story epitomizes this systemic manipulation. What began as a public health crisis transformed into a global experiment in narrative control – demonstrating how rapidly populations could be reshaped through coordinated messaging, institutional authority, and weaponized fear. The pandemic wasn’t just about a virus; it was a proof of concept for how comprehensively human cognition could be engineered – a single node revealing the true scope and ambition of discourse manipulation.
Think about the cycle: American taxpayers unknowingly funded the crisis itself – then paid again to be deceived about it. They paid for the development of gain-of-function research, then paid again for the messaging that would convince them to accept masks, lockdowns, and experimental interventions. The system is so confident in its psychological control that it doesn’t even bother hiding the evidence anymore.
As I’ve documented in my Engineering Reality series, this framework for consciousness management runs far deeper than most can imagine. USAID’s revelations aren’t isolated incidents—they’re glimpses into a vast system of social design that has been in operation for decades. When the same agency funding your fact-checkers is openly paying for ‘social deception,’ when your trusted news sources are receiving direct payments for ‘social architecture,’ the very framework of what we consider ‘real’ begins to crumble.
We’re not just watching events unfold – we’re watching reactions to artificial events, then reactions to those reactions, creating an infinite regression of derivative meaning. People form passionate positions about issues that were constructed, then others define themselves in opposition to those positions. Each layer of reaction fuels the next phase of steered consensus. What we’re witnessing isn’t just the spread of manufactured realities, but the architecture of cultural and geopolitical trends themselves. Artificial trends spawn authentic reactions, which generate counter-reactions, until we’ve built entire societies responding to carefully orchestrated theater. The social engineers aren’t just steering individual beliefs – they’re reshaping the very foundations of how humans make sense of the world.
These revelations are just the tip of the iceberg. Anyone paying attention to the depth and depravity of the corruption knows that this is only the beginning. As more information emerges, the illusion of neutrality, of benevolence, of institutions acting in the public interest, will crumble. No one who truly engages with this information is walking away with renewed faith in the system. The shift is only happening in one direction – some faster than others, but none in reverse. The real question is: what happens when a critical mass reaches the point where their foundational understanding of the world collapses? When they realize that the records shaping their perception were never organic, but manufactured? Some will refuse to look, choosing comfort over confrontation. But for those willing to face it, this is not just about corruption – it’s about the very nature of the reality they thought they inhabited.
The implications are staggering not just for individual awareness, but for our very ability to function as a republic. How can citizens make informed decisions when reality itself has been splintered into competing manufactured tales? When people discover that their most deeply held beliefs were shaped, that their passionate causes were scripted, that even their cultural interests and tastes were curated, that their opposition to certain systems was anticipated and designed – what remains of authentic human experience?
What’s coming will force a choice: either retreat into comfortable denial, dismissing mounting evidence as “right-wing conspiracy theories,” or face the shattering realization that the world we thought we inhabited never actually existed. My research over the past few years points to far more nefarious activities yet to be revealed – operations so heinous that many will simply refuse to process them.
As I wrote about in “The Second Matrix,” there’s always the risk of falling into another layer of controlled awakening. But the greater risk lies in thinking too small, in anchoring ourselves to any single thread of understanding. The USAID revelations aren’t just about exposing one agency’s role in shaping reality – they’re about recognizing how our very thought patterns have been colonized by recursive layers of artificial reality.
This is the true crisis of our time: not just the manipulation of reality, but the fragmentation of human consciousness itself. When people grasp that their beliefs, causes, and even their resistance were shaped within this system, they are forced to confront the deeper question: What does it mean to reclaim one’s own mind?
But here’s what they don’t want you to realize: seeing through these systems is profoundly liberating. When you understand how reality is constructed, you’re no longer bound by its artificial constraints. This isn’t just about exposing deception – it’s about freeing consciousness itself from manufactured limitations.
