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Biden’s Department of Education Is Investigating Christopher Rufo For “Misgendering”

Listed among many allegations

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | September 11, 2023

The Department of Education, under President Joe Biden’s administration, is wielding its influence against Christopher Rufo, a conservative advocate and the New College of Florida.

Allegedly, the civil liberty offenses committed by Rufo include the “misgendering” of certain individuals and the closing down of the university’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) division within the school.

Screenshots of Rufo’s posts were used as evidence.

The allegations began unfolding on social media, where Rufo publicized the supposed evidence used against him. Among the charges was the allegation that Rufo had addressed the former head of the school’s DEI, Yoleidy Rosario-Hernandez, as “she” or “her.” Noteworthy is that Rosario-Hernandez, a biological woman, chooses the pronouns “ze/zir.”

Moreover, Rufo is accused of referring to a student, who prefers to be called “they/them,” as “her.”

Chiming in on this development, Rufo intensified the debate by posting, “President Biden’s Department of Education has opened a civil rights investigation into New College of Florida, following a complaint that, in part, alleged that I ‘misgendered’ the college’s former DEI director, who uses ‘ze/zir’ pseudo-pronouns. This is madness.”

The complaint further extends to accuse Rufo of violating civil rights by withdrawing funding from the DEI department and the Gender Studies Program. As per the Department of Education’s guidelines, the gravity of the situation could escalate, assuming it substantiates the claim and the accused parties choose to disregard any determined ruling — escalating into a potential implication with the Department of Justice.

September 12, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

Trump charges are political persecution – Putin

RT | September 12, 2023

The numerous criminal charges against former US President Donald Trump amount to persecution and showcase the “rot” in the American political system, Russian President Vladimir Putin has stated.

The US in its current state “cannot claim the right to teach others democracy,” the Russian leader said on Tuesday during a panel discussion at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok.

“The things that are happening to Trump are persecution of a political competitor… That is what it is. And it is done in the full view of the US public and the entire world,” he added.

The controversy is beneficial to Russia in the sense that it “exposes” Washington ”for what it is,” according to Putin. The US government chose to be hostile to Moscow and has propagandized its population into perceiving it as such, he argued.

“[The US] demonstrates what they called in Soviet times ‘the bestial scowl of imperialism’,” he joked.

Moscow does not expect any substantial change in US foreign policy vis-a-vis Russia, regardless of who takes the White House after next year’s election, the president said.

“[Trump] was accused of having a special relation with Russia, which is total nonsense and bulls**t. But he was the president who introduced the most sanctions against Russia,” Putin noted.

The American elites predominantly perceive Russia as an existential enemy, Putin believes. The country also has friends in the US, who want good relations and share Russia’s views on traditional values, the president added, but those voices are being suppressed.

Since leaving office, Trump has been charged with numerous crimes at both the federal and state level, ranging from election tampering to inciting the January 6 Capitol riot to financial improprieties.

The businessman-turned-politician, who is considered the frontrunner for the Republican nomination for presidency, has said that his legal woes amount to a “witch hunt” by his opponents.

September 12, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite | | Leave a comment

What Should We Do About the Powerful Israel Lobby?

Make them register as “foreign agents”

BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • SEPTEMBER 12, 2023

World Jewry is on the attack against Elon Musk, who has threatened to sue the Jewish advocacy group Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for as much as $22 billion for defaming him and doing material damage amounting to many billions of dollars to his company X, which used to be known as Twitter, falsely smearing the platform and its owner for allegedly providing an antisemitic haven for “hate speech.” Per Musk, the ADL has gone so far as to put pressure on potential advertisers not to do business with him and to engage in a total boycott of X.

I for one can only say “Thank you Mr. Musk and it is only regrettable that no one did anything against an organization dedicated to spewing hatred directed against many Americans while also seeking to deprive an entire nation of constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech. And while you are at it, I would also recommend that you take a look at the other groups that are partners in Zionist crime, most significantly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) which has now created a PAC dedicated to defeating any politician who is known to be critical of Israel. After the 2020 national election, AIPAC boasted that the PAC that it had set up had raised $17 million to defeat candidates critical of Israel, while also supporting those politicians who were friends, 95% of whom were elected. To pretend that the Lobby exists to provide some kind of perspective or balance in foreign policy is a case of who is kidding whom on the issue of Israel. ADL and AIPAC are dedicated to enriching and protecting a foreign country that is on a daily basis engaged in a broad series of crimes against humanity as well as war crimes and which is characterized by persecution based on religion and race. ADL and AIPAC have no concern for what damage is done to the American people due to their persistent corruption of our body politic and media to achieve their treasonous objectives.”

So what has the physically hideous and mentally deficient Mr. Jonathan Greenblatt, the Chief Executive Officer of ADL, been up to and why has it taken so long for some Americans, to include Musk and Tucker Carlson, to react to being abused, stripped of rights, and vilified every time anyone dares to speak up? Well, the simple answer is that anyone who dares to challenge Israel’s vile behavior or Jewish control over large parts of the United States economy plus near total dominance of its political class can count on being attacked in the media and labeled an antisemite, which means that, increasingly, one might well be charged with a “hate crime” which can bring with it both civil and criminal penalties. Even at the state level, in 35 jurisdictions, one can now even be denied a job or benefits for supporting an economic boycott of the Jewish state.

Greenblatt and company believe that they can get away with murder, both metaphorically and literally, because they are protected by their money, media access and the political cover that they have flat out bought and also obtained through intimidation and threats. The interaction with Tucker Carlson began when Greenblatt began fulminating over Tucker’s willingness to discuss on his talk show controversial subjects that are familiar to conservatives but are generally banned by the media, to include “replacement theory.” The theory suggests that the decline of birth rates of whites is deliberate due to government policies that make it economically difficult to raise more than one or two children. The decline in workers is being replaced by the hordes of illegal immigrants allowed into the country, which will produce a permanent Democratic Party majority that will be docile and controllable. Jewish groups are seen as enthusiastic for the open borders and cultural and political shifts that go with them.

Greenblatt and the ADL initially focused on Tucker Carlson in particular given his high profile and popularity. Greenblatt repeatedly demanded that Fox News fire Tucker for discussing the “great replacement” theory as well as other white-nationalist talking points. Greenblatt has denounced Carlston’s alleged willingness “To use his platform as a megaphone to spread the toxic, antisemitic, and xenophobic ‘great replacement theory’ is a repugnant and dangerous abuse of his platform.” He called on advertisers to stop supporting the Carlson program and Fox with their dollars. Also, under-fire conservative Republican Representative Matt Gaetz subsequently became involved in the argument, saying that Tucker Carlson is correct about openly discussing white nationalist ‘replacement’ conspiracy theory and he called out Greenblatt and the ADL as “racist,” i.e. “anti-white.” Carlson has retorted that the ADL is trying to destroy freedom of speech in the United States, most particularly whenever the issue under discussion is the abuse of Jewish power or Israel.

Greenblatt was delighted, invoking woke buzzwords to confirm his own superior ethical status, when Carlson was fired in April, tweeting that “It’s about time. For far too long, Tucker Carlson has used his primetime show to spew antisemitic, racist, xenophobic & anti-LGBTQ hate to millions.” Apparently Greenblatt is not disturbed by racism and xenophobia and related crimes against humanity in Israel, but that is to be expected.

Musk’s history with Greenblatt is revealing. Shortly after Musk obtained control of Twitter in April 2022, he was contacted and pressured by ADL in a bid to remove what Greenblatt described as antisemitic content. Twitter’s CEO Linda Yaccarino negotiated the issue, but Musk believes that the platform should be characterized by allowing all forms of legal speech, and beyond excluding sites calling for violence, Twitter became exemplary as a free speech zone. Free speech includes criticism of the Jewish religion, Jewish group behavior and the Jewish state of Israel, even including doubting the evidence for the perpetual victimhood holocaust myth, all of which Greenblatt regards as antisemitism and therefore hate crimes. As the disagreement with ADL heated up, the hashtag #BanTheADL began to appear and it has now become the most used tag with more than a quarter of a million appearances on X. Greenblatt has denounced the users of the hashtag as “white supremacists,” in line with his apparent belief that antisemites and other racist evildoers are basically political conservatives. Musk responded to Greenblatt’s “intimidation tactics” by suggesting that “Perhaps we should run a poll on this… with the ‘we’re labeling everything we don’t like as hateful/racist/dangerous/far-right’ BS.” He also observed accurately that “The ADL, because they are so aggressive in their demands to ban social media accounts for even minor infractions, are ironically the biggest generators of anti-Semitism on this platform.”

One hopes that Elon Musk’s proposed lawsuit will proceed and bring about the dismantlement of ADL and the dethronement of Greenblatt, but as important as the free speech issue is, there is also another aspect to the entitlement and immunity that groups representing narrowly construed Jewish and Israeli interests currently enjoy. ADL is firmly entrenched with the power brokers in Washington and is even involved in training new FBI agents how to recognize antisemites and other types of racists. Nevertheless, one might suggest that the labeling of all critics and many white Americans as antisemites just might be a weapon that is beginning to lose its effectiveness since it is used so promiscuously by Greenblatt and others.

Beyond constitutional rights, there is a national security issue which no one in government dares touch and that is the corruption of American foreign policy on behalf of the state of Israel by Greenblatt and his friends. Jewish and Israeli power is sometimes jokingly referred to as “wag the dog” but when it is employed to involve America in unnecessary wars and to gift one of the world’s wealthiest countries with billions of dollars in “aid” every year, something is seriously wrong. And it all happens out in the open due to something called “hubris” whereby most major Jewish organizations meet regularly with Israeli Embassy diplomats and spies to cooperate on activities that benefit both Israel and its Jewish partners.

A key bit of legislation intended to monitor the activities of foreign agents residing in the US is the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (22 U.S.C. § 611 et seq.) which “imposes public disclosure obligations on persons representing foreign interest. It requires ‘foreign agents’—defined as individuals or entities engaged in domestic lobbying or advocacy for foreign governments, organizations, or persons (‘foreign principals’)—to register with the Department of Justice (DOJ) and disclose their relationship, activities, and related financial compensation. FARA does not prohibit lobbying for foreign interests, nor does it ban or restrict any specific activities. Its explicit purpose is to promote transparency with respect to foreign influence over American public opinion, policy, and laws; to that end, the DOJ is required to make such information publicly available. FARA was enacted in 1938 primarily to counter Nazi propaganda.”

The actual legislation, which perfectly describes groups like ADL and AIPAC interact with the Israeli government, reads as follows: “The term ‘agent of a foreign principal’ means–(1) any person who acts as an agent, representative, employee, or servant, or any person who acts in any other capacity at the order, request, or under the direction or control, of a foreign principal or of a person any of whose activities are directly or indirectly supervised, directed, controlled, financed, or subsidized in whole or in major part by a foreign principal, and who directly or through any other person (i) engages within the United States in political activities for or in the interests of such foreign principal.”

Famously, President John F. Kennedy tried to compel AIPAC’s predecessor organization the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs to register under FARA, but he was assassinated before that could be accomplished. He also was seeking to block Israel’s nuclear program, which has suggested the obvious conclusion about how and why he died. That aside, for today’s US government the question becomes, “When is our Attorney General Merrick Garland, who seems to be preoccupied with finding Russian war criminals in Ukraine and white supremacists in America, going to enforce the FARA statute on the numerous Jewish organizations like ADL and AIPAC and compel them to register?” That will require them to be transparent both on their “foreign” relationships and also reveal the sources of their funding. ADL had a reported $238 million in assets in 2021. The act of registering will also confirm that they do no routinely represent American interests but rather Israeli priorities, which will hopefully shift the public perception on what they represent. Jewish and Zionist Garland who works for a declared Zionist president who claims to be Catholic is hardly likely to do the right thing, but we can always hope that ADL’s recent foray will prove to be a step too far!

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

September 12, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

Musk threatened with investigation for blocking Ukrainian attack

Elizabeth Warren speaks during a Senate Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington DC, April 27, 2023 © AP / Jose Luis Magana
RT | September 12, 2023

US Senator Elizabeth Warren has called on Congress to investigate Elon Musk over his refusal to enable a Ukrainian drone attack on the Russian naval fleet in Crimea. Despite condemnation in Washington, Musk has defended his decision to cut satellite service to the Ukrainian military.

“The Congress needs to investigate what’s happened here and whether we have adequate tools to make sure foreign policy is conducted by the government and not by one billionaire,” Warren told reporters at the US Capitol on Monday.

Musk and other Big Tech CEOs are due to meet with US lawmakers to discuss artificial intelligence on Wednesday. However, the subject of the hearing has been overshadowed by news that Musk intervened last year to prevent six Ukrainian naval drones from hitting Russian ships at the Crimean port of Sevastopol.

The Ukrainian military had been using SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service for communications and guidance since the beginning of the conflict with Russia. When Musk learned that the drones were en route to Sevastopol, he ordered SpaceX engineers to shut down the service within 100km of the Russian peninsula, CNN reported on Thursday, quoting an upcoming biography of the billionaire.

As a result, the drones “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,” the report claimed. Ukrainian Digital Transformation Minister Mikhail Fedorov then begged Musk to turn the signal back on via text messages, but Musk refused.

“If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation,” the billionaire explained last week, adding that he never allowed the service to be activated near Crimea in the first place.

Musk’s explanation caused outrage in Kiev, with President Vladimir Zelensky’s top aide accusing the SpaceX CEO of “committing evil.” In the US, CNN anchor Jake Tapper argued on Sunday that Musk had “effectively sabotaged” an American ally, and asked US Secretary of State Antony Blinken if he should face “repercussions” for thwarting the attack.

