The Tragic Consequences of believing Anti-Science
The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | January 17, 2023
I try not to write about anyone who has died because if it was my family member I would not want to read any speculations about their death. However, in this case I feel that justice has not been given a chance and therefore it needs highlighting.
The tragic story begins on 10 May 2020. Stephanie Warriner, who had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) attended Toronto hospital because she was struggling to breath.
This is where the first piece of anti-science takes place. A population whipped up into a frenzy about Covid is on high-alert. They have been convinced that touching a parcel which hasn’t been quarantined for at least 72 hours, is likely to be riddled with the new virus and will cause them to die. Therefore, anyone with a cough is a walking weapon.
Due to Stephanie’s cough she was assumed to be COVID positive – anti-science mistake no.1. She was therefore placed in the Covid ward. Later, after testing it was found that she was in fact negative.
After a night in hospital, Stephanie left the Covid ward to go and get some food. Sitting in the hospital lobby she committed the terrible anti-science crime of wearing her mask around her neck.
Anti-science mistake no.2. People have been told that useless masks will stop people transmitting a virus. There’s no need to go into the science of it but let’s put it this way, an asbestos removal man doesn’t wear a loose piece of cloth to stop him getting lung cancer.
This was in 2020, before vaccines, so people couldn’t release their pent up fear by getting aggressive with the vaccine hesitant. Instead this pressure-release valve was opened up on the maskless.
At 6.38 a.m. a nurse and a security guard approach Stephanie and are seen talking to her. Another security guard and another member of staff are close behind. Remember Stephanie has her mask on her chin so is extremely dangerous, four people are required.
In the video, it seems like the nurse is angrily telling Stephanie something, to which Stephanie stands up, gently pushes the nurse and tries to walk off. The nurse then bundles her against a wall and the security guard assists.
At this point, the CCTV operator turns the camera away from the scene. Moments later, at 6:41, the video captures a motionless Stephanie being wheeled away from the scene by the pair that bundled her into the wall. Her feet drag along the floor showing that she is clearly unconscious.
As CBC News reports, much of this information has been subject to a publication ban until now. The reason being that the case has now been quashed and the Crown won’t appeal.
That’s despite the available video footage, two security staff who testified the accused placed weight on her upper body while she was held chest down, a forensic pathologist who testified Warriner would still be alive had she not been restrained that day — and revelations one of the guards admitted he falsely claimed Warriner threw the first punch.
Toronto criminal lawyer, Frank Addario, said “to see a judge decide to quash a case in this way is rare”. ”It’s not common for a judge to screen out a case before it’s set for trial… The system is set up so after a preliminary inquiry, the cases are generally sent on to trial because the bar to get a case sent on to trial is very low.”
There was no CCTV footage of the incident because the guard in charge of the camera “panicked” and “got really anxious”, so panned away.
The nurse claimed she took Warriner to the wall “as a last resort, after extensive efforts to verbally de-escalate an aggressive patient”. However, the nurse’s supervisor testified that he felt her actions were wrong.
Two eye witnesses said that 125-pound Stephanie was held down by her upper body despite training and policies warning not to. Both guards claimed this was because Stephanie repeatedly assaulted the nurse but during an internal investigation this turned out to be false. The guard said Stephanie punched the nurse’s face and was kicking but after being confronted with footage he sobbed “I’m sorry. I would have never said the things I said in there if I knew there was a video”. Got to love genuine remorse.
A coroner’s report would conclude Warriner died from a brain injury resulting from a lack of oxygen “due to restraint asphyxia following struggle and exertion,” with her underlying lung disease a possible factor.
Disgusting behaviour.
Tragically, Stephanie lost her life because of anti-science. Anti-science, together with fear, made people believe that the world would end if a piece of cloth was not worn on one’s face correctly. It also gave the power-hungry an excuse to target people who were just minding their own business.
And it seems anti-science is playing its part in the justice system as well. Whilst we don’t know all of the facts that made the Judge quash the case, the CBC article hints at this not being normal. The Judge even noted that “there is evidence that death could have been the culmination of the factors he [the forensic pathologist] described”.
Anti-science killed a lot of people over the last few years and this is just one, tragic and specific example of that.
Fortunately, with enough data analysis and push back, the anti-science was shown for what it truly was. Otherwise, tragic stories, such as Stephanie’s, would still be happening today (maybe they still are but hopefully to a lesser extent).
Judge calls California’s medical misinformation law “nonsense,” blocks it
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | January 25, 2023
A federal judge questioned the new California law that penalizes doctors for sharing COVID-19 “misinformation.”
The new law, which came into effect on January 1 this year, prohibits doctors from spreading what the state deems to be misinformation to patients, or risk being penalized for “unprofessional conduct,” which could result in their licenses being revoked.
Here’s a summary of the case so far if you’re not up to date.
The law has been challenged through separate lawsuits filed by two organizations and a group of doctors on the grounds of First Amendment violations. They filed a motion at the US District Court of Sacramento to hold the law until the cases are concluded.
In a hearing, Senior Judge William Shubb described the law’s definition of misinformation as “nonsense.”
We obtained a copy of the order for you here.
“Because AB 2098 [the misinformation law] implicates [plaintiff’s] First Amendment right to receive information, she has standing,” the court wrote.
“Vague statutes are particularly objectionable when they involve sensitive areas of First Amendment freedoms because they operate to inhibit the exercise of those freedoms,” the court added, referring to a 2001 case, California Teachers Association v. State Board of Education.
“When the challenged law implicates First Amendment rights, a facial challenge based on vagueness is appropriate.”
The court granted the plaintiffs a hearing to challenge the law and blocked the enforcement of the law until the case is decided.
The law defines misinformation as “false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus contrary to the standard of care.”
Shubb noted that “standard of care” is not a new principle, but argued, “contemporary scientific consensus” is.
According to Deputy Attorney General Kristin Liska, who is representing Gov. Gavin Newsom, a medical professional has to violate all three aspects of the definition of misinformation for punishment to be applicable; share misinformation, contradict scientific consensus, and go against the standard of care.
However, she refused to give examples of statements that would fit the definition, saying that it would depend on the circumstances. Shubb then asked how she expects medical professionals to know what would violate the law.
Supporting the vaccine injured and bereaved
Health Advisory & Recovery Team | January 25, 2023
On Saturday 21st January 2023, the vaccine injured and bereaved gathered with people who support them in marches across the UK organised by Truth be Told. The London march saw thousands of protestors who began at BBC broadcasting house before a silent memorial procession. White roses were then thrown over the railings into Downing Street. Speakers included Andrew Bridgen MP, many vaccine injured individuals and those who have been trying to help amplify their voices like Mark Sharman, former ITV and BSkyB executive, who funded and produced the film Safe and Effective a Second Opinion.
Those campaigning for better compensation without huge barriers and delays have found themselves in conflict with those who want to stop vaccination completely. It is in the interest of the former to downplay the numbers affected and the latter would benefit from a larger number. There is nothing to be gained by such conflict when both sides are trying to hold politicians to account and struggling to do so. While data is suppressed it is not possible to quantify the extent of harm but the extent can’t remain hidden forever. Whatever figure is finally put on it, it will be too high for an intervention that many of the injured did not need and which was oversold in terms of its ability to prevent infection. Whatever figure is reached, those who are injured deserve compensation and the companies who have profited do not deserve indemnity.
Unvaccinated German care home worker, accused of sparking a November 2021 outbreak that left three elderly women dead, faces criminal trial
eugyppius: a plague chronicle | January 18, 2023
From the Deutsche Presse-Agentur :
After a Corona outbreak that left three dead in a Hildesheim care home, a former employee will face trial in February…. She stands accused of one count of negligent homicide and two counts of negligent bodily injury, as well as forgery. The 45-year-old allegedly faked double vaccination against Corona by presenting a fake vaccine certificate …
Despite the infection of her son, the woman was at first allowed to continue working in late November 2021. … She is alleged to have been infected without noticing, and initially transmitted the virus to a colleague during a coffee break. Thus, a “chain of infection is alleged to have been set in motion.” Three female residents aged 80, 85 and 93 died in the outbreak.
According to the indictment, forensic medical examination revealed that Corona was the cause of death in the case of the 80-year-old. Other causes could not be ruled out for the other two victims … The woman has admitted to falsifying her vaccine certificate, but denies responsibility for the outbreak.
There were three other infections among home staff, and 11 among residents … Because the woman was known to oppose vaccination, her employer obtained information about the the date and batch numbers [listed on her certificate]. These … made it clear it was a forgery.
I’ve followed this case for a while, but I’ve avoided writing about it, because it just makes me depressed.
There’s the little things that irritate me, like the contact-tracing hocus-pocus and the ridiculous assumption that moments of transmission can be located as precisely as a coffee break. Or the awkward fact, that of the three Covid deaths this incident achieved for our un-unpluggable mortality ticker, medical examiners could assign only one to the virus with any confidence. The main thing, though, is just the incredible injustice of blaming fellow humans for infections with pervasive seasonal respiratory pathogens. This poor woman only faked vaccination to keep her job, and the outbreak at her home occurred well after the myth of vaccine efficacy against infection had collapsed. There’s just no reason to bring charges here.
If anything killed those old women, it was the care home and their decision to keep employees with positive close contacts at work. They almost certainly had no choice: These places suffer chronic staffing shortages, vastly exacerbated by pandemic-era mismanagement. And indeed, why should anyone work in a care home now? The pay is poor, you endure unusual levels of harassment over personal medical choices, and you can even face prosecution for passing on viruses your kids pick up at school.
Davos’ Damndest Delusion: FBI As Good Guys?
By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | January 24, 2023
You can judge an audience by how much bullshit they accept from the podium. By that standard, the World Economic Forum attendees in Davos, Switzerland last week were either depraved or craven. Why else would FBI chief Christopher Wray not get hooted down for portraying his agency as “good guys?”
Why was the FBI boss even making an appearance at a conference chockful of political weasels, billionaires, and depraved activists like former Vice President Al Gore? Actually, Wray was part of a panel on national security that included luminaries such as Ukrainian Vice-Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko, who could have offered insights from her government’s perpetual failed war against pervasive corruption. Wray boasted that “the level of collaboration between the private sector and the government, especially the FBI has, I think, made significant strides.”
A month before Wray’s appearance, Americans learned that “collaboration” meant the FBI massively censoring Twitter in recent years. As journalist Matt Taibbi revealed, “As the election approached in 2020, the FBI overwhelmed Twitter with requests, sending spreadsheets with hundreds of accounts.” The official browbeating continued until very recently. In an internal email from November 5, 2022, the FBI’s National Election Command Post sent the FBI San Francisco field office (which dealt directly with Twitter) “a long list of accounts that ‘may warrant additional action’” — i.e., suppression. The FBI pressured Twitter to torpedo parody accounts that only idiots or federal agents would not recognize as humor. Taibbi wrote, “The master-canine quality of the FBI’s relationship to Twitter comes through in this November 2022 email, in which ‘FBI San Francisco is notifying you’ it wants action on four accounts.”
The FBI condemned the TwitterFiles as “conspiracy theorists… feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.” But Taibbi and his colleagues didn’t fabricate the emails the FBI sent to Twitter.