The jig may be up on USAID’s reality architecture operation. But the deeper challenge lies in reconstructing meaning in a world where the very fabric of reality has been woven from artificial threads. The choice we face isn’t just between comfortable illusion and uncomfortable truth. The old system demanded validation before belief. The new reality requires something else entirely: the ability to recognize patterns before they’re officially confirmed, to feel coherence across multiple domains, to step outside the crafted game completely. This isn’t about choosing sides in their manufactured binaries – it’s about seeing the pattern architecture itself.
What does this liberation look like in practice? It’s catching the pattern of a manufactured crisis before it’s fully deployed. It’s recognizing how seemingly unrelated events – a banking collapse, a health emergency, a social movement – are actually nodes in the same network of control. It’s understanding that true sovereignty isn’t about having all the answers, but about developing the capacity to sense the web of deception before it solidifies into apparent reality. Because the ultimate power isn’t in knowing every answer – it’s in realizing when the question itself has been designed to trap you inside the manufactured paradigm.
As we develop this pattern recognition capacity – this ability to see through algorithmic manipulation – what it means to be human is itself evolving. As these systems of ideological infrastructure crumble, our task isn’t just to preserve individual awakening but to protect and nurture the most conscious elements of humanity. The ultimate liberation isn’t just seeing through the deception – it’s maintaining our essential humanity in a world of tightly controlled perception.
As these systems of reality sculpting crumble, we have an unprecedented opportunity to rediscover what’s real – not through their manufactured frameworks, but through our own direct experience of truth. What’s authentic isn’t always what’s organic – in a mediated world, authenticity means conscious choice rather than unconscious reaction. It means understanding how our minds are shaped while maintaining our capacity for genuine connection, creative expression, and direct experience. The most human elements – love, creativity, intuition, genuine discovery – become more precious precisely because they defy algorithmic control. These are the last frontiers of human freedom—the unpredictable, unquantifiable forces that cannot be reduced to data points or behavioral models.
The ultimate battle isn’t just for truth – it’s for the human spirit itself. A system that can engineer perception can engineer submission. But there’s a beautiful irony here: the very act of recognizing these systems of reality construction is itself an expression of authentic consciousness – a choice that proves they haven’t conquered human perception completely. Free will cannot be engineered precisely because the capacity to see through engineered reality remains ours. In the end, their greatest fear isn’t that we’ll reject their manufactured world – it’s that we’ll remember how to see beyond it.
USAID in Myanmar: A Legacy of Soft Power Manipulation?
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 31.03.2025
Democrats and the mainstream media continue to blame US President Donald Trump’s USAID cuts for crippling Myanmar’s earthquake response, despite his pledge of aid.
Trump and Elon Musk have slammed USAID for fraud, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio said it had “strayed from its original mission.” what was USAID REALLY doing in Myanmar?
Pushing Woke Agendas
Musk’s DOGE axed a $45M DEI scholarship program in Myanmar, launched in 2024 to fund 1,000 students in SE Asia and online at the University of Arizona. It was less about education and more about grooming future US allies against China, insiders told Radio Free Asia. Media reports say many in Myanmar also fear the programs erode local culture and values.
Terrorism Allegations
Myanmar’s ruling State Administrative Council (SAC) urged the US in 2024 to rethink funding activities “which some label as terrorism.”
“We believe the US is manipulating Myanmar to counter China’s influence in the region,” the military government told US media. “Despite the US presenting itself as a champion of democracy, the aid disproportionately benefits Myanmar’s opposition groups.”
Media Manipulation
USAID redirected $42.4M to advocacy groups post-2021. A now-frozen $1M was set for ‘independent’ media like Mizzima, seen as an anti-government mouthpiece. The group Human Rights Myanmar said the frozen funds “are vital for organizations challenging military rule and promoting democracy, which advance US interests by upholding American values and countering China’s authoritarian influence.” USAID’s Myanmar partners reportedly also include CARE International, which runs gender-focused projects and the Overseas Irrawaddy Association which relocates activists.