Blinken refused to condemn Musk, but several members of Congress have spoken out against the billionaire. Musk “cannot have the last word when it comes to national security,” Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jack Reed told reporters on Monday.

At the time of the thwarted attack, Musk was bankrolling Ukraine’s access to the Starlink network. The Pentagon has since stepped in to partly fund the program, and Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said on Monday that future contracts between the military and private firms like SpaceX will likely include “assurances” that these technologies can be used for offensive purposes.

September 12, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Militarism | , | Leave a comment

Cockup or Conspiracy? Understanding COVID-19 as a ‘Structural Deep Event’

Was there more to COVID-19 in terms of underlying agendas, in particular with respect to global-level actors?

BY DR PIERS ROBINSON | PANDA | MARCH 31, 2022

Updated July 2023 based upon article originally published in March 2022

It’s been three years since COVID-19 emerged as a dominant and, for some time, all-consuming issue. Now there are signs we are witnessing the unravelling of some of the key policy responses – blanket lockdowns and population-wide injections – that have been so aggressively promoted by many, although not all, governments around the world. There is also reluctance by many to concede there have been problems with the COVID-19 responses to date. However, doubts about the efficacy of lockdowns are now widely aired and well substantiated and there is increasing evidence for, and awareness of, the dangers surrounding the mRNA genetic vaccine. And it is at least clear that large numbers of people, including scientists and academics, are expressing views at odds with authority or mainstream claims that lockdowns reduce mortality and that mass injections are a rational and efficacious solution.

As debate over ‘The Science’ increases, more and more people now question whether or not there is more to COVID-19 in terms of underlying agendas, in particular with respect to global-level actors such as the World Economic Forum (WEF), the World Health Organization (WHO) and so-called ‘Big Pharma’. In the early days of COVID-19 any such talk was immediately dismissed as ‘conspiratorial’ nonsense and, broadly speaking, people raising non-mainstream doubts about any aspect of the COVID-19 issue were subjected to vilification by ‘authoritative’ voices and corporate media.

Such dynamics were very much in evidence with respect to debate over the origins of COVID-19. And yet, today, the so-called ‘lab leak theory’, whatever its veracity, has moved from a ‘sphere of deviance’ to a ‘sphere of legitimate controversy’ with mainstream scientists through to legacy media and governments discussing it. At the same time, there is increased public awareness of various political agendas, for example the WEF’s ‘Great Reset’ visions. Indeed, a refrain from some quarters is that yesterday’s conspiracy theory is today’s fact. So, if all this is not about a virus, what might actually be going on?

COVID-19 and the ‘Structural Deep Event’ concept

First and foremost, it is necessary to dispel the idea that any attempt to understand intersections between political-economic agendas and COVID-19 is absurd or crazy. Here, we can learn much from Professor Michael Parenti’s 1993 talk on conspiracy and class power:

No ruling class could survive if it wasn’t attentive to its own interests; consciously trying to anticipate, control or initiate events at home and abroad both overtly and secretly. It is hard to imagine a modern state if there would be no conspiracy, no plans, no machinations, deceptions or secrecy within the circles of power. In the United States there have been conspiracies aplenty … they are all now a matter of public record.

PARENTI, 1993

It is a fact, then, that powerful political and economic actors do not blindly and irrationally stumble through history but rather strategise, plan and take actions that are expected to achieve results. They may make mistakes and plans are not always successful, but that does not mean they do not try and sometimes succeed in their aims and objectives. For example the tobacco industry worked long and hard, and with some success, to shape scientific and political discourse regarding their product and delay public awareness of its dangers.

Second, it is also true that powerful actors can have clear perceptions of their interests and are guided by the desire to realise, protect and further them. Where those interests come from might be reducible to any number of material or ideological influences. But origins do not matter, powerful actors still have conceptions of their interests and what they want to do.

Third, in today’s world of weakening democracies, corporate conglomerates and extreme concentration of wealth, it is also true that many political and economic actors are extremely powerful, whether measured in relative or absolute terms. They have resources and skills at their disposal that others do not. One potent tool available is that of propaganda, which grants significant leverage and influence to those with the skills and resources to disseminate it. For those liberals who remain at peace with their world – believing that powerful actors simply relay their political, economic and social goals to knowledgeable publics who then consent, or refuse to consent, to those goals – the fact that propaganda is exercised extensively across liberal democratic states comes as a shock. Indeed, many mainstream scholars struggle to recognise the role of propaganda even in well documented examples such as that of the tobacco industry shaping the science on the harms of smoking or the bogus claims regarding weapons of mass destruction (WMD) used to justify the invasion of Iraq. Recognising that propaganda is a major component of exercising power within so-called liberal democratic states logically removes any justification for the assumptions that a) powerful actors cannot or do not manipulate publics and b) citizenry are sufficiently autonomous and knowledgeable to always be able to grant or withhold consent.

And as Parenti observed, history is replete with examples of powerful actors successfully pursuing goals and manipulating populations in the process. In the days after 9/11, we now know that British and American officials were planning a wide-ranging series of actions – so called ‘regime-change’ wars – that went well outside the scope of the official narrative regarding combating alleged ‘Islamic fundamentalist terrorism’. One British embassy cable stated, four days after 9/11, that ‘[t]he “regime-change hawks” in Washington are arguing that a coalition put together for one purpose [against international terrorism] could be used to clear up other problems in the region’. Within weeks British Prime Minister Tony Blair communicated with US president George W. Bush saying, amongst many other things, ‘If toppling Saddam is a prime objective, it is far easier to do it with Syria and Iran in favour or acquiescing rather than hitting all three at once’. As these two western leaders conspired at the geo-strategic level, a low-level ‘spin doctor’, Jo Moore, commented on the utility of 9/11 in terms of day-to-day ‘media management’, noting that it was ‘a good day to bury bad news’. Jo Moore was forced to resign, Bush and Blair laid the tracks for 20-plus years of conflict in the international system, including the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the recently ended 20-year occupation of Afghanistan. And today, there is substantial evidence that the foundational official story regarding the 9/11 crimes is in fact false with the evidence clearly pointing toward the involvement of a number of state-level actors, including within the US.

Professor Peter Dale Scott (University of California, Berkeley) developed the concept of the  ‘structural deep event’ and this is useful in capturing the idea that powerful actors frequently work to instigate, exploit or exacerbate events in ways that enable substantive and long-lasting societal transformations. These frequently involve, according to Scott, a combination of legal and illegal activity implicating both legitimate and public-facing political structures as well as covert or hidden parts of government – the so-called deep state which is understood as the interface ‘between the public, the constitutionally established state, and the deep forces behind it of wealth, power, and violence outside the government’. So, for example, Scott argues that the JFK assassination became an event that enabled the maintenance of the Cold War whilst the 9/11 crimes likewise enabled the global ‘war on terror’, and that both involved a variety of actors not usually recognized in mainstream or official accounts of these events. It is important to note that Scott claims his approach does not necessarily imply a simplistic grand conspiracy, but is rather based on the idea of opaque networks of powerful and influential groups whose interests converge, at points, and who act to either instigate or exploit events in order to pursue their objectives.

Applied to COVID-19, a ‘structural deep event’ reading would point toward a constellation of actors, with overlapping interests, working to advance agendas, and being enabled to do so because of COVID-19. Such a reading does not necessarily include or exclude the possibility of COVID-19 being an instigated event and one that functioned, in the widest sense, as a propaganda event enabling powerful actors to realise their goals. What are the grounds for seriously considering a ‘structural deep event’ reading?

The damaging COVID-19 response

There is now an overwhelmingly strong case to be made that the key responses to COVID-19 – lockdowns, cloth masking and mass injection – were, on their own terms, flawed.

A large swathe of scientists and medical professionals are now clearly and repeatedly warning governments and populations that lockdowns are harmful and ineffective whilst mass injection of populations with an experimental genetic vaccine resulted in substantial harms. Indeed, it is increasingly clear that the use of the PCR test, which gave a skewed impression of infection and death rates leading to the locking down of entire (healthy) populations for extended periods of time in response to a respiratory virus, and then attempting to submit people to an experimental injection on a repeated basis, were not scientifically robust policies. As of mid 2023, although causes are disputed, there continues to be worrying excess mortality across many countries. It is also now clear to many that the scale and nature of COVID-19 was exaggerated in a way that suggested the existence of an entirely new and unusually deadly pathogen that demanded drastic responses when, in fact, this was not the case.

It is also now apparent that a remarkable and wide-ranging propaganda effort, involving extensive use of behavioural scientists, was used to mobilise support for lockdowns and, later on, injections as well as exaggerate any threat posed. An early paper published in April 2020, authored by over 40 academics, presented a blueprint for how ‘social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behaviour with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts’. Furthermore, many Western governments have behavioural psychology units attached to the highest levels of government, designed to shape thoughts and behaviour, and these were engaged early on during the COVID-19 event. According to Iain Davis, in February 2020 the WHO had established  the Technical Advisory Group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health (TAG); ‘The group is chaired by Prof. Cass Sunstein and its members include behavioural change experts from the World Bank, the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Prof. Susan Michie, from the UK, is also a TAG participant’. In the UK, behavioural scientists from SPI-B (Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour) reconvened on 13 February 2020 and subsequently advised the UK government on how to secure compliance with non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). Broadly, these propaganda techniques included maximising perceived threat in order to scare populations into complying with lockdown and accepting the experimental genetic vaccines as well as utilising non-consensual measures involving incentivization and coercion through, for example, various mandates.

We also now know that propaganda activities included smear campaigns against dissenting scientists and, in at least one major case, were initiated by high-level officials: in Autumn 2020, Anthony Fauci and National Institute of Health director Francis Collins discussed the need to swiftly shut down the Great Barrington Declaration, whose authors were advocating an alternative (and historically orthodox) COVID-19 response focused on protecting high-risk individuals and thus avoiding destructive lockdown measures. Collins wrote in an email that this ‘proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists … seems to be getting a lot of attention … There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises’. Rather than a civilised and robust scientific debate, a smear campaign followed. Furthermore, censorship and suppression appears to have been experienced widely across swathes of academia whilst the White House is currently being sued with respect to First Amendment violations against scientists including Professors Kulldorff and Bhattacharya from the Great Barrington Declaration.

The legacy corporate media, social media platforms and large swathes of academia appear to have played an important role in disseminating this propaganda and promoting the official narrative on COVID-19. The proximity of legacy corporate media to political and economic power has been well understood for many decades: concentration of ownership, reliance upon advertising revenue, deference to elite sources, vulnerability to smear campaigns and ideological positioning are all understood to sharply limit the autonomy of legacy media (these factors also arguably shape academia). With COVID-19 these dynamics are exacerbated by, for example, direct regulatory influence, such as Ofcom direction to UK broadcasters, and censorship by ‘Big Tech’ of views deviating from those of the authorities and the WHO. The Trusted News Initiative (TNI) and Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) have coordinated major legacy media in order to counter what they claim to be ‘misinformation’, and this appears to have played a role in suppressing legitimate scientific criticism whilst elevating ‘official’ narratives. At the global ‘governance’ level, both the United Nations and the WHO promoted campaigns around combating alleged ‘disinformation’ and the so-called ‘misinfo-demic’. Currently moves are afoot to further strengthen elite control over media discourse via legislation aimed at preventing so-called ‘misinformation’, ‘disinformation’ and ‘online harms’ and which is being rolled out over multiple legislatures.

Finally, confirmation of direct involvement of US authorities with censorship decisions by the social media company Twitter has been presented in the ‘Twitter Files’ and, in the UK, further corroboration regarding the role and significance of a Counter Disinformation Unit within the UK government. Matt Taibbi’s work on the ‘Twitter Files’, presents what is described as the Censorship Industrial Complex, or Counter-Disinformation Industry, which links universities, foundations, NGOs and federal agencies and which have actively censored content on Twitter during the COVID-19 event. Critically, these censorship regimes dovetail with the aforementioned legislative developments relating to ‘disinformation’ and ‘online harms’.

Extreme and flawed policy responses – societal lockdown and mandated mass injection – combined with widespread propaganda activities aimed at securing the compliance of the population might be explicable in a number of ways. For example:

  1. The cock-up thesis might be invoked to explain all of this as an irrational panic response by well-intentioned or ideologically driven actors who got things badly wrong and imitated each other while doing so.
  2. It might be that these policy responses are the result of narrow vested interests and corruption.
  3. Powerful actors might have sought to take advantage of COVID-19, even instigate the event, so as to advance substantial political and economic agendas and, as part of this, helped to promote advantageous narratives during the COVID-19 event.

Following two years of massive societal disruption aimed at containing a seasonal respiratory virus, and the persistence of some aspects of the COVID-19 narrative despite substantive scientific challenges, it is clearly necessary to take seriously the very real possibility that vested interests and substantial political agendas underly the COVID-19 event. So, what is the key evidence for explanations two and three?

Manipulation and exploitation of Health Agencies: Regulatory Capture at the NIH and CDC plus the World Health Organization and Pandemic Preparedness Agenda

Evidence for vested interests and corruption has come, in particular, from analyses of US regulatory bodies and the actions of the WHO. In particular, evidence has emerged showing that key authorities in the US – the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – under the influence of Anthony Fauci, the Chief Medical Officer to the US President, have suffered from conflicts of interest. The term ‘regulatory capture’ is frequently used to describe this situation. [2]

For example, Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s detailed analysis of the US-led COVID-19 response in The Real Anthony Fauci, documents the corrupt relationship between so-called ‘Big Pharma’ and Anthony Fauci arguing that, to all intents and purposes, there has been regulatory capture whereby pharmaceutical companies and public officials enjoy mutually beneficial arrangements. This mutual infiltration is understood by Kennedy to underpin the COVID-19 response, especially the commitment to a ‘vaccine-only’ solution and suppression of preventative treatments such as Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ). By way of  example, Kennedy relays the case of Dr Tess Lawrie and WHO researcher Andrew Hill in which Hill appeared to confirm there was pressure to delay publication of results supporting the efficacy of Ivermectin. Regarding HCQ, Kennedy writes:

By 2020, we shall see, Bill Gates exercised firm control over WHO and deployed the agency in his effort to discredit HCQ’ …

On June 17, the WHO – for which Mr. Gates is the largest funder after the US, and over which Mr. Gates and Dr Fauci exercise tight control – called for the halt of HCQ trials in hundreds of hospitals across the world. WHO Chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus ordered nations to stop using HCQ and CQ. Portugal, France, Italy, and Belgium banned HCQ for COVID-19 treatment.

