Trump: ‘Very Bad Things are Going to Happen.’ Netanyahu Wants the U.S. to Destroy Iran.
By Dennis J. Kucinich | April 1, 2025
In my article, “The High Price of War with Iran: $10 Gas and the Collapse of the U.S. Economy,” I reminded readers of how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been behind the push for America to destroy Iraq, Libya, Syria and now Iran. I reviewed the severe economic consequences for the U.S. if it attacks Iran. Today, I cite the human health and atmospheric effects of a U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear research facilities. The resulting nuclear fallout would bring a catastrophe unprecedented in human history.
Last week, President Trump said “very bad things are going to happen” to Iran, if that nation’s leaders do not sign a new nuclear deal. The President is right. He can make very bad things can happen to Iran.
But Iran is not the only country to which “bad things” are going to happen if Iran’s nuclear research infrastructure is destroyed by the U.S., as is revealed by a careful study of the spread of radiation created by the promised bombings.
America has been Netanyahu’s pawn for decades. Will the wealth, lives and security of our nation be sacrificed yet further to an agenda which brings only debt to our nation and death to innocents abroad?
The return of Donald Trump to the White House for a second term has enabled Netanyahu’s right-wing party to accelerate the pulverization of Gaza, expand settlements and to repel the Houthis pro-Gaza attacks on Red Sea shipping.
Netanyahu viewed Trump’s first election in 2016 as a new opportunity to topple Iran’s leadership. Trump, in partnership with Netanyahu, withdrew the U.S. from a multi-lateral agreement which limited Iran’s nuclear development in exchange for sanctions relief.
An attack by B-2 bombers on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure would destroy the targeted sites, and unleash radioactivity endangering the lives of tens of millions in Iran and hundreds of millions beyond. Due to radioactive drift, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, eastern Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan also would be severely impacted.
In practical terms, given proximity to Iran, and the direction of the wind, high levels of radiation-induced illness, some fatal, and sharp increases in cancer and birth defects would occur. Radiation would contaminate and ruin food supplies, agricultural land, farm animals, and water resources hundreds and even thousands of miles from Iran.
The eastern regions of Turkey, northwestern India, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan would be exposed to moderate contamination. Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and Egypt’s Sinai could be affected, depending on the wind.
Israel has long fanned existential fears by conjuring the threat of a nuclear attack by Iran, while being indemnified by the U.S. for its self-styled “defensive” aggression in Gaza, where at least 50,000 Gazans have been killed and over a million Palestinians driven from their homes.
While the widely publicized intent of President Trump to bomb Iran imperils Iran and neighboring countries, it also makes Israel vulnerable to a massive counterstrike from Iran and puts in the bullseye all U.S. troops in the region within 2,500 miles of Iran.
The attack B-2 bombers headed to Iran are designed to carry nuclear “bunker busters” as well as conventional 500 lb gravity bombs. The objective is to take down Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, which includes nuclear reactors and research labs. Nukes bombing nukes equals massive radioactive fallout.
“There will be Bombing.”
“If they don’t make a deal, there will be bombing,” Trump said in a telephone interview this past Sunday with NBC News. “It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before.”
Civics lesson: Official threats against another state are a violation of the UN Charter, Article Two, Section 4, which “prohibits the threat or use of force against …. any state.” Both Iran and the US signed and ratified that agreement nearly 80 years ago, in recognition of its organizing principle: “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war…”.
It is a war crime to aggress against another country. Under the US Constitution, no president has the right to unilaterally take our nation to war, absent an imminent threat to the United States. The Constitutional Convention placed the war power in the hands of Congress. This was in contrast to the British Crown’s expansion of war for empire.
The litany of reasons not to attack Iran is eerily similar to the reasons America should not have attacked Iraq: Iran is not a threat to the United States. Iran has not attacked the United States. Iran does not have the intention or the ability to attack the United States. That being the case, the opportunities for a false flag incitement are ripe.
Significantly, last week the U.S. Intelligence community, in its annual Global Threat Assessment, refuted Netanyahu’s oft-repeated claim about Iran building a nuclear weapon:
“We continue to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003”.
In the 16 years I spent in Congress, I was often one of the only members who rose to question the Bush Administration’s plans to attack Iran, time and again calling out the dangers of attacking nuclear research facilities and calling for diplomatic means to block Iran’s potential development of a nuclear weapon.
The agreement, arrived on July 14, 2015, the Joint Comprehensive Plain of Action (JCPOA). It took the U.S. China, Russia, Germany, France, and the UK thirteen years to craft a workable agreement which limited Iran’s ability to enrich uranium to weapons grade. The agreement was a landmark for international cooperation. It put the spectral genie of Iran’s potential development of a nuclear weapon back in the bottle.
That did not satisfy Netanyahu, however. He longed for the toppling of the Iran regime, and continued to hype existential fears among Israelis. Trump cancelled the JCPOA, at Netanyahu’s behest, setting in motion a series of events which may lead the US to attack Iran soon.