Trump-Putin parley is a bit under the weather
By M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | Indian Punchline | March 31, 2025
The Kremlin apparently came to the conclusion last week that it was about time to do some plain-speaking that US president Donald Trump’s quest for a 30-day ceasefire in the Ukraine war was a non-starter. Over the weekend, in a series of remarks, Trump reacted sharply that he’s “very angry” with President Vladimir Putin over his approach to the proposed ceasefire and threatened to levy tariffs on Moscow’s oil exports if the Russian leader does not agree to a truce within a month.
Trump is either incapable or unwilling to accept that neither Russians nor Ukrainians have their heart in the ceasefire deal (for different reasons, though) even while paying lip service to it, as each wants to have Trump on its side.
Unlike Ukrainians who are blasé about their desire to continue to wage the war until Russian forces vacate their territories in the east (knowing that may never happen), Russians are savvy operators who prioritise the unfinished business of the war while playing their part in the diplomatic circuit.
Actually, Russians are in two minds whether the war could end once their military gains total control over Donbass, or, should they also take control of Odessa, Nikolaev, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkov, etc. to create a security zone roughly, along the Dniepr River, and, let the UN figure out the future of the rump state of Ukraine. (See my blog A Third Way to end the war in Ukraine, Indian Punchline, March 29, 2025.)
Such is the backlog of the West’s betrayals and repudiation of agreements, including during first term, that Russia may come to estimate that its best security guarantee for durable peace lies in creating solid facts on the ground.
Trump will do well to read the extraordinary report featured in the New York Times dated March 29, 2025 titled The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine. It is a doctored version of the untold story of America’s hidden role in Ukrainian military operations against Russia but the main thing is that it confirms the Russian allegation that this has been a proxy war kick-started by the US with great deliberateness.
Suffice to say, Trump’s claim to be a good Samaritan with a bleeding heart who wants the war to end, et al, won’t fly. On the other hand, Putin is nonetheless keen on establishing a good personal rapport with Trump and anchor a meaningful US-Russia partnership on it, realistic enough to accept that Trump is as good an American president as Russia would ever get.
That said, Putin is also unwavering that in order for peace to be durable, conditions must be created first where he needs Trump’s understanding, although Russian people are deeply sceptical about any US mediation.
Trump refused to say if there was any deadline for Russia to agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine, but he told reporters on board Air Force One yesterday, “It’s a psychological deadline. If I think they’re [Russians] tapping us along, I will not be happy about it.”
On the contrary, Russians have been as transparent as they could in the prevailing climate of deep distrust — and no real effort has yet begun to address the root causes of the conflict.
The Russian negotiator Grigory Karasin, an accomplished career diplomat and deputy foreign minister and currently a senator heading the foreign affairs committee of the upper-house Federation Council, who was the negotiator at the expert group negotiations at Riyadh last Monday, said over the weekend with great candour on Russia’s national television that the 12-hour talks “haven’t led to any radical breakthrough yet, but the opportunities are there. It would have been naive to expect any breakthroughs.”
Karasin claimed that the US negotiators, including senior National Security Council director Andrew Peek and State Department policy planning chief Michael Anton, initially presented “proposals that are unacceptable to Russia.”
“But then, in my opinion… they realised that a team of civilised, reasoned interlocutors was sitting in front of them,” he said, describing the talks as having had a “good atmosphere” despite the lack of progress.
Importantly, Karasin said he expects US-Russian negotiations on Ukraine to continue at least until the end of 2025 or beyond.
We will never know how accurate was the feedback Trump received from the inconclusive negotiations in Riyadh. Clearly, the US has since resiled from the understanding given to the Russian side in regard of waiving the sanctions for the export of Russian food and fertilisers to the world market, facilitate the payments system and provide other underpinnings needed.
Karasin’s glasnost was apparently not music to Trump’s ears. Nonetheless, good sense prevailed finally, as Trump signalled his intentions to talk to Putin.
Will that help? Putin said as recently as last week that Russia’s interests will not be bartered away. Even if Trump were to now decide to join hands with the UK and France to lead the “coalition of the willing” to continue the Ukraine war, it is unlikely Putin will budge on Russia’s core interests.