More broadly, the WHO has been important in terms of co-ordinating COVID-19 policy responses. Although notionally independent, the WHO has increasingly come under corporate influence via both the growth of corporate-influenced organisations such as Gavi (Global Vaccine Alliance), CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) and private financing via the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The WHO is also currently negotiating the treaty on pandemic preparedness with the governments of member states to provide unprecedented powers to this organisation to enable rapid responses, transcending national governments, when the WHO declares pandemics in the future, thus centralising control and potentially overriding national sovereignty.

This line of analysis might lead to a conclusion that what we have experienced to date – harmful lockdowns and injection strategies underpinned by massive propaganda – is primarily the result of corruption, conflicts of interest and vested interests, rather than what could reasonably be described as good faith errors by politicians and bureaucrats.

The World Economic Forum and the ‘Great Reset’

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has been associated by some analysts with the COVID-19 event and in 2020 Klaus Schwab, its founder, published a co-authored book titled COVID-19: The Great ResetSchwab declared: ‘The Pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world’. One key component of the political-economic vision promoted by the WEF is ‘stakeholder capitalism’ (Global Public-Private Partnerships, GPPP) involving the integration of government, business and civil society actors with respect to the provision of services. Another key component involves harnessing ‘the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution’, especially the exploitation of developments in artificial intelligence, computing and robotics, in order to radically transform society toward a digitised model. Slogans now frequently associated with these visions include ‘you will own nothing and be happy’, ‘smart cities’ and ‘build back better’.

It is also apparent that the WEF, as an organising force, has considerable reach. It has been involved with training and educating influential individuals – through its Young Global Leaders Programme and its predecessor, Global Leaders for Tomorrow – who have subsequently moved into positions of considerable power. It has also been noted that many national leaders (e.g. Merkel, Macron, Trudeau, Ardern, Putin, and Kurz) are WEF Forum of Young Global Leaders graduates or members and have ‘played prominent roles, typically promoting zero-covid strategies, lockdowns, mask mandates, and ‘vaccine passports’. In 2017 Schwab boasted:

When I mention our names like Mrs Merkel, even Vladimir Putin and so on, they all have been Young Global Leaders of the World Economic forum. But what we are very proud of now is the young generation like prime minister Trudeau, president of Argentina and so on. So we penetrate the cabinets. So yesterday I was at a reception for prime minister Trudeau and I will know that half of this cabinet or even more half of this cabinet are actually young global leaders of the World Economic Forum …. that’s true in Argentina, and it’s true in France now with the president a Young Global Leader

Corporate members of the WEF’s Forum of Young Global Leaders includes Mark Zuckerberg whilst ‘Global Leaders for Tomorrow’ included Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.

Financial Crisis, the Central Banks and Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC)

It is now established that a major crisis in the repo markets during the Autumn of 2019 was followed by high-level planning aimed at resolving an impending financial crisis of greater proportions than the 2008 banking crisis. According to some analysts, one response appears to have been a strengthened drive to control currencies via the Central Banks: Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). The General Manager of the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), Agustin Carstensstated in October 2020 that:

we intend to establish the equivalence with cash and there is a huge difference there. For example, in cash we don’t know who is using a $100 bill today … the key difference with the CBDC is that the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability and also we will have the technology to enforce that.

A programmable CBDC potentially provides complete control over how and when an individual spends money, in addition to allowing authorities to automatically deduct taxes through a person’s ‘digital wallet’. According to some analysts, this development would also effectively remove any significant control over financial policy at the national level. Although decried as a ‘conspiracy theory’ in the early days of the COVID-19 event, it has now become clear that there is a determined drive toward implementing CBDCs and which has the potential to qualitatively change the character of national-level governance.

Technologies associated with programmable CBDCs overlap with those associated with 4IR and concepts regarding digitised society. Specifically, digital identity, a potential component of the intended CBDC, provides a basis for the creation of a digital grid upon which information relating to all aspects of an individual’s life will be available to governments, corporations and other powerful entities such as the security services. Also notable is the relationship between digital ID and the drive to create ‘vaccine passports’ as part of the COVID-19 response: Microsoft and the Rockefeller Foundation are central players in ID2020, alongside Gavi. The overall objective is to create a global-level digital ID framework that integrates with health/vaccination status. As with CBDC, the push to implement these frameworks is ongoing, not dissipating, and include the recent announcement by the WHO and EU of a ‘digital health partnership’ aimed at facilitating implementation of digital health certificates for health and travel controlled by the WHO. [3]

All of these political and economic agendas point toward a conclusion more closely aligned with the ‘structural deep event’ (Scott) thesis, in that they highlight the possibility that COVID-19 has been exploited to advance major political and economic agendas. As such, COVID-19 is itself primarily a propaganda event, instrumentalized in order to pursue political-economic agendas. This hypothesis is, at least in part, distinct from the idea that corruption and narrow vested interests explain most of what we have seen.

Threats to democracy and understanding what this all might mean

The political and economic processes identified regarding the WEF, WHO, digital ID, the central banks and CBDC, the pandemic preparedness agenda and the Censorship Industrial Complex/Counter-Disinformation Industry are not speculative or theoretical, they are directly observable and ongoing. They are also proceeding in the absence of serious scrutiny by legislatures and wider democratic debate whilst new ‘emergencies’ over war in Ukraine and the climate appear to be being exploited in order to maintain momentum even as COVID-19 recedes from view. Indeed, one scholar of political communication notes that ‘insidious scare tactics deployed during Covid are still being used in the field of climate communications, where they were first developed.’

It is also worth spelling out the potential interaction between these agendas and threats to democracy. It is now clear that populations have been subjected to highly coercive and aggressive attempts to limit their autonomy, including restrictions on movement, the right to protest, freedom to work and freedom to participate in society. Most notably, significant numbers of people were pushed, sometimes required, to take an injection at regular intervals in order to continue their participation in society whilst PCR test requirements for travelling, for example, have introduced further coercive elements into everyday life. These developments have been accompanied by, at times, aggressive and discriminatory statements from major political leaders with respect to people resisting injection. The threat to civil liberties and ‘democracy as usual’ is unprecedented. The economic impact has been dire and COVID-19 has seen a dramatic and continued  transfer of wealth from the poorest to the very richest (see for example Oxfam, 2021 and Green and Fazi, 2023). And, today, the drive to create a regulatory framework via the pandemic preparedness agenda, which includes modification of the International Health Regulations, combined with the rolling out of online ‘harm’ legislation and the promotion of moral panic over ‘disinformation’ and ‘online harm’, all create an architecture that enables high levels of control over populations within ostensibly democratic polities.

Furthermore, the combination of a programmable CBDC, a ‘vaccine passport’ that determines access to services and real-world spaces and the availability of all online behaviours to corporations and governments, can enable a system of near total control over an individual’s life, activities and opportunities. This system of control can be seen in China with the social credit system currently being implemented in certain provinces. Integration of personal data and money though a digital ID would also allow individuals to be readily stripped of their assets. These developments reflect the rise of technocracy whereby government and society become increasingly controlled by experts and technicians and individual autonomy and democracy are curtailed. They can also be related to the transhumanist movement which enthusiastically looks forward to human-machine interfaces and their proclaimed potential to ‘perfect the human condition’.

Of course, it is still possible that the sustained adherence to lockdown and mass injection (in spite of growing evidence against their efficacy and safety) are explicable through reference to government blunders, whilst the parallel political and economic projects and rapid reduction in civil liberties are coincidences.

However, it would be remiss to set aside the fact that organisations such as the WHO and the WEF exist within a wider network, or constellation, of extremely powerful, non-elected political and economic entities made up of major multinational corporations, intergovernmental organisations (IGOs), large private foundations and other non-governmental organisations (NGOs). These include, in no particular order, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and other central banks; asset managers Blackrock and Vanguard; global-level entities such as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Club of Rome, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation, Chatham House, the Trilateral Commission, the Atlantic Council, the Open Society Foundations and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; and major corporations including so-called ‘Big Pharma’ and ‘Big Tech’ such as Apple, Google (part of Alphabet Inc), Amazon and Microsoft. And, of course, governments themselves are part of this constellation, with the most powerful – the US, China and India – having considerable influence. In addition, the European Union (EU) supranational body, via its President Ursula von der Leyen, promoted the EU Digital COVID Certificate and also demanded at times that all EU citizens be injected.

As such, it is entirely plausible, if not increasingly likely, that the interests shared between multiple political and economic actors have manifested themselves in the form of concrete political and economic agendas which, in turn, have been advanced via the COVID-19 event. It is also possible that the current war in the Ukraine as well as climate issues are being exploited by many of the same actors and in a similar fashion. Along these lines, Denis Rancourt recently noted:

It is only natural now to ask “what drove this?”, “who benefited?” and “which groups sustained permanent structural disadvantages?” In my view, the COVID assault can only be understood in the symbiotic contexts of geopolitics and large-scale social-class transformations. Dominance and exploitation are the drivers. The failing USA-centered global hegemony and its machinations create dangerous conditions for virtually everyone.

An increasingly large body of work supports the understanding of COVID-19 as a structural deep event. Important and pathfinding analyses were provided in the early months of the COVID-19 event by Cory MorningstarWhitney Webb and Piers Robinson, amongst others. James Corbett was one of the first to warn of the impending dangers of a biosecurity state all the way back in March 2020, whilst Patrick Wood alerted us to the dangers of technocracy long before the arrival of COVID-19.

In States of Emergency (2022) Kees van der Pijl argues there has been a ‘biopolitical seizure of power’ in which an intelligence-IT-media complex has crystallised as a new class block seeking to quell growing unrest and the strengthening of progressive social movements throughout the world. Under cover of Covid-19, and via ruthless exploitation of people’s fear of a virus, van der Pijl traces how this new class block is attempting to impose control via high-tech, digitised societies necessitating mandatory injections and digital ID, as well as censorship and manipulation of public spheres. In short, van der Pijl describes a total surveillance society involving massive concentration of power and the end of democracy. Kheriaty’s The Rise of the Biomedical State (2022) offers a detailed presentation of how COVID-19 provided the impetus for an emerging biosecurity state whilst Iain Davis’ Pseudopandemic (2022) presents the COVID-19 event as primarily a propagandised phenomenon functioning to enable the continued emergence of a technocratic order built around the Global Public-Private Partnership (GPPP) and ‘stake-holder capitalism’ that has appeared primarily to serve the interests of what he describes as an elite ‘parasite class’. Simon Elmer’s (2022) analysis presents all of these developments in terms of the rise of a new form of fascism whilst Broecker (2023) emphasises the technocratic and anti-democratic underpinnings of the political developments ushered in under the cover of the COVID-19 event.

Robert F. Kennedy’s The Real Anthony Fauci, although focused on documenting the corruption with respect to public health institutions and ‘Big Pharma’, is clear about its consequences for our democracies. Early in the book he notes that Fauci ‘has played a central role in undermining public health and subverting democracy and constitutional governance around the globe and in transitioning our civil governance toward medical totalitarianism’. Later in the book, Kennedy discusses the interplay between military, medical and intelligence planners and raises questions about an ‘underlying agenda to coordinate dismantlement of democratic governance’:

After 9/11, the rising biosecurity cartel adopted simulations as signaling mechanisms for choreographing lockstep responses among corporate, political, and military technocrats charged with managing global exigencies. Scenario planning became an indispensable device for multiple power centers to coordinate complex strategies for simultaneously imposing coercive controls upon democratic societies across the globe.

Broadly in line with this analysis, the work of both Breggin and Breggin and Paul Shreyer argue that the political and economic agendas advanced during the COVID-19 event had been long in the pipeline and point toward it being an instigated event as opposed to a spontaneous – naturally occurring – one that groups opportunistically took advantage of.

Along with all this, transhumanism, life extension or ‘enhancement’ through technology and digitalised society, observable in some of the output from the WEF and public musings of key individuals, appears to reflect a set of beliefs in technology and progress that can be traced back to Enlightenment thinking of the last 300 years. Philosophical debates over technology and what it means to be human have remained at the heart of the Enlightenment ‘project’, although perhaps deeply buried. Associated with this might be scientism as a religious cult of the West.

Attempts to attach a label to the complex political and economic processes we are witnessing include descriptors such as ‘global fascism,’ ‘global communism,’ ‘neo-feudalism,’ ‘neo-serfdom’, ‘totalitarianism,’ ‘technocracy,’ ‘centralization vs. subsidiarity,’ ‘stakeholder capitalism’, ‘global public-private partnerships,’ ‘corporate authoritarianism’, ‘authoritarianism,’ ‘tyranny’ and ‘global capitalism.’ Dr Robert Malone, inventor of part of the mRNA technology used in the COVID-19 injections, openly refers to the threat of global totalitarianism as does US presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy Jr.