On that Davos panel last week, Wray dramatically placed both hands on his chest and declared, “The good guys are constrained by the rule of law and international norms. The bad guys aren’t.” But that self-evident truth is tricky to reconcile with the history of FBI surveillance crime sprees.
In October 2001, the Patriot Act gave the FBI a green light to cannibalize the nation’s email with its Carnivore email wiretapping system. Carnivore was contained in a black box that the FBI compelled Internet service providers to attach to their operating system. Though Carnivore might be authorized for a single person, Carnivore could automatically impound the email of all the customers using that service. The ACLU’s Barry Steinhardt observed, “Carnivore is roughly equivalent to a wiretap capable of accessing the contents of the conversations of all of the phone company’s customers, with the ‘assurance’ that the FBI will record only conversations of the specified target.”
The Patriot Act authorized life sentences in prison for computer hackers who maliciously spread viruses but federal agents were exempt from the law. The FBI created a special program to send emails to individuals to infect their computers with malware that enabled keystroke monitoring and automatic detection of all passwords. Norton, McAfee, and other computer security firms secretly agreed to leave a backdoor for the FBI to exploit with no warning to computer users. James Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology observed, “In order for the government to seize your diary or read your letters, they have to knock on your door with a search warrant. But [FBI malware] would allow them to seize these without notice.” The FBI also developed malware permitting it to covertly turn on a computer’s camcorder “without triggering the light that lets users know it is recording,” as The Washington Post reported in 2013.
The Patriot Act made it far easier for FBI agents to snatch personal data via National Security Letters (NSLs). These subpoenas compel individuals, businesses, and other institutions to surrender confidential or proprietary information that the FBI claims is related to a national security investigation. NSLs enable the FBI to seize records that reveal “where a person makes and spends money, with whom he lives and lived before, how much he gambles, what he buys online, what he pawns and borrows, where he travels, how he invests, what he searches for and reads on the Web, and who telephones or e-mails him at home and at work,” The Washington Post noted in 2005.
The number of NSLs increased by a hundredfold after 9/11. There is no judicial oversight of this power, and each FBI field office is entitled to dictate its own NSLs. Almost every NSL was accompanied by a gag order: Anyone who discloses that their data had been raided by the FBI could be sent to prison for five years.
By 2006, the FBI was issuing 50,000 NSLs a year. A single NSL can lasso thousands of people’s records, including all the clients of public libraries or book store customers. In 2007, an Inspector General report revealed that more than 10,000 NSLs may have violated federal law. Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin (D-IL), declared that the IG report “confirms the American people’s worst fears about the Patriot Act.” Rather than arresting FBI agents who brazenly broke the law, FBI chief Robert Mueller created a new FBI Office of Integrity and Compliance.
But the FBI was just getting warmed up. In 1978, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to outlaw political spying (such as the FBI had committed) on American citizens. FISA created a secret court to oversee federal surveillance of suspected foreign agents within the U.S., permitting a much more lenient standard for wiretaps than the Constitution permitted for American citizens.
FISA warrants authorize the FBI to “conduct, simultaneous telephone, microphone, cell phone, e-mail and computer surveillance of the U.S. person target’s home, workplace and vehicles. Similar breadth is accorded the FBI in physical searches of the target’s residence, office, vehicles, computer, safe deposit box and U.S. mails,” a court decision noted. People surveilled under FISA orders rarely learn the feds have been intruding unless they are arrested as a result. And the FISA court rubberstamps 99.9% of all FBI search warrant requests.
The FISA court “created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans,” The New York Times reported in 2013 after Edward Snowden leaked court decisions. The court rubber-stamped FBI requests that bizarrely claimed that the telephone records of all Americans were “relevant” to a terrorism investigation under the Patriot Act, thereby enabling N.S.A. data seizures later denounced by a federal judge as “almost Orwellian.” In 2017, a FISA court decision included a 10-page litany of FBI violations, which “ranged from illegally sharing raw intelligence with unauthorized third parties to accessing intercepted attorney-client privileged communications without proper oversight.”
After the 2016 election, FBI officials devoted themselves to crippling Trump’s presidency with fabricated evidence on Russia collusion. Kevin Clinesmith, a top FBI lawyer, was convicted for falsifying evidence to secure a FISA warrant to unjustifiably target Trump campaign officials. A 2019 Inspector General report concluded that FBI officials made 17 “significant inaccuracies and omissions” in its application to the FISA court to spy on former Trump advisor Carter Page. The FBI withheld details from the court that would have crippled the credibility of the warrant request.
In 2021, a FISA court report revealed that the FBI has conducted warrantless searches of a massive data trove compiled by the National Security Agency for “public corruption and bribery,” “health care fraud,” and other targets — including people who notified the FBI of crimes and even repairmen entering FBI offices. Even people who volunteered for the FBI “Citizens Academy” program were illegally tracked by the FBI. In 2019, an FBI agent conducted an unjustified database search “using the identifiers of about 16,000 people, even though only seven of them had connections to an investigation,” The New York Times reported. In 2021, the FBI carried out more than 3 million warrantless searches on U.S. persons, according to data revealed in early 2022.
Maybe FBI boss Wray believes that the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable warrantless searches doesn’t apply to “good guys.” The audience in Switzerland might have cheered him for making that assertion. Has the World Economic Forum ever seen a government surveillance scheme that it didn’t like?
Instead of swallowing Wray’s piffle, Americans should heed former FBI chief James Comey. In 2015, Comey told a congressional committee: “You should not trust me…because you cannot trust people with power.” President Trump followed that advice and fired Comey two years later. But Comey’s point remains a better lodestar for judging the FBI than the hokum currently prevailing in the mainstream media, on Capitol Hill, or at scheming Swiss confabs.
Jim Bovard is the author of Public Policy Hooligan (2012), Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), and 7 other books. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors and has also written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, and other publications. His articles have been publicly denounced by the chief of the FBI, the Postmaster General, the Secretary of HUD, and the heads of the DEA, FEMA, and EEOC and numerous federal agencies.
Fired Workers Sue New York City, Seek $250 Million and End to COVID Vaccine Mandate
The Defender | January 20, 2023
New York City public-sector workers who lost their jobs for refusing to comply with the city’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate on Thursday filed a $250 million lawsuit against the city and Mayor Eric Adams seeking to end the mandate.
The 72 fired workers are demanding the city overturn the mandate, reinstate their jobs and compensate them with punitive damages.
The workers argue the mandate should be found “arbitrary and capricious” given that “President Joe Biden, Governor Kathy Hochul and Senator Chuck Schumer have all declared that the pandemic is over,” and that it was already rescinded for private sector employees and students, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit, filed in the Bronx County Supreme Court of the State of New York, also alleges the plaintiffs were discriminated against with “willful or wanton negligence, or recklessness” and were mocked and ridiculed by their colleagues.
Many of the plaintiffs — formerly with the New York Police Department (NYPD), the New York Fire Department, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and other agencies — worked for the city for more than 20 years but now are unemployed, have lost their homes and their ability to support their families, the lawsuit states.
Attorney James Mermigis, who represents the plaintiffs, told The Defender :
“Anybody that goes into the city does not have to be vaccinated except for NYC public sector workers, including firemen, policemen, teachers.
“I just think it is absurd, especially once Mayor Adams lifted the mandate for private employees, that these people, who were heroes during COVID-19, still have the mandate.”
According to the lawsuit, Adams admitted, “I don’t think anything dealing with COVID is makes sense [sic], and there’s no logical pathway of what one can do[sic].”
The lawsuit also alleges the COVID-19 vaccines don’t prevent disease transmission and that it is well-established that the risks of vaccination outweigh the benefits.
It also argues the plaintiffs have immunity from prior infection that should exempt them from any mandate, because “the scientific community has conclusively established that natural immunity provides strong and durable protection.”
According to the lawsuit, the city used, “a discriminatory practice to coerce, intimidate, threaten, or interfere with Petitioners in their exercise or enjoyment of their closely held religious beliefs,” by failing to engage in “cooperative dialogue” with them regarding their petitions for religious exemption, which were denied.
The plaintiffs seek $250 million in punitive damages.
“[Punitive damages] punish the city for its behavior towards its employees in the hopes that they will establish policies in the future that will prevent this from happening again,” Mermigis said.
Landmark win for New York healthcare workers may help city workers
Alleging New York City lacked the authority to institute COVID-19 vaccine mandates, city workers cited the landmark ruling earlier this month by the New York Supreme court, which struck down the state’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for healthcare workers.
In that case, which Children’s Health Defense (CHD) financed, the court held that the state’s health department lacked the authority to impose the mandate.
In the ruling, Judge Gerard Neri declared the mandate “null, void, and of no effect.”
The court also ruled that the state’s mandate was “arbitrary and capricious” on the basis that COVID-19 vaccines do not stop transmission of the virus, thereby eliminating any rational basis for such a policy.
That lawsuit was filed Oct. 20, 2022, by Medical Professionals for Informed Consent and additional plaintiffs against NYSDOH, New York Gov. Kathleen C. Hochul and Mary T. Bassett, the state’s health commissioner.
Commenting on the Supreme Court ruling in favor of healthcare workers, Mermigis said he believes the decision will help the workers’ case against the city.
“It puts less pressure on the judge reading our lawsuit knowing that another judge in New York also eliminated a healthcare vaccine mandate,” Mermigis said.
Michael Kane, CHD’s national grassroots organizer and founder of Teachers for Choice, said:
“It’s historic what Sujata Gibson and CHD were able to do and it’s part of the cascading falling dominoes. It really feels like it’s just a matter of time.
“They will delay as much as they can, but public opinion has shifted. The courts are no longer afraid. Judges are no longer afraid to rule lawfully, and we are starting to see that.”
Court of public opinion is shifting
More than 1,750 city workers were fired for refusing vaccination, including 36 members of the NYPD and 950 Department of Education employees, The New York Post reported.
Many of them brought — and won — lawsuits against the city. But the city appealed all of the rulings challenging its vaccine mandate for public employees, The Defender reported.
On Sept. 13, 2022, a Manhattan Supreme Court ruled that unvaccinated NYPD officer Alexander Deletto could keep his job. The city appealed that ruling.
In a Sept. 23, 2022, ruling, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Lyle Frank reinstated the jobs of several unvaccinated members of the NYPD’s union, the Police Benevolent Association of the City of New York. The city also appealed that decision.
On Oct. 5, 2022, Staten Island Supreme Court Justice Ralph Porzio ruled New York City must reinstate a Staten Island firefighter. The city appealed that decision as well.
Later in October 2022, Justice Porzio struck down New York City’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for public workers, ruling in favor of 16 unvaccinated city workers who sued following their termination. That decision is currently being appealed.
According to Kane, however, the tides are turning — and that could be significant for the lawsuit filed Thursday.
Kane said:
“We are now seven days into the [CHD] victory and there has been no appeal. This is the first case for New York employees that have been fired that has stood for even seven days …
“The most important thing now is that the court of public opinion is different. I really feel that we are winning the majority in the court of public opinion, and that influences what happens in all of these courts …
“We are definitely rooting for him [Attorney Mermigis] and hoping he is very successful with the case.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Incentivizing Censorship: a Snitch in Every Skull
Traveling the nine circles of thought-police hell with TJ Coles, the cancelled University of Plymouth academic.