However, Trump’s real predicament is something else. He had a choice to decouple the US from the war. But then, he was also swayed by the Wall Street’s obsessive interest in Ukraine being a honeypot, which of course is incompatible with his known aversion to assuming the obligations and responsibilities of a de facto colonial power in a faraway land 10,000 kms away.
The result is, Ukrainians have lost respect for him. Zelensky hit out on Friday, saying, “Ukraine has received the new draft agreement on natural resources from the US, which is totally different from the previous framework agreement. Ukraine will not recognise the United States military aid as a debt. We are grateful for support but it’s not a loan.”
Wall Street Journal reported on the new revised draft document sent to Kiev from Washington, which insists on Zelensky signing an agreement giving the American companies control over key economic projects. In particular, the US seeks the right to be the first to participate in Ukraine’s infrastructure projects and mining programs, including rare-earth metals and construction of ports.
The fund, managed primarily by US representatives, will channel the profits to pay off the cost of military aid provided by Washington to Kiev. If the agreement is signed, Ukraine will have 45 days to submit a list of projects for consideration by the fund.
Britain’s Daily Telegraph reported that under the latest version of the deal, the US would control half of Ukraine’s oil and gas reserves, its metals and much of its infrastructure, including railways, ports, pipelines and refineries, through a joint investment fund. The US plans to receive all profits until Ukraine pays it at least $100 billion in compensation for military aid, with a 4% surcharge. Kiev will start receiving 50% of the profits only after the debt is repaid.
The newspaper added that the new fund will be registered in the state of Delaware but will operate under the jurisdiction of New York. And the US will have the right to veto the sale of Ukrainian resources to third countries and the prerogative to check the accounts of any Ukrainian agency involved.
Trump has fallen between two stools. Ukraine is highly unlikely to accept the deal with the US. Also, trust Russian ingenuity to make a counter offer in business relationship to Trump that he can’t refuse. In sum, Trump’s attempt to enhance trust with Putin was indeed the right approach. And Putin reciprocated in earnestness.
Indeed, their parley made some headway until it came under weather, thanks to the mercantile considerations in play regarding Ukraine’s resources, which require that the war must be put to sudden death. Whereas, such wars have their own dynamics too.
Iran Responds to Trump’s Threats: US Has 10 Bases and 50K Troops in Our Vicinity
Al-Manar | March 31, 2025
The director general for the Americas at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has issued an official warning to the United States Interests Section in Tehran to warn Washington against any hostile actions.
In the absence of the Swiss ambassador, Issa Kameli summoned the chargé d’affaires of the Swiss Embassy, which represents the U.S. in Tehran, to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and conveyed Iran’s firm resolve to respond decisively and immediately to any threat.
The Swiss charge d’affaires was summoned on Monday over recent threats against Iran made by U.S. President Donald Trump.
During the meeting, Kameli condemned and rejected the inflammatory remarks, calling them violations of international law and the principles outlined in the United Nations Charter.
The Iranian official presented an official note warning against any malicious activity, emphasizing the Islamic Republic of Iran’s unwavering resolve to counteract any aggression.
The chargé d’affaires assured Kameli that the matter would be promptly relayed to the U.S. government.
Commander of the IRGC Aerospace Forces Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh indicated that the United States has 10 bases and 50 thousand troops in our vicinity.
“Those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi stressed that Iran may never engage in direct talks with the US administration, adding that Washington received and reviewed Tehran’s response to Trump’s letter.
Trump has warned that he might order military strikes against Iran if Tehran fails to reach an agreement with Washington on its nuclear program. “If they don’t make a deal, there will be bombing,” Trump said in an interview with NBC News. However, he added that he could instead impose “secondary tariffs” on Iran if no deal is reached, as he did during his first term in office.
Earlier in the day, Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei warned that if Washington commits any hostile act against Iran, “it will certainly receive a heavy blow in return.”
French presidential hopeful Marine Le Pen sentenced to jail: Politicians react
RT | March 31, 2025
French and foreign politicians are reacting to the sentences handed down on Monday by a Paris court in a case against the National Rally party (RN) and several prominent figures, including Marine Le Pen, the party’s former leader who currently heads its parliamentary faction.