In summation, there are multiple and readily observable signs of political and economic actors working to variously instigate, exaggerate and/or exploit the COVID-19 event. At the same time there are no signs that those promoting the claim that COVID-19 represented an unusually dangerous health crisis are conceding any ground, even as the facts become clear that it was nothing exceptional and that the responses have been a disaster for public health and well-being. Both ideology and underlying agendas appear to be influencing the dynamics of current events, all of which are occurring in the context of major shifts in the distribution of power globally: witness the BRICS block and various geo-political realignments, including the increasingly likely strategic failure for the West in relation to the Ukraine war. None of this looks like the COVID-19 response was just some innocent and incompetent blunder by our scientific and medical establishments.

The tasks ahead

For those occupying corporate or mainstream positions in politics, media or academia, the fear of being tarred with the ‘conspiracy theorist’ label is usually enough to dampen any enthusiasm for serious evaluation of the ways in which powerful and influential political and economic actors might be shaping responses to COVID-19 to further political and economic agendas. But the stakes are now simply too high for such shyness and, indeed cowardice, to be allowed to persist. There are strong and well-established grounds to take  analyses along the lines of the ‘structural deep event’ thesis seriously, as set out in this article, and there are clear and present dangers to our civil liberties, freedom and democracy.

Building on the work already started, researchers must explore more fully the networks and power structures that have shaped the COVID-19 responses and which have sought to move forward various political and economic agendas. Analysing more fully the techniques used, including propaganda and exploitation of COVID-19 as an enabling event, is now an essential task for researchers to undertake. It is also important to consolidate understanding of linkages with ongoing drives related to the UN sustainability agenda – e.g. 15 minute cities – and the climate agenda, all of which potentially involve technocratic and top-down policy approaches at odds with autonomy and democracy. Such work, ultimately, can not only deepen our understanding of what is going on; it can also provide a guide for those who seek to oppose what is being described by some as ‘global totalitarianism’ or ‘fascism’. It is of equal importance for scholars of democracy and ethics to further unpack the implications of these developments with respect to liberty and civil rights as well as, more widely, creative thinking with respect to alternative visions of social, political and economic organisation and including the development of parallel societies.

It could of course be the case that such a research agenda ultimately leads to a refutation of the ‘structural deep event’ thesis and confirmation that everything witnessed over the last three years has been simply cock-up or blunder. But it seems increasingly unlikely that this would be the result and evidence in support of the structural deep event reading is stronger now than ever. It is essential that critical research into the consequences of the COVID-19 response does not become bounded by an unwarranted assumption that all can be reduced to well- intentioned but erroneous responses. The stakes are high and it has never been more essential to seriously engage with uncomfortable possibilities – even if that means interrogating uncomfortable and alarming explanations.


 Endnotes

1. Thanks to David Bell, Isa Blumi, Heike Brunner, Jonathan Engler, Nick Hudson and Ewa Siderenko for comments and input.

2. Sheldon Watts offers historic background illustrating how the establishment regularly rewrites the science to serve other purposes. In the case of Cholera, the main editors of The Lancet in the late 19th century actually contradicted their own findings of a previous decade in order to accommodate trade interests concerning the quarantining of British ships from India that would have harmed the British Empire’s economic model. From being a human communicable disease, it transformed into a dark-skinned disease of the orient. Watts, Sheldon. “From rapid change to stasis: Official responses to cholera in British-ruled India and Egypt: 1860 to c. 1921.” Journal of World History (2001): 321-374. Thanks to Isa Blumi for this reference.

3. See https://www.who.int/initiatives/global-digital-health-certification-network – Global ‘public health infrastructure’ to ‘expand digital solutions’ and EU Digital Covid Certificate taken over by the WHO’s  GDHCN  Certificate https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/coronavirus-response/safe-covid-19-vaccines-europeans/eu-digital-covid-certificate_en.


Selected References

Organized Persuasive Communication: A new conceptual framework for research on public relations, propaganda and promotional culture’ by Vian Bakir, Eric Herring, David Miller, Piers Robinson, Critical Sociology, 2019.

The unintended consequences of COVID-19 vaccine policy: why mandates, passports and restrictions may cause more harm than good’ by Kevin Bardosh,  Alex de Figueiredo, Rachel Gur-Arie, Euzebiusz Jamrozik, James Doidge, Trudo Lemmens, Salmaan Keshavjee, Janice E Graham,  Stefan Baral, British Medical Journal, 2023.

Using social and behavioural science to support COVID-19 pandemic response’ by Jay Van Bavel et al, in Nature Human Behaviour by Jay Van Bavel et al, 2020.

Global Health And The Politics Of Catastrophe: Who will save us from the WHO and its new world order?’ by David Bell, PANDA, 2021.

The World Health Organization and COVID-19: Re-establishing Colonialism in Public Health- PANDA’ by David Bell and Toby Green, PANDA, 2021.

‘Negotiating the future of political philosophy and practice: Renewal of democracy or technocratic governance’ by Hannah Broecker, Kritische Gesellschaftsforschung, 2023.

Covid 19 and the Global Predators, by Peter Breggin and Ginger Breggin, 2021.

Pseudopandemic: New Normal Technocracy, by Iain Davies, 2021. 

A State of Fear by Laura Dodsworth,  Pinter & Martin Publishers, 2021.

The Road to Fascism: For a Critique of the Global Biosecurity State, By Simon Elmer, architectsforsocialhousing, 2022.

The Covid Consensus’ by Toby Green and Thomas Fazi, Hurst Publishers, 2023.

Engineering Compliance: From Climate to Covid and Back Again’ by Philip Hammond, Propaganda In Focus, 2023.

The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, by Robert F. Kennedy Jr, 2021.

The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State, by Aaron Kheriaty, 2022.

Doubt is Their Product by David Michaels, Oxford University Press.

Propaganda Trudeau Style’ by Ray McGinnis, Propaganda in Focus, 2022.

PCR testing skewed and corrupted data on SARS-CoV-2 infection and death rates’ by Jennifer Smith, PANDA, 2022.

Conspiracy and Class Power: A Talk by Michael Parenti’, – Global Research, 1993.

States of Emergency: Keeping the Global Population in Check, by Kees van der Pijl, Clarity Press, 2022.

COVID Coercion: Boris Johnson’s Psychological Attack on the UK Public’ by Mike Robinson,  UKColumn, 2020.

Threats to Freedom of Expression: Covid-19, the ‘fact checking counter-disinformation industry’, and online harm legislation’, by Piers Robinson,  Propaganda In Focus.

Deafening Silences: propaganda through censorship, smearing and coercion’ by Piers Robinson, Propaganda in Focus, 2022.

‘COVID is a Global Propaganda Operation’, interview with Piers Robinson, Asia Pacific, 2021.

The Propaganda of Terror and Fear: A Lesson from Recent History’, by Piers Robinson,  OffGuardian, 2020.

The American Deep State by Peter Dale Scott, Rowman and Littlefield, 2017.

Censorship and Suppression of Covid-19 Heterodoxy: Tactics and Counter-Tactics’, by Yaffa Shir-RazEty ElishaBrian MartinNatti Ronel & Josh GuetzkowMinerva, 2022. 

‘Chronik einer angekündigten Krise’ by ‘Paul Schreyer’, 2021.

Who is responsible for inflicting unethical behavioural-science ‘nudges’ on the British people?’ by Gary Sidley, PANDA, 2022.

The Show Must Go On. Event 201: The 2019 Fictional Pandemic Exercise’ by Cory Morningstar, 2020.

From Covid to CBDC: The Path to Full Control’ by John Stylman, Brownstone Institute, 2022.

Transhumanism and the Philosophy of the Elites’ by Danica Thiessen, PANDA, 2023.

Was SARS-CoV-2 entirely novel or particularly deadly?’ by Thomas Verduyn, Todd Kenyon, Jonathan Engler, PANDA, 2023.

‘Red pill or blue pill variants inflation and the controlled demolition of society’ The Philosophical Salon, available at ‘Red Pill or Blue Pill? Variants, Inflation, and the Controlled Demolition of Society’ by Fabio Vighi,  The Philosophical Salon, 2021.

All Roads Lead to Dark Winter’, by Whitney Webb, Unlimited Hangout, 2020.

COVID-19 and the shadowy “Trusted News Initiative”’, by Elizabeth Woodworth, Common Ground, 2021.

September 11, 2023 Posted by | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Childhood Vaccination Schedule – Part One: The First Vaccine – Hepatitis B

By Michael Bryant | 21st Century Wire | September 5, 2023

Introduction

As more vaccines are added to the US childhood immunization schedule it’s imperative that there be a broader public discussion about the prominence of vaccines in public health policy, what benefits they convey and a forthright assessment of the risks involved. 

Though vital to both the short and long term health of children, exploratory questions, in-depth rational discussion and comprehensive analysis about vaccines are considered off-limits for the mainstream medical establishment.

In the conventional narrative it is accepted as an article of faith that vaccines are miraculous discoveries responsible for global disease eradication and are the most important medical product for disease prevention.

For today’s pediatricians promoting and implementing the childhood immunization program has become their primary duty.

It is widely believed that if we stopped, or even reduced vaccinations, we would be going back to the dark ages. Any individual that challenges this vaccine orthodoxy is seen as a heretic.

Despite the deeply ingrained belief system of the vaccine ideology a growing number of parents and health advocates are beginning to ask many of the questions which have been swept under the rug for years.

Are all of these vaccines necessary? Are they safe? Are the diseases they are supposed to prevent truly diseases of concern?

Does the claim that vaccines are responsible for reductions in disease, disability, and death from a variety of infectious diseases fit with the facts when scrutinized?

Why such an increase in the number of vaccinations through the years? Has this escalating vaccine program produced an accompanying improvement in health outcomes?

What happens if I don’t give my child all of these vaccines? What happens if I don’t give my child any of these vaccines? What happens to children who don’t get vaccinated?

These are some of the questions parents are not supposed to ask and precisely the questions that need to be addressed.

While the information presented in this series is publicly available it is denied admittance into the public discourse by means of systematic indoctrination by a compromised media apparatus and a medical establishment which has created a mystique around vaccines while persuading the public they are the holiest of all medicinal products.

As an antidote to this institutional programming we embark upon a series of articles which take a close look at each of the vaccines on the childhood schedule and the diseases they are designed to prevent.

Our series begins with an overview of the US Childhood Immunization Schedule and a detailed look at the initial shot given to infants on the first day of life- the Hepatitis B vaccine.

The United States Childhood Immunization Schedule – An Overview

In the past few decades the childhood vaccine schedule in the United States has exploded into what is now the most aggressive childhood vaccination schedule in the world. It wasn’t always this way. Most baby boomers likely had only 2 or 3 vaccinations- polio, smallpox and DTP with never more than one shot given per visit.

With the recent addition of the COVID-19 vaccines to the childhood schedule the number of recommended injections ballooned to a regimen of 72 injections of 90 antigens by age eighteen for any child that undergoes the full immunization schedule circa 2023.

To understand how this came to pass we need to understand the history of how we got here.

The first vaccine mandate in the United States was enacted in Massachusetts in 1810 and was centered on smallpox. The legislation was essentially an ad hoc law which gave local health boards the authority to require vaccination.

The first public school mandate was issued in Massachusett in the 1850’s. At that time the only vaccine of interest was for smallpox. By the end of the 1800s most states in New England had smallpox vaccine requirements for children attending public schools.

The next significant stride in vaccine recommendations and requirements for children would arrive a century later in 1954, focusing on the polio vaccine developed by Jonas Salk.

By 1955, the polio vaccine was fully licensed and through the Polio Vaccine Assistance Act Congress appropriated funds to provide federal grants for states to purchase the vaccine and for the costs of planning and conducting vaccination programs.

This Act would become the template for the utilization of federal funds to cover various costs of vaccine programs and would  provide the impetus for a mass inoculation campaign for polio.

At this time there were no codified mechanisms to mandate vaccine uptake, doctors recommendations were considered just that- guidance with no strict obligation or enforcement for adherence.

In 1962 the Vaccine Assistance Act would establish a permanent mechanism to provide ongoing financial support to state and local health departments. This Act would allow the CDC to appropriate federal funds for the provision of vaccines and establish an advisory group to assist in managing vaccination programs.

To this day the 1962 Act remains one of the most important mechanisms for aligning local and state health department immunization activities with federal funds to deliver vaccines to children.

In 1964 the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) was created under the US Public Health Service. Its mission was to review the science and evidence of vaccines given to children and to make recommendations on when those vaccines should be given and at what age.

The 1960s and 1970s saw a wave of new vaccines hit the market. A second type of polio vaccine was developed along with the first Hepatitis B vaccine. Measles vaccines were developed as a single vaccine and then combined with the mumps and rubella vaccines to create the “MMR” vaccine.

Paralleling the increase in the volume of vaccines came the creation of global immunization programs. In 1974 the World Health Organization established the Expanded Programme on Immunization which was designed to ”strengthen vaccine programmes, supply, and delivery, and ensure universal access to all relevant vaccines for all populations across the life course.”

These changes radically altered the business landscape of vaccine manufacturing. What was once a cottage industry of small pharmaceutical companies, individual investigators and physician scientists evolved into the mega corporations that exist today.

By 1977, the U.S. federal government had set up the Childhood Immunization Initiative which sought to increase vaccination rates in children against seven diseases (diphtheria, measles, mumps, pertussis, poliomyelitis, rubella, tetanus) for which vaccines had been developed. This began the process by which all 50 states would adopt mandatory school vaccinations.

In the 1980s, vaccines against Hepatitis B, Haemophilus influenzae type b, and pneumococcal disease were recommended for children at different ages. By 1983 the number of recommended injections had increased to 23 doses of 7 vaccines by age six.

In 1986, the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act created a system of passive and active surveillance for cases of adverse reactions to vaccines as well as a mechanism to compensate any persons injured by vaccines.