From Deal Breaker to Deal Maker?
Scott Ritter a former UN Weapons Inspector and Marine intelligence specialist provides a detailed account of Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA, in his book, entitled Deal Breaker.
The JCPOA which Trump took down had blocked Iran’s production of enriched uranium (processed to increase the percentage of uranium-235 (235U) at the Natanz and Fordow nuclear facilities.
It blocked Iran’s development of weapons-grade plutonium and frustrated even covert attempts to produce fissile (capable of undergoing nuclear fission) materials used for nuclear weapons.
The President now is demanding Iran sign a new deal. He wants Iran to get rid of the weapon-making capability which he errantly enabled by cancelling the JCPOA.
Eight years after the cancellation of the JCPOA, President Trump is apparently demanding Iran voluntarily take down its nuclear infrastructure which provides nuclear power, nuclear research and yes, with no JCPOA, can, at this moment, enrich uranium to near–weapons grade.
The Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran has issued a fatwa (a religious ruling) against the use of nuclear weapons.
The new deal which the President is seeking, at best, could end up looking a lot like the JCPOA, and, at worst, puts him in the position of issuing a non-negotiable demand for Iran to voluntarily take down its nuclear infrastructure, or the US will do it militarily.
Iran has rejected direct negotiations with Washington under such circumstances. It has, however, maintained indirect communication with the U.S. through Oman as the President escalates the threat of a massive bombing attack.
B-2 bombers are in place, equipped with the most powerful weapons in America’s arsenal ready to be activated from Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean, 2,400 miles southeast of Iran. The B-2 has the capacity to attack and return to Diego Garcia without refueling.
In someways this showdown with Iran was set in place on July 25, 2024, when Prime Minister Netanyahu addressed Congress. In a spell-binding speech for which he received over 50 standing ovations, Netanyahu skillfully aligned Israel’s and the U.S. policy on Iran:
“If you remember one thing, one thing from this speech, remember this: Our enemies are your enemies, our fight is your fight, and our victory will be your victory,” Mr. Netanyahu declared.
At this point, the measure of consequence needs to be assessed. The only difference between war games, preparing for war and actual war, is in the intent.
Israel intends to destroy Iran and needs the US to do it.
Joint US-Israeli Air Force war games have been held recently in preparation for an attack.
The U.S. has nineteen B-2 bombers. Each cost over $2 billion. Their unique flying wing design, with the plane wrapped in radar-absorbing materials help it avoid detection. The B-2s use sophisticated electronic countermeasures to jam or stymie opposition radar and missiles.
Iran is ill-equipped to defend against the B-2 bombers’ stealth warfare. At best the shortened detection range will limit Iran’s ability to lock onto the B-2 with surface-to-air missiles.
Each B-2 can carry sixteen, 2,400 lb., B83 thermo-nuclear gravity bombs, also known as nuclear bunker busters, which explode deep inside the earth. Each B83 bomb has the explosive capacity of 80 Hiroshimas which means each B-2 bomber is capable of delivering the destructive power of 1280 Hiroshimas.
Once the B83’s detonate they destroy underground structures and send shockwaves through rock. Earthquakes and massive ground displacement result, with radioactive debris being flung into the atmosphere.
There is a metaphysics at work here of bringing to oneself that which one fears. The United States is preparing to attack Iran because of Israel’s fear of Iran.
Trump: “It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before.”
The U.S. will first attack Iran’s underground missile cities at Khorramabad, and Panj Pellah, Bakhtaran, with nuclear bunker busters or Massive Ordnance Penetrators aimed at underground missile sites, to incapacitate Iran’s ability to retaliate.
The use of nuclear bunker busters will send nuclear debris into the immediate atmosphere, and it will be carried aloft by the wind.
Simultaneously, the U.S. will strike at the Fordow enrichment plant, buried deep in a mountain. A combination of 30,000 lb. Massive Ordnance Penetrators (GBU-57s) capable of burrowing 200 ft into the earth before exploding, and nuclear bunker busters, will be deployed, creating a multiplier factor in blast physics, collapsing tunnels and sending radioactive materials into the atmosphere and far beyond. Fordow is heavily fortified and may be able to withstand the initial attack.
The Natanz underground facility will be similarly struck, with radioactive matter breaking into the atmosphere.
The ground-level Bushehr Nuclear Power plant will be destroyed, its reactor vessel breached, the reactor core will meltdown, massive release of radioactive materials (cesium-137, iodine-131, strontium-90, and plutonium) will go into the atmosphere, and, depending upon the wind, and the weather, radioactive plumes will drift over other countries.
Countless civilians will perish from radiation poisoning and severe burns. Birth defects will be present for generations to come. Nuclear explosion refugees will be created. Chernobyl-type effects will require people to leave their homes, never to return.
Tehran’s Research Reactor, Isfahan Nuclear Tech Center, Arak Heavy Water Reactor, Natanz Surface Facility and the Parchine Military Complex are ground level and surface level structures which will be targeted and destroyed, either by nuclear weapons or so-called conventional weapons.