The RN and associated individuals were accused of embezzling EU funds allocated for the salaries of aides of European Parliament members and diverting them to the national coffers. Several defendants have been sentenced to prison terms of various lengths, while Le Pen was barred from seeking public office for five years.
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31 March 2025
13:21 GMT
French MEP Francois-Xavier Bellamy, who serves as vice president of the Republicans, has called the sentence “a very dark day for French democracy” and “major interference in our democratic life,” regardless of people’s opinions of the National Rally.
”The candidate whom the polls actually place in the lead in the presidential election has been barred from running by a court decision: this unprecedented event will leave deep scars,” he said on X.
The French judicial system is “taking the risk of casting suspicion of arbitrariness” and needs to redeem itself in the eyes of the people by proving its impartiality, the politician added.
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13:12 GMT
Le Pen’s lawyer, Rodolphe Bosselut, has announced his intention to appeal the verdict. He denounced the “provisional execution” ruling, which imposes an immediate political ban on his client and offers “no recourse” through the legal process.
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13:09 GMT
Laurent Wauquiez, leader of The Republicans, a center-right parliamentary faction, has told BFM that “it is not healthy for an elected official in a democracy to be banned from running for office.”
He characterized the verdict as “very harsh” and “not the path we should have taken.”
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13:03 GMT
Geert Wilders, the leader of the Dutch right-wing Party for Freedom (PVV), has expressed “shock” at the verdict, describing it as incredibly tough.
“I support and believe in her for the full 100% and I trust she will win the appeal and become President of France,” he said on X.
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12:59 GMT
Left-wing party La France Insoumise has rejected the court’s verdict to ban Le Pen from running for office.
The party “has never supported using the court to get rid of the National Rally,” a statement published by its national coordinator, Manuel Bompard, said. “We are fighting it at the ballot box and in the streets, through the popular mobilization of the French people, as we did during the 2024 legislative elections.”
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12:56 GMT
Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini has described the verdict as “a declaration of war by Brussels,” claiming that it is being celebrated by those who “fear the judgment of the voters.”
In a post on X, he compared the outcome of the trial to the recent annulment of the presidential election in Romania, ordered by the Constitutional Court last December over claims of foreign interference. Calin Georgescu, an independent candidate who won the first round, has since been barred from participating in the new election.
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12:50 GMT
Le Pen announced her appearance on TF1 TV later in the day.
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12:43 GMT
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has described the verdict as the “agony of liberal democracy” in the EU.
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12:35 GMT
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a conservative politician whose views on the EU’s policies closely align with those of Le Pen, has expressed support for her on his social media. He posted the phrase “Je suis Marine!” (“I am Marine!” in French) on X and tagged her account.
The expression has become prominent internationally since the January 2015 terrorist attack on the French satirical outlet Charlie Hebdo, when it was widely used to make a stance against jihadism and attempts to silence free speech.
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12:30 GMT
RN President Jordan Bardella has denounced the verdict, describing it on X as unjust. “It is French democracy that is being executed,” he wrote.
Donald Trump is Looking Like a War President
By Adam Dick | Peace and Prosperity Blog | March 31, 2025
Donald Trump ran for president presenting himself as the peace candidate. A little over two months into his presidency, Trump, however, appears to be establishing himself as a war president.
Instead of quickly ending the US government’s support for war against Russia through Ukraine and against Palestinians, Lebanon, and beyond through Israel, Trump is keeping the money, weapons, and intelligence flowing to support the war efforts of these two so-called allies. It would have been simple for Trump to just declare “no more” and bow out of these wars, but he has chosen not to do so. He is also directing new major military action against Somalia and Yemen. Plus, Trump is threatening to bomb Iran, as well as attack any of Iran’s military that may be found around Yemen. Even Greenland is newly in the crosshairs of US military might during Trump’s presidency, with Trump declaring that the US will acquire the island territory of Denmark one way or another, up to through the use of military force.