With the passage of the 1986 Act and its implementation in 1988, a liability shield for pharmaceutical companies was created. On the heels of the 1986 Act the number of vaccines placed on the CDC schedule would escalate.

Even as the list of available vaccines was growing local and state health boards had differing opinions on when to give vaccines, which children should get them and how many should be given.

In order to standardize vaccine uptake, the first “harmonized” childhood immunization schedule  was issued in 1995 by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), and the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP). combining recommendations of all three national groups.

This initial schedule included diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, measles, mumps, rubella, polio (oral), Haemophilus influenzae type b, and Hepatitis B vaccines. (The DTP and MMR vaccines were combination vaccines for diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis; and measles, mumps, rubella.)

Since then, the schedule has been adjusted as new vaccines have been developed, taken off the market or the risk profile for children changed.

Today, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), all 50 states have legislation requiring specific vaccines for students with exemptions varying from state to state.

These laws apply not only to children attending public schools but also to those attending private schools and day care facilities.

There are 45 states and Washington D.C. that grant religious exemptions for people who have religious objections to immunizations and 15 states which allow for philosophical exemptions.

All school immunization laws grant exemptions for medical reasons.

Six states (California, Connecticut, Maine, Mississippi, New York, and West Virginia) do not allow religious or philosophical exemptions from vaccination requirements as of 2021.

NCSL also states that the laws and regulations on vaccine requirements in all 50 states and DC follow the vaccine schedule set forth by CDC.

The trajectory of this vaccine program would result in 54 injections of 72 antigens by 2019 for  US children by age eighteen who adhered to the full CDC schedule- with even more shots added as the Covid vaccines were placed on the child immunization schedule.

This dizzying array of injections in the childhood immunization schedule begins on a child’s first day of life with the Hepatitis B vaccine.

Hepatitis B – The Disease: A Case Study In Manufacturing Public Perception 

The first question every parent should ask when considering the Hepatitis B vaccine is, “Does my child need a vaccine for Hepatitis B on the first day of life?”

Given the low risk of newborns acquiring the HepB infection and the ease with which pregnant mothers can be screened it’s fair to ask why a newborn would need the HepB vaccine?

Before arriving at that answer we look back at how Hepatitis B, the disease, was transformed from a relatively obscure disease which impacted a limited population into a widespread public health predicament.

The conventional characterization of Hepatitis B is as a type of viral hepatitis which causes acute and chronic liver infection. It is generally accepted that in order to contract HepB direct contact with infected blood or other body fluids is required. Transmission routes that by any standards pose little or no risk to infants.

This is in fact how public health officials characterized the disease back in 1981 when the Hepatitis B vaccine  initially gained approval. The CDC’s own Fact Sheet on HepB the disease does not include newborn babies as a risk group for that disease.

The risk groups listed are, “injection drug users, homosexual men, sexually active heterosexuals, infant/children of immigrants from disease-endemic areas, sexual/household contacts of infected persons, infants born to infected mothers, health care workers and hemodialysis patients.”

What was it that changed the CDC’s earlier 1982 recommendation, which targeted only a small “at-risk” population, into a set of more aggressive policies that would result in the 1991 recommendation that all infants get three doses of HBV by 18 months of age?

And how did the HepB vaccine become compulsory for all schoolchildren in 47 states by the year 2000 even as the CDC admits that they lack proof of HepB being transmitted in a school setting?

In large part the answer to these questions lies in how the public’s perception of HepB was radically altered through orchestrated media messaging and deliberately provocative depictions of the disease by industry and public health officials. Notably the change in HepB’s image came immediately following the vaccine’s development, licensure and introduction.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, prior to the approval of the vaccine, HepB was a disease which had little to no relevance to most Americans and nowhere to be found on the media radar. Before the Hepatitis B vaccine was developed and marketed most Americans had little reason to view the disease as a threat to their health.

New cases of HepB were quite low in the 1970’s, began to rise in the 1980’s, concurrent with the AIDS crisis, and then began to fall again in the 1990’s.

By its own admission the CDC attributed this decline to, “reduction of transmission among men who have sex with men and injection-drug users, as a result of HIV prevention efforts.”

As scientific discoveries leading to the vaccine moved forward HepB acquired a more public image.

The advent of the AIDS crisis in the early 1980s, the development of genetically-engineered pharmaceuticals in the late 1980s, and the political push for health reform in the early 1990s all led to changes in how HepB was presented to Americans.

The media, medical and scientific community would all contribute in altering the image of HepB through the 1980s and 1990s. Media outlets would often conflate HepB with HIV/AIDS in order to arouse public attention and induce fear towards this obscure disease.

Provocative headlines and stories began to surface with claims that Hepatitis B was similar to HIV and possibly worse.

The historical medical view that HepB was a disease which only impacted a narrow subset of the population was replaced by hysterical media representations that anyone could be at risk of Hepatitis B.

In her article, “Do We Really Need Hepatitis B on the Second Day of Life?”, Vaccination Mandates and Shifting Representations of Hepatitis B, history of health sciences professor Elena Conis chronicles some of this history:

“Outlets from the Philadelphia Tribune to Good Housekeeping reported that a third of people with the disease were not in any of the known risk groups. Redbook warned readers that hepatitis was “spreading fast,” and the Boston Globe noted that hepatitis was spread by sharing gum, food, toothbrushes, and razors and by body piercing. New York magazine, in a feature titled, “The Other Plague,” recounted the stories of a young woman who contracted a fatal case by getting her ears pierced, a young man who was infected when mugged at knife-point, and a woman infected at a nail salon. Frequent mention of the prevalence of asymptomatic carriers heightened the sense of an immediate health threat: in the words of the New York magazine reporter, anyone could be one of the U.S.’s 1.5 million “Typhoid Marys,” unwittingly transmitting hepatitis B to people unaware of their risk.”

Such media reports citing HepB disease statistics would normally originate with statements generated by officials at the CDC.

Most of the inflated disease statistics found in the media reports were generated in the very same  ACIP Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) which called for mass vaccination with hepatitis B vaccine.

In that report the CDC stated that there are an “estimated 1 million-1.25 million persons with chronic hepatitis B infection in the United States” and that, “each year approximately 4,000-5,000 of these persons die from chronic liver disease” and that, “an estimated 200,000-300,000 new [Hepatitis B] infections occurred annually during the period 1980-1991.”

To generate those statistics the CDC, in what at best would be considered duplicitous, circled back to itself citing an MMWR 1990 report as the basis for their claims. Nowhere in either report were scientific references used to support those claims.

Despite the media campaign, vaccine uptake for HepB was not rising to desired levels as vaccinating high-risk adults was proving to be difficult. This would result in a more systematic strategy at the national level.

In September of 1991 the Immunization Practices Advisory Committee (ACIP) would develop and codify a national program for the HepB vaccine- Hepatitis B Virus: A Comprehensive Strategy for Eliminating Transmission in the United States Through Universal Childhood Vaccination.

In 1992 the World Health Organization (WHO) would follow suit recommending that “all infants should receive their first dose of hepatitis B vaccine as soon as possible after birth, preferably within 24 hours, even in countries where Hepatitis B virus is of low endemicity.”

Acknowledging children were not in the at-risk group for HepB the ACIP committee lamented that “HBV transmission cannot be prevented through vaccinating only the groups at high risk of infection.”

Using this rationale they declared a blanket vaccination policy for all newborns- “a comprehensive strategy to prevent HBV infection, acute hepatitis B, and the sequelae of HBV infection in the United States.”

Earlier that year, June 11,1991 in a Boston Globe article titled, “U.S. To Urge All Children Be Vaccinated for Hepatitis B,” an official from the CDC admitted, “We do not feel that targeting adults for vaccination has worked. This will be the first time that a vaccine is recommended for children to prevent a disease that primarily occurs in adults.”

In testimony before Congress Michael Belkin summed it up neatly, “So in the CDC and ACIP’s own words, almost every newborn US baby is now greeted on its entry into the world by a vaccine injection against a sexually transmitted disease for which the baby is not at risk -because they couldn’t get the junkies, prostitutes, homosexuals and promiscuous heterosexuals to take the vaccine.”

Not to be swayed by logic, the CDC would effectuate a comprehensive HepB vaccine program and a medical product with an initial target population of drug addicts and homosexuals would become compulsory for every child in the country.

The Hepatitis B Vaccine Clinical Trials- The Devil’s In the Details

It is a near certainty that few physicians will study the details of a vaccine clinical trial found in the package inserts of each vaccine. Rarely will a pediatrician or physician initiate a conversation with a patient or parent about what those trials entailed and what else the package insert reveals.

Yet that is exactly the first place one should go to get a clear picture of the safety profile for any vaccine.

In 2017 the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) received a tip from a supporter that the clinical trials used by the FDA to license the two children’s HepB vaccines, Engerix-B and Recombivax HB, only reviewed safety data for a few days after injection.

ICAN was so stunned by this revelation that they assumed the supporter was making false claims. Upon reviewing the package inserts for both vaccines ICAN found the claims to be true.

The package insert for GlaxoSmithKline’s Energix-B vaccine, approved in 1989, acknowledges  that the subjects were monitored for only 4 days after administration of the vaccine. By any standards 4 days of post-injection data is inadequate to assure a product’s safety. As noted by ICAN, “the review period for a vaccine given to infants and young children should be longer as neurological and developmental disorders are often discovered until the child is a few years old.”

2019 study authored by researchers at the FDA and Duke University confirmed ICAN’s position, stating that compared to licensing time period for adults, “data on drug efficacy and safety in children may require an additional 6 years.”

Another troubling facet of GSK’s pre-licensure clinical trials is that ENGERIX-B was administered to 5,071 healthy adults and children. Of the 13,495 doses administered in 36 clinical trials nowhere is it listed how many of those subjects were adults, how many were children and how many were infants.

As there were no specifics on how many individuals from each age group were involved the results of these trials are uninterpretable with respect to the risks of vaccinating infants.

While the trials for Energix-B were certainly less than rigorous the pre-licensure trials for Merck’s Recombivax HB vaccine might hold the dubious distinction for being the most unscrupulous and underpowered trials in the annals of the Pharmaceutical Industry.

In only three clinical studies, 434 doses of RECOMBIVAX HB, 5 mcg, were administered to a whopping 147 healthy infants and children (up to 10 years of age) who were monitored for a mere 5 days after each dose.

Along with the fact that 147 subjects is a grossly insufficient number upon which to base any determination on vaccine safety, the ages of the trial participants are not even listed. How many infants were in the study? Was there even a single newborn in the study?

Additionally, as is the case with virtually all vaccine clinical trials, neither of these two HepB trials used a proper randomized placebo-controlled clinical trial.

Beyond the untrustworthy nature of the composition and execution of these trials there is also the nagging problem with the difference between the noted outcomes of the clinical trials versus the post marketing experience.

In the clinical trials, effects are only studied for a few days immediately following vaccination, (with no true placebo), and only minor adverse reactions such as irritability, fever, diarrhea, fatigue/weakness and injection site pain are mentioned.

But in the “post marketing data”, which means post-approval injections in the general population,  a laundry list of more serious adverse reactions such as Guillain-Barré syndrome, multiple sclerosis, encephalitis, thrombocytopenia, meningitis, Stevens-Johnson syndrome, tachycardia and many more are reported.

This is one of the elemental tricks the Pharmaceutical Industry uses to conceal the nature and extent of injuries which may be attributable to the shots.

More serious adverse reactions are swept under the rug by asserting that “no causal link has been established” between the injection and these reactions.

In the trials subjects are observed for only a few days and nothing is found to cause concern.

But when the general public starts reporting real world serious adverse events, these are dismissed as no long term studies are done which could establish causal relations.

ICAN’s lawyer Aaron Siri in a 9 hour deposition brought these many problems to the attention of Stanley Plotkin, the ‘Godfather of Vaccines’, who authored what is considered the bible on vaccines,

In the deposition Siri gets Plotkin to admit that the Hepatitis B vaccine (given to babies on their first day of life), has not had an adequate safety study:

Siri asked, “How long does it say that safety was monitored after each dose?”

Dr. Plotkin responded, “Five days.”

Siri responded, “Is that long enough to detect an autoimmune issue that arises after five days?”

Dr. Plotkin stated, “No.”

Siri then asked, “Was there any control group in this trial?”

Dr. Plotkin, who had just argued how important control groups are to cause and effect, answered, “It does not mention any control group, no.”

Based on the weight of the evidence ICAN is currently petitioning the FDA to withdraw the licensure of these Hepatitis B vaccines and asserts that these vaccines should never have been approved.

Given that the utility of the Hep B vaccine for toddlers is unsubstantiated and the clinical trials are at best problematic it would seem incumbent upon the manufacturers to at least provide ironclad evidence for the safety of these products.

Is this the case?

The data tell a different story.

Dangers of the HepB Vaccine- An Open Secret

In the first months of life a child’s brain and biological systems are at critical stages of development. Throughout pregnancy parents are bombarded with directives from their physician telling them a multitude of vaccinations will be essential to protect their child from the pending torrent of infectious diseases.

In addition to the medical stipulations given by their pediatrician, parents understand that they will be faced with mandates for day care and schooling as well as ever-present societal pressures. The combination of these forces create a climate of fear and coercion intended to bring about automatic compliance.

Little to no information about vaccines are volunteered at most pediatric visits. Parents are expected to obediently trust their physician and place their faith in a medical system that assiduously claims vaccinations are necessary, safe and effective. Questions challenging the utility and safety of a vaccine are typically discouraged and dismissed.

In the United States the journey into this world of mass vaccination begins on the day of birth with the Hepatitis B vaccine.