Iran Can Still Hit Back
Iran’s underground missile system is widely distributed. Faced with imminent destruction, Iran, at the first sign of an attack, will simultaneously launch multiple rockets from many underground sites, a “shower of missiles” numbering in the thousands.
These deadly projectiles can change trajectories and targets while in flight, making the vaunted missile defense of Israel less effective. While Israel’s 2000 lb. bombs, the type dropped on Gaza, are more precise, the Shabab-3 has the potential of inflicting much more significant damage over a larger radius of Israeli cities.
U.S. Troops in Region will Pay
Tens of thousands of US troops, Army, Navy, Airforce, Marines, Space Force are stationed within reach of Iranian missiles. They are under no threat unless Iran is attacked.
Iran’s short-range missiles, Fateh-110 and Zolfagher, can reach Saudi Arabia. Iran’s medium-range ballistic missiles, the Shabab-3, Emad, Sejjil, and Ghadr can travel up to 1,550 miles (2,500 km), to Israel. Its intermediate range missiles are capable of striking 2,485 miles deep into eastern and central Europe,
It is not in the interests of the United States to attack Iran.
The United States is risking becoming the most hated nation on earth, using nuclear weapons again, bombing nuclear facilities, creating radioactive consequences for potentially dozens of nations and tens of millions of people born and unborn.
America has been Netanyahu’s pawn for decades. Will the wealth, lives and security of our nation be sacrificed yet further to an agenda which brings only debt to our nation and death to innocents abroad?
During his campaign, President Trump stated repeatedly that he aimed to have a strong military to avoid war. Military strength must be matched by diplomatic strength. He must come up with a deal that avoids a U.S. war with Iran, without a foreign leader’s self-interested meddling. “Very bad things” do not have to happen if good people prevail. If America nukes Iran, our nation will never escape the fallout.
Russia offers mediation of talks between Tehran, Washington: Ryabkov
Al Mayadeen | April 1, 2025
Russia warned of United States airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, condemning US President Donald Trump’s threats to bomb Tehran unless a deal with Washington is reached.
“Threats are indeed being heard, ultimatums are also being heard,” Russia Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Rybakov told International Affairs in an interview published Tuesday, adding, “We consider such methods inappropriate, we condemn them, we consider them a way for (the US) to impose its own will on the Iranian side.”
Russia proposed mediation between Trump’s administration and Iran, following their strategic partnership deal earlier this year.
Ryabkov said that Trump’s threats to Iran only complicate the situation between the two countries, emphasizing that if the US administration follows up with its warnings and strikes Iranian nuclear facilities, the consequences could be catastrophic for the entire region.
“While there is still time and the ‘train has not left’, we need to redouble our efforts to try to reach an agreement on a reasonable basis. Russia is ready to offer its good services to Washington, Tehran, and everyone who is interested in this,” the deputy foreign minister stated.
Iran stands steadfast to US threats
Ali Larijani, a top advisor to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, cautioned on March 31 that any US or Israeli strike targeting Iran’s nuclear sites would push Tehran to pursue nuclear weapons development.
He argued that attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities would backfire against US interests, warning, “Under such circumstances, we would have no choice but to reconsider our stance and potentially seek nuclear arms as a deterrent.”
Larijani warned that any military strike on Iran would only strengthen domestic resolve to fast-track nuclear weapons development, adding that due to Iran’s preparedness, such an attack would only delay the nuclear program temporarily – by no more than two years.
On March 31, the leader of the Islamic Revolution and the Islamic Republic of Iran, Sayyed Ali Khamenei, delivered a stern warning, asserting that any entity considering hostile actions toward Iran would be met with a severe and proportionate retaliation, while also stressing that efforts to provoke internal division would be decisively countered by the Iranian people, as they have shown in previous instances.
Admiral Alireza Tangsiri, the commander of the naval forces in Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC), warned “foreign parties” against threatening Iranian interests, stating, “If foreigners attempt to attack us, pressure us, or endanger our interests, we will stand against them with full force.”
At the same time, he emphasized that “Iran does not seek war but will respond firmly to any aggression.”
Ukrainian drone strikes passenger bus – Donbass officials
RT | April 1, 2025
At least 16 people were injured in the Russian frontline city of Gorlovka when a Ukrainian kamikaze drone struck a bus early on Tuesday morning, Mayor Ivan Prikhodko has reported.
The incident marks the latest assault on the beleaguered residents of the city, which is located in Russia’s Donetsk People’s Republic. The mayor took to social media to share images showing the destruction.
The Russian Investigative Committee stated that Ukrainian forces deployed a kamikaze drone to target a bus near a central stop. The strike also caused damage to a nearby administrative building, the law enforcement agency added, describing the event as attempted murder.
Local health officials reported that five of the victims are currently in serious condition at local hospitals.
A regional watchdog that regularly posts updates on Ukrainian strikes in Donbass reported that several artillery shells landed in Gorlovka on the same day.
A similar drone strike targeted a passenger bus near Gorlovka in mid-March.
Last week, Rodion Miroshnik, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s ambassador-at-large overseeing investigations into alleged war crimes, highlighted a rising number of civilian casualties resulting from Ukrainian attacks on vulnerable locations such as Gorlovka. He suggested that this trend, occurring amid US-backed discussions for a peaceful resolution to the conflict, indicates Kiev’s intent to obstruct mediation efforts.
The administration of President Donald Trump is advocating for a negotiated ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia as part of its strategy to normalize relations with Moscow. While the Russian government has welcomed this shift in Washington’s stance, it has expressed deep skepticism toward the Ukrainian authorities, claiming that Kiev is not engaging in negotiations in good faith.
Here’s why the West has so far failed to start World War III
By Tarik Cyril Amar | RT | March 31, 2025
Under the title ‘The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine’, the New York Times published a long exposé that has made a splash. It is a long article advertised – with a lumbering clunkiness that betrays cramping politics – as the “untold story of America’s hidden role in Ukrainian military operations against Russia’s invading armies.”
And it clearly aspires to be sensational: A revelation with a whiff of the famous Pentagon Papers that, when leaked to the same New York Times and the Washington Post in 1971, revealed what a mass-murderous fiasco America’s Vietnam War really was.
Yet, in reality, this time the New York Times is offering something less impressive by magnitudes. And the issue is not that the Pentagon Papers were longer. What really makes ‘The Partnership’ so underwhelming are two features: It is embarrassingly conformist, reading like a long exercise in rooting for the home team, the US, by access journalism: Based on hundreds of interviews with movers and shakers, this is really the kind of ‘investigation’ that boils down to giving everyone interviewed a platform for justifying themselves as good as they can and as much as they like.
With important exceptions. For the key strategy of exculpation is simple. Once you see through the rather silly group-therapy jargon of a tragic erosion of ‘trust’ and sad misunderstandings, it is the Ukrainians that get the blame for the US not winning its war against Russia, in their country and over their dead bodies.
Because one fundamental conceit of ‘The Partnership’ is that the war could have been won by the West, through Ukraine. What seems to never even have entered the author’s mind is the simple fact that this was always an absurd undertaking. Accordingly, the other thing that hardly makes it onto his radar screen is the crucial importance of Russia’s political and military actions and reactions.
This, hence, is an article that, in effect, explains losing a war against Russia without ever noticing that this may have happened because the Russians were winning it. In that sense, it stands in a long tradition: Regarding Napoleon’s failed campaign of 1812 and Hitler’s crash between 1941 and 1945, all too many contemporary and later Western observers have made the same mistake: For them it’s always the weather, the roads (or their absence), the timing, and the mistakes of Russia’s opponents. Yet it’s never – the Russians. This reflects old, persistent, and massive prejudices about Russia that the West cannot let go of. And, in the end, it is always the West which ends up suffering from them the most.
In the case of the Ukraine conflict, the main scapegoats, in the version of ‘The Partnership’, are now Vladimir Zelensky and his protégé and commander-in-chief General Aleksandr Syrsky, but there is room for devastating side swipes at Syrsky’s old rival Valery Zaluzhny and a few lesser lights as well.
Perhaps the only Ukrainian officer who looks consistently good in ‘The Partnership’ is Mikhail Zabrodsky, that is, the one – surprise, surprise – who worked most closely with the Americans and even had a knack of flatteringly imitating their Civil War maneuvers. Another, less prominent recipient of condescending praise is General Yury Sodol. He is singled out as an “eager consumer” of American advice who, of course, ends up succeeding where less compliant pupils fail.
Zabrodsky and Sodol may very well be decent officers who do not deserve this offensively patronizing praise. Zelensky, Syrsky, and Zaluzhny certainly deserve plenty of very harsh criticism. Indeed, they deserve being tried. But constructing a stab-in-the-back legend around them, in which Ukrainians get blamed the most for making the US lose a war that the West provoked is perverse. As perverse as the latest attempts by Washington to turn Ukraine into a raw materials colony, as a reward for being such an obedient proxy.
With all its fundamental flaws, there are intriguing details in ‘The Partnership’. They include, for instance, a European intelligence chief openly acknowledging – as early as spring 2022 – that NATO officers had become “part of the kill chain,” that is, of killing Russians who they were not, actually, officially at war with.
Or that, contrary to what some believe, Westerners did not overestimate but underestimate Russian abilities from the beginning of the war: In the spring of 2022, Russia rapidly surged “additional forces east and south” in less than three weeks, while American officers had assumed they would need months. In a similar spirit of blinding arrogance, General Christopher Cavoli – in essence, Washington’s military viceroy in Europe and a key figure in boosting the war against Russia – felt that Ukrainian troops did not have to be as good as the British and Americans, just better than Russians. Those daft, self-damaging prejudices again.