A little over two months into the new Trump presidency, the death and destruction keeps coming from the US support for Ukraine and Israel in their wars. Further, the US military is directly engaging in newly expanded military attacks elsewhere, and new wars are being threatened in regard to Iran and — out of left field — Greenland.
Can Trump still become the peace president he suggested he would be? Time is running out. The way things are shaping up, it looks like there is a good chance the US will be more immersed in wars two months from now than it is so far in the new Trump administration.
Judge rules Marine Le Pen ineligible to run for president in 2027 in latest blow to democracy in the EU
Remix News – March 31, 2025
A judge has ruled Marine Le Pen is ineligible to run for office, along with eight MEPs from her National Rally party, after they were found guilty of misappropriation of EU funds. The move is the latest attack on democracy in the EU, with judges increasingly deciding elections in Europe. Le Pen has also been sentenced to four years in prison, with two years suspended.
Notably, the news comes right as Le Pen leads the polling for French presidential elections in 2027, as Remix News reported earlier today.
The court estimated that the total losses amounted to €2.9 million, as a result of “paying by the European Parliament people who actually worked for the far-right party.” Le Pen was found to be responsible for €1.8 million in damages herself. The judgment also concerns 12 assistants. The prosecutor’s office initially alleged that €7 million had been used in this way.
Investigators accused Le Pen of managing the illegal use of European subsidies between 2004 and 2016, when she served as an MEP. They stated that instead of working in Strasbourg, assistants were to work for Le Pen’s National Rally party in a domestic capacity.
“It was found that all these people actually worked for the party, that their deputy did not commission them any tasks,” said the judge. Assistants then “passed from one deputy to another.”
“It was not about combining the work of assistants, but about combining the budgets of MPs,” said the judge.
Le Pen said before the trial that the matter is entirely political and that her opponents wished for her “political death.”
Other commentators have expressed surprise at not only the verdict but also the decision to exclude her from elections.
Pierre Lellouche, a lawyer and former Deputy of the French National Assembly, appeared on CNEWS to point out that the current prime minister, François Bayrou, faced the same charge and suffered no consequences.
“Then, last but not least, there is the case of (François) Bayrou, the current prime minister, who has been prosecuted for exactly the same thing, i.e., for abuses of party funding declared as parliamentary assistants in Europe, at the EU parliament. Bayrou emerged from this affair without being in the least concerned. In fact, the public prosecutor’s office has once again referred the matter to the courts, but even so, we’re dealing with a double standard here. It’s a bit surprising.”
He noted that the “separation of powers” is increasingly shifting towards judges, and noted that in many previous elections, these judges have tipped the scales in favor of certain candidates.
“We’re finding that more and more, everything is getting mixed up, everywhere. Look at Trump, who had seven judges behind him, and that didn’t stop him from winning. Finally, Strauss-Kahn was eliminated, Fillon was eliminated by a somewhat untimely and rapid indictment at the time of the presidential election, which allowed Mr. Macron to govern the country for seven years after all, which is no mean feat. Especially since, in the Fillon affair, the public prosecutor subsequently indicated that this was not entirely neutral and that the Élysée was particularly interested in this case. So you see, there is a separation of powers, but at the moment, power is shifting to the judges, and that can have a huge impact.”
Another attorney, Maxime Thiebaut, also brought up the case of Bayrou, saying:
“At the very least, you know, it comes as a surprise that Marine Le Pen has been found guilty. I would point out that Mr. (François) Bayrou was acquitted on a similar charge, because it was considered that he had not acted with intent. So I wasn’t in Mr. Bayrou’s file and I wasn’t in Ms. Le Pen’s file, but I note that there was also an expectation that Madame Le Pen would be guilty. We all know very well that when you’re the leader of a political party, you’re pretty far removed from the actual running of the party. Mr. Bayrou was recognized by Ms. Le Pen. Is it political or not? I don’t know and I won’t give my opinion on that.”
This is not the only such case either, with Romania banning the presidential frontrunner, Călin Georgescu, from running for president as well as arresting him.
Is AIPAC Getting What They Want in DC?