To the extent that Hepatitis B is a danger to anyone, that risk is understood to be through sexual contact or sharing needles. A sexually transmitted risk or a needle exchange risk means there is little to no chance of Hepatitis B infection for infants calling into question the fundamental rationale for this vaccine.

Less than one percent of all HepB cases occur in children under 15 years old. In North America, Europe and Australia a mere one-tenth of one percent are said to be carriers of HepB. Of adults infected, 90-95% clear the virus on their own, without intervention.

While it is thought that infants born to mothers who are infected with HepB carry a greater risk of contracting the disease, pregnant women can easily be screened for this disease if there is a concern.

Given this risk profile, as infants and young children receiving this vaccine face little to no chance of hepatitis B infection, we have to ask, Is this vaccine worth the  potential risk of neurodevelopmental disorders or other adverse impacts associated with this vaccine?

The answer to those questions can be found in answering the most important question for any medical product, “Is it safe?”

From the earliest days of development and production safety concerns have dogged the various iterations of the Hepatitis B vaccine.

The original HepB vaccine, Heptavax B, manufactured by Merck Sharp & Dolme and approved by the FDA in 1981, was unlike previous vaccines in that it contained inactivated virus collected from plasma of HepB-infected donors rather than live, weakened virus or killed, denatured virus.

Maurice Hilleman hypothesized that he could make a HepB vaccine by injecting patients with Hepatitis B surface protein using three treatments of blood serum together with rigorous filtration. To obtain the necessary plasma Hilleman collected blood from gay men and intravenous drug users—groups said to be at risk for viral hepatitis.

Hilleman believed the immune system would recognize the surface proteins as foreign, and manufacture specific antibodies which would destroy these proteins. His theory went that if the patient were infected with HepB in the future the immune system would produce protective antibodies which would destroy the viruses.

On November 16, 1981, CBS Evening News reporter Dan Rather touted Hilleman’s vaccine as the “first completely new viral vaccine in 10 years,” and hailed it as, “the first vaccine ever licensed in the United States that is made directly from human blood.”

Though lauded as a revolutionary medical achievement at the time, the original plasma derived HepB vaccine was not intended for widespread use in the US due to the fact that liver cancer was relatively uncommon in the US at the time and the cost of the vaccine was seen as prohibitive.

Excitement surrounding this novel plasma vaccine soon dissipated due to a public relations problem. It came to light that the clinical trials which tested the vaccine in the 1970s had included only gay men who had been identified as being at high risk of the infection.

The approval of the serum derived vaccine had the added misfortune of coinciding with the AIDS crisis which heightened concerns over the safety of using potentially contaminated human serum in vaccines due to fears of transmission of live HepB or other blood-borne pathogens.

As gay men and injection drug users were frequent blood donors for the vaccine this brought about fears that blood plasma could be infected and the vaccine itself could become a carrier for HIV/AIDS.

These concerns of potential contamination with human viruses led to the 1986 introduction of a second hepatitis B vaccine, Recombivax-HB. This new type of vaccine, known as a recombinant vaccine, manufactured by Merck Sharp & Dolme, was the first vaccine produced using recombinant DNA technology.

The creation of this new type of vaccine entailed inserting the gene of the HepB virus protein envelope  into yeast cells, eliminating the risk of viral contamination from using human serum to produce the vaccine.

Frank E. Young, FDA Commissioner at the time, heralded this development as yet another medical marvel declaring, “This vaccine opens up a whole new era of vaccine production. These techniques should be able to be extended to any virus or parasite to produce other vaccines that normally cannot be propagated in the laboratory.”

Noting that the plasma-derived vaccine had annual sales of only $45 million, Edward E. Penhoet, president of Merck’s collaborator Chiron Corp., suggested that the new recombinant HepB vaccine would be more profitable for Merck as genetically engineered vaccines are “cheaper to produce” than those derived from human blood.

By 1989, a second recombinant hepatitis B vaccine, Engerix-B manufactured by The SmithKline Beecham Company, was approved for use in the U.S.

While the new HepB vaccines tempered anxieties surrounding the previous plasma-based vaccines a different set of problems materialized in the manufacturing processes and with certain ingredients in the HepB recombinant vaccines.

A 2005 French study, Multiple sclerosis and hepatitis B vaccination: Adding the credibility of molecular biology to an unusual level of clinical and epidemiological evidence, highlighted issues with HepB virus polymerase contamination asserting, “We reviewed evidence showing that hepatitis B vaccine HBV has a marked potential to induce auto-immune hazards, neurological as well as non-neurological. We emphasized that for a drug used as a prevention, HBV was remarkable by the unusual frequency, severity and variety of its hazards.”

The authors came to the stark conclusion that, ‘‘the principle of precaution’’ should urgently be applied [with] regard to the tiny benefit (if any) of large HepB vaccination in low-endemic countries. In addition, the benefit/ratio of this costly prophylaxis should be seriously re-assessed even in countries where the frequency of HepB is higher.”

Soon issues surrounding genetically modified yeast proteins used in the HepB vaccines cropped up.

Links to yeast-containing vaccinese and autoimmune disease were observed, creating concerns that the genetically engineered yeast in the HepB vaccines may cause children with an allergy to yeast to react severely to the vaccine.

Bioinformatics and epidemiological evidence link the yeast protein found in the Hepatitis B vaccines to numerous autoimmune disorders. Part of the study’s stark conclusion was, “Vaccine makers have refused to perform such checks, resulting in devastating consequences.”

The Hepatitis B Foundation warned, “The vaccine may not be recommended for those with documented yeast allergies or a history of an adverse reaction to the vaccine.”

The CDC’s Pinkbook on Hepatitis B identified another potential problem with latex packaging in the vaccines observing, “Some presentations of HepB vaccines contain latex, which may cause allergic reactions.”

As the first dose of the HepB vaccine is recommended and usually given on the day of birth this presents a conspicuous problem. How is it possible to know if a newborn has an allergy to yeast or latex or any of the other vaccine ingredients?

While certainly not insignificant, even more alarming safety concerns than yeast and latex allergies have been identified with certain ingredients found in the HepB vaccine.

Until the early 2000s the original gene based HepB vaccines, Recombivax and Engerix, contained the mercury preservative thimerosal, a mercury- and thiosalicylate-containing organic compound with antiseptic, bactericidal, and fungicidal properties. Certain exposures to thimerosal are known to be toxic to the central nervous system, kidneys, liver, spleen, and bone marrow. Some believe that even the tiniest amounts of methylmercury, found in thimerosal, carry a risk of adverse neuropsychological outcomes.

2016 longitudinal study of the relationship between Thimerosal-containing hepatitis B vaccination and developmental delays made an assessment that, “During the decade in which Thimerosal-HepB Vaccines (T-HBVs) were routinely recommended and administered to US infants (1991–2001), an estimated 0.5–1 million additional US children were diagnosed with specific delays in development as a consequence of 25 μg or 37.5 μg organic Hg from T-HBVs administered within the first 6 months of life.”

The study added, “[This] study provides compelling new evidence to confirm and extend previous epidemiological studies finding a significant relationship between organic Hg exposure from Thimerosal-containing childhood vaccines and the subsequent increased risk of a diagnosis for specific delays in development.”

A 2018 cross-sectional study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health strongly suggested that the 1990s-era thimerosal-containing HepB vaccine caused considerable harm to children concluding, “This cross-sectional study provides new evidence consistent with and extends the results from previous epidemiological and biological studies on the adverse effects of Hg exposure from Thimerosal-containing childhood vaccines. This study supports a significant about nine-fold increase in the risk of adverse effects as measured by receipt of special education services among boys receiving infant Thimerosal-containing hepatitis B vaccination.”

The study added to the chorus of voices demanding thimerosal be removed from all vaccines given to pregnant women and children.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Modernization Act of 1997 called for the FDA to review and assess the risk of all mercury-containing food and drugs.

In 1999 the FDA determined that, “under the recommended childhood immunization schedule, infants might be exposed to cumulative doses of ethylmercury that exceed some federal safety guidelines established for ingestion of methylmercury, another form of organic mercury (Ball et al., 2001). In July 1999, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) issued a joint statement recommending the removal of thimerosal from vaccines as soon as possible.”

The statement also recommended, “a temporary suspension of the birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine for children born to low-risk mothers until a thimerosal-free alternative became available.”

Merck responded by making a new vaccine available immediately, gaining FDA approval for its  thimerosal-free Recombivax HB vaccine on August 27, 1999 with distribution beginning in September.

SmithKline Beecham reformulated its thimerosal-free Engerix-B which the FDA approved in 2000.

Neal Halsey, M.D., director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety, assured the public the new Engerix-B contained only trace amounts of thimerosal (<1 mcg), which will “have no clinically relevant effects making it equivalent to a thimerosal-free product.”

While recommending newborns and infants up to the age of six months avoid vaccinations with thimerosal the CDC still allowed those over the age of six months to receive the thimerosal-containing HepB vaccines.

Even as thimerosal was being phased out of children’s vaccines, safety concerns surrounding ingredients in the Hepatitis B vaccine persisted. Disturbing reports relating to aluminum adjuvants found in the vaccines emerged and continue to this day.

In a 2008 article in Mothering magazine pediatrician Robert Sears sounded alarm bells about the dangers of vaccinations which contained aluminum adjuvants.

While embarking upon an inquiry to see if anyone had actually tested and scientifically assessed “safe” levels of injected aluminum he discovered an FDA document on aluminum toxicity which warned:

“Aluminum may reach toxic levels with prolonged parenteral administration [i.e., injected into the body] if kidney function is impaired. Research indicates that patients with impaired kidney function, including premature neonates [i.e., babies], who received parenteral levels of aluminum at greater than 4 to 5 micrograms per kilogram of body weight per day, accumulate aluminum at levels associated with central nervous system and bone toxicity. Tissue loading [i.e., toxic buildup in certain body tissues] may occur at even lower rates of administration.”

second document produced by the American Society for Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition (ASPEN) also emphasized a daily limit of 4 to 5 mcg of aluminum per kilogram (2.2 lbs) of body weight for babies being fed an IV solution containing aluminum.

While neither of these documents mentioned vaccines specifically, both the ASPEN group and the FDA agreed that all injectable solutions for children should be limited to a maximum amount of 25 mcg of aluminum within a 24-hour period.

The FDA’s Code of Federal Regulations explicitly states, “The aluminum content of large volume parenteral (LVP) drug products used in total parenteral nutrition (TPN) therapy must not exceed 25 micrograms per liter ([micro]g/L).”

The unsettling fact regarding the HepB vaccine in regards to aluminum is that each dose, given at birth, 2 months and 6 months, is laced with 250 mcg of aluminum– far exceeding the recommended safe levels for large volume parenteral (LVP) drug products.

In a 2011 study Canadian scientists Professor Christopher Shaw and Dr. Lucija Tomljenovic asked the question, Aluminum Vaccine Adjuvants: Are they Safe?

The answers they discovered are worth quoting at length:

“Aluminum is an experimentally demonstrated neurotoxin and the most commonly used vaccine adjuvant. Despite almost 90 years of widespread use of aluminum adjuvants, medical science’s understanding about their mechanisms of action is still remarkably poor.

Experimental research, however, clearly shows that aluminum adjuvants have a potential to induce serious immunological disorders in humans. In particular, aluminum in adjuvant form carries a risk for autoimmunity, long-term brain inflammation and associated neurological complications and may thus have profound and widespread adverse health consequences.”

“Given that multiple aluminum-adjuvanted vaccines are often given to very young children (i.e., 2 to 6 months of age), in a single day at individual vaccination sessions, concerns for potential impacts of total adjuvant-derived aluminum body burden may be significant. These issues warrant serious consideration since, to the best of our knowledge, no adequate studies have been conducted to assess the safety of simultaneous administration of different vaccines to young children.” [Bold Added]

In a 2013 study, Aluminum in the Central Nervous System: Toxicity in Humans and Animals, Vaccine Adjuvants, and Autoimmunity, Shaw and Tomljenovic concluded, “In young children, a highly significant correlation exists between the number of pediatric aluminum-adjuvanted vaccines administered and the rate of autism spectrum disorders. Many of the features of aluminum-induced neurotoxicity may arise, in part, from autoimmune reactions, as part of the autoimmune/inflammatory induced by adjuvants (ASIA) syndrome.

UK Professor Christopher Exley, known as Mr. Aluminum, has devoted much of his life to studying the dangers of aluminum, with a particular focus on the use of aluminum adjuvants in childhood vaccines.

With numerous studies and papers to his credit Exley is particularly recognized for his discovery which proved that cells known to populate a vaccine injection site actually take up aluminum adjuvant into their cell bodies.

Accompanying this finding was his pioneering revelation that antigens and adjuvants are taken up as separate particles. Both discoveries have implications for the possible role of aluminum adjuvants in instigating serious adverse events distant from the vaccine injection site.

Multiple studies have aligned with Exley’s findings that the intramuscularly injected aluminum vaccine adjuvant is absorbed into the systemic circulation and travels to different sites in the body such as the brain, joints and the spleen where it accumulates and is retained for years post-vaccination.

Cui Bono?

According to statistics, Hepatitis B causes death in fewer than one quarter of one percent of those infected. It is a near certainty that even that rate is an overestimate since deaths of hepatitis B infected drug addicts and alcoholics is more likely due to their habits which destroy their liver and other vital organs and not the disease.

In 1986, five years before the CDC began pushing for vaccination of all newborns, the US had documented fewer than 280 cases of hepatitis B infection in children under age 14. Newborns are probably the least likely human beings on the planet at risk of actually getting hepatitis B.

Given that most infants are not at risk for Hepatitis B in the United States and given the copious documentation linking the Hepatitis B vaccine to various pathologies (herehere and here) we return to the question: Why the fanatical push for universal HepB vaccination for children?