The New York Times’ “untold story” is also extremely predictable. Despite all the detail, nothing in ‘The Partnership’ is surprising, at least nothing important. What this sensationally unsensational investigation really does is confirm what everyone not fully sedated by Western information warfare already knew: In the Ukraine conflict, Russia has not merely – if that is the word – been fighting Ukraine supported by the West but Ukraine and the West.
Some may think the above is a distinction that doesn’t make a difference. But that would be a mistake. Indeed, it’s the kind of distinction that can make a to-be-or-not-to-be difference, even on a planetary scale.
That’s because Moscow fighting Ukraine, while the latter is receiving Western support, means Russia having to overcome a Western attempt to defeat it by proxy war. But fighting Ukraine and the West means Russia has been at war with an international coalition, whose members have all attacked it directly. And the logical and legitimate response to that would have been to attack them all in return. That scenario would have been called World War III.
‘The Partnership’ shows in detail that the West did not merely support Ukraine indirectly. Instead, again and again, it helped not only with intelligence Ukraine could not have gathered on its own but with direct involvement in not only supplying arms but planning campaigns and firing weapons that produced massive Russian casualties. Again, Moscow has said this was the case for a long time. And Moscow was right.
This is why, by the way, the British Telegraph has gotten one thing very wrong in its coverage of ‘The Partnership’: The details of American involvement now revealed are not, actually, “likely to anger the Kremlin.” At least, they are not going to make it angrier than before, because Russia is certain to have long known about just how much the US and others – first of all Britain, France, Poland, and the Baltics – have contributed, directly and hands-on, to killing Russians.
Indeed, if there is one important takeaway from the New York Times’ proud exposé of the extremely unsurprising, it is that the term ‘proxy war’ is both fundamentally correct and insufficient. On the one hand, it perfectly fits the relationship between Ukraine and its Western ‘supporters’: The Zelensky regime has sold the country as a whole and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives to the West. The West has used them to wage war on Russia in pursuit of one overarching geopolitical aim of its own: To inflict a ‘strategic defeat’ on Russia – that is, a permanent demotion to second-rate, de facto non-sovereign status.
The above is not news, except perhaps for the many brainwashed by Western information warriors from historian-turned-war-apostle Tim Snyder to lowlier X agitators with Ukrainian flags and sunflowers in their profiles.
What is also less than stunning but a little more interesting is that, on the other side, the term proxy war is still misleadingly benign. The key criterion for a war being by proxy – and not its opposite, which is, of course, direct – is, after all, that major powers using proxies limit themselves to indirect support. It is true that in theory and historical practice that does not entirely rule out adding some limited direct action as well.
And yet, in the case of the Ukraine conflict, the US and other Western nations – and don’t overlook the fact that ‘The Partnership’ hardly addresses all the black ops also conducted by them and their mercenaries – have clearly, blatantly gone beyond proxy war. In reality, the West has been waging war on Russia for years now.
That means that two things are true: The West almost started World War III. And the reason it has not – not yet, at least – is Moscow’s unusual restraint, which, believe it or not, has actually saved the world.
Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine the US fighting Canada and Mexico (and maybe Greenland) and learning that Russian officers are crucial in firing devastating mass-casualty strikes at its troops. What do you think would happen? Exactly. And that it has not happened during the Ukraine War is due to Moscow being the adult in the room. This should make you think.
Tarik Cyril Amar is a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory
Merz against Germans and Europeans
By Ricardo Nuno Costa – New Eastern Outlook – April 1, 2025
The last session of the Bundestag under the Scholz government paved the way for the extraordinary injection of 500 billion euros into the German economy, with the votes of the CDU/CSU, the SPD and the Greens. Behind this special fund, which involved an amendment to the Basic Law, is an attempt to revive the country’s economy, which has been stagnating since it declared economic war on its biggest energy supplier, Russia, in 2022. More worryingly, the easing of the debt brake that has now been approved does not set any future limits, which could lead Berlin into a debt spiral. For now, a week later, there is already talk of additional spending of at least 350 billion euros on this package. The decades-long brand image of German ‘fiscal discipline’, of the transparency of its economy and of Germany as the continent’s safeguard of monetary stability is thus falling apart.
The new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, who has always sold the image of being a ‘frugal’ and ‘rigorous’ politician and has vehemently opposed any change to the debt ceiling, is the mastermind and the one who will effectively direct the implementation of this fund over the next 12 years, thus being able, as head of government, to take out loans for public investments or direct payments from the federal budget. Calculated, the amount comes to a staggering 42 billion extra euros a year, almost a tenth more than the last federal budget. The money will flow into the German economy and generate opportunities, but at what cost?
Merz was for years the head of BlackRock Deutschland, the German branch of the world’s largest ‘shadow bank’, the asset manager BlackRock. In 2020, in order to run for the head of CDU/CSU), he formally stepped down from his position at the New York giant. Now, the opposition (and even members of the current grand coalition with the SPD) believe that the Chancellor wants to continue lobbying for the interests of his bosses on the other side of the Atlantic and combine Germany’s rearmament projects with an infrastructure programme from which BlackRock and the German arms giant Rheinmetall will make juicy profits at the expense of the public purse. MP and former parliamentary leader of the Social Democrats, Rolf Mützenich, accuses Merz of wanting to do business with foreign and security policy by keeping Germany under the thumb of the US military industrial complex. It was the best way he could find to ‘appease Donald Trump’, the SPD MP recently told Spiegel. So it’s clear that there’s no cut with the US, despite all the murmuring and outrage that Trump’s election has caused among a frustrated European elite, who blindly bet everything on Kamala Harris.
From austerity to debt
The Federal Republic, despite its reputation for austerity, is a champion of ‘special funds’. From the Marshall Plan to the country’s opaque and hurried reunification process, Berlin has always found ways to bypass legality or even the rules of the common market in order to keep its public accounts apparently healthy. The current special fund is by far the largest of the 29 previously approved. The Financial Markets Stabilisation Fund (200 billion in 2008), Covid (150 billion in 2020), the Armed Forces (100 billion in 2022) and the ‘energy crisis’ (200 billion in 2022) were the biggest. Through these extra budgets, Berlin has been hiding the true scale of its public debt and budget deficit for the last 20 years. Now things are clearer and many questions arise.
Germany is Europe’s largest economy, but it has been contracting for three years. The Berlin government actually has more liquidity than ever because it is taxing its citizens more than ever, but it needs to use these tricks to approve potentially unnecessary and exaggerated plans. In the current conditions of de-industrialisation, does Germany have the capacity to generate the physical wealth to get the economy growing again, or will the operation result in a setback that could aggravate the inflation already persistent since the special fund against Covid? Experts warn that the initiative will not have the capacity to generate economic competitiveness. Issuing debt for government programmes will do nothing to address this major shortcoming in the German economy.
Consequences for Europe
The approval of this fund further corroborates the idea that Europe as a whole – and not just the South, once vilely labelled the ‘PIGS’ – has, in fact, never left the crisis of 2007-08 and that its political classes (with Germany at the forefront) have insistently done the opposite of what they should have done.
How will France, Italy, Spain and the other Eurozone partners react to a move that could be considered ‘dumping’ between partners? Could this injection cause a new financial derivatives’ crisis?
Merz’s move had the immediate effect of boosting the European public debt market, causing the value of bonds to fall and their rates to rise. This dragged down Italian, Spanish, French and even Japanese bonds as a result. With the German state competing aggressively for new clients to finance its debt, it is forcing its European partners to follow suit. Discord is served. In other words, what Merz is doing is using his position as the Eurozone’s strong link by using the whole of Europe to pay for his businesses.
Does the new government in Berlin intend to finance its economy around sovereign bonds and a Frankfurt stock exchange with little more than a central European reach, and try to compete with the heavyweights of the global markets in New York, London, Tokyo, Shanghai and Hong Kong? Is this realistic?
Merz’s plan coincides with the European Commission’s Readiness 2030 programme to issue another 650 billion euros in debt outside the Budget Pact and another 150 billion to be disbursed in European guarantees. The biggest debt issue since the ‘bazooka’ against Covid, which is still being paid for in the form of inflation. The project calls for states to allocate at least 1.5% of their budgets to defence, in order to launch a continent-wide arms industry and supposedly create jobs in the sector. No one has asked the states (let alone their people) if they want to live in a war economy. No one has said how these 650 billion will be paid back, or what guarantees the ‘European guarantees’ give a State.
The expansive policies of German governments since 2008 have been controversial, even within their own borders. The Federal Court of Audit harshly criticised the new fund: ‘The financial management of the federal government has thus been largely externalised,’ it accused. It warned that the financial package ‘could result in billions of euros in interest costs’. This will have catastrophic economic and social consequences for future generations.
Merz is betting on public spending, but in reality this is a kind of untimely neoliberal Keynesianism, as it will be financed by the US speculative banks, to which the new chancellor has always been closely linked. The whole process seems less than transparent, just to say the least.
Problematic social situation
For big businesses, the arms industry, construction companies, the speculator class and the financial sector, the injection of such a huge amount of money will have the effect of energising the economy for a while and improving some ageing infrastructure. But for the small citizens (the overwhelming majority of the population), the consequences of the current announcement will be devastating. Merz has already announced a ‘radical reform’ of pensions and social welfare benefits.
A good example of the state of public accounts in Germany is yet to be seen. Recently, the scandal broke at the hands of hundreds of thousands of small business owners across the country, who saw their businesses almost bankrupted during the lockdown campaign of the Merkel 4 and Scholz governments. In an extremely deceitful manoeuvre, the banks mandated by the state administrations have now (four years later) demanded that they return up to thousands of euros in ‘aid’ per head, which the state authorities granted them in compensation for the forced paralysis of trade. This is a simple transfer of wealth from the country’s small productive sectors directly into the pockets of the financial-technocratic class (banks, lawyers and accountants), with the public administrations acting as bait.
Social discontent is also being felt in the numerous strikes in various sectors, particularly public transport and airports.
In a recent joint interview, the directors of two popular publications, one linked to the left and the other close to the AfD, agreed to create a united front and promised to join forces against the current state of affairs. There will be larger demonstrations than during Covid, ‘authorised or not’, with encampments in city centres, ‘for as long as it takes’. The images of popular revolt from 15 years ago in Madrid and Athens will be repeated, this time in Berlin.
Ricardo Nuno Costa ‒ geopolitical expert, writer, columnist, and editor-in-chief of geopol.pt
Orbán counters FT article telling the EU to ‘solve its Orbán problem’
Remix News | April 1, 2025
The Financial Times’ piece entitled “It’s time for the EU to solve its Orbán problem” has elicited a stern response from Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán.
The piece determines that the EU must support Ukraine’s fight against Russia and provide it with arms to do so. And to do this, it must also somehow get Hungary on board, despite the country repeatedly reiterating its pro-peace stance.
Author Mujtaba Rahman states, “The EU’s ability to do this is directly compromised by Orbán, who has been hugely emboldened by Trump’s return. The Hungarian prime minister keeps in lockstep with Trump and Putin in the hope of winning favours from both.”
Rahman then lists “levers” the bloc can pull to essentially force Hungary’s hand, primarily through the withholding of cash the country desperately needs due to what the author calls Hungary’s “stagnant economy.”
“EU funds are therefore critical if Orbán is to boost investor confidence in the country’s economy. The European Commission has leverage and should use it,” the piece reads. Rahman also suggests simply suspending Hungary’s voting rights.
The article ends by stating, “The EU is now facing a Darwinian moment. It will either adapt or die. To protect Ukraine and its Russian ‘frontline’ states, it must face down Orbán.”
In a response posted on X, Orbán wrote, “The Financial Times is right about one thing: Europe has arrived at a Darwinian moment. They want to change the EU from a peace project to a war project. This is not evolution, this is decay. We must resist, even if they want to punish us.”
Germany to target ‘internal EU enemies’ – Politico
RT | April 1, 2025
The incoming German government plans to play a larger role in EU decision-making, including by punishing nations that dissent against the bloc’s foreign policy, Politico has reported. According to the outlet, a draft coalition agreement targets Hungary, which has defied EU decisions on issues such as the Ukraine conflict and sanctions against Russia.
Germany is set to have a new coalition government formed by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Christian Social Union (CSU), and the Social Democrats (SPD), likely led by Friedrich Merz of the CDU. The parties are currently finalizing agreements on key policy areas, including migration, climate, and EU relations. Merz is reportedly aiming to form the new government before Easter on April 20.
One of the documents reviewed by Politico outlines Berlin’s plans for a more assertive EU strategy. It proposes using the ‘Weimar Triangle’ – a trilateral alliance of Germany, France, and Poland, which currently holds the EU’s rotating presidency – to influence the bloc’s direction and strengthen Germany’s use of its voting rights.
The draft also states that Berlin plans to “defend” the EU against “internal and external enemies” by calling for punitive action against member states that allegedly violate principles such as the rule of law. Proposed penalties include withholding EU funds and suspending voting rights.
“We will take even more consistent action against violations,” the document states. “Existing protective instruments, from infringement proceedings and the withholding of EU funds to the suspension [of] membership rights such as voting rights in the Council of the EU, must be applied much more consistently than before.”
The coalition has also proposed the creation of a “comprehensive sanction instrument” to rein in perceived dissenters, including replacing the EU’s foreign policy unanimity requirement with majority voting to prevent countries from blocking decisions such as sanctions.
“The consensus principle in the European Council must not become a brake on decision-making,” the document states.
While Hungary is not mentioned by name, the draft agreement appears to be a clear reference to the country, which has long been at odds with EU policies, including over its approach to the Ukraine conflict and its sanctions policy towards Russia.
Budapest has argued that sanctions have been detrimental to the bloc’s economy, and has exercised its veto right on several motions to delay or dilute measures. Prime Minister Viktor Orban has repeatedly accused the EU of taking a “pro-war” stance and has pursued independent peace initiatives on the Ukraine conflict.
The EU has previously threatened to suspend Hungary’s voting rights. It withheld around €22 billion in funds earmarked for Budapest in 2022, citing rights and judicial concerns, but ultimately released about half of that amount last year.
How Bernie Sanders and the Democrats Made Elon Musk the Richest Man in the World
By Thomas Eddlem | The Libertarian Institute | April 1, 2025
Just before Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) started their ongoing series of rallies against Elon Musk and President Donald Trump, Sanders stopped by Face the Nation on CBS and hilariously exclaimed in feigned outrage:
“We’re looking at a rapid growth of oligarchy. We’re looking at a rapid growth of authoritarianism. And I fear that we’re looking at a rapid growth of kleptocracy as well. And I’m going to do everything I can to work with my supporters all over this country to stand up and fight back to make sure we have an economy that works for everybody, not just Elon Musk.”
All I could do is laugh, as Bernie Sanders specifically and the other Democrats generally are the ones who made the economy work so well for Elon Musk.
The $465 million Energy Department loan under President Barack Obama that saved Tesla from bankruptcy in 2010 emerged from the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which was adopted because Bernie Sanders and all the Democrats in the Senate voted for it (except Debbie Stabenow and a half-dozen conservative Republicans). Further, Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (which all the Senate Democrats voted for, including Bernie Sanders) included the $7500/EV subsidy that put $1.5 billion in Elon’s wallet. Nearly all Republicans voted against it.
And Musk’s Tesla gains more than $1 billion dollars annually from carbon tax credits passed by Democrats in California in the first decade of the century and which was expanded by President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (which Sanders and all Democrats passed on a party-line vote in the Senate, and AOC and her Democratic colleagues voted for in the House).
The Washington Post reported on February 26 that Musk received some $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits in the past two decades, most from the federal government funded by Democrats (and some from Democrat-run California), often with strong Republican opposition. And most of these subsidies were realized during President Biden’s term.
Sanders complains constantly about Musk being a billionaire, but you don’t have to be a math major to understand that it’s a just smidge easier to become a billionaire when the government hands you $38 billion. Of course, Sanders and his touring sidekick Ocasio-Cortez work for a government that takes in $5,485 billion from people for almost nothing and somehow still runs a deficit of $1,781 billions every year. So maybe they don’t have the competency to pull that kind of math off.
Sanders and AOC seem to think it was the Republicans who fought for all those green energy subsidies and carbon swap programs. They seem to think the Republicans wanted to keep money flowing to NASA because of the GOP’s fond memories of JFK sending astronauts to the moon, and did not work to end the wasteful agency. But in reality it was Democrats who kept funding flowing to NASA, resulting in Space X scoring huge multi-billion federal space contracts.
If truth in advertising laws were being enforced, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s nationwide “Rally Against Oligarchy” would instead be labeled “Rally Against the Oligarchy We’re Building.”
I don’t think Elon Musk is a Nazi; I think he’s a highly talented tax dollar harvester. But if he is a Nazi, he is the Democrats’ Nazi. Democrats made him the richest man in the world and saved his businesses from bankruptcy with massive government subsidies championed by the Democrats. They need to own this, because they can’t deny it.
Instead, many of the same Democrats who voted for the politicians who made Musk the richest man in the world now think that a massive pogrom against Musk is a successful strategy to resist Trump’s policies and oppose “fascism.” Uh huh.
Nothing says “I’m opposing fascism” like spray-painting a swastika on a Tesla owned by a Jewish dude. Three quarters of all the swastikas being publicly painted across the world today are being painted by Democrats in America on Teslas, and the other quarter are being painted by the remnants of the neo-Nazi Azov Brigade that has been absorbed into the Ukrainian National Army, a group the Democrats back to the hilt with your tax dollars.
The world’s swastikas being painted these days are being scrawled or funded by the Democratic Party within a rounding error of 100% of the global total. For the first time in many years I went over to the Stormfront.org webpage (a page run by open neo-Nazis) and found them positively bitchy with suppressed jealousy about how Democrats have managed to spread their message so much further than the Mädelschaft of goobers who run that website.
Meanwhile, the captive media fact-checkers acknowledge, “At least 10 Tesla dealerships, charging stations and facilities have been hit by vandals,” along with the vandalization of hundreds of cars of [private] Tesla owners, but simultaneously claim there’s “no evidence of coordinated vandalism.” It’s got to sting when Democrats can pull off a slow-motion, global Krystallnacht against Tesla when the Schutzstaffel-wannabes have been so unsuccessful for so many decades. Meanwhile, Democrats get wild cheers from The Daily Show audience for their ongoing swastika pogrom.
I predict Stormfront’s next published story will be a worried report about the global shortage of swastikas, accompanied by a request for the Democrats to refund a quota of some of the swastikas back so American neo-Nazis can stop swastika rationing.
There’s a reason Elon Musk’s companies faced twenty different investigations by multiple government agencies under the Biden administration and most of those investigations just went away once Trump took office, and it wasn’t because of Elon’s criminal conduct. It was the criminal conduct of Washington and its lawfare. That’s part of the plan, too.
Elon backed the “wrong” party, according to the Democrats. They villainize Musk and the Koch brothers but not Bill Gates, John Kerry, and George Soros. Their vilification of billionaires is notably and risibly selective.
The latter are their bread-and-butter while the former fund their opposition. Washington politics long ago ceased to be an ideological battle, succumbing fully to a team sport.
We’re on a Highlander course for political parties in America: There can be only one.
In at least one sense, we’re already there; Trump and his cabinet are all 2004 Democrats, with a Kennedy in charge of the world’s largest welfare agency and no mandate to cut even a dime of welfare spending. That’s what the “conservative” Republican Party has become. America has a uniparty, and the media wants to make us choose either the Party of Caesar or the Party of Pompey, but both are on the same path to centralization of power in Washington.
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.
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