By Karen Kwiatkowski | LewRockwell | March 29, 2025
Pro-Israel lobbies and organizations got what they paid for in 2024. Hundreds of millions of dollars of pro-Zionist donations to the Trump campaign and Trump-aligned PACs helped elect Trump, and every important appointment, and some less important ones are vocal Israel-firsters. Pre-existing massive military and other aid from the US taxpayer to Israel has been expanded under Trump. Avid Zionists lead the State Department, the Pentagon, and direct national intelligence. Zionist Steve Witkoff serves as the President’s envoy and chief diplomat in the two major wars the US has been supporting for years, wars Trump wants to resolve in the first half of his last term.
Why, it should be almost perfect, from an AIPAC point of view: a completely controlled executive branch, and a 99% controlled US Congress! The only Republican member of Congress without an AIPAC handler is Kentucky’s Thomas Massie, and both parties have seen its Israel-questioning members successfully primaried or otherwise replaced.
We should be seeing celebrations in the lobby headquarters, and a kind of confidence that I saw way back in 2002 when Israeli generals owned the Pentagon, with full and on-demand access to Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.
But instead of celebrating, the lobby has huddled and mustered. It’s working over the lower level appointee process now, with its Senate investment Tom Cotton leading the charge against those they see as unreliable. Their unhinged reaction to the appointment of realist Ridge Colby as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy is telling.
Stefanik is now out as a potential US Ambassador to the UN – the reason? Unlike AIPAC which draws mightily from both parties to get their initiatives, Trump needs more reliable Republican votes and a bigger margin. In other words, AIPAC has created a 99% pro-Israel Congress, yet, the Christian Zionist they needed in the UN has to be sent back to Congress because Trump needs her there.
Trump envoy Steve Witkoff is in trouble with the Republican Jewish Coalition now, based on his frank and open conversation with Tucker Carlson last week. Their complaint is addressed by a welcome tweet from JD Vance saying “The people sniping at him are mad that he is succeeding where they failed for 40 years. Turns out a lot of diplomacy boils down to a simple skill: don’t be an idiot.”
Witkoff is getting heat from the Jewish war lobby for being “fooled” by Putin and “fooled” by Hamas, and they want Rubio to conduct all the negotiations. Bless their hearts, of course they do!
The recent Signal chat kerfluffle is interesting. Signal is a commercial, open source, encrypted messenger app, and its security design and record is good. In 2022, there was a hack of an unrelated cloud server that created a short-lived ability to impersonate a Signal user. This particular breach could have been, and is, prevented by use of the Signal registration lock feature. The Pentagon has policies on Signal app usage, and obviously the inclusion of former IDF soldier and neocon journalist Jeffrey Goldberg in the Principals Small Group chat lies outside of those policies, as does the kind of information being chatted about – a Congressionally undeclared war against Yemen, US war-fighting for Israel, and the administration’s raw contempt for peace in the Middle East, and for Europe’s lack of gratitude for “all the US does” to secure Europe’s dwindling trade and security trade interests. Max Blumenthal’s take at The Gray Zone is clear, and he calls out Goldberg correctly, in a way that the bumbling SecDef tried to.
What we do know is that the Signal “leak” wasn’t a whistleblower attempt – Goldberg has few Constitutional principles and only opposes Trump’s foreign policy when it deviates from that of Netanyahu. We also know that a normal journalist who stumbles on government information important for taxpayers to know about, keeps the source open and protects it. He does not quickly remove himself (as Goldberg did) from that unique source of information. What a goldmine for a Pulitzer, had Goldberg been interested in that kind of reward! We also know that in the time between the leaked chat and the subsequent attack on Yemen, days went by as several normally quiet and unknown Senators on the Intelligence Committee became extraordinarily well-prepared to attack DNI Gabbard and CIA Director Ratcliffe on the topic during the Trump’s first annual threat estimate presentation. Warner nearly flubbed his lines, but it was a remarkably good show from Senators we rarely hear from. It also served to de-emphasize and distract from whatever was in that Estimate – including Iran isn’t making the bomb, and is a NPT signatory, unlike Israel which makes plenty of them and refuses to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Furthermore, Gabbard and Ratcliffe were not the preferred candidates for Israel, so making them look incompetent, rogue, or otherwise needing to be replaced is part of a time- honored agenda for the Israel lobby. Gabbard is honest, and while exceedingly pro-Israel she prefers peace and diplomacy over fighting someone else’s war. Ratcliffe, while “good on Israel” is known as an America Firster, and more interested in a future conflict with China, something that would necessarily detract from fighting and subsidizing Israel’s endless wars.