Helen of desTroy | January 22, 2023
An informational iron curtain is coming down across the West, and its architects are determined to make examples out of those who refuse to pick a side. Our Democracy™ has adopted a zero-tolerance policy for pollution of the information ecosystem, and the Thought Police are standing by to halt rogue infodemics in their tracks, lest the people lose trust in their institutions. Dr. Tim Coles, a freelance writer and postdoctoral researcher until recently at the University of Plymouth didn’t realize he was in their crosshairs until he found himself locked out of his university email account in October. Tech support was no help; department staff refused to talk to him, closing ranks and sending him a threatening email demanding he cease contact. Clearly, he had violated some unwritten law. But what?
The chain of emails that had culminated in his removal only raised further questions about why an apparent stranger whom Plymouth has refused to name – a university employee, he suspects – had complained about his writing for Australian magazine Nexus to his old PhD examiner. In a Kafkaesque turn, the complaint lacked a single concrete accusation of wrongdoing that Coles could defend himself against, instead equivocating around familiar “conspiracy theorist” tropes.
At any rate, no one had thought to consult Coles, perhaps believing him to be a disgruntled ex-student trading on his old university email rather than a researcher whose work at the university was funded by an outside trust and had nothing to do with his political writing. Rather than pause for clarification, his PhD examiner appeared to jump in with both feet, urging tech staff to help get Coles “off [the university’s] books.”
While a prolific writer on many controversial topics – US funding and training of neo-Nazis in Ukraine, the West’s neocolonial plunder of Africa under the guise of fighting terrorism, and Big Pharma’s giant power-grab under cover of Covid-19 unholy alliance of Big Pharma and Big Tech amid the coronavirus outbreak are just a few – Coles believes he ran afoul of the university censors with a series of articles about intelligence agencies blackmailing people with child sexual abuse that ran in Nexus not long before the cancellation effort began. That particular subject has a tendency to get journalists killed, and Coles wonders if his ejection from Plymouth might be a warning shot from groups displeased with his inquiries. He acknowledges, however, that the timing may be a coincidence – Hope Not Hate and other intelligence-controlled censorship advocates were apparently trying to have Nexus banned in the UK around the same time for its publication of unorthodox views on Covid-19.
While he believes the evidence in the email chain is enough to prove wrongdoing by the university, Coles couldn’t even file a complaint through the normal channels, as his inquisitors had roped the complaints department into their conspiracy by including them in the email chain. He has considered releasing the messages publicly as a last resort, but first plans to employ an outside arbitrator and give the System one last chance – more than he was given, at any rate.
Dr. Coles is far from the first to be booted from a British university campus for thoughtcrime. He sees parallels between his case and that of David Miller, the University of Bristol sociology professor who was subjected to a ferocious academic inquisition and ultimately drummed out of his post in late 2021 after the Board of Deputies of British Jews deliberately misinterpreted comments he had made about Israel weaponizing Jewish students abroad. The university’s Union of Jewish Students had been attacking him for years before seizing upon the supposedly discriminatory comment, which they only heard because they had sent in an activist ’spy’ to monitor one of his classes – ironically validating the professor’s claims better than his own arguments could have.
Like Coles, Miller was never directly confronted by his accuser, who opted for mealy-mouthed pseudo-accusations (“conspiracy theorist,” “inciting hatred”) over potentially-disprovable crimes. Like Plymouth, Bristol took the side of the accuser against its employee almost reflexively. Former Labour MP Chris Williamson, himself a victim of the Israeli lobby’s devastating smear machine, joined the Support David Miller campaign in warning that the university’s failure to stand up for the professor would only encourage “bad faith actors” to pursue further censorship.
Shortly before the lobby finally convinced Miller’s university to mount an investigation into his supposed bigotry, he observed that such pressure tactics were imported from the Israel lobby in the US and pointed out that if any other foreign lobby attempted to wage such total war on its critics, they would be “laughed out of the room.” But Coles’ experience suggests other groups have taken lessons from the Israelis – and that Williamson’s warning was prescient.
Academic “cancel culture” is a well-known scourge of American campuses, where careless tweeting costs lives and professors can be axed for using the wrong pronouns. But while most discussion of the phenomenon centers on the targeting of conservative professors, it has targeted left-wing heterodoxy with equal fury, as tenured New York University media studies professor Mark Crispin Miller discovered when a student demanded his firing via Twitter after taking offense to a discussion questioning the utility of masks in his 2020 class on Propaganda.
Like Coles and his fellow Miller across the pond, Miller was attacked by university colleagues with vague allegations of “attacks on students and others in our community,” “aggressions and microaggressions,” and “explicit hate speech” and an investigation was launched behind his back even in the absence of any specific forbidden act. Administrators went one step further and contacted all his students to remind them of the CDC’s mask guidance, lest their fragile minds have been corrupted by the conspiracy theorist in the classroom. They couldn’t fire him – he was tenured, after all – but they did their best to make his life so miserable that he would leave, forbidding him from teaching his beloved Propaganda class, and he has been on sabbatical since.
Even Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, was recently denied a fellowship at the Carr Center for Human Rights, part of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, on the basis of wrongthink – what its dean described as his “anti-Israel bias.” Roth has toed the line on foreign policy groupthink elsewhere, dutifully demonizing Putin, Assad, Trump, and so on as the needs of Empire demanded. But his refusal to ignore Israel’s increasingly bold apartheid policies got him the David Miller treatment despite years of faithful service. If Roth isn’t safe, many academics have begun to wonder, what the hell are they going to do to me?!
While Dr. Coles questions if universities were ever really the freethinkers’ utopia so many academic misfits yearn for, there is no denying groupthink has tightened its hold in recent years. While an academic might once have been left alone to research controversial subjects on his own time so long as he didn’t embarrass his employer, this laissez-faire approach has been replaced by an administrative panopticon that is both hyper-responsive and reflexively condemnatory – a “cottage industry of shutting people down.” Censorship has been outsourced from the state and its corporate minions to “academics and think tanks who are given a well-funded government hammer so they see everything as a nail of disinformation,” Coles explains. Not simply salaried, they are financially incentivized to bag-and-tag as many pieces of “disinformation” as they can, essentially bounty hunters for inconvenient truths, enabling a much tighter, more granular control of information than was ever possible under a traditional totalitarian model.
These programs and campaigns – with names like Integrity Initiative, Center for Countering Digital Hate, Trusted News Initiative – initially appear to be independent nonprofits that just happen to share a common devotion to fighting fake news. However, their cooperation is more than superficial, with many of the same entities ultimately directing their actions as they work together to artificially muscle the discourse in the desired direction, choking off competing narratives while maintaining plausible deniability regarding their connections to the state.
In this model of soft totalitarianism, the dissident is not so much ordered to cease publishing objectionable ideas, or even threatened with execution or creative torture. He is merely subjected to mounting insults, ‘nudged’ in certain directions, and gradually stripped of resources, especially any public platform he may have had in accordance with his refusal to follow the rules. Amid this complex ballet of carrot and stick, he is constantly reminded that these are his decisions, making him (in his own mind, at least) a willing participant in his own spiritual suffocation.
Fact-checkers, once mere newsroom employees tasked with verifying the details of major stories, have been artificially elevated into a caste of gatekeepers, deemed impartial arbiters of truth even as their donor lists burst with conflicts of interest from Pierre Omidyar to Bill Gates to George Soros. This veneer of independence allows them much greater latitude than any equivalent government body, as the ignominious collapse of the US’ Disinformation Governance Board last year proved. This official Ministry of Truth, which would have operated out of the Department of Homeland Security, was a bridge too far even for the American media establishment, which had long since embraced its unofficial equivalent censoring tweets and Facebook posts to keep the world safe for democracy.
All it took to get English-speaking countries to accept the need for these newly-minted (the International Fact Checking Network was only launched in 2015) cognitive babysitters was for a few pathological liars to blame Trump’s 2016 electoral victory and Brexit on Russian disinformation. Never mind that neither hypothesis was ever substantiated, or that both have since been thoroughly discredited – unfiltered access to information has joined the lengthy list of threats to social harmony, and the fact-checkers, having tasted power, are unlikely to return to the newsroom. Given that a free press is integral to a functioning democracy, it goes without saying that any regime looking to dismantle the latter would want to get the former out of the way.
No sooner had Dr. Coles been chased out of his university for his writing in one Australian alt-media magazine then he was engulfed in a censorship firestorm over another. An article appeared earlier this month in New Zealand news outlet Stuff excoriating bookstore chain Whitcoulls for carrying the latest edition of New Dawn, a publication which proudly bills itself as a “forum for alternative, non-mainstream ideas that question consensus reality.” Stuff’s coverage berated the bookstore for exposing unsuspecting customers to the jungle of “conspiracy theories” barely restrained within its pages (full disclosure: I have also contributed writing to New Dawn), focusing its rage on Coles’ “The curious case of Brenton Tarrant,” about the Christchurch mosque shooter.
When Whitcoulls did not immediately capitulate, “disinformation expert” Kate Hannah was called in to warn Kiwis who picked up the magazine that they were enabling “dark agendas” seeking to “destabilize liberal democracy.” Reading Coles’ article wasn’t just engaging in wrongthink, but actually committing a crime, she explained, because the article included information on how to access the illegal-in-New-Zealand helmet-cam video Tarrant recorded while shooting his way through the mosque. Just reading about where to find the video might run afoul of hate speech laws, she mused in a radio interview.
Of course, the article includes no such instructions, nor does it – as Hannah claimed – claim Tarrant didn’t shoot anyone. Coles is baffled by the disinfo expert’s disinfo, but suspects the reason they didn’t include his name (standard practice in establishment hit-pieces) in the pressure campaign is that he could justifiably sue for libel. But the mere threat of legal repercussions was sufficient to keep 99.9% of Kiwis away from the forbidden magazine, and perhaps sensing no sales in its future, Whitcoulls finally pulled the issue from its shelves.
New Zealand’s size and isolation make it a perfect experimental laboratory, and the other Four Eyes haven’t hesitated to use it as such. Nor have the Israelis, whose operation was exposed during the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. The 2019 shooting that launched the current touchless torture regime was preceded as such events often are by a series of odd ‘coincidences’ and foreshadowings. Just a few months before the massacre, a group of American survivors of the Parkland, Florida high school shooting visited the city to discuss “living through a tragedy” with their Kiwi counterparts; two Parkland survivors and a Sandy Hook survivor allegedly committed suicide in the months following the mosque killings. A police drill just happened to be taking place near the fleeing gunman, allowing participants to “heroically” capture him in what media dutifully described as a “hell of a coincidence.”
The speedy gun-grab that followed the tragedy left citizens helpless in the claws of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, and the subsequent clampdown on the internet was unprecedented in any other western “democracy,” with prison sentences meted out for merely sharing a link. Ostensibly to prevent anyone from reading Tarrant’s manifesto or watching the curiously videogame-like footage of the killings, the rules had the effect of banning access to entire video archives, international forums, and other information resources that might have helped the country’s residents make sense of what had just been done to them, and they were designed to be copied by the other four Eyes – or any other country that should want them.