If we look at the HepB childhood vaccination program from a perspective of health and “saving lives” we are confronted with a world of contradictions and manipulations- none of it makes sense.

If looked at it through the lens of power, money and control everything makes perfect sense.

2005 letter written by Dr. Marc Girard to the Director General of the World Health Organization referenced a correspondence he had with an Indian colleague, Dr J. Puliyel, on the false data being disseminated by the WHO about the epidemiology of hepatitis B in India. 

This exchange gives us insight into the processes by which a once non-existent threat is turned into a public health crisis and the motives behind this.

Girard noted that, “the mechanisms of the deception described by Dr Puliyel were exactly comparable to those I observed in my own country — and of course with the same results: a plea of “experts” to include hepatitis B vaccination in the national vaccination program, in spite of its costs and, its unprecedented toxicity.” [Emphasis added]

Dr. Girard went on to state: “It is blatant that in the promotion of the hepatitis B vaccination, the WHO has never been more than a screen for an undue commercial promotion, in particular via the Viral Hepatitis Prevention Board (VHPB), created, sponsored and infiltrated by the manufacturers.

In Sept 1998, while the dreadful hazards of the campaign had been given media coverage in France, the VHPB met a panel of “experts”, the reassuring conclusions of which were extensively announced as reflecting the WHO’s position: yet some of the participants in this panel had no more “expertise” than that of being employees of the manufacturers.” [Emphasis added]

Girard also drew attention  to a 1997 interview published in the French journal Sciences et Avenir in which GlaxoSmith Beecham’s business manager admitted, “We started increasing the awareness of the European Experts of the World Health Organization (WHO) about Hepatitis B in 1988. From then to 1991, we financed epidemiological studies on the subject to create a scientific consensus about hepatitis being a major public health problem. We were successful because in 1991, WHO published new recommendations about hepatitis B vaccination.”

This cynical admission by one of the primary manufacturers of the Hepatitis B vaccine offers a glimpse into how the time honored strategy of problem-reaction-solution is applied in the Pharmaceutical Industry

The disease itself is seen as superfluous, all that is necessary is to create the perception that there is a widespread public health crisis which requires a heroic and international medical intervention in the form of a vaccine which, curiously, was already in production leading into the “crisis.”

Such a frank admission reinforces the facts surrounding the history of Hepatitis B, there was little to no problem with this disease until after the vaccine became available and for marketing reasons they had to change the image of the disease.

Tracing the breadcrumbs of the entire production of the Hepatitis B vaccine campaign a pattern emerges which appears to be a non-medical agenda that leads to the reliable predictor-follow the money.

For years vast amounts of financial and political capital were invested in the Hepatitis B vaccine as well as enormous amounts of resources allocated towards research and development. Each new HepB vaccine was hailed as a medical wonder.

Despite these efforts the medical industry couldn’t get people to take the vaccine which meant meager returns on these enormous investments.

To solve this dilemma, and address the sunk costs, the pharmaceutical industry, through its cadre of captured policy makers, invented regulations fashioned to make the vaccines compulsory thusly creating a captured customer base and guaranteeing revenue.

The “at-birth” vaccines have the added benefit, from the manufacturers perspective, of providing “vaccine training wheels” for new parents, conditioning them for a steady routine of immunization appointments.

The 12 million doses of Hepatitis B vaccine administered to children each year in the US alone represents a substantial annual income stream for vaccine manufacturers.

The NY Times reported that the average cost to fully vaccinate a child to the age of 18 in a private doctor’s office soared from $100 in 1986 to $2,192 by 2014.

To get every dose of every recommended vaccine in a private pediatricians office circa 2023 that cost now exceeds a staggering $3,000.

Heading into the 21st century the commercialization of vaccines has expanded into a colossal and profitable global enterprise, and according to International Monetary Fund chief Kristalina Georgieva, vaccine policy is now one of the most important drivers of global economic policy.

A Final Word

In two separate hearings in 1999 Michael Belkin, whose daughter died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) immediately after receiving a Hepatits B vaccine dosage, called the HepB vaccine policy a ”bureaucratic vaccination program that is on auto-pilot flying into a mountain” and accused CDC bureaucrats of “hav[ing] a vested interest in the status quo.”

Mr. Belkin’s conclusions merit reciting in full:

  • Newborn babies are not at risk of contracting the hepatitis B disease unless their mother is infected.

  • Hepatitis B is primarily a disease of junkies, gays, and promiscuous heterosexuals.

  • The vaccine is given to babies because health authorities couldn’t get those risk groups to take the vaccine.

  • Adverse reactions out-number cases of the disease in government statistics.

  • Nothing is being done to investigate those adverse reactions.

  • Those adverse reactions include numerous deaths, convulsions and arthritic conditions that occur within days after

  • Hepatitis B vaccination. The CDC is misrepresenting hypothetical, estimated disease statistics as real cases of the disease.

  • The ACIP is recommending new vaccines for premature infants without having scientific studies proving they are safe.

  • The U.S. vaccine recommendation process is hopelessly compromised by conflicts of interest with vaccine manufacturers, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the CDC.

While Mr. Belkin was addressing the Hepatitis B vaccination specifically as an injection which may present risks for health complications, the risks of toxicity and adverse reactions for all vaccines is a question that demands far more rigorous scrutiny than has been provided to date.

We hope that this series will provide a framework for a long overdue assessment of this highly contentious medical issue.

Our next installment takes a look at the Rotavirus vaccine.

September 10, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

EU Chief Boasts About Vaccine Passports, Calls For More Global Digital Collaboration – Paving The Way For Digital IDs

By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | September 10, 2023

With an ominous call for increased global collaboration and centralization, European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen at a G20 Summit session, dubbed “One Future,” today appealed for an international regulatory body for Artificial Intelligence and digital ID systems similar to coronavirus vaccine passports.

Von der Leyen audaciously proclaimed our collective future to be digital, hence the implied necessity for global entities to draw boundaries and enforce regulations.

Von der Leyen, in her position as the EU Commission President, touched on AI and the digital landscape in her address. She acknowledged the potential dangers and gargantuan opportunities linked with advancing AI technology and emphasized the importance of channeling such explosive technology.

“Today I want to focus on AI and digital infrastructure. As it has been described, AI has risks but also offers tremendous opportunities. The crucial question is how to harness a rapidly changing technology.

“In the EU, in 2020, we presented the first-ever law on artificial intelligence. We want to facilitate innovation while building trust. But we need more. What the world does now will shape our future. I believe that Europe — and its partners — should develop a new global framework for AI risks,” von der Leyen said.

Von der Leyen praised the European Union’s move in 2020 to introduce the first legal framework on AI, a step taken with the intent of fostering innovation alongside trust. However, she insisted that this wasn’t sufficient. She suggested a multinational adoption of a coping mechanism for managing AI risks.

The EU Chief also stressed that globally accepted standards must be created under the purview of the United Nations, akin to their Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Humanity stood to benefit, she argued, if an international authority could clarify the risks and rewards related to AI, akin to the IPCC for climate concerns.

Concurrently, von der Leyen championed the concept of digital public infrastructure similar to the coronavirus passport system – a system developed by the EU as a response to the Covid saga. The World Health Organization embraced it with open arms as a global standard for combating health threats.

“Many of you are familiar with the COVID-19 digital certificate. The EU developed it for itself. The model was so functional and so trusted that 51 countries on 4 continents adopted it for free. Today, the WHO uses it as a global standard to facilitate mobility in times of health threats,” von der Leyen continued.

Alarmingly, von der Leyen praised the EU’s strides towards a bloc-wide digital identity app capable of storing a citizen’s personal information, including credit cards, driver’s license, and passport data.

These developments ring alarm bells for individuals and nations valuing free speech and privacy.

September 10, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

5th Circuit Upholds Injunction Against Government Censorship

We got a big win Friday in Missouri v. Biden: Appellate Court Forbids White House, CDC, Surgeon General, and FBI from Censoring Americans Online

By Aaron Kheriaty, MD | Human Flourishing | September 10, 2023

Here’s my five-minute summary and reaction to the appellate court’s decision on Friday upholding the central provisions in our injunction against the government. (I’ll post the full interview soon when it’s available.)

The unanimous three-judge panel ruled: “The White House, the Surgeon General, the CDC, and the FBI likely coerced or significantly encouraged social-media platforms to moderate content, rendering those decisions state actions. In doing so, the officials likely violated the First Amendment.” The appeals court thereby confirmed that for last several years, our Federal government has been systematically violating the highest law of the land—the United States Constitution—by censoring the protected speech of hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans tens of millions of times. News of the ruling was front page above-the-fold yesterday in The New York Times and The Washington Post, suggesting that the legacy media cannot ignore this issue any longer.

Not all the defendants in the suit were enjoined by the appellate court’s decision, which focused on the White House, the Surgeon General, the CDC, and the FBI. This is not, however, an indication that the other agencies named as defendants, such as CISA, are free to engage in censorship of protected speech. It simply means that at this early stage of limited discovery the appellate court did not think we have presented sufficient evidence to meet the very high legal bar required for a preliminary injunction. Although the injunction focuses on four agencies, the entire federal government is now on notice: any future communications between government officials and big tech are subject to subpoena and scrutiny in our case. If those come from any of the four enjoined agencies, those officials may now be subject not only to civil liabilities but to criminal penalties as well.

The ruling also confirmed that not only coercion but even “significant encouragement” by government officials to modify content is a form of unconstitutional censorship. The judges ruled that evidence we presented demonstrated both coercion and significant encouragement.

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Contextualizing the scope of the violations of constitutional rights in our case, the judges noted that there are virtually no prior free speech cases of this scope and magnitude: “The Supreme Court has rarely been faced with a coordinated campaign of this magnitude orchestrated by federal officials that jeopardized a fundamental aspect of American life. Therefore, the district court was correct in its assessment—’unrelenting pressure’ from certain government officials likely ‘had the intended result of suppressing millions of protected free speech postings by American citizens.’ We see no error or abuse of discretion in that finding.”

September 10, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

You Should Be Very Worried About the Digital Services Act

By David Thunder | The Freedom Blog | September 9, 2023

Article 11 of The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, which replicates a part of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, protects the right of European citizens to “hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers,” and affirms that “the freedom and pluralism of the media shall be respected.” Sadly, the fate of freedom of expression in Europe now very much hangs in the balance, as the European Union has just enacted a law that empowers the Commission to significantly restrict the ability of citizens to use digital platforms to engage in robust and sincere democratic discourse.

Under the recently enacted Digital Services Act, the European Commission may apply significant pressures upon digital platforms to curb “hate speech,” “disinformation” and threats to “civic discourse,” all of which constitute notoriously vague and slippery categories, categories that have historically been co-opted to reinforce the narrative of the ruling class. By giving the European Commission broad discretionary powers to oversee Big Tech content moderation policies, this piece of legislation holds freedom of speech hostage to the ideological proclivities of unelected European officials and their armies of “trusted flaggers.”

Purpose of the Digital Services Act

The stated purpose of the Digital Services Act (DSA) that has just come into force in Europe is to ensure greater “harmonisation” of the conditions affecting the provision of “intermediary” digital services, in particular online platforms that host content shared by their customers. The Act covers a bewildering array of issues, from consumer protection and the regulation of advertising algorithms to child pornography and content moderation. Among other purposes that appear in the wording of the Act, we find the fostering of “a safe, predictable and trusthworthy online environment,” the protection of citizens’ freedom of expression, and the harmonisation of EU regulations affecting online digital platforms, which currently depend on the laws of individual member States.

DSA Is Not As Innocent As It Appears

At a superficial glance, the Digital Services Act (DSA) might look rather innocuous. It places fairly formal requirements on “very large online platforms” such as Google, Twitter/X, Facebook and Tiktok to have clear appeals procedures and to be transparent about their regulation of harmful and illegal content. For example, section 45 of the Act reads as a fairly light touch requirement that providers of online digital services (“intermediary services”) keep customers informed of terms and conditions and company policies:

Providers of the intermediary services should clearly indicate and maintain up-to-date in their terms and conditions the information as to the grounds on the basis of which they may restrict the provision of their services. In particular, they should include information on any policies, procedures, measures and tools used for the purpose of content moderation, including algorithmic decision-making and human review, as well as the rules of procedure of their internal complaint-handling system. They should also provide easily accessible information on the right to terminate the use of the service.

But if you start to dig into the Act, you very soon discover that it is poisonous for free speech and is not in the spirit of Article 11 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, which guarantees citizens the “freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.” Below, I detail certain aspects of the Act that, taken together, pose an unprecedented threat to freedom of speech in Europe:

1. DSA (Digital Services Act) creates entities called “trusted flaggers” to report “illegal content” they identify on large online platforms. Online platforms are required by the act to respond promptly to reports of illegal content provided by these “trusted flaggers” nominated by member State-appointed “Digital Service Coordinators.” The Act requires large online platforms to “take the necessary measures to ensure that notices submitted by trusted flaggers, acting within their designated area of expertise, through the notice and action mechanisms required by this Regulation are treated with priority.”

2. Strictly speaking, while digital platforms are required to respond to reports of illegal content submitted by “trusted flaggers,” it appears from the wording of the Act that the platforms have discretion to decide how exactly to act upon such reports. They might, for example, disagree with the legal opinion of a “trusted flagger” and decide not to take down flagged content. However, they will face periodic audits of their actions’ compliance with the Act by auditors working on behalf of the European Commission, and these reviews will hardly look favourably upon a pattern of inaction in the face of flagged content.