Where was National Security Director Waltz – who would have thunk he’d miss the presentation of the National Threat Estimate? He had added Jeffrey Goldberg to the chat, he’s not sure how, and he was in Greenland when Gabbard and Ratcliffe were facing the orchestrated wrath of suddenly security-conscious Senators. Not surprisingly, AIPAC was Congressman Waltz’s top contributor between 2017 and 2024.
All is not well in Israel’s western capital. Increasingly, AIPAC is dependent on Christian Zionists and lying politicians who will take their money but fail to completely deliver (although Waltz clearly did his part lately). Even Huckabee – a rare Christian Ambassador to Israel – is not trusted by the various Israel lobbies for reasons that demonstrate a small but growing schism between American and Israeli jews, and Zionism in general. AIPAC is finding it more difficult to recruit new generations of activists in the US. Increasing calls to publicly identify dual citizens in the US Congress, and to register AIPAC under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) are being heard.
Almost 20 years ago, John Mearshimer and Stephen Walt published a groundbreaking assessment of the influence of the Israeli lobby to jeers, condemnation and threats. Today, everyone in Washington is in general agreement with that paper, casually reveal that influence, occasionally even complaining about it. Today, Israel fights the BDS movement in the US through state and federal legislation. It demands major restrictions on American speech, expression and assembly for those who dare to consider the Zionist state a brutal colonizer, warmongering, genocidal or racist, undeserving of our military or political assistance and support. Two years before the latest US-funded genocide in Gaza, 37% of American Jews between 18 and 29 believed US is too supportive of Israel, while only 16% of American Jews over age 65 felt that way. Trend lines like these are not good for organizations like AIPAC.
Trump thus far has refused to fire anyone over the Signal fiasco, despite the preparation and preference for this solution from the “lobby.” If Waltz is safe, no doubt Ratcliffe and Gabbard are as well. Trump’s sensitivities to spies in his midst, his concept of personal loyalty, and his simple and blessed inability to be bullied all work against AIPAC. Trump’s ending of war in Ukraine with a settlement and ceding of territory could be applied to Israel. Trump’s demand that Europe pull its own weight financially and defensively could be applied to Israel. His preference to protect America here, via border control, revitalizing US industry, and designing Golden Domes all speak to ideas of America First, a desire to reduce foreign influence/spying and a shift away from American imperialism toward realism. These ideas, if applied to US-Israel policy, would end the current lop-sided relationship, and raise the costs of Zionism far beyond what Israel could afford on its own.
No wonder the Israel lobby is cranky.
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From the Archives
The lies about the 1967 war are still more powerful than the truth
By Alan Hart | June 4, 2012
In retrospect it can be seen that the 1967 war, the Six Days War, was the turning point in the relationship between the Zionist state of Israel and the Jews of the world (the majority of Jews who prefer to live not in Israel but as citizens of many other nations). Until the 1967 war, and with the exception of a minority of who were politically active, most non-Israeli Jews did not have – how can I put it? – a great empathy with Zionism’s child. Israel was there and, in the sub-consciousness, a refuge of last resort; but the Jewish nationalism it represented had not generated the overtly enthusiastic support of the Jews of the world. The Jews of Israel were in their chosen place and the Jews of the world were in their chosen places. There was not, so to speak, a great feeling of togetherness. At a point David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, was so disillusioned by the indifference of world Jewry that he went public with his criticism – not enough Jews were coming to live in Israel.
So how and why did the 1967 war transform the relationship between the Jews of the world and Israel? … continue
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