While all five Eyes adopted unprecedented controls on social media during Covid-19, New Zealand went much further than its peers in controlling the actual publication of news. In March 2020, facing rumors that lockdown was imminent, Ardern warned upstanding citizens to avoid all unauthorized sources of information, urging them to stick with the government’s official site as “your single source of truth.” The message didn’t age well – New Zealand was locked down within the week – but her point had gotten across loud and clear. Arrested while protesting Auckland’s return to lockdown in 2021 over just three “cases,” popular radio host and pandemic dissident Vinny Eastwood was only released on the conditions that he remain under house arrest 24/7 and stay off the internet – draconian requirements for a man who made his living live-streaming. He was later permitted back online, but only on the condition that he not advocate against Covid-19 restrictions – a deliberately subjective line in the sand meant to encourage self-censorship above all.
While the media establishment overflowed with praise for Ardern over her iron-fisted suppression of the population – er, pandemic – no one has thought to ask why, if the West questions all Covid-19 stats coming out of China due to government control of all information sources, they believed the numbers coming out of New Zealand. Even news sites like Stuff, which describes itself as “fiercely independent,” are actually public-private partnerships – in this case funded by the New Zealand government and the Google News Initiative, powered by the bonanza of helicopter money that was dumped on the news media in 2020 to fight the “infodemic” of Covid-19 “disinformation.” That the campaign against New Dawn was no organic outrage was clear – Coles’ article is the last in the issue, and the likelihood of an indignant civilian pawing through 70 pages of conspiracy contraband just to find something they can claim is illegal approaches zero. Its favorable result means it will likely become the blueprint for future book-burning campaigns.
But why go after a couple of obscure Australian conspiracy magazines? Especially in New Zealand, but increasingly in the US and Europe, Big Tech no longer allows the average user to stumble upon the kind of content published by New Dawn or Nexus. Even non-Google search results from once-reliable alternatives like DuckDuckGo and Brave have been scrubbed clean of all deviations from the establishment line on topics like Covid-19 or the war in Ukraine, let alone the Christchurch shooting, and as Coles remarked, the censorship is even creeping through time into the Wayback Machine, the internet researcher’s go-to that once contained archives of much of the internet dating back decades – but now increasingly turns up error pages or sloppily retconned fact-checks. However, Kiwis browsing at Whitcoulls had at their fingertips a powderkeg of new information, rendered all the more volatile by three years spent in informational quarantine. Just as a person locked down for months will see her immune system suffer for lack of outside stimulation, any novel pathogens hitting her much harder when she finally goes outside, the Good Citizen who imbibed only Ardern-approved data for three years will likely be unable to muster even the slightest argument against whatever outrageous claims she finds in New Dawn and perhaps become lost to the weak grasp of establishment propaganda forever.
There’s an easy solution to this problem, should New Zealand want to solve it. Teach children to think critically, instead of the dumbed-down “media literacy” programs being promoted by every self-proclaimed “disinfo expert” this side of PropOrNot. Thought-stopping “information hygiene” techniques (Google it! Look it up on Wikipedia!) and reflexive appeals to authority (only a scientist can interpret that study for you!) do not help an individual resist persuasion. But a population armed with the ability to recognize an official lie and dismantle it would not allow themselves to be locked down over a few cases of a disease they were almost 100% certain to survive anyway – so of course New Dawn couldn’t be permitted to question Christchurch. It is the (shaky) foundation on which Ardern’s hastily-constructed police state was built. As rumors fly about her surprise resignation on Thursday and the media establishment rends its garments over how “unfairly” this “icon of many” was treated by “far-right extremists,” it seems clear her departure will be weaponized to further crack down on the increasingly nebulous specter of “hate speech.”
Americans who believe the New Dawn affair could only have happened in an unarmed, isolated nation like New Zealand should pay attention to what their Congress is up to. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) earlier this month introduced a bill that would criminalize the publication of “antagonism based on ‘replacement theory’” and “hate speech that vilifies or is otherwise directed against any non-White person or group” on social media if it can be said that the perpetrator of a “white supremacy inspired hate crime” had encountered the material before committing the crime – or that if they had encountered the material, it could conceivably have motivated them to take such actions.
Without bothering to define such critical terms as “hate speech” or even “replacement theory,” often trotted out for effect when the speaker needs to strike an emotional chord, the bill leapfrogs pre-crime to a total reversal of cause and effect. A content creator can be charged with conspiracy to commit a white supremacy motivated hate crime so long as the actual criminal can be shown to have engaged with their content before committing the crime. In fact, they don’t even need to engage with it – so long as the content could theoretically motivate a “person predisposed to engaging in a white supremacy inspired hate crime” to, well, you know. It’s completely subjective, based on what a “reasonable person” would do when no “reasonable person” would be caught dead in the same room as this bill. This means if someone reads the nursery rhyme “Baa baa black sheep” – declared ‘problematic’ nearly a decade ago for its racial overtones – then picks up an AR-15 and shoots a black family at church, the nursery rhyme writers could be charged with conspiracy to commit a white supremacy-motivated hate crime. Jackson Lee herself cited the example of “someone making a post online that catches the attention of someone who then drives to North Texas and kills 20 Mexican Americans” to make clear precisely how unhinged she is.
It’s doubtful that such a case would make it to court, or lead to a conviction if it did, but public opinion – a product of think tank fellows rather than crowds – can turn on a dime. What sorority girl getting sloshed on margaritas in an oversized Cinco de Mayo sombrero in 2012 would have thought she’d be sentenced to remedial readings of “White Fragility” in 2022? The aim is not to create more work for the official censors but to spook the target into silence with fear of what could happen. Leaving the definition of “white supremacy” open-ended allows an ever-larger spectrum of opinion to be cordoned off as toxic, banned from university campuses and social media, and finally memory-holed as unthinkable. At the same time, actual racists like Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion are invited with open arms to travel the US speaking on university campuses, swastika tattoos and all. While the Anti-Defamation League is quick to tar and feather any academic who points out Israeli war crimes, the censorship-loving Jewish organization has issued what amounts to an official indulgence for Ukraine’s biggest Third Reich fanboys.
I know what would look great with that swastika – another swastika!
Given the FBI’s penchant for crafting terrorism plots out of whole cloth, it would be a simple matter to take out all online wrongthinkers in one fell swoop under the white supremacy conspiracy law – just set up the usual militia honeypot for disaffected white boys, hand them the gear and point them at the minority in question, and make sure a manifesto is found nearby conspicuously listing the websites of every influential dissident in America. While last year’s Missouri v. Biden lawsuit proved – and the Twitter Files confirmed – that social media platforms were being used by a dozen or more government agencies to circumvent First Amendment prohibitions on state censorship, this new arrangement would eliminate even the need for that end-run, requiring only the fig leaf of Unacceptable White Supremacist Beliefs™ to justify the most egregious constitutional abuses.
“Replacement theory” – the idea that white Americans and/or Europeans are being deliberately supplanted in “their” nations by swarthy foreign hordes to suit nefarious ruling class purposes – first entered the mainstream discourse when Tarrant, who titled his manifesto “The Great Replacement,” supposedly set out to kill as many Muslims as possible because they were out-breeding Europeans. Tarrant’s manifesto would have gotten quite a few people in trouble as white-supremacy conspirators, many of them dead – it includes poems from Dylan Thomas and Rudyard Kipling, memes, Wikipedia articles, and an infamous passage explicitly citing black conservative commentator Candace Owens as his ideological inspiration. Tarrant and copycats like Payton Gendron (the Buffalo supermarket shooter and friend of the FBI whose manifesto borrowed liberally from Tarrant and others) have helped transform the epithet “conspiracy theory” from CIA-sponsored smear to precursor of violent extremism, though they couldn’t have done it without UNESCO, the World Jewish Congress, and the Council of Europe, who recently joined forces to remind humanity that “conspiracy theories cause real harm to people, to their health, and also to their physical safety.”
Europe has taken the legal lead in equating conspiracy theory to terrorism, banning author David Icke from the entire Schengen Area last year because his scheduled speech at a peace rally in the Netherlands posed a potential “threat to public order.” Rather than stand up to the police state, the media eagerly flew to its side, quoting “experts” who sagely opined that the “danger” posed by Icke’s “conspiracy ideology” was both clear and present and could inflict “lasting harm” upon the country. This is in keeping with the refrain the WHO has kept up all alongside Covid-19 – that a deadly “infodemic” is spreading through sharing unapproved information about the virus, and that good citizens refrain from posting conspiracy theories online because words are equivalent to violence. This is a central part of children’s “media literacy” classes, aimed at building the perfect content filter directly into the child – because Big Brother can’t be everywhere. The idea is to graduate a generation for whom privacy is alien, dissent is criminal, obedience is a competitive sport, and turning in your parents for wrongthink is second-nature, all justified by the vague nonspecific crisis that has been looming in the background since they were born.
The censorship of New Dawn, the university witch-hunts against Dr. Coles and both Millers, the absurd white supremacy conspiracy bill, are all symptoms of the same totalitarian virus gradually sucking the will to resist out of humanity. Just as viruses need host cells to multiply, so does this one require an army of facilitators – “fake news” bounty hunters, “disinformation experts,” and the like – to smooth out humanity’s rough edges into blissful obedience. A pandemic – even an artificially-inflated synthetic one like Covid-19 – has to end, but an infodemic is forever, and this one has proven 100% fatal to human rights.
Meta gave the CDC de facto power to police Covid “misinfo”
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | January 20, 2023
The mask is slipping (pun fully intended), all over the place – regarding the Big Tech/Big Government collusion. Now it’s time to pay close attention to the role played by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
We’ve already been awed – just by the magnitude of the whole thing – if not exactly “shocked” by the Twitter Files.
After all, while it was happening, a whole lot of observers surmised that something of the sort had to be behind the unprecedented and, seemingly inexplicable levels of censorship on the platform.
But – what in the world was happening at Facebook, around the same time? After all, Facebook is an almost orders of magnitude bigger and more influential social network than Twitter.
For the time being, we don’t have the same “direct line” to internal documents as is the case with Twitter, which was made possible by the dedication to transparency by the new owner himself.
However, what could be dubbed as the “Facebook Files” are based on credible sources, too – Reason is coming out with a story based on confidential emails that emerged thanks to a court case – the state of Missouri suing the Biden administration.
The emails show that Facebook (and by extension Instagram) representatives and the CDC not only kept in touch at all times, but that the tech giant also “routinely asked government health officials to vet claims relating to the virus, mitigation efforts such as masks, and vaccines.”
In turn, the CDC kept a watchful eye on what speech was allowed on Facebook, what policies toward censorship of “inconvenient” Covid topics applied, and this government agency had no problem instructing the social network behemoth how to behave in these instances.
Robbie Soave, a senior editor for Reason, revealed some examples of what was happening in a series of tweets citing the emails and providing screenshots. One shows that in May 2021, CDC started to get involved in “vetting” content on Facebook that concerns Covid vaccines. And CDC had the last word on what was allowed to remain online as “accurate.”
Other emails show that Facebook (Meta) made sure the CDC was given de facto power to police Covid “misinformation,” while at the same time flagging content for the CDC, consulting with it on claims that could “contribute to vaccine refusals.”
At the same time, Reason is acknowledging that this was by no means the only federal agency to engage in similar activities, all aimed at pressuring some of the world’s biggest social platforms to allow only a certain narrative, and discredit any skepticism, even that coming from medical professionals and scientists.
Even President Biden made sure to “contribute” to this effort, when he in June 2021 bizarrely accused Facebook of “killing people.”
This was really meant to say that the giant had better not dare allow any Covid content the White House failed to “vet” behind the scenes – one way or another.
And the giant obliged, sometimes probably even exceeding the level of compliance expected from the administration. An internal email now reveals that Facebook went as far as to “snitch” on its own users making fun of Anthony Fauci, apparently in a bid to defend his reputation – again, at the expense of free speech.
“One email warned the CDC that Facebook users were mocking Fauci for changing his mind about masking and double-masking. The CDC replied that this information was ‘very helpful’,” Soave, the magazine’s senior editor and host on The Hill TV channel, tweeted.
The upcoming, March issue of Reason delves into how the CDC turned into the speech police when it came to pressuring social media to block content that the government agency decided was Covid “misinformation.”
And this was online speech that this, and other government agencies, have no constitutional way of directly suppressing without breaking the law.
“There is a word for government officials using the threat of punishment to extort desired behaviors from private actors. That word is: jawboning,” Soave remarked in one of the tweets.
And one can imagine – and the emails now show – just how gun-shy and ready to please those in power Facebook had become, after years of public vilification, and who knows what kind of pressure behind the scenes in the wake of the 2016 US election.
The Davos establishment reveals whom it truly fears
By Rachel Marsden | RT | January 22, 2023
The World Economic Forum at Davos used to be THE place to see and be seen, but the idea of the richest and most influential people in the world hobnobbing around a common agenda for the world has lost its luster as the policies peddled by its attendees spark increased skepticism among average citizens.
Forum founder Klaus Schwab, the de facto frontman of the organization, has cranked out one distasteful hit after another in recent years. He has spoken of how the organization “penetrates the cabinets” of governments in its recruitment efforts. He coined the term “The Great Reset,” about which he published a book just a few months into the Covid-19 pandemic in July 2020, advocating that the pandemic be used as inspiration to “reimagine our world” at a time when much of the globe was locked down on orders of their governments – many members of which were Davos regulars. There was little appetite to turn lockdowns into a permanent lifestyle change, but here was Klaus promoting the benefits of burying the old life – all under the pretext of an event that the WEF had already wargamed in October 2019 in New York, just ahead of the crisis, in an exercise called “Event 201.” “The exercise will bring together business, government, security and public health leaders to address a hypothetical global pandemic scenario,” the WEF announced at the time. It’s all just a bit too creepy.
It’s the constant effort of top-down global coordination around murky financial interests laundered through the Davos agenda that irks the common person. The fact that just a single leader of a G7 country attended this year’s event speaks volumes about how poorly it’s now viewed. The premier of the western Canadian province of Alberta, Danielle Smith, said of the WEF after her cabinet’s swearing-in ceremony last October: “I find it distasteful when billionaires brag about how much control they have over political leaders. That is offensive… the people who should be directing government are the people who vote for them. Quite frankly, until that organization stops bragging about how much control they have over political leaders, I have no interest in being involved with them.”
Those invited to preach at the altar during the high mass of globalism this year seemed to know exactly what kind of sermon the crowd wanted to hear. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was apparently the only G7 leader who thought it would be a good look to be seen hanging out with the unelected masters of the planet while Westerners – and Europeans in particular – grapple with the high cost of their governments’ policies in their daily lives. Scholz doubled down on the same green dreams that put Germany’s economy in peril with no viable backup plan once the European Union had effectively cut off Russian energy through sanctions. “Most importantly, our transformation toward a climate-neutral economy, the fundamental task of our century, is currently taking on an entirely new dynamic. Not in spite of but because of the Russian war, and the resulting pressure on us Europeans to change. Whether you are a business leader or a climate activist, a security policy specialist or an investor, it is now crystal clear to each and every one of us that the future belongs solely to renewables. For cost reasons, for environmental reasons, for security reasons, and because in the long run, renewables promise the best returns,” Scholz said in his address. Meanwhile, Germany is firing its coal power plants back up and reconsidering its nuclear power phase-out. How about worrying about how German industry is going to function in the next year when green initiatives, such as hydrogen imports from Portugal and Norway, aren’t set to even get off the ground until at least 2030? Scholz used his time at the podium at Davos to greenwash the economic uncertainties that Germany faces as a result of the EU’s energy sanctions on Russia. In other words, green hopes and dreams took center stage in this pitch to global investors, thus providing a convenient distraction from the more worrisome current realities.
Greenwashing was joined at Davos by the pitching of anti-democratic initiatives via concern trolling. During a panel discussion dedicated to “disrupting distrust” – which really should have been called “How can we get people to better swallow our nonsense?” – Richard Edelman, the CEO of the eponymous global communications firm, blamed the derailments on right-wingers. “My hypothesis on that is that right-wing groups have done a really good job of disenfranchising NGOs. They’ve challenged the funding sources. They’ve associated you with Bill Gates and George Soros. They’ve said that you’re world people, as opposed to what you are, which is local,” Edelman lamented, ignoring the fact that they wouldn’t have needed to fly their private jets to a “local” event. What he’s really attacking are dissidents, many of whom just happen to be populists and right-leaning. And no doubt the fact that they’re digging into the special interests laundered through many NGOs makes the job of PR pros such as Edelman more challenging.
“Edelman is a despicable human being – his job is literally being a professional liar!” Tweeted billionaire Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, whose controversial purchase of the social media platform and subsequent reversal of its heavy-handed censorship policies haven’t exactly endeared him to the Davos crowd. Mocking Schwab’s call to “master the future” in the opening keynote, Musk tweeted, “’Master the Future’ doesn’t sound ominous at all … How is WEF/Davos even a thing? Are they trying to be the boss of Earth!?” Musk then took a Twitter poll that found that 86% of 2.4 million respondents answered ‘no’ to the question of whether the WEF should “control the world.”
A WEF spokesman said that Musk hasn’t been invited to the gathering since 2015. Musk confirmed his lack of interest in attending: “My reason for declining the Davos invitation was not because I thought they were engaged in diabolical scheming, but because it sounded boring af lol.”
Boring, indeed – in the same way that a cult meeting where everyone nods their heads in agreement is a snooze fest. The last time things were even remotely interesting at Davos was when former US President Donald Trump showed up and rejected the Davos mantra of climate change doom. “The message represents a sharp departure from the official playbook at the World Economic Forum, where this year’s theme is ‘Stakeholders for a Cohesive and Sustainable World’,” wrote CNN in January 2020.
Who asked them, though? These elites represent no one’s interests but their own, which are economic and are for the benefit of their shareholders – hence the forum’s name. If the average citizen is now waking up to the fact that anything coming out of Davos should be scrutinized through that lens, then it can only be a good thing for freedom, democracy, and national sovereignty.
Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist, and host of independently produced talk-shows in French and English.
JFK and America’s Destiny Betrayed
A Review of DiEugenio’s “Foreign Policy Coup” Theory
BY LAURENT GUYÉNOT • UNZ REVIEW • JANUARY 21, 2023
I have watched Oliver Stone’s documentary on the assassination of JFK, both the short version, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, and the long version in four episodes, JFK: Destiny Betrayed. I recommend the latter, which I will discuss here. Although the technical parts (the bullets, the autopsy, Oswald’s CIA handlers) are interesting and partly new, I will focus exclusively on the theory regarding the main culprits and their motive. And I will discuss the larger work of James DiEugenio, who wrote the film—and probably interviewed the different contributors, although Stone appears to be doing it.
James DiEugenio has been investigating the Kennedy presidency and the Kennedy assassination from the time of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), which was largely a consequence of Oliver Stone’s Hollywood film JFK (1991). His first book was Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case (1992, newly edited in 2012). In 1993, he founded Citizens for Truth about the Kennedy Assassination (CTKA), and co-edited Probe Magazine, now replaced by the website KennedysandKing.com.
In 1997, DiEugenio published a powerful two-part book-length article, “the Posthumous Assassination of JFK” (1997). It is still essential reading for anyone interested in the controversies surrounding Kennedy’s presidency and assassination, or puzzled by the unending stream of bizarre Kennedy lore. This is the text you want to send to anyone telling you about the Kennedys’ mafia dealings and unrestrained sex life, their murder of Marilyn Monroe, or Bobby’s irresponsible assassination plots against Castro that backfired on his brother. These stories are so widespread, repeated in well-published and well-reviewed books, that millions of people assume them to be documented. Writing on the occasion of the release of Seymour Hersh’s The Dark Side of Camelot, DiEugenio exposed their fraudulent nature and their true motivation: the obsession to “smother any legacy that might linger,” for “assassination is futile if a man’s ideas live on through others.” This flow of defamation had started in the 70s, as a counter-fire to the Church Committee and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), and intensified in the 1990s after the ARRB. It never dried up.
Character assassination is only one part of the propaganda unleashed against the Kennedy legacy. Another part has consisted in distorting the historical record of Kennedy’s presidency, and particularly the radical but short-lived innovations of his foreign policy. DiEugenio writes in “Dodd and Dulles vs. Kennedy in Africa” (1999, modified 2016):
a clear strategy of those who wish to smother any search for the truth about President Kennedy’s assassination is to distort and deny his achievements in office. Hersh and his ilk have toiled to distort who Kennedy really was, where he was going, what the world would have been like if he had lived, and who and what he represented.[1]
DiEugenio has provided insightful answers to these questions. A graduate in Contemporary American History, he is probably the best Kennedy historian among Warren Commission critics, and his work has opened the way for other revisionist historians like Monika Wiesak, author of the recent and excellent America’s Last President: What the World Lost When It Lost John F. Kennedy (read DiEugenio’s review here). According to DiEugenio, there has been, in addition to the cover-up about Kennedy’s death, a “cover-up about Kennedy’s foreign policy,”[2] so that even critics of the Warren Commission fairytale have largely failed to grasp the full extent of Kennedy’s changes from the foreign policy of his predecessors—dominated by the Dulles brothers; “by only chasing Vietnam and Cuba, to the neglect of everything else, we have missed the bigger picture.”[3] The bigger picture drawn by DiEugenio includes the Congo, Indonesia, Laos and the Middle East. DiEugenio’s most essential articles on these topics are:
- “Deconstructing JFK: A Coup d’État over Foreign Policy?” written for Covert-Operation magazine (2021)
- “Nasser, Kennedy, the Middle East, and Israel” (2020)
- “Introduction to JFK’s Foreign Policy: A Motive for Murder” (2014)
- “ Dodd and Dulles vs. Kennedy in Africa” (1999, modified 2016)
The three scholars who most contributed to DiEugenio’s understanding of the uniqueness of Kennedy’s foreign policy, and who are interviewed in the film JFK: Destiny Betrayed, are:
- Richard Mahoney, for JFK: Ordeal in Africa, Oxford University Press, 1983,
- Philip Muehlenbeck, for Betting on the Africans: John F. Kennedy’s Courting of African Nationalist Leaders, Oxford University Press, 2012,
- Robert Rakove, for Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World, Cambridge University Press, 2012 (read DiEugenio’s review).
Although he praises James Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable (2008), DiEugenio rejects his mythical portrayal of JFK as a Cold Warrior converted to peacemaking during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.[4] Despite the contrary impression he made during his televised debates with Nixon in 1960, Kennedy was never a Cold Warrior. The collection of statements published under the title The Strategy of Peace for his presidential campaign proves it.
DiEugenio traces Kennedy’s general ideas on foreign policy back to 1951, when Kennedy toured the Middle East and Asia. His meeting in Saigon with Edmund Gullion, whom he later brought into his cabinet, had convinced him that sending American troops to Indochina was a grave mistake.[5] He would never change his mind on that issue.[6]
By 1957, Kennedy was formulating a radical—by U.S. standard—foreign policy for the Arab world, which he outlined in a speech on the Senate floor denouncing French colonial occupation of Algeria:
In these days, we can help fulfill a great and promising opportunity to show the world that a new nation, with an Arab heritage, can establish itself in the Western tradition and successfully withstand both the pull toward Arab feudalism and fanaticism and the pull toward communist authoritarianism.[7]
Unlike his predecessors Truman and Eisenhower, and in defiance of the doctrine that prevailed in the CIA, the Pentagon and the State Department, Kennedy accepted and welcomed a multipolar world, the only way, in his view, to overcome the dangerous bi-polarization of the Cold War. Had he succeeded, he would have transformed the U.S. into something totally different from what it was starting to become since WWII, and has fully become since he died: an imperial bully feared but hated throughout the world. In “Deconstructing JFK: A Coup d’État over Foreign Policy?” DiEugenio makes the point that:
[Kennedy’s] speeches, correspondence and high-level meetings with emerging Third World leaders reveal his growing antipathy for colonialism, rejection of imperialism, toleration for the non-aligned movement—contrasting markedly with his predecessor—and promotion of nationalistic leaders, albeit ones that were considered to be “responsible” in their moderation.[8]
The first foreign policy reversal that Kennedy made once in office was on the Congo. Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first democratically elected leader, was killed three days before Kennedy’s inauguration, victim of a coup supported by the CIA. Jacques Lowe’s shot of JFK getting the news of Lumumba’s death on February 13th is, to DiEugenio, the picture that best symbolizes Kennedy’s personal commitment to support the national independence of Third world countries, and the ordeal of his struggle against the CIA’s machinery of assassination and regime change. After U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarksjold was killed (likely murdered) in a plane crash in September 1961, Kennedy carried on his campaign for a free and independent Congo. Lyndon Johnson destroyed this first attempt at a democracy in post-colonial Africa, and backed Josef Mobutu, who turned into a corrupted dictator and allowed his country to be utilized by outside imperial interests.
Kennedy rejected the “with us or against us” mentality of the foreign policy establishment, and this was also demonstrated by his support for Indonesia’s nationalist leader Sukarno, who co-founded the Non-Aligned Movement. In 1958, Eisenhower had authorized the CIA’s attempt at overthrowing Sukarno, but when Kennedy assumed office, he reversed that policy, and helped Sukarno stabilize his country. Less than a year after Kennedy’s death, the CIA was planning again covert action against Sukarno, which led to the killing of at least 500,000 people suspected of communist sympathy. Sukarno was placed under house arrest and CIA-backed Suharto ruled for three decades, turning his people into low-wage workers for foreign companies.[9]
And then, of course, there is Cuba and Vietnam. The story of Kennedy’s resistance to the Pentagon and the CIA’s push for military confrontation and escalation in these countries has been told many times—most eloquently by James Douglass—, so that I do not need to tell it again. Authors of the dominant school of JFK assassination research—and that includes those interviewed in Stone’s documentary—assume that Cuba and Vietnam are, in that order, the most important reasons why Kennedy was killed. DiEugenio agrees, but brings a larger spectrum of motives.
DiEugenio writes in “Nasser, Kennedy, the Middle East, and Israel”:
For decades, the critical community overlooked areas of Kennedy’s foreign policy outside of Vietnam and Cuba. Kennedys and King has attempted to correct that oversight in recent years. We have tried to educate our readers on issues like Kennedy’s policies in Congo, Indonesia, Dominican Republic, and Laos. We have also tried to show how, after his murder, those policies—as well as his policy toward Vietnam and his attempts at detente with Moscow and Havana—were also altered.
But there is still another area of the world about which Kennedy’s reformist foreign policy is overlooked. That area is the Middle East. This is odd since many commentators justifiably perceive that the Middle East is one of the most important areas on the globe.[10]
He writes in his “Introduction to JFK’s Foreign Policy: A Motive for Murder”:
Why is the JFK case relevant today? Well, because the mess in the Middle East now dominates both our foreign policy and the headlines, much as the Cold War did several decades ago. And the roots of the current situation lie in Kennedy’s death, whereupon President Johnson began the long process which reversed his predecessor’s policy there.[11]
In other words, the Middle East is the region of the world where Kennedy’s foreign policy and Johnson’s reversal of that foreign policy have had the most dramatic and most lasting consequences. What was at stake was America’s involvement in the conflict between Israel and the Arab world, and that meant, essentially, between Ben-Gurion and Nasser.
So DiEugenio acknowledges that: 1. LBJ completely reversed JFK’s foreign policy, and 2. the most consequential reversal was in the Middle East, for the longtime benefit of Israel and to the detriment of Egypt. Yet he points, not to Johnson or Ben-Gurion, but to Allen Dulles as the most likely culprit for the Dallas coup. Does he document any evidence that Allen Dulles was interested in switching alliance from Egypt to Israel? None whatsoever. It is true that the Eastern Establishment generally favored Saudi Arabia over Egypt, but it is not the case that they wanted a closer relationship with Israel. So what is unique about Johnson’s pro-Israel policy is that it was not a return to a pre-Kennedy policy, but something new altogether. It was a radical break from all previous administrations. Recall Eisenhower’s resolute reaction to Israel’s invasion of the Sinai in 1956, and contrast it with what happened ten years later, when Johnson greenlighted Israel’s attack on Egypt and expansion, and covered up Israel’s false-flag attack on the USS Liberty designed to draw the U.S. into the war.
Allen Dulles’s major interest in foreign policy in the 1960s was over Cuba. Assassinating Castro and/or invading Cuba to restore an American colonial regime was his priority. Like the majority of JFK investigators, DiEugenio considers that Kennedy had so angered the CIA, and Dulles in particular, when he didn’t go along with their plan to invade Cuba—not once but twice, first with the Bay of Pigs landing in 1961, and secondly during the Cuban Missiles Crisis in 1962—that Dulles’s gang decided to assassinate him. But guess what: LBJ did not invade Cuba either. He didn’t give the CIA and Pentagon hawks the retaliatory invasion of Cuba that their plan was supposed to force upon him. He didn’t even try.
This is a major weakness of that semi-mainstream theory to which DiEugenio subscribes, and which he contributed to write. That weakness is partly compensated by the secondary focus on Vietnam. It is true that, in Vietnam, Johnson gave the National Security state what they wanted, and more. As author Peter Dale Scott wrote, Johnson “had been, since 1961, the ally of the Joint Chiefs (and in particular Air Force General Curtis LeMay) in their unrelenting efforts, against Kennedy’s repeated refusals, to introduce U.S. combat troops into Asia.”[12] Yet, that presentation ignores one aspect of the full story.
The strongest push for sending ground troops to Vietnam came from Walt Rostow (“the biggest Cold Warrior I’ve got,” Kennedy said). As deputy to the National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy under Kennedy, Rostow had already weighted heavily on Kennedy’s decision to send military “advisors” to Vietnam. But Kennedy had grown weary of his bellicose advise (“Walt had ten ideas, nine of which would lead to disaster”).[13] Walt Rostow was promoted by Johnson as National Security Advisor, and found in the new president more enthusiasm for his war plans. Rostow was the main promoter of the lie that Johnson’s Vietnam policy was a continuation of Kennedy’s.[14]
Johnson named Walt’s brother Eugene Under-Secretary of State, “appointed precisely to support the coming Israeli war” according to Joan Mellen.[15] Walt and Eugene Rostow, sons of Jewish immigrants, had a good deal of control on U.S. Israeli policy. On June 8, 1967, the very day of the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, Walt had recommended to Johnson that Israel be allowed to keep the captured territories.
Why did the Rostow brothers want a Vietnam War? In “Was Vietnam a Holocaust for Zion” I explained why the Vietnam War was good—even crucial—for Israel. But don’t take my word for it. Here is what French president Charles De Gaulle said during his November 27, 1967 press conference:
Without the tragedy of Vietnam, the conflict between Israel and the Arabs would not have become what it has become. And if South-East Asia could experience a renewal of peace, the Middle-East would also find its way to peace, in the climate of détente which would follow such an event.[16]
I am not implying that the shift in policy on Vietnam between Kennedy and Johnson does not support the theory that CIA and Pentagon killed Kennedy. It does. I am merely pointing out that Johnson’s pro-Israel cabinet members were at least as influential as Dulles and LeMay in Johnson’s reversal of Kennedy’s decision to withdraw from Vietnam, a fact which is also consistent with the theory that Israel was the prime mover.
In his JFK and the Unspeakable, James Douglass has documented JFK’s deep commitment to prevent nuclear proliferation and even abolish weapons of mass destruction “before they abolish us” (Kennedy’s speech at the UN General Assembly, September 25, 1961). But Douglass makes no mention of JFK’s bitter confrontation with Ben-Gurion and Eshkol on that very issue. In this way, Douglass has proven that the historical school of which he has become a standard bearer is involved in a cover-up. To be generous, I ascribe it to a case of “cognitive inhibition”. I imagine it works somewhat like this: “My work—that is, the truth—is too important to risk it being censored by saying something bad about Israel.” Personally, I prefer to stick to Peter Janney’s principle that “the truth takes no prisoners.”
To his credit, DiEugenio does not eschew the Dimona story. His website links to two articles by Avner Cohen, author of Israel and the Bomb (1998), and William Burr of the National Security Archive, accompanied by declassified documents (here and here).[17] DiEugenio himself writes about Israel’s effort to acquire nuclear weapons in “Nasser, Kennedy, the Middle East, and Israel” (2020):
Ben Gurion and the other Israeli leaders were so devoted to this aim that they resorted to two illicit means in order to secure the goal. First—there is no other way to say this—they involved themselves in a government-wide conspiracy to deceive Kennedy about the true nature of the Dimona reactor.
Israel’s second means to go nuclear was the theft of enriched Uranium from the U.S.:
Through [Roger] Mattson [author of Stealing the Atom Bomb], and also author Grant Smith [author of Big Israel], we know today that Israel had stolen hundreds of pounds of highly enriched uranium out of what was essentially their shell plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania, called NUMEC.[18]
Stone and DiEugenio mention the first of these Israeli deceptions in their film (the long version only, episode 3, 40:50). After a brief reminder of Kennedy’s decision to support the U.N. resolution for the return of Palestinian refugees, we are told:
The other problem Kennedy faced with Israel was the construction of the atomic reactor at Dimona. JFK was strongly against any proliferation of nuclear weaponry. He had been assured by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion that Dimona was designed for peaceful uses of atomic energy. In the spring of 1963, Kennedy demanded full inspections by the US of the Dimona reactor, and threatened to place American aid for Israel in limbo if no agreement was reached. And at the time of his assassination, negotiations were in process for biannual inspections.
That is better than nothing. But since that story is only incidental to the thesis defended by Stone and DiEugenio, it seems to have been included only to immune the authors from the blame of covering it up, that Douglass deserves.
Interestingly, it is Stone who brings up this topic in this interview with Canadian journalist Éloïse Boies. At 34:20, DiEugenio states that “nobody was more anti-nuclear proliferation than John F. Kennedy. This was really a very important issue with him.” At this point, Stone interjects:
He took on Israel. He took on Ben-Gurion in Israel, because they were building a bomb that they’d stolen from us. And he really wanted to put a stop to that, but he, unfortunately died before, and Johnson carried through, knew about it and let it go, till Israel had the bomb by 1968. And even then, in 68, Johnson shut the Pentagon up. He said: “We are not going to announce this. The American people won’t know that Israel has the bomb.”
Notice Éloïse’s reaction: “Let’s talk about [something else].” The point is that, for Stone and DiEugenio, Dimona seems to be anecdotal and hardly relevant to solving the case. At the end (from 50:27), when asked “Who did it, and why?” they stick to the conclusion that Allen Dulles was the mastermind, with perhaps Curtis LeMay. But, they add as an afterthought, Dulles is only “the executioner” and “does get the OK from someone else. … You know who they are: the people with money” … like “David Rockefeller”. Éloïse gets it: “It’s all about money, at the end of the day.” It becomes absolutely ridiculous. When your theory implodes under its own hollowness, it’s time to change. But, as Stone says “once they’re locked in, it’s very hard for historians to go back” (19:10).
It might seem unfair for me to point to an interview rather than to the film itself. But the value of that interview is precisely to reveal the logical fallacies and confusions that are not apparent in the film.
In that same interview (from 40:30), Stone says: “I don’t think Johnson was involved in the murder.” DiEugenio adds: “Johnson fell for the CIA story coming out of Mexico City” (an Oswald impersonator visiting both the Soviet and the Cuban embassies in Mexico in October 1963). But then DiEugenio mentions that Edgar Hoover had told Johnson that the Mexico story was impossible, since neither the voice nor the photo provided by the Mexico CIA station fitted the real Oswald. So now “the question becomes: did Johnson really believe this?” This gets confusing. DiEugenio can’t seem to decide whether Johnson believed Oswald’s communist legend or not.
But DiEugenio’s dilemma has no reason to be. For not only Johnson knew the communist Oswald to be bogus; it was he who used this fake communist connection to block all investigations. DiEugenio is an admirer of the work of professor John M. Newman, whose books he reviewed (here, here, here, and here), and whom he interviewed for the film. One contribution of Newman, introduced in the 2008 edition of his book Oswald and the CIA and repeated in the first three volumes of his series The Assassination of President Kennedy, is, in his own words:
An essential element of the plot was a psychological operation to raise the specter of WWIII and the death of forty million Americans. This threat of a nuclear holocaust was then used by President Johnson to terrify Chief Justice Earl Warren and some of the other men who served on the Warren Commission to such an extent that they believed there was no alternative to writing a report stating Lee Oswald alone had assassinated the president.[19]
According to that theory, endorsed by DiEugenio in this review,[20] Oswald’s profile as a communist pro-Castro activist was inbuilt in the plan (by none other than James Jesus Angleton), not for the purpose of starting WWIII, but as a national security pretext that Johnson could use to impose the lone-nut theory, lest the discovery of a conspiracy would “kick us into a war that can kill forty million Americans in an hour,” as Johnson kept repeating.[21] One important implication is that “many of the post-assassination lies and cover-ups were carried out by people who had nothing to do with the pre-existing plot to assassinate the president” and who “thought that what they were doing was in the best interests of the country.”[22] This applies to thousands of people from the Dallas Police to TV networks. But can it apply to Johnson himself? Given Johnson’s quick and efficient mastery of this device, it is much more likely that it was fabricated by Angleton specifically for Johnson and with his foreknowledge.
Yet DiEugenio and other authors on his site are dismissive of investigators who incriminate Johnson, and especially of Phillip Nelson, author of LBJ: The Mastermind of JFK’s Assassination. A big book like that (730 pages) is bound to contain some weak arguments, but the reviews in KennedysandKing.com (here and here) do not do justice to the strong evidence accumulated by Nelson that Johnson was actively involved, not just in the cover-up, but in the preparation of the Dallas ambush.[23] (Read Nelson’s response to KennedysandKing.com here). DiEugenio concurs with Douglass that Johnson was unaware of the conspiracy against his president, but “chose to cover-up everything and surrender to Cold War prerogatives.”[24] He assumes that Johnson was a man who had no clear idea of his own in foreign policy and liked to be told what to do. That is at odds with everything we learn from Johnson’s biographers—especially Robert Caro.
From my viewpoint, which differs from Nelson’s, Johnson’s role in the assassination cannot be understood independently from Israel’s—nor can Angleton’s role. Johnson allowed, and probably planned, the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty in 1967, and he excused Israel when the operation failed (“Johnson did not break relations with Israel, and there were no trials held over this atrocity,” notes DiEugenio).[25] Not only that, but, as DiEugenio writes in “Nasser, Kennedy, the Middle East, and Israel”:
As Roger Mattson notes in his book on the subject, when the CIA alerted the new president that it appeared that Israel had now developed the atomic bomb, Johnson barely reacted. (Mattson, p. 97) There was no official investigation launched. In fact, Johnson told the CIA not to alert either State or Defense about the discovery.[26]
For those two acts, Johnson qualifies as a traitor to the country he had been sworn to serve. If Johnson was working for someone, it was not for the “Eastern Establishment,” of which he had never been part; it was for Israel. Johnson was the initiator of a pro-Israel policy that Truman, Eisenhower, the Dulles brothers or the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Kennedy would never have imagined in their worst nightmare. It is today widely known that Johnson is the US president who “firmly pointed American policy in a pro-Israel direction.”
In conclusion, I find several logical flaws in DiEugenio’s general theory, the basis for Stone’s documentary:
- DiEugenio recognizes that the change of foreign policy from JFK to LBJ was most consequential in the Middle East, yet he blames the CIA and the Pentagon (Dulles and LeMay) for the assassination, although neither the CIA nor the Pentagon ever advocated the pro-Israel policy that Johnson set up. Johnson’s unprecedented support for Israel, to the point of treason, went against the approach advocated by the CIA, the Pentagon or the State Department. But it was the best foreign policy that Ben-Gurion could dream of.
- According to DiEugenio and the dominant school, the CIA’s prime motive for eliminating Kennedy would have been to resume their favored foreign policy toward Cuba, which Kennedy had stubbornly opposed. But that didn’t happen after the assassination. Johnson kept Kennedy’s pledge to Khrushchev not to invade Cuba, which Dulles and LeMay considered pure treason.
- DiEugenio agrees that Kennedy was intensely worried about nuclear proliferation, and that Israel posed him the most difficult problem. He also knows that Johnson did nothing to stop Israel from going nuclear, and showed neither surprise nor displeasure when told that Israel made its first nuclear bomb in 1968, with bomb-grade uranium stolen from the U.S. Johnson tried to keep it secret—which obviously was what Israel wanted. Yet DiEugenio does not see Dimona as having been a motive in the assassination, and finds no reason to suspect either Israel or Johnson.
- DiEugenio believes that JFK’s assassination was a “coup d’État over foreign policy,” and I agree that this is the only way to make sense of it. But the purpose of a coup d’État is to replace one head of state by another. Therefore, it is self-contradictory for DiEugenio to minimize Johnson’s role and motive in the assassination.
Actually, I think DiEugenio’s notion of a “cover-up about JFK’s foreign policy” needs to be qualified. Not all areas of Kennedy’s foreign policy are equally covered up. The three teachers of DiEugenio—Richard Mahoney, Philip Muehlenbeck and Robert Rakove—are published by Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press: not exactly fringe publishers. Rakove and Muehlenbeck are even included in the bibliography of the Wikipedia article on “Foreign policy of the John F. Kennedy administration” (so are James Douglass and John M. Newman). This Wikipedia article is quite accurate and detailed, with one exception for the section about “Israel and Arab States”—a fine hasbara job, probably by Bennett Naftali’s army of Zionist Wikipedia editors. See by yourself:
The real “cover-up about JFK’s foreign policy” is the cover-up about JFK’s Israeli policy. According to DiEugenio’s own logic, that points in the direction that DiEugenio is not looking.
Since DiEugenio sees a link between Kennedy’s assassination and his “posthumous assassination”, I also suggest that he gets a clue about Kennedy’s assassins by looking at the political profile of Kennedy’s “posthumous assassins”. The list includes, next to Seymour Hersh, authors who specialize in trashing the Kennedy family, like Ronald Kessler (The Sins of the Father, 1997), Edward Klein (The Kennedy Curse, 2004), or the incomparable C. David Heymann, the Mossad employee (by his own admission)[27] who wrote the salacious Bobby and Jackie: A Love Story (2009). Is there a pattern here?
What about Howard Zinn, Gar Alperovitz, Martin Peretz, and Noam Chomsky, that DiEugenio blames in “The Left and the Death of Kennedy” (1997) for their defense of the Warren Commission report and their participation in the orgy of Kennedy-bashing. Chomsky, whom DiEugenio sees as the most nefarious liar when it comes to Kennedy’s presidency or his assassination (here and here), has nothing in common with Allen Dulles or Curtis LeMay. He is an anti-imperialist, and as such he should make Kennedy his hero, his icon. But Chomsky has another agenda: one of his specialties is blaming America for the crimes of Israel. As for Martin Peretz, DiEugenio writes that his New Republic buried Kennedy’s death in 1979, then “tried to bury his life.”
It actually made a feature article out of a review of the tawdry Horowitz-Collier family biography The Kennedys. Who did that publication find suitable to review this National Enquirer version of the Kennedy clan? None other than Midge Decter, wife of neo-conservative godfather Norman Podhoretz, mother-in-law of Elliot Abrams.
The Podhoretzs are not Eastern Establishment, but they hate the Kennedys. Their hatred is transgenerational and inextinguishable. If you doubt it, read the piece below, written by Norman’s son a week after the tragic death of John F. Kennedy Jr. The author imagines Satan—or is it Yahweh?—teasing Joe Kennedy in hell and bragging to have killed his grandson—a particularly heinous version of the “Kennedy curse”.
Perhaps DiEugenio should give more serious consideration to the “who” and the “why” of Kennedy’s “posthumous assassination”. But that would take him on the road less traveled, a dangerous path—some say suicidal.
Strangely, though, many other well-trodden roads seem to now converge on the Israeli trail:
- Investigators tracking Johnson end up finding a snake pit of sayanim in his White House, as did Phillip Nelson in his second and third books (LBJ: From Mastermind to “The Colossus” and Remember the Liberty).
- Jefferson Morley, investigating Angleton, saw him in cahoots with the cream of the Mossad, who considered him “the biggest Zionist of the lot,” while Robert Amory, head of the CIA Directorate of Intelligence, called him a “co-opted Israeli agent” to his face.
- David Talbot concludes that RFK was assassinated by the same cabal as his brother, who now used for a patsy an anti-Zionist Palestinian, thereby presenting RFK’s assassination as motivated by “a visceral, irrational hatred of Israel” (but Talbot sees no Israeli fingerprint in there—another case of cognitive inhibition).
- No one investigating Jacob Rubenstein, known as Jack Ruby, can now ignore his work for the Irgun as a “gangster for Zion” and his repeated declarations that “I did it for the Jews”.[28]
- Clay Shaw, the only person (beside Oswald) to have been charged with having participated in the assassination, has been found a board member of Permindex, “a Mossad arms trading and money laundering venture” chaired by Louis Bloomfield, a devoted supporter of the Israeli cause and of the Mossad, as shown by Michael Collins Piper.[29]
- The word is out that Arlen “Magic Bullet” Specter was a dedicated Israel-firster, honored by the Israeli government as “an unswerving defender of the Jewish State,” and by AIPAC, as “a leading architect of the congressional bond between our country and Israel”.[30]
- It can’t be ignored that Abraham Zapruder, the man whose camera didn’t shiver when Kennedy’s head exploded, had his business office in one of the snipers’ nests, the Dal Tex Building overlooking Dealey Plaza, owned by B’nai B’rith financier David Weisblat.[31]
- Investigators interested in George DeMohrenschildt cannot fail to learn that, before being found dead with a bullet in his head, he had complained that “the Jewish mafia” was out to get him.[32]
And of course, we must add to the equation Israel’s criminal record for the last sixty years. Thanks to Ronen Bergman, author of Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, we know that Israeli secret services has never had any inhibition against eliminating anyone perceived as a threat to Israel’s national security, especially when it comes to Israel’s nuclear hegemony in the Middle East. Bergman learned from the assassins themselves because, he writes, “acts that people in other countries might be ashamed to admit to are instead a source of pride for Israelis.”[33]
We now know so much more than Stone and DiEugenio could know when they first got involved in Kennedy assassination research. But those who understood Israel’s power back then already had a clue. In March 1992, commenting critically on Stone’s motion picture JFK, American Congressman Paul Findley noted in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs:
It is interesting — but not surprising — to note that in all the words written and uttered about the Kennedy assassination, Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, has never been mentioned. … on this question, as on almost all others, American reporters and commentators cannot bring themselves to cast Israel in an unfavorable light — despite the obvious fact that Mossad complicity is as plausible as any of the other theories.
Three years later, Mike Piper filled the gap with Final Judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy (expanded through five editions until 2005). His work has been ignored by most investigators, but in 2013, historian Martin Sandler (listen to him here) mentioned it in his precious edition of The Letters of John F. Kennedy, to introduce Kennedy’s letter to David Ben-Gurion dated May 18, 1963:
author Michael Collins Piper actually accused Israel of the crime. Of all the conspiracy theories, it remains one of the most intriguing. What is indisputable is that although it was kept out of the eye of both the press and the public, a bitter dispute had developed between Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion, who believed that his nation’s survival depended on its attaining nuclear capability, and Kennedy, who was vehemently opposed to it.[34]
In his previous letter to Kennedy, dated May 12, Ben-Gurion had assured Kennedy that the Egyptians “want to follow the Nazi example,” and begged: “Mr. President, my people have the right to exist… and this existence is in danger.”[35] He also made a bizarre digression about Jordanian King Hussein: “there is always a danger that one single bullet might put an end to his life and regime.”[36]
Notes
[1] DiEugenio, “Dodd and Dulles vs. Kennedy in Africa,” 15 February 1999, last modified 16 October 2016, www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/dodd-and-dulles-vs-kennedy-in-africa
[2] “DiEugenio at the VMI seminar,” 16 September 2017, www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/jim-dieugenio-at-the-vmi-seminar
[3] DiEugenio, “Introduction to JFK’s Foreign Policy: A Motive for Murder,” 22 December 2014, www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/introduction-to-jfk-s-foreign-policy-a-motive-for-murder
[4] “DiEugenio at the VMI seminar, 16 September 2017, www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/jim-dieugenio-at-the-vmi-seminar
[5] James Norwood, “Edmund Gullion, JFK, and the Shaping of a Foreign Policy in Vietnam,” 8 May 2018, www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/edmund-gullion-jfk-and-the-shaping-of-a-foreign-policy-in-vietnam
[6] James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, Touchstone, 2008, pp. 107, 102.
[7] Quoted in “DiEugenio at the VMI seminar,” 16 September 2017, www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/jim-dieugenio-at-the-vmi-seminar
[8] DiEugenio, “Deconstructing JFK: A Coup d’État over Foreign Policy?” January 14, 2021, covertactionmagazine.com/2021/01/14/deconstructing-jfk-a-coup-detat-over-foreign-policy/
[9] DiEugenio, “Deconstructing JFK: A Coup d’État over Foreign Policy?” January 14, 2021, covertactionmagazine.com/2021/01/14/deconstructing-jfk-a-coup-detat-over-foreign-policy/
[10] DiEugenio, “Nasser, Kennedy, the Middle East, and Israel,” 22 October 2020, www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/nasser-kennedy-the-middle-east-and-israel
[11] DiEugenio, “Introduction to JFK’s Foreign Policy: A Motive for Murder,” 22 December 2014, www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/introduction-to-jfk-s-foreign-policy-a-motive-for-murder
[12] Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1993, pp. 30-33.
[13] David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, Random House, 1972, pp. 156-162.
[14] John K. Galbraith, “Exit Strategy – In 1963, JFK ordered a complete withdrawal from Vietnam,” Oct/Nov 2003, www.bostonreview.net/articles/galbraith-exit-strategy-vietnam/
[15] Joan Mellen, Blood in the Water: How the US and Israel Conspired to Ambush the USS Liberty, Prometheus, 2018, p. 32.
[16] Film of De Gaulle’s press conference on fresques.ina.fr/de-gaulle/fiche-media/Gaulle00139/conference-de-presse-du-27-novembre-1967 at 41 min.
[17] Avner Cohen and William Burr, “ Concerned About Nuclear Weapons Potential, John F. Kennedy Pushed for Inspection of Israel Nuclear Facilities,” April 21, 2016, nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2016-04-21/concerned-about-nuclear-weapons-potential-john-f-kennedy and “ The Battle of the Letters, 1963: John F. Kennedy, David Ben-Gurion, Levi Eshkol, and the U.S. Inspections of Dimona,” May 2, 2019, nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2019-05-02/battle-letters-1963-john-f-kennedy-david-ben-gurion-levi-eshkol-us-inspections-dimona
[18] DiEugenio, “Nasser, Kennedy, the Middle East, and Israel,” 22 October 2020, www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/nasser-kennedy-the-middle-east-and-israel For more detail, read DiEugenio’s review of Roger Mattson’s book Stealing the Atom Bomb (2016), “How Israel Stole the Bomb”, September 11, 2016, on consortiumnews.com/2016/09/11/how-israel-stole-the-bomb/ Read also DiEugenio’s review of Monika Wiesak, America’s Last President.
[19] John Newman, Where Angels Tread Lightly: The Assassination of President Kennedy, volume 1, self-published, 2017, p. xx; repeated in vol. 2, Countdown to Darkness, and in vol. 3, Into the Storm.
[20] DiEugenio’s words: « In his new Epilogue for this 2008 edition, Newman explains why only someone who a.) Understood the inner workings of the national security state, and b.) Understood and controlled Oswald’s files, could have masterminded something as superhumanly complex as this scheme. One in which the conspiracy itself actually contained the seeds that would sprout the cover-up » (DiEugenio, “John Newman, Oswald and the CIA (re-issue),” 01 September 2008, on www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/newman-john-oswald-and-the-cia-re-issue
[21] LBJ in a conversation to Senator Richard Russell on November 29, 1963, quoted in Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, op. cit., p. 83.
[22] John Newman, Where Angels Tread Lightly, op. cit., p. xx.
[23] Phillip Nelson, LBJ: The Mastermind of JFK’s Assassination, XLibris, 2010, p. 377-378
[24] Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, op. cit., p. 81.
[25] DiEugenio, “Deconstructing JFK: A Coup d’État over Foreign Policy?” January 14, 2021, covertactionmagazine.com/2021/01/14/deconstructing-jfk-a-coup-detat-over-foreign-policy/
[26] DiEugenio, “Nasser, Kennedy, the Middle East, and Israel,” 22 October 2020, www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/nasser-kennedy-the-middle-east-and-israel
[27] “C. David Heymann,” on spartacus-educational.com/JFKheymann.htm
[28] William Kunstler, My Life as a Radical Lawyer, Carol Publishing, 1994, p. 158.
[29] Michael Collins Piper, Final Judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy, American Free Press, 6th ed., 2005, chapter 15, pp. 247-269.
[30] Natasha Mozgovaya, “Prominent Jewish-American politician Arlen Specter dies at 82,” Haaretz, October 14, 2012, www.haaretz.com/jewish/arlen-specter-dies-at-82-1.5192779.
[31] That shots came from the Dal Tex was suggested by Jim Garrison in his October 1967 Playboy interview, p. 165-166, ia801307.us.archive.org/20/items/JimGarrisonPlayboyInterview/Jim-Garrison-Playboy-Interview.pdf.
[32] Police report on fr.scribd.com/document/258263723/Police-report-on-sucide-of-de-Mohrenschildt; His wife confirmed to Jim Marrs that her husband thought that “the Jewish Mafia and the FBI” were out to get him: Jim Marrs, Crossfire: The Plot that Killed Kennedy, Carroll and Graf, 1989, p. 285.
[33] Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, John Murray, 2019, p. xv.
[34] Martin Sandler, The Letters of John F. Kennedy, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013, p. 333. Listen to Sandler here on this topic on www.c-span.org/video/?c4547313/user-clip-jfk-gurion-mossad-dimona
[35] Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb, Columbia UP, 1998, pp. 109 and 14.
[36] Quoted in Monika Wiesak, America’s Last President: What the World Lost When It Lost John F. Kennedy, self-published, 2022, p. 214.
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Major rabbi says non-Jews are donkeys, created to serve Jews
By Khalid Amayreh, in occupied East Jerusalem | The People’s Voice | October 18, 2010
A major Jewish religious figure in Israel has likened non-Jews to donkeys and beasts of burden, saying the main reason for their very existence is to serve Jews.
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual mentor of the religious fundamentalist party, Shas, which represents Middle Eastern Jews, reportedly said during a Sabbath homily earlier this week that “the sole purpose of non-Jews is to serve Jews.”
Yosef is considered a major religious leader in Israel who enjoys the allegiance of hundreds of thousands of followers. … continue
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