3. The Digital Services Act also requires “very large online platforms” (platforms such as Google, Youtube, Facebook and Twitter) to undertake periodic “risk mitigation” assessments, in which they address “systemic risks” associated with their platforms, including but not limited to child pornography, “gender violence” (whatever that means), public health “disinformation,” and the “actual or foreseeable negative effects on democratic processes, civic discourse and electoral processes, as well as public security.” Platforms have “due diligence” obligations under the Act to take appropriate measures to manage these risks. Unlike a voluntary code of practice, opting out is not an option, and failure to comply with these “due diligence” obligations will be subject to hefty sanctions.

4. The sanctions attached to non-compliance with the Act are remarkable. The Commission, if it deems that a large online platform such as X/Twitter has not been in compliance with the DSA, may fine said platform up to 6% of its annual global turnover. Because the idea of non-compliance is hard to quantify and pretty vague (what exactly is required in order to meet “due diligence obligations” of systemic risk management?), it seems likely that companies that wish to avoid legal and financial headaches would prefer to err on the side of caution, and put on a show of “compliance” to avoid getting fined.

5. The periodic audits envisaged by this Act will serve as a tool for the Commission to pressure large online platforms into taking action to “manage” the “risks” of disinformation and threats to “civic discourse and electoral processes,” risks which are notoriously vague and are probably impossible to define in a politically impartial fashion. The threat lurking in the background of these audits and their associated “recommendations” is that the Commission may impose multi-billion dollar fines upon online platforms for non-compliance. Because of the rather vague idea of non-compliance with “due diligence obligations,” and the discretionary nature of the financial sanctions threatened in the DSA, this Act will create an atmosphere of legal uncertainty both for online platforms and for their users. It heavily incentivises online platforms to police speech in a way that passes muster with the EU Commission, around vague categories like “disinformation” and “hate speech”, and this will obviously have repercussions for end-users.

6. According to the European Commission, “hate motivated crime and speech are illegal under EU law. The 2008 Framework Decision on combating certain forms of expressions of racism and xenophobia requires the criminalisation of public incitement to violence or hatred based on race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin.” It is important to point out that the EU Commission favours expanding the categories of illegal hate speech at a Europe-wide level to include not only “race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin,” but also new categories (presumably, including things like gender identity). So illegal hate speech is a “moving target” and is likely to become ever broader and more politically charged as time goes on. According to the the European Commission’s own website,

On 9 December 2021, the European Commission adopted a Communication which prompts a Council decision to extend the current list of ‘EU crimes’ in Article 83(1) TFEU to hate crimes and hate speech. If this Council decision is adopted, the European Commission would be able, in a second step, to propose secondary legislation allowing the EU to criminalise other forms of hate speech and hate crime, in addition to racist or xenophobic motives.

7. The most disturbing aspect of DSA is the enormous power and discretion it places in the hands of the European Commission – notably, an unelected commission – to oversee compliance with DSA and decide when online platforms are non-compliant with respect to their “due diligence obligations” to manage risks whose meaning is notoriously vague and manipulable, such as hate speech, disinformation, and anti-civic discourse. The European Commission is also giving itself the power to declare a Europe-wide emergency that would allow it to demand extra interventions by digital platforms to counter a public threat. There will be no legal certainty about when the EU Commission might declare an “emergency.” Nor is there any legal certainty about how the European Commission and its auditors will interpret “systemic risks” like disinformation and hate speech, or assess the efforts of service providers to mitigate such risks, since these are discretionary powers.

8 Nor is clear how the Commission could possibly undertake an audit of “systemic risks” of disinformation and risks to civic discourse and electoral processes without taking a particular view of what is true and untrue, salutary and harmful information, thus pre-empting the democratic process through which citizens assess these issues for themselves.

9. Nor is it clear which checks and balances will be in place to prevent the DSA from becoming a weapon for the EU Commission’s favourite causes, whether the war in the Ukraine, vaccine uptake, climate policy, or a “war on terror.” The broad power to declare a public emergency and require platforms to undertake “assessments” of their policies in response to that, combined with the broad discretionary power to fine online platforms for “non-compliance” with inherently vague “due diligence obligations,” give the Commission a lot of leeway to lord it over online platforms and pressure them to advance its favoured political narrative.

10. One particularly sneaky aspect of this Act is that the Commission is effectively making disinformation illegal *through a backdoor*, so to speak. Instead of clearly defining what they mean by “disinformation” and making it illegal – which would probably cause an uproar – they are placing a “due dilegence” requirement upon large online platforms like Twitter and Facebook to take discretionary measures against disinformation and to mitigate “systemic risks” on their platforms (which include the risk of “public health disinformation”). Presumably, the periodic audits of these companies’ compliance with the Act would look unkindly on policies that barely enforced disinformation rules.

So the net effect of the act would be to apply an almost irresistible pressure on social media platforms to play the “counter-disinformation” game in a way that would pass muster with the Commission’s auditors, and thus avoid getting hit with hefty fines. There is a lot of uncertainty about how strict or lax such audits would be, and which sorts of non-compliance might trigger the application of financial sanctions. It is rather strange that a legal regulation purporting to defend free speech would place the fate of free speech at the mercy of the broadly discretionary and inherently unpredictable judgments of unelected officials.

* * *

The only hope is that this ugly, complicated and regressive piece of legislation ends up before a judge who understands that freedom of expression means nothing if held hostage to the views of the European Commission on pandemic-preparedness, the Russia-Ukraine war, or what counts as “offensive” or “hateful” speech.

P.S. Consider this analysis as a preliminary attempt by someone not specialised in European law, to grapple with the troubling implications of the Digital Services Act for free speech, based on a first reading. I welcome the corrections and comments of legal experts and those who have had the patience to wade through the Act for themselves. This is the most detailed and rigorous interpretation I have developed of the DSA to date. It includes important nuances that were not included in my previous interpretations and corrects certain misinterpretations – in particular, platforms are not legally required to take down all flagged content, and the people who flag up illegal content are referred to as “trusted flaggers,” not “fact-checkers.”).

September 10, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

The CIA’s Continued Secrecy on Chile and JFK

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | September 8, 2023

On August 31, the Nation magazine published an article entitled “Chile: The Secrets the US Government Continues to Hide,” which details the CIA’s continued steadfast insistence on keeping its records secret that relate to the agency’s 1970-1973 efforts to bring regime change to Chile. 

The CIA’s continued secrecy, of course, brings to mind the agency’s equally steadfast insistence on keeping its JFK-assassination related records secret into perpetuity. 

The CIA, needless to say, cites the two magic words — “national security” — to justify its continued secrecy in both events. 

I suggest that two other words are the real reason for the CIA’s continued secrecy in both events: “criminal cover-up.”

After all, the JFK assassination took place 60 years ago and the Chilean coup took place 50 years ago. The notion that the release of CIA assassination-related and coup-related records would threaten “national security,” no matter what definition is used for that ridiculous, meaningless term, is laughable to the extreme.

Actually, the Chilean coup bears a relationship to the JFK assassination. That’s because the national-security establishment’s mindset toward its regime-change operation in Chile reflected its mindset toward its regime-change operation in Dallas. My hunch is that those still-secret records relating to Chile would provide further circumstantial evidence pointing toward the reasons for the operation in Dallas.

In 1970, Chilean voters delivered a plurality of vote to Salvador Allende in the presidential election. Since Allende had not received a majority of votes, the election was thrown into the hands of the Chilean congress.

U.S. officials deemed Allende a grave threat to U.S. national security, on two grounds: that he was a socialist but, more important, that he was befriending the communist world, including Cuba and the Soviet Union, something that Kennedy had done as well in his famous Peace Speech at American University a few months before he was assassinated. 

The CIA embarked on a campaign of bribing the members of the Chilean congress to vote against Allende (which, of course, is somewhat ironic given the fierce U.S. reaction to supposed Russian involvement in U.S. elections).

At the same time, the U.S. national-security establishment made plans for a Chilean military takeover. What’s interesting is that the CIA did not assassinate Allende. Instead, it convinced the Chilean national-security establishment that Allende posed a grave threat to Chilean national security and, therefore, that the Chilean national-security establishment had a moral duty to violently prevent Allende from assuming the presidency.

That’s a very important and very revealing point, one that undoubtedly comes across loud and clear in those still-secret CIA records relating to the Chile coup. The point reveals the U.S. national-security establishment’s conviction that it had the moral duty to violently remove JFK from power in order to protect America from a president whose policies, they concluded, posed a grave risk to “national security.” (See FFF’s book JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne.)

Much to the chagrin of the U.S. national-security establishment, however, the commanding general of Chile’s armed forces, Gen. Rene Schneider, opposed the idea of a coup. His position was that the Chilean constitution did not permit a coup as a way to remove a democratically elected president from office. He said that Chileans would have to wait until the next election. 

Therefore, the CIA simply orchestrated a violent kidnapping of Schneider which left him dead from gunshot wounds on the streets of Santiago. Ironically, the CIA’s kidnapping and assassination of this innocent man boomeranged because the Chilean congress, faced with tremendous anger over Schneider’s murder among the Chilean citizenry, rejected the CIA’s bribes and installed Allende into power. 

Three years later, however, the U.S. national-security establishment prevailed in its efforts and helped military strongman Gen. Augusto Pinochet violently take over the reins of power. By the end of the war between the executive and national-security branches of the government, Allende was dead, just as Kennedy was ten years before.

With the full support of the Pentagon and the CIA, Pinochet’s henchmen rounded up some 60,000 innocent people and proceeded to torture and/or rape most of them. They also killed or disappeared around 3,000 of them. 

Orlando Letelier

Among those rounded up was Orlando Letelier, a highly respected man who had served in the Allende administration as ambassador to the United States, minister of foreign affairs, minister of the interior, and minister of defense. After being tortured in captivity, world pressure forced Pinochet to release him.

Letelier moved to Washington, D.C., where he joined a leftist think tank and began lobbying against the Pinochet regime. Pinochet and his national-security establishment deemed Letelier to be a grave threat to Chilean “national security.”

On September 21, 1976, Letelier was killed by a car bomb on the streets of Washington, D.C., along with his young assistant Ronni Moffitt. 

It was determined that Pinochet’s secret Gestapo-like internal police force, which was called DINA and which worked with the CIA, had orchestrated and carried out the Letelier assassination. Among those convicted of the crime was a DINA agent named Michael Townley, who was a U.S. citizen. 

As part of what was clearly a sweetheart deal, Townley pled guilty in U.S. District Court as part of a plea bargain with U.S. officials. Get this: He was sentenced to only ten years in jail for what amounted to the cold-blooded murder of two innocent people. To put that in perspective, compare it to the 22-year jail sentence that a U.S. District Judge recently meted out to a man convicted of simply participating in the January 6 protests. Townley was also given immunity from prosecution in Chile for another national-security assassination in which he had allegedly been involved. 

But that’s not all. After serving only 62 months in jail, get this: He was admitted into the federal witness protection program! That meant that the feds gave him a secret identity and let him live a normal life somewhere in the world. 

The Letelier assassination has always been blamed on Pinochet. Is it possible that the CIA, working with DINA, was also embroiled in that assassination, on grounds of “national security”? My hunch is that those records relating to Chile that the CIA steadfastly continues to keep secret would help provide an answer to that question, which, needless to say, would be a good reason for wanting them to kept secret.

September 10, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Civil Disobedience Against Mandatory Masking Works!!

Press For Truth | September 9, 2023

Mandatory mask mandates are making a comeback for Covid-19(84) 2.0 but this will only apply to you if you allow it to!

In this video Dan Dicks of Press For Truth speaks with Denis Rancourt, a PHD and former professor of physics at the University of Ottawa and researcher for the Ontario Civil Liberties Association about mandatory masking policies that are slowly but surely returning and most importantly how one can effectively engage in acts of civil disobedience when it comes to refusing to wear a mask.

To learn more visit:

ocla.ca

Follow Denis on X:

https://twitter.com/denisrancourt

September 10, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Video | | Leave a comment

California passes law on ‘affirmation’ of children

RT | September 9, 2023

The California State Assembly on Friday approved a bill redefining the health, safety, and well-being of children to include “gender identity or gender expression.” Critics say it will enable the state to seize children who “transitioned” without the approval of their parents.

Assembly Bill 957 was adopted with a vote of 57-16 and sent to Governor Gavin Newsom for signature. It amends Section 3011 of the Family Code to “include a parent’s affirmation of the child’s gender identity or gender expression as part of the health, safety, and welfare of the child.”

Family courts use the health and well-being standard to make decisions as to which parent gets custody of children in divorce disputes, or in cases in which parents have their children taken away by the state due to abuse or neglect.

“That is our duty as parents, to affirm our children,” State Representative Lori Wilson, a Democrat from the San Francisco Bay Area, said in a speech on the Assembly floor.

State Senator Scott Wiener, a fellow San Francisco Democrat, co-sponsored the bill. He was behind the 2022 ‘trans refuge bill’ which gave immunity from other states’ laws to minors seeking ‘gender affirming care’ in California.

Republicans have criticized the proposal, arguing that family court judges already have the discretion to make that determination. With only 18 seats in the 80-member chamber, however, there was little they could do to stop it.

Last month, a school district in the Bay Area paid $100,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by a parent whose child was “secretly transitioned” without her knowledge or consent. Jessica Konen alleged that the Spreckels Union School District and three of its employees “secretly convinced” her daughter of being bisexual and transgender, referred to her as a boy, instructed her on binding her breasts, and allowed her to use the faculty bathroom.

Teachers allegedly encouraged Konen’s daughter to use a boy’s name, wear clothing for boys, read articles about gender transition, and “not to tell her mother about her new gender identity or new name, saying that her mother might not be supportive of her and that she couldn’t trust her mother.”

When the school eventually informed Konen, she claimed that she went along with it out of fear that the state might take the child away. The girl “began to return to her original self” after March 2020, when California switched to online lessons due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

September 9, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment