Ukrainian investigative journalist ‘kidnapped’ by draft officers
RT | December 23, 2025
A Ukrainian investigative journalist is reportedly missing after being seized by conscription officials days after filing a criminal complaint against his local city administration.
A video shared on the Facebook account of Aleksey Brovchenko, which went viral this week, was purportedly filmed by CCTV cameras at his home in Podgorodnoye in Dnepropetrovsk Region on Monday morning. It showed people in military and police uniforms apprehending a man and forcing him into a van despite a woman’s vocal objections – which the description called a “kidnapping.”
Brovchenko’s family said he was beaten earlier in the day and called police to file a complaint, but was instead taken away and has since been out of touch with them.
Last week, the journalist reported an “interesting situation” at a police station where he went to file a complaint against the town mayor for alleged fraud. He said officers accused him of being a draft dodger but let him go instead of transferring him to military officials – a move he described as a sign that “the police will soon switch to the side of the people.” Brovchenko’s reporting often highlights suspected abuses by conscription centers.
City head Andrey Gorb, whom the journalist had accused of wrongdoing, claimed on Tuesday that Brovchenko is a “fake journalist” who “did everything to derail the mobilization.” He thanked police and military officers “for doing their job.”
Military mobilization is a contentious issue in Ukraine, viewed by many as unfair due to corruption that allows the wealthy and powerful to evade mandatory service. Videos of what critics call abductions regularly go viral, even as officials downplay the so-called “busification” as not a serious problem.
Public resistance to recruiting also exacerbates existing issues with Ukrainian troop desertion. The Prosecutor General’s Office recently stopped reporting the number of cases against soldiers who have left their posts, a move critics say is an attempt to conceal the scale of the manpower drain.
FDA Won’t ‘Rubber-Stamp’ Pfizer mRNA Flu Vaccine Without Better Safety Data
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | December 15, 2025
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) likely won’t approve Pfizer’s mRNA flu vaccine unless the drugmaker produces data proving the product is safe for seniors, according to FDA Commissioner Marty Makary.
Makary told Fox News last month that the data from Pfizer’s recently completed Phase 3 clinical trial showed that adults 65 and older were at higher risk of several serious adverse events, including kidney failure and acute respiratory failure.
“We’re not just going to rubber-stamp new products that don’t work, that fail in a clinical trial,” Makary said. “It makes a mockery of science if we’re just going to rubber-stamp things with no data.”
Makary said the shot “failed in seniors” and the trial data “showed zero benefit” from the vaccine.
Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., senior research scientist for Children’s Health Defense, said Makary’s comments signal a change in the way the FDA evaluates clinical trial data for vaccines.
“Makary’s FDA threw out the rubber stamp,” Jablonowski said. “The FDA, under different leadership, may have brushed off the lack of efficacy and Pfizer’s concerning safety data. A future administration may resurrect the rubber stamp. For the time being, this is Makary’s FDA.”
Last month, Pfizer published the results of its clinical trial in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). However, the published results included data only for participants between 18 and 64. Data for participants 65 and older, published only on ClinicalTrials.gov, drew criticism from some scientists.
That data showed that elderly trial participants who received the mRNA vaccine had a significantly higher rate of death and several serious adverse events, including cancer, compared to participants who received the conventional non-mRNA flu shot.
This contrasts with Pfizer’s claims that the vaccine delivered “statistically superior efficacy” compared to the conventional flu shot, and that the frequency of serious adverse events was “similar” across the mRNA and non-mRNA groups.
“The disposition of the kidney and lung issues associated with the mRNA shot was concerning,” Jablonowski said.
Some experts noted that even among the 18-64 age group, adverse events were higher among trial participants who received the mRNA shot.
The only mention of the trial data for people 65 and over in the NEJM came in an accompanying editorial, which noted that this age group faces “the highest risk of hospitalization or death” from the flu.
Dr. Meryl Nass, a former internist and founder of Door to Freedom, said she was encouraged by Makary’s remarks. She said the FDA is legally required to license only those drugs that are proven to be safe and effective.
“This mandate is at least 70 years old,” Nass said. “What Makary is saying is already mandated by Congress. But the FDA has chosen to ignore that mandate due to politics, and Congress has failed to enforce it. Makary is actually obeying the law for the first time in decades regarding flu shots.”
Makary: annual mRNA vaccination ‘not based on science’
Makary told Fox News that past administrations rubber-stamped vaccine approvals even when safety data was questionable.
“That was the MO in the Biden administration with the eternal COVID booster approvals for young healthy kids,” Makary said.
The current administration will adopt a different approach to vaccine approvals, especially for children, Makary said.
“Recommending that a 6-year-old girl get another 70 mRNA COVID shots, one each year for the rest of her life, is not based on science,” Makary said.
Makary’s remarks came days after the release of a leaked memo in which Dr. Vinay Prasad, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said changes are coming to the framework for evaluating flu vaccines.
“We will revise the annual flu vaccine framework, which is an evidence-based catastrophe of low quality evidence, poor surrogate assays, and uncertain vaccine effectiveness measured in case-control studies with poor methods. We will re-appraise safety and be honest in vaccine labels,” Prasad wrote in that memo.
Dr. Robert W. Malone, a member of ACIP and the committee’s influenza workgroup, told The Epoch Times that Prasad’s memo means “the entire influenza vaccine, annual vaccination enterprise is now subject to major disruption.”
In May, COVID-19 vaccine manufacturer Moderna withdrew its application for FDA approval of a combination mRNA flu and COVID-19 vaccine, after the FDA requested more clinical trials.
In June, the CDC’s vaccine advisers voted to stop recommending flu shots that contain thimerosal — a mercury-based preservative linked to neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism.
‘No one has figured out’ how to make mRNA shots safe
Makary’s statements came amid growing questions about the safety, efficacy and necessity of existing non-mRNA flu vaccines and waning uptake of the shots.
A Cleveland Clinic study published in April found that people who received the flu vaccine were 27% more likely to get the flu than those who didn’t.
Another study, published that month in JAMA Network Open, found that flu vaccines, whether given alone or in conjunction with COVID-19 shots, caused women to have longer menstrual cycles.
Endpoints News reported last month that public demand for flu vaccines is stalling and that “the general consensus among vaccine makers for Covid-19, flu and RSV is that dampening demand has shrunk sales.” Data from Eurostat indicate a decline in flu vaccine uptake in the European Union.
Research into mRNA-related platforms is also facing growing scrutiny. In August, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services cancelled nearly $500 million in funding for mRNA vaccine research.
“With regard to mRNA injections, no one has figured out how to make them safe,” Nass said. “mRNA shots provide an unknown dose, and they can be ‘the gift that keeps on giving,’ because we don’t know how to shut off the production of mRNA-coded proteins. We probably never will.”
Nass added that while FDA rules require that a specific dose be established for every drug, “somehow this rule has never applied to mRNA vaccines.”
“I believe the mRNA platform is irrevocably flawed for this reason alone, although there are other toxicities involved that also make the platform problematic,” Nass said.
A growing number of scientists have called for the suspension or withdrawal of the administration of mRNA vaccines and products.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
How Israel hijacked US politics, media and tech – without Americans even realizing

By Maryam Qarehgozlou | Press TV | December 20, 2025
When tech billionaire Larry Ellison was tapped to help oversee TikTok’s US operations, the move immediately drew scrutiny over the Oracle co-founder’s longstanding ties with the Israeli regime and how it could sharpen censorship of pro-Palestinian content on the platform.
Oracle’s ascendance came after the US Supreme Court upheld a law banning TikTok earlier this year, positioning the company as the frontrunner to take control of the Chinese-owned app.
Under the arrangement, Oracle would serve as the “secure cloud provider,” storing US user data and controlling the recommendation algorithm, an authority Washington framed as necessary to counter alleged Chinese “manipulation.”
But while the campaign against TikTok was outwardly led by China hawks, pro-Israel contractors, and the powerful Zionist lobby in Washington, played a central role in shaping the political pressure that made Oracle an obvious choice for the takeover.
Pro-Palestine advocates point out that a deeper motivation has been to silence the overwhelming pro-Palestinian opinions and sentiments on TikTok, where users have in great detail documented Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and challenged American-Israeli narratives about it.
The platform has become a key outlet for unfiltered footage from Gaza, including scenes of devastation, civilian casualties, and global solidarity campaigns.
Research from Northeastern University has consistently shown that pro-Palestinian posts dwarf pro-Israel content—most recently, in September 2025, by a ratio of roughly 17 to 1.
This imbalance reflects TikTok’s younger user base—Gen Z and millennials—who increasingly reject Washington’s and Tel Aviv’s deceptive and deeply manipulative positions.
Israel’s leadership understands the stakes. Benjamin Netanyahu recently described social media as a decisive “weapon” in modern warfare, calling the TikTok sale “the most important purchase” for securing influence over US public opinion.
Oracle’s deep alignment with Israeli interests has only heightened concerns. The company had already tightened its grip over aspects of TikTok’s operations while openly embracing a pro-Israel agenda and, as an Intercept investigation revealed, suppressing pro-Palestine activism within its own ranks.
Oracle CEO Safra Catz, an Israeli-American and longtime supporter of the Zionist project, made her stance bluntly clear, telling an Israeli business outlet: “For employees, it’s clear: if you’re not for America or Israel, don’t work here—this is a free country.”
Ellison, a major funder of Israeli causes and a close ally of Donald Trump, has long been celebrated by the US political establishment.
Trump—who placed him in the front row at his inauguration—famously hailed him as “one of the most serious players in the world.”
In 2017, Ellison made the largest single donation in the history of the so-called “Friends of the Israel Forces,” a US-based organization tied to the Israeli military responsible for genocidal attacks across Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
Oracle’s material support for Israel extends far beyond philanthropy. In 2021, the company opened a $319 million data center in occupied al-Quds, providing cloud services to Israeli banks, health institutions, and military units.
Immediately after Israel launched its genocidal assault on Gaza on October 7, 2023, Oracle publicly declared its support for the regime even as hospitals and schools were bombed.
Catz instructed that the message “Oracle Stands with Israel” be displayed across all company screens in more than 180 countries.
The company has also actively participated in Israel’s digital propaganda efforts. Following the outbreak of the war on Gaza, Oracle and the Israeli regime officials developed “Words of Iron,” a project designed to amplify pro-Israel content while whitewashing horrendous war crimes and countering critical narratives on TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter.
In February 2024, Oracle collaborated with the Israeli military’s cyber department on a hackathon seeking “tech solutions” for rehabilitating illegal settlements near Gaza.
Around the same time, Oracle donated medical and environmental supply bags worth half a million dollars to Israeli occupation forces.
Oracle’s political lobbying worked in tandem with its technological support. Last summer, Catz joined a closed-door meeting with US senators to push for continued weapons shipments to Israeli-occupied territories.
Later that year, Oracle partnered with Rafael Advanced Defense Systems—one of Israel’s major weapons manufacturers—on an AI program to provide “warfighters with quick, actionable insights in the battlespace.”
While Israel escalated its bombing and invasion of Gaza, some Oracle employees reported that the company was actively curtailing internal support for Palestinians.
Oracle’s charitable matching program quietly removed organizations such as Medical Aid for Palestinians and UNRWA from its list of eligible beneficiaries, effectively blocking workers from directing matched funds toward humanitarian relief.
Ellison and Catz are hardly outliers; they are part of a broader pattern of influential Zionist figures holding disproportionate power across US political, financial, media, academic, tech, and cultural institutions.
Although only about 2 percent of the US population identifies as Jewish, Jewish and Zionist representation among American elites is significantly higher—a trend that has shaped US foreign policy, cultural production, and the sustained alignment with Israel’s violent occupation.
Below is a list of influential Zionist figures who occupy key positions across these sectors.
Jews in American politics
In February 2021, less than a month after former US President Joe Biden’s inauguration, the Israeli daily The Jerusalem Post celebrated the new president’s appointments of 15 Jewish politicians.
“US President Joe Biden has appointed a strong, experienced team for his new administration. Among them are a minyan and a half of Jews. Indeed, I wonder if there has ever been a more Jewish US administration,” columnist Shlomo Maital wrote in the article.
The article added that “a vigorous American presence in world affairs, spearheaded by the Jewish A-Team, is in Israel’s long-term interest, more than an ‘America first’ administration that made the US largely irrelevant in global affairs.”
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, CIA Deputy Director David Cohen, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines were among the Jewish members of Biden’s administration holding influential positions.
The list also included Chief of Staff Ronald Klain, Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Eric Lander, Deputy Health Secretary Rachel Levine, and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas.
Other key figures were NSA Cybersecurity Director Anne Neuberger, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, COVID-19 Coordinator Jeff Zients, and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky.
Also serving in senior economic and political roles were Jared Bernstein, a member of the Council of Economic Advisors, and Douglas Emhoff, husband of Vice President Kamala Harris.
As Secretary of State, Blinken was a central public and diplomatic defender of US support for Israel during the initial phase of the Gaza genocide — pressing allies, coordinating arms transfers, and publicly backing negotiations framed to protect the Israeli regime while offering limited humanitarian concessions for the besieged people of the Gaza Strip.
According to rights groups and activists, his steady diplomatic backing helped shield Israeli genocidal actions from stronger, public US rebukes.
Yellen’s Treasury enforced and expanded financial pressure instruments, such as sanctions that the US uses against Iran and other supporters of the Palestinian resistance.
The Treasury under Yellen issued targeted sanctions on Iran’s petroleum and petrochemical sectors.
Cohen, as Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (Treasury), also designed and executed sanctions that targeted Iran’s oil, petrochemical, and financial sectors.
He is widely described in reporting and policy bios as the administration’s “sanctions guru.”
As Deputy Director of the CIA (and acting director briefly), Cohen brought his sanctions experience into targeting work against Iran — shaping covert disruption tools in addition to Treasury levers.
These unilateral sanctions form a core non-military lever in the US hawkish toolkit.
A Lancet study in August found a significant link between sanctions and higher mortality. The US and EU sanctions were associated with over 564,000 deaths annually from 1971 to 2021 in 152 countries.
It is similar to the global mortality burden associated with armed conflict.
Children under 5 years faced about an 8-9 percent higher death risk, and adults aged 60-80 years had about a 2-3 percent higher risk.
The study found the strongest effects for unilateral, economic, and US sanctions, but none from UN sanctions.
Trump’s first term also included many Jewish officials in senior roles. Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior advisor, was among the most influential, alongside Elliot Abrams, Special Representative for Venezuela and later Iran, and David Friedman, Ambassador to the Israeli-occupied territories.
Other key figures included Jason Greenblatt, Special Representative for International Negotiations on Palestine; Steve Mnuchin, Secretary of the Treasury; Stephen Miller, Senior Advisor for Policy; Gary Cohn, Director of the White House National Economic Council; Reed Cordish, Assistant to the President for Intragovernmental and Technology Initiatives; and Avrahm Berkowitz, Deputy Advisor to the President.
Additional senior officials were Rod Rosenstein, Deputy Attorney General; Elan Carr, Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism; Ellie Cohanim, Deputy Special Envoy for the same office; Jeffrey Rosen, Attorney General; Morgan Ortagus, State Department spokesperson; David Shulkin, Secretary of Veterans Affairs; and Lawrence Kudlow, Director of the National Economic Council.
Also serving in high-level positions were Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and advisor, who was raised Christian but converted to Orthodox Judaism to marry Kushner in 2009; John Eisenberg, National Security Council Legal Counsel; Ezra Cohen-Watnick, Acting Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; and Len Khodorkovsky, Deputy Secretary of State and Senior Advisor to the US Special Representative for Iran.
Several senior Jewish members of the Trump administration played central roles in reshaping US policy in ways strongly favorable to the Israeli regime.
Kushner was the architect of the Abraham Accords, the normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab states — including the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan.
Kushner also helped push forward the administration’s West Asia so-called “Peace to Prosperity” plan, which embraced long-standing Israeli positions on expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank, and occupation of Palestine.
David Friedman, the Ambassador to Israeli-occupied territories, used his position and strongly supported recognizing occupied al-Quds as Israel’s capital, encouraged the relocation of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to al-Quds, and backed Israel’s claim to West Bank settlements.
His diplomatic messaging consistently pushed Washington toward formally accepting Israeli control over the occupied territories.
Jason Greenblatt, Trump’s envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, worked closely with Friedman and Kushner.
He was one of the primary US officials promoting the idea that settlement expansion was not an obstacle to peace. His role helped shift the State Department’s language away from the traditional American view of settlements as “illegitimate,” aligning it more closely with Israeli regime positions.
Lawrence Kudlow and Gary Cohn, who headed the National Economic Council at different times, supported the administration’s economic components of West Asia policy, including aid packages tied to normalization and economic incentives designed to complement Kushner’s diplomatic agenda.
Elan Carr and Ellie Cohanim, from the State Department’s antisemitism office, advanced aggressive messaging on global antisemitism that often intertwined with defending the Israeli regime’s genocidal and apartheid policies. Their public diplomacy helped cast any criticisms of Israel in terms of antisemitism, influencing international discussions.
After re-entering the White House for a second term in January, Trump once again packed his inner circle with vocal Jewish and Zionist loyalists, many of whom stand out for their unprecedented hostility toward the Palestinian people and their basic rights.
Trump stacked his advisory ranks with a mix of familiar figures and newer faces who exert outsized influence over his relationship with the Jewish community in the US and in the occupied territories.
Among them are Will Scharf, White House staff secretary; Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser; Steve Witkoff, US special envoy to West Asia; Howard Lutnick, secretary of commerce; Boris Epshteyn, Trump’s personal senior counsel; Elizabeth Pipko, national spokesperson for the Republican Party; Lee Zeldin, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency; and Laura Loomer, an extremist influencer who operates as an unofficial loyalty enforcer within Trump’s political orbit.
Ivanka Trump and her husband were notably absent from much of Trump’s 2024 campaign and announced two years ago that they had stepped back to support Trump “outside the political arena.”
However, as one of Trump’s former top aides alongside Kushner—who played a central role in brokering the Abraham Accords and now runs a multibillion-dollar private equity fund bankrolled by the governments of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar—many speculate that the couple’s influence, particularly Kushner’s, will persist throughout Trump’s presidency.
This influence is expected to be especially pronounced in shaping the administration’s interference in West Asian affairs, as has already witnessed during the so-called Gaza “truce deal.”
Miller, one of Trump’s most hardline advisers on immigration during his first term, was instrumental in shaping some of the administration’s controversial policies, including the travel ban targeting seven Muslim-majority countries and the policy that separated the children of undocumented migrants from their parents at the border.
Pipko is an avowed Zionist and stated following her appointment that “supporting Israel is in the best interest of the United States.”
She has also attacked pro-Palestinian protests on US college campuses, singling out demonstrations at her alma mater, Harvard.
In an interview with Ynet News, she dismissed the protests as “awful” and “disgusting.”
Loomer, who has described herself as “a proud Islamophobe,” ran an online campaign in August that pressured the US State Department into halting visa issuance for children from Gaza in desperate need of medical care amid Israel’s genocidal war on the besieged Strip.
Zionist donors heavily underwrote Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.
Miriam Adelson, a casino magnate with an estimated net worth of $35 billion and a prominent Zionist mega-donor, spent more than $100 million to propel Trump back into the White House.
She is the widow of Sheldon Adelson, one of the most prolific financiers of illegal Israeli settlements in history.
Miriam Adelson is herself a settler, born and raised in the occupied Palestinian territories, and has been a vocal champion of the regime’s settler-colonialism.
She is closely associated with the ideology of neo-Zionism, which advocates not only the permanent retention of occupied Palestinian land but also the expansion of the occupation through annexation of Palestine and neighboring countries.
Ivy League presidents
The Ivy League is a group of eight elite private universities located in the northeastern United States. They include Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale.
At present, five of these institutions are led by Jewish presidents.
Their Jewish and Zionist identities have become most visible amid the wave of pro-Palestine university encampments that swept campuses across the United States.
Beginning at Columbia University on April 17, 2024, pro-Palestinian students established encampments on at least 80 college and university campuses nationwide, demanding that their institutions disclose investments tied to Israeli-occupied territories and divest from financial and cultural entities that support Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
These demands were raised in the context of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians—most of them women and children—and the continuation of the violent ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their land.
The protests echoed a call from Palestinian civil society for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) of Israel.
The largely peaceful demonstrations, however, were met overwhelmingly with force. Police crackdowns resulted in mass arrests and injuries, actions frequently ordered by the students’ own university administrators and, in some cases, backed by faculty members.
After taking office in January, Donald Trump signed an executive order to “combat antisemitism,” directing federal agencies to explore avenues for deporting pro-Palestinian activists, including student protesters—a demand to which many universities, including Ivy League institutions, readily capitulated.
Christopher Ludwig Eisgruber, a Jewish-American who has served as Princeton University’s 20th president since July 2013, ordered the removal of a major pro-Palestinian encampment on Cannon Green, citing preparations for commencement, and has repeatedly resisted demands that Princeton divest from the Israeli regime.
In April 2024, when police—acting on authorization from university administrators—arrested dozens of students during pro-Palestinian protests, including at Princeton, Eisgruber warned that those students would face disciplinary action that could “extend to suspension or expulsion.”
Alan Garber, another Jewish academic leader, was appointed president of Harvard University in August 2024 after serving as interim president since January 2 of that year.
He succeeded Claudine Gay, who was forced to resign after being accused by members of Congress of failing to adequately condemn and combat “anti-Semitism” on Harvard’s campus during pro-Palestine encampments.
Under Garber’s leadership, Harvard shared information with the US Department of Homeland Security in response to its request for the disciplinary records of international students and records of pro-Palestinian activity.
Sian Leah Beilock, the president of Dartmouth College, is another Jewish leader within the Ivy League.
She faced sharp criticism for her decision to call in police to dismantle a pro-Palestinian encampment on campus on May 1 of last year.
Mike Kotlikoff, who is also Jewish, assumed permanent leadership of Cornell University in March, as universities faced unprecedented pressure from the Trump administration over pro-Palestinian student protests.
In November 2024, while serving as Cornell’s interim president, a leak revealed that Kotlikoff had suppressed academic freedom after criticizing a pro-Palestinian professor’s planned course on the Gaza genocide in an internal email.
The course, Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance, was set to be taught by Eric Cheyfitz, who is also Jewish.
Cheyfitz, the Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters and a scholar of Indigenous studies, wrote in the course description that it would examine how Indigenous peoples have been engaged “in a global resistance against an ongoing colonialism.”
He further stated that the course would “present a specific case” of the ongoing genocidal war as “settler colonialism in Palestine with a particular emphasis on the International Court of Justice finding ‘plausible’ the South African assertion of ‘genocide’ in Gaza.”
Kotlikoff wrote in an email to another professor that he “personally finds the course description to represent a radical, factually inaccurate, and biased view of the formation of […] Israel and the ongoing conflict.”
Kotlikoff replaced Martha Pollack, who is also Jewish, and stepped down amid sweeping pro-Palestinian protests across US college campuses.
During the protests, Pollack expressed disappointment with student demonstrators and warned that if they refused to dismantle their encampments, “more temporary suspensions… are forthcoming.”
Christina Paxson, who converted to Judaism after marriage, serves as president of Brown University.
Last year, for the second time during her tenure, Paxson rejected divestment from 10 companies identified by a student-led pro-Palestine initiative as facilitating “the Israeli occupation of Palestinian Territory.”
Hollywood
It is widely documented that Jewish people are overrepresented in Hollywood relative to their share of the overall population.
Jews account for roughly 2 percent of the American population, yet various estimates suggest they have historically comprised a far higher proportion of key industry roles, including studio executives, writers, and actors.
Some discussions cite figures of 20 percent or higher in certain sectors of the entertainment industry.
Jewish entrepreneurs were instrumental in founding most of the major film studios during Hollywood’s so-called Golden Age.
These figures include Adolph Zukor, founder of Paramount Pictures; William Fox, founder of the Fox Film Corporation; Louis B. Mayer and Marcus Loew, co-founders of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM); Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack Warner, the brothers behind Warner Bros; Carl Laemmle, a founder of Universal Pictures; and Harry and Jack Cohn, founders of Columbia Pictures.
In more recent decades, prominent Jewish executives have continued to occupy influential positions in the entertainment industry.
They include Bob Iger, chief executive officer of The Walt Disney Company; Adam Aron, CEO of AMC Entertainment; Jon Feltheimer, CEO of Lionsgate; Shari Redstone, president and CEO of National Amusements; David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery; and influential film producer and former Sony Pictures head Amy Pascal.
For years, activists and some academics have warned that this concentration of power has helped shape an industry culture that frequently aligns with pro-Israel narratives, whitewashing Zionist crimes while marginalizing or excluding Palestinian perspectives.
Jewish Hollywood power brokers, they say, used their influence in the mid-20th century to mobilize cultural support for the Zionist project, portraying settler violence as “Jewish self-defense” in early films and theatrical productions.
By contrast, Palestinian narratives are routinely sidelined. Palestinian films are often excluded from major festivals and streaming platforms, while Israeli atrocities are frequently framed in ways that downplay or obscure Palestinian suffering.
Even films and documentaries that seek to center Palestinian humanity and lived experience have become a subject of sustained controversy within the industry.
Finding mainstream Hollywood productions that portray Palestinians in a balanced, non-dehumanizing manner remains difficult, as decades of output have either perpetuated negative stereotypes or erased Palestinian perspectives altogether.
The few films that do offer more nuanced or humanizing depictions of Palestinians are typically independent productions or international co-productions, often directed by Palestinian filmmakers working outside the Hollywood studio system.
Meanwhile, public support for Palestinian rights or criticism of the Israeli regime or its backers has increasingly carried professional consequences in Hollywood.
Actors and industry professionals—both Jewish and non-Jewish—have faced reprisals ranging from being dropped by agents to losing roles, contributing to a pervasive “silencing effect.”
In December 2023, two months into Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, actress Melissa Barrera, a star of the Scream franchise, was fired from the next installment after posting on social media about Israel’s real-life horror show in the Gaza Strip.
Barrera was not alone. In November of the same year, actress Susan Sarandon was dropped by United Talent Agency (UTA) after speaking at a pro-Palestinian rally.
Actor Mark Ruffalo also faced backlash during Israel’s May 2021 assault on Gaza, when he was pressured to apologize for using the term “genocide.”
Top 50 Billionaires
The latest rankings of the world’s wealthiest individuals highlight a notable trend: of the top 50 billionaires globally, at least 12 are Jewish, showcasing their considerable influence across technology, finance, and investments.
Leading the pack is Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, whose fortune stands at $213.7 billion, making him the third richest person in the world.
Close behind is Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms, which includes Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, with a net worth of $202.4 billion and a world rank of 4.
The search engine giants Larry Page and Sergey Brin, co-founders of Google, are ranked 6th and 7th, respectively, with fortunes of $157.8 billion and $150.7 billion.
Other prominent Jewish billionaires in the top 50 include Steve Ballmer of Microsoft ($127.7 billion, rank 9), Michael Dell of Dell Technologies ($113.5 billion, rank 12), and media mogul Michael Bloomberg of Bloomberg LP ($104.7 billion, rank 16).
Stephen Schwarzman, a major figure in investments, ranks 28th with $50.4 billion, while Jeff Yass, active in trading and investments, holds $49.6 billion at rank 29.
Luxury fashion also sees Jewish representation through Gerard Wertheimer and Alain Wertheimer, owners of Chanel, both holding $41.5 billion and sharing world rank 38.
The Miriam Adelson & family, tied to the casino industry, are valued at $34.9 billion, ranking 49.
The overwhelming majority are based in the United States, dominating technology and investment sectors, and heading companies that shape global information flows.
But beyond wealth, their power has had devastating consequences for Palestinians.
Meta and Oracle, for example, have been implicated in censoring Palestinian voices online, shaping narratives in favor of Israeli policies while silencing dissent.
Google, Microsoft, and Dell Technologies have enabled the Israeli military’s genocidal war on Gaza over the past two years, providing cloud infrastructure, AI, and technology services that the regime has used to target Palestinian civilians.
This concentration of wealth and technological control underscores not only the disproportionate influence of Jewish billionaires in the US tech world but also raises profound questions about the ways these platforms and services are weaponized in geopolitics—always aligning with US and Israeli agendas to the detriment of human rights.
Sport teams owners
Ownership patterns across major US professional sports leagues reveal a striking concentration of power among a small group of ultra-wealthy Jewish stakeholders, many of whom hold openly pro-Zionist political positions or have backed policies hostile to Palestinian advocacy.
In the National Basketball Association (NBA), estimates indicate that roughly 40 percent of franchises are majority-owned by individuals or groups with Jewish backgrounds—far exceeding their approximate 2 percent share of the US population.
An additional five teams include Jewish minority stakeholders, underscoring a level of influence that extends well beyond ownership into league governance and political positioning.
Out of 30 NBA teams, 12 are majority-owned by Jewish stakeholders.
These include Anthony Ressler (Atlanta Hawks); Gabe Plotkin and Rick Schnall (Charlotte Hornets); Jerry Reinsdorf (Chicago Bulls); Dan Gilbert (Cleveland Cavaliers); Miriam Adelson (Dallas Mavericks); Joe Lacob and Peter Guber (Golden State Warriors); Herbert Simon (Indiana Pacers); Micky Arison (Miami Heat); Marc Lore (Minnesota Timberwolves); Steve Ballmer (Los Angeles Clippers); Joshua Harris and David Blitzer (Philadelphia 76ers); and Mat and Justin Ishbia (Phoenix Suns).
Teams with Jewish minority owners include the Jacobs family (Sacramento Kings), Larry Tannenbaum (Toronto Raptors), George Kaiser (Oklahoma City Thunder), Oliver Weisberg (Brooklyn Nets), and Larry Fink (New York Knicks).
For four decades, the NBA itself has been led by two commissioners—David Stern (1984–2014) and Adam Silver (2014–present)—both of whom presided over eras marked by close alignment with US foreign policy narratives and repeated controversies related to Palestine.
The league has faced sustained criticism for suppressing or sanitizing Palestinian references under political pressure.
In 2017, the NBA removed “Palestine—occupied territory” from an official website list following a complaint from Israel’s sports minister.
A year later, the league apologized after a fan-voting list for the All-Star Game included “Occupied Palestine,” blaming an outsourced firm after Israeli officials demanded its removal.
Senior NBA figures, including Commissioner Adam Silver, along with current and former players, have participated in high-profile trips to Israeli-occupied territories, meeting with Israeli regime officials and engaging in public relations efforts to normalize occupation.
Meanwhile, players who expressed solidarity with Palestinians faced swift backlash.
Former NBA star Dwight Howard said he was pressured to delete a “Free Palestine” tweet in 2014 after receiving multiple calls, including one from the commissioner’s office.
This concentration of ownership and political alignment is not limited to basketball.
In the National Football League (NFL), 11 of the league’s 32 teams are owned by individuals or families with controlling Jewish stakes, including Arthur Blank (Atlanta Falcons), David Tepper (Carolina Panthers), Jim Irsay (Indianapolis Colts), Mark Davis (Las Vegas Raiders), Stephen Ross (Miami Dolphins), the Wilf family (Minnesota Vikings), Robert Kraft (New England Patriots), Steve Tisch (New York Giants), Jeffrey Lurie (Philadelphia Eagles), the Glazer family (Tampa Bay Buccaneers), and Josh Harris and Mitchell Rales (Washington Commanders).
Major League Baseball (MLB) shows similar patterns.
Eight of its 32 teams are majority-owned by Jewish stakeholders—David Rubenstein (Baltimore Orioles), Jerry Reinsdorf (Chicago White Sox), Bruce Sherman (Miami Marlins), Mark Attanasio (Milwaukee Brewers), Steve Cohen (New York Mets), the Fisher family (Oakland Athletics), Stuart Sternberg (Tampa Bay Rays), and the Lerner family (Washington Nationals).
Six additional teams have Jewish minority owners or executives, including Tom Werner (Boston Red Sox), David Blitzer (Cleveland Guardians), Stan Kasten and Peter Guber (Los Angeles Dodgers), and Lester Crown (New York Yankees).
Several teams without Jewish majority owners—including the New York Yankees, San Francisco Giants, Los Angeles Dodgers, and Toronto Blue Jays—are run by Jewish presidents or senior executives.
Across leagues, Jewish owners and executives with strong pro-Israel views have helped shape institutional responses that activists warn would marginalize Palestinian voices while reinforcing US and Israeli political narratives.
Federal Reserve
Beyond sports and entertainment, Jewish financiers have played central roles in US monetary power structures.
Paul Moritz Warburg, a German-Jewish banker from Kuhn, Loeb & Co., was a key architect of the US Federal Reserve System.
From 1987 to 2014, the Federal Reserve was chaired consecutively by Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, and Janet Yellen— three Jewish individuals overseeing periods of aggressive financial intervention that disproportionately benefited Wall Street while entrenching US global dominance.
Other influential Jewish figures include Emmanuel Goldenweiser, who supervised early Federal Reserve Board operations, and Stanley Fischer, who later served as vice chair.
Media, advertising, adult entertainment
Jewish Americans have also been influential across a wide spectrum of media, advertising, and public relations industries, sectors that play a decisive role in shaping political narratives, as well as adult entertainment businesses.
In the advertising and public relations world, influential Jewish executives include Richard Edelman, CEO of the global PR firm Edelman; Carl Spielvogel, co-founder of the major agency Backer & Spielvogel; Ronn Torossian, founder of 5W Public Relations; and Marian Salzman, a senior advertising and communications executive and trend expert.
Torossian, an American public relations executive, is a prominent and controversial figure in the far-right Zionist movement, known for his leadership of the recently re-launched Betar USA organization.
Betar USA, under Torossian’s leadership, has been using inflammatory rhetoric and calling for violence. In response to a social media post about Palestinian children killed in the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza, the group’s account commented, “Not enough. We demand blood in Gaza!”
Betar has been involved in identifying and circulating lists of pro-Palestinian protesters for deportation.
Digital media platforms have also been dominated by Jews with allegiance to the Tel Aviv regime.
Susan Wojcicki was an American business executive who was the chief executive officer of YouTube from 2014 to 2023.
Human rights and digital media advocacy groups, such as the organization 7amleh, have denounced YouTube’s policies and blatant bias against Palestinian voices and in favor of Israeli narratives.
In November 2015, Wojcicki and other Google representatives met with Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely to establish a mechanism for monitoring and removing Palestinian content deemed “inflammatory” by the apartheid regime in Tel Aviv.
In adult entertainment, prominent founders and executives include Michael Lucas, the founder and CEO of Lucas Entertainment, one of Manhattan’s largest gay adult film companies.
Last year, the adult film producer faced intense backlash after bragging about writing his name on a missile to be dropped in Gaza in a post on social media.
Several adult entertainment stars have since vowed to boycott working with Lucas and his company over the “reprehensible” post.
Taken together, the American landscape reveals not a coincidence but a pattern: a dense web of political power, corporate control, cultural influence, and financial leverage that consistently converges to protect Israel from accountability while suppressing Palestinian voices.
Disguised under the language of “security,” “shared values,” and “combating antisemitism,” US institutions have been mobilized by the powerful Zionist lobby to normalize occupation, whitewash mass killings, and criminalize solidarity with the oppressed.
The result, according to activists, is a manufactured consensus in which Israel’s crimes are laundered through American power centers, and dissent is treated as a threat.
As Gaza is starved, bombed, and erased in real time, this alignment exposes the moral bankruptcy of an order that privileges loyalty to a settler-colonial regime over international law, human rights, and basic human life, they warn.
HHS to Prohibit Hospitals From Performing Sex-Change Surgery on Kids
By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | December 19, 2025
Federal health officials are taking action to prohibit hospitals from performing sex-rejecting procedures on children and support the families of children who underwent such procedures and now regret it, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said Thursday at a live press conference.
Sex-rejecting procedures, or “gender-affirming care,” refers to the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and/or surgery as a treatment for gender dysphoria. The Mayo Clinic defines gender dysphoria as a “feeling of distress that can happen when a person’s gender identity differs from the sex assigned at birth.”
Children are falling prey to a “predatory multi-billion dollar industry,” said U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Kennedy cited a study that reported profits from sex-rejecting drugs and surgeries surpassed $4.4 billion in 2023, and were on track to top $7.8 billion by 2031.
Kids’ and teens’ brains aren’t fully mature yet when they decide to undergo the procedures, said Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Mehmet Oz.
Kennedy agreed, citing a comment by one doctor who “callously” described sex-rejecting procedures in kids as a “big money maker.”
Kennedy said:
“Hospitals rake in millions of dollars by convincing boys and girls that a lifetime of off-label prescriptions for estrogen and testosterone blockers, chest reconstruction surgeries and more are the only way to achieve true happiness and belonging in life.
“It’s wrong. The Trump administration will not stand by while ideology, misinformation and propaganda push young people into decisions they cannot fully understand and that they can never reverse.”
Kennedy told his audience — which included Congress members and several attorneys general — that he signed a declaration stating that healthcare practitioners who perform sex-rejecting procedures on minors would be deemed out of compliance with professionally recognized standards of healthcare.
The “overwhelming body of evidence” shows “these procedures hurt, not help children,” Kennedy said.
The declaration is based on an HHS peer-reviewed report published last month, “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices,” which concluded sex-rejecting procedures have an unfavorable risk-benefit profile and fail to meet professionally recognized healthcare standards.
Hospitals that perform sex-rejecting procedures on minors will no longer be eligible for Medicaid or Medicare funding. And no Medicaid funding can be used to pay for the procedures, Oz said. “We’re not going to let taxpayer money go to hurt these children.”
CMS will release a notice of proposed rulemaking to bar hospitals from performing sex-rejecting procedures on kids as a condition of participation in Medicare and Medicaid. It will also release a notice of proposed rulemaking to prevent Medicaid dollars from going toward sex-rejecting procedures on kids.
CMS will issue its final rule after a 60-90 day period soliciting public comments.
HHS also announced it will work to reverse the Biden administration’s attempt to have gender dysphoria be considered a disability under federal law.
That’s important, so hospitals that no longer perform sex-rejecting procedures will not be charged with discriminating against those with a disability, according to an HHS press release.
Admiral Brian Christine, M.D., HHS assistant secretary and head of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, on Thursday signed a public health message telling medical providers, families and policymakers that sex-rejecting procedures are not safe or effective treatments for pediatric gender dysphoria.
“Evidence shows sex-rejecting puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries are dangerous,” Christine said in a statement. “Providers have an obligation to offer care grounded in evidence and to avoid interventions that expose young people to a lifetime of harm.”
Doctors should ‘start slowly’ when treating gender dysphoria
President Trump charged HHS to undertake actions against sex-rejecting procedures in his January executive order, “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.”
The MAHA Report also named the “overmedicalization” of U.S. youth as a key driver of the childhood chronic disease epidemic, Kennedy noted.
As the number of youth diagnosed with gender dysphoria has increased in recent years, thousands of children have been “fast-tracked” into sex-rejecting procedures, Oz said.
Doctors seeing kids who have gender dysphoria should “start slowly” with the least invasive treatments possible, such as psychotherapy and evaluating for other conditions like ADHD, autism, anxiety and depression.
Gender expression is complex, and scientists are still trying to find out all the factors that play a role.
For instance, research by Shanna Swan, an environmental and reproductive epidemiologist, suggests that prenatal exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals can blur physiological and behavioral sex differences in offspring.
However, she and other scientists conducting similar research acknowledged the issue’s political and ethical implications.
“We have to be very careful not to frame gender non-conforming as an adverse effect,” said Swan, an environmental and reproductive epidemiologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in a report by Undark.
NIH to fund research supporting kids who want to ‘de-transition’
National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Jay Bhattacharya announced his agency, which already stopped supporting research on gender transition, will do science aimed at helping kids who are “de-transitioning” — or wanting to “de-transition” back to their original sex — and their families.
Thousands of kids and their families have been harmed by these procedures, Bhattacharya said. “We are going to fund science to help them because what I don’t want is for the answers to those families to be based on basically no evidence or presumed knowledge that we don’t actually have.”
Chloe Cole, a 21-year-old, spoke at the press conference about detransitioning at age 16 after starting on puberty blockers at age 13 and undergoing an irreversible double mastectomy at 15.
“I, myself, and every other detransitioner I know have so many different medical concerns,” she said. “They’re not being addressed because our own doctors don’t have any standards of care to refer to. They don’t know what to do with us.”
‘Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?’
Cole, now an activist against sex-rejecting procedures, has a bill named in her honor.
The “Chloe Cole Act,” initially proposed under a different title by the U.S. Department of Justice, would ban hospitals, clinics and doctors from performing sex-rejecting procedures on kids.
It would also allow children who underwent such procedures and their parents to sue the healthcare provider for damages. On Sept. 18, the bill was referred to the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. The bill hasn’t yet come up for a vote.
On Dec. 17, a related bill championed by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene passed the House. The “Protect Children’s Innocence Act,” which has yet to be voted on in the Senate, would make it a federal crime to provide gender-affirming care to a minor.
“Every American needs to hear Chloe Cole’s story,” Greene wrote in a 2022 X post of a speech Cole gave about her experiences. “The gender clinic presented my parents with the classic false dichotomy: Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?” Cole said.
At yesterday’s press conference, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Marty Makary said that the notion that parents are putting their child at increased risk of suicide if they don’t consent to sex-rejecting procedures is a “baseless claim that has never been supported with good data.”
Bhattacharya agreed. He told the audience this true story:
“There was a researcher that the NIH funded that did a study to answer the question, was it more likely that a child who didn’t transition would commit suicide?
“That researcher found the answer was no, but because the researcher’s ideology was so enmeshed in this — because if the answer is no, that means she might get canceled — she refused to release the study.”
The NIH obtained the researcher’s data and made it available for other researchers to work with, Bhattacharya said.
Makary also shared that the FDA will issue warning letters to 12 manufacturers and retailers that are illegally marketing breast binders to kids as a treatment for gender dysphoria.
Breast binders are a “class one medical device” usually used by women after breast cancer surgery, he said. Using them long-term can have negative effects, including pain, compromised lung function, lung collapse and difficulty breastfeeding.
“The warning letters will formally notify the companies of their significant regulatory violations and how they should take prompt corrective action,” Makary said.
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.
Government Bodies Humiliated by Promoting Junk Climate Scares from Retracted Nature Paper
By Chris Morrison | The Daily Sceptic | December 12, 2025
The old academic putdown ‘it’s not even wrong’ comes to mind in considering the disgraced and now retracted science paper Kotz et al. The science writer Jo Nova has speculated on how the paper was even published in Nature, “given how awful it was”. With its unfalsifiable claims of $38 trillion of global damage each year by 2050 due to human-caused climate change, Kotz was patent nonsense. It was not even within touching distance of other extravagant claims of climate damage. Yet Kotz was avidly picked up by government agencies around the world seemingly desperate to use any old gobbledegook to push the Net Zero fantasy.
Being wrong assumes that something is within a ballpark of being right. The Kotz authors tried that and made some adjustments to the figures after initial criticism when the paper was published in April 2024. But in the end the task was hopeless and Nature retracted the work this month. But not before its conclusions on climate impacts have cascaded through numerous governmental operations tasked with determining and regulating public policy. A great deal of rewriting now looks to be in order.
Earlier this month, the Bank of England used “plausible” scenarios derived from Kotz to go into full climate catastrophising overdrive with suggestions that asset and bond markets could face stresses similar to the 2008 global crash. On Monday, the Daily Sceptic looked in detail at the Horlicks made by the UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility, which used Kotz to divest itself of the opinion that the country’s GDP would fall by nearly 8% unless humans stopped the weather changing. Annual state borrowing was forecast to rise by £50 billion by 2050 unless the Net Zero rain dance was successful. In a report to the British Parliament, the Climate Change Committee referenced Kotz in a section discussing economic damage arising from climate risk. Meanwhile, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) appears to have been a keen fan of Kotz and all its downstream impact works such as Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) Phase V. Over the last year there are many references with the FCA keen to emphasise non-linear economic losses and the need for conservative assumptions in financial stress testing.
What might be considered surprising is that all of this work closely connected to Kotz was produced at a time when serious doubts about the paper were raised in science circles. From the start of this year, concerns started to mount about data quality and extrapolation methods. It became apparent there were problems over an Uzbekistan economic database from 1995-1999 that led to model estimates of temperature impacts on growth inflating global projections by a factor of three. Attempts were made to revise the original paper but in the end the task was too great and Nature finally retracted it. It is hardly an exaggeration to observe that dodgy data from Uzbekistan cascaded through the paper out into the real world where it led the Bank of England just a few days ago to publish scares of climate-induced global crashes.
“This study was used to justify all kinds of economic decisions that otherwise make no sense. Ka-ching. Ka-ching,” notes Jo Nova. This is emblematic of the whole field of climate research, she observed, adding: “Monopsonistic research always finds what the one sole customer (the Blob) pays it to find. Thus the government-funded establishment loved it. Look how popular this junk research was.”
The Kotz paper arose from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), a known nest of hard-line climate activists with substantial past climate catastrophising form. This is the number one place to go for disappearing sea ice, an overturning Gulf Stream and bazillion-dollar falls in global wealth. Needless to say it is backed by copious amounts of Government money from the European Union as well as private foundations. Considerable money appears to flow from individual project grants.
Interestingly, few US government bodies appear to have been caught out by the damage impacts model produced by Kotz that was later integrated into the NGFS catastrophising scenarios. The Trump Administration has been cleaning house of all the federal climate catastrophising BS this year. It didn’t take long for the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Treasury Department to withdraw from the NGFS, an international body of regulators and banks set up at the height of the Green Mania in 2019.
Earlier this year, President Trump signed an executive order that said the results of federal scientists must be falsifiable, computer models must be explainable and negative results available. Not all activist-scientists were happy with this return to the ”gold standard”, with a group including Michael ‘Hockey Stick’ Mann writing in the Guardian – seemingly without irony – that it will “destroy American science as we know it”.
It certainly destroyed the ability of the American Central Bank to tout global financial collapse on the basis of a Government-funded science paper so bad even ideologically-captured Nature has been forced to retract it.
Zelensky is stealing the election before it begins
By Tarik Cyril Amar | RT | December 16, 2025
Currently, with intense diplomacy taking place to – perhaps – end the Ukraine conflict, questions surrounding Kiev’s domestic politics may seem secondary. However, in reality, they are as important as the search for peace.
There are two reasons: First, Ukrainians have a right to finally be released from their perverse bondage to what is, in effect, a long-ago failed Western proxy war against Russia. Those still in denial about this fact should check out a recent interview with a former Biden administration policy official. Amanda Sloat has casually admitted that much now: The war could have been avoided if the West had not insisted on NATO membership prospects for Ukraine, which never really existed anyhow.
Observers not blinded by Western propaganda – including this author – were warning that, for Ukraine, this fake NATO perspective was a road to catastrophe. But the Sloats of this world refused to listen. Why then did the West want the war? To diminish Russia by using Ukraine as a battering ram and Ukrainians as cannon fodder.
Secondly – and more practically – no peace will last without an end to Ukraine’s ultra-corrupt current authoritarian regime. Talk about defending “democracy” in Ukraine is absurd. Under Vladimir Zelensky, there is no such thing left. By now, even some Western mainstream commentators are starting to admit Zelensky’s authoritarianism. Yet the former entertainment producer and vulgar comedian started systematically undermining what little democracy Ukraine used to have well before the escalation of February 2022, as Ukrainian observers and critics at the time widely discussed and deplored.
Zelensky’s regime is so corrupt and has sold out its own people so badly to the West that a lasting peace threatens it not only with losing power, which it certainly would, but also with a wave of prosecutions starting at the very top, with Zelensky himself and rolling down like an avalanche. Put differently, this is a regime that would always be tempted to re-start the war to distract from the retribution it must fear.
That is why US President Donald Trump is right to call for presidential elections in Ukraine. Moreover, Zelensky has extended his mandate on flimsy grounds and thereby usurped power even formally. The often-heard claim that Ukraine cannot hold presidential elections in wartime, by the way, is badly misleading, and a thoroughly politically motivated misrepresentation of the facts: In reality, the Ukrainian constitution only prohibits parliamentary elections in time of war. Elections for the presidency are impeded by ordinary laws which can, of course, easily and legally be changed by the majority which Zelensky controls in parliament. That is merely a question of political will, not legality.
By now, even Zelensky and Kiev’s political elite admit the above. Indeed, Zelensky has charged parliament with devising procedures for such elections. So, you may ask, what about his regime and its Western propagandists claiming for over a year that this is simply illegal and can’t be welcome? Simple: that was a big fat lie. Welcome to Zelensky world and its crooked reflection in the mirror cabinet of the Western mainstream media.
Yet curb your enthusiasm. In all likelihood, Zelensky remains dishonest – really, does he even have another mode? – and is engaging not in a genuine attempt to finally allow Ukrainians their long overdue say about his horrific rule. Instead, it is – alas! – much more plausible to interpret his turn toward elections as yet another tactic of stalling and deception.
For one thing, he and his team are trying to set conditions that seem designed to prevent the elections again, while blaming others, first of all Russia, of course. In essence, their demands boil down to, once again, pushing for either more Western arms or a ceasefire that they can abuse instead of the full peace agreement that is actually needed. Moscow will not agree to such a scheme, as Kiev knows very well.
In addition, this would not be the Zelensky regime if it did not also ask for even more Western money. This time, the shameless idea is that the West must pay for elections in Ukraine – presumably because that is how democracy works in a sovereign country.
Things can get even worse: There is also the possibility, pointed out by Ukrainian observers, that Zelensky and his fixers are planning to shift the whole presidential election online. If they do, falsification in Zelensky’s favor is de facto guaranteed.
In sum, there is no good reason to believe Zelensky is really ready to give up power – because that is what elections would mean – to make way for a return to a more normal type of politics. His current statements and gestures seemingly indicating the opposite are meant to deceive, most of all, the West. Neither Ukrainians nor Russia is likely to believe him anyhow.
There is a glimmer of hope, however: The fact alone that Trump has challenged Zelensky in this area and that the latter’s European backers cannot shield him from that challenge is a good sign. As is the fact, of course, that Zelensky has felt pressured and cornered enough to not revert to the old lie that presidential elections are not possible in wartime.
Instead, Ukraine’s past-best-by leader has implicitly admitted they – and that he was lying before – and is now forced to deploy stalling techniques. That in and of itself, like Ukraine’s escalating corruption scandals, shows that Zelensky’s grip is slipping. And that is good for everyone, including Ukrainians. For without an end to the Zelensky regime, it is likely that no peace can be made and certain that no peace can last.
Tarik Cyril Amar is a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory.
The Great European Asset Heist Will Fail
By Leanna Yavelskaya | Ron Paul Institute | December 12, 2025
Let’s stop pretending Brussels is engaged in noble statecraft. The EU’s rush to steal more than €180 billion in frozen Russian sovereign assets held at Euroclear is the most reckless gamble Europe has taken in decades. Moscow’s central bank is not wrong to call the move unlawful; its lawsuit against Euroclear merely underscores a simple truth: weaponizing sovereign reserves violates long-standing norms that have protected global capital flows for half a century. Brussels may dress this up as “solidarity with Ukraine,” but using immobilized reserves as collateral for massive loans crosses a line that Western institutions once treated as sacrosanct.
The political sales pitch — that these are merely Russia’s “war chest” — deliberately ignores an uncomfortable reality: sovereign reserves ultimately underpin a nation’s entire economy, including its citizens’ savings and pensions. Seizing or leveraging them sets a dangerous precedent: any country deemed objectionable by a majority of EU governments could one day see its wealth confiscated. That is not rule-of-law liberalism; it is discretionary power cloaked in humanitarian rhetoric.
Euroclear, one of Europe’s critical financial arteries, now finds itself caught between Brussels’ political ambitions and Moscow’s threats of counterclaims. Belgium knows the danger intimately — its own officials have repeatedly warned that breaching sovereign-immunity doctrines could expose the country to massive liabilities. When even EU member states start raising alarms, you know the legal ground is shaky.
What is truly astonishing is the European Commission’s refusal to confront the broader consequences. Financial systems run on trust, not idealistic speeches. Undermine the principle that sovereign reserves are untouchable, and investors everywhere — not just in Moscow — take note. China, which holds substantial euro-denominated assets, has already condemned the EU’s approach as destabilizing. Beijing may not dump its euro holdings tomorrow, but the EU is actively encouraging major powers to question Europe’s reliability as a financial partner. That alone should alarm anyone who cares about the euro’s long-term viability.
The internal politics are equally explosive. Hungary, Slovakia, and even Belgium itself have raised serious objections on both legal and risk grounds. If Brussels forces the plan through regardless, it will only strengthen the already potent narrative in several member states that the EU is willing to trample national interests and established law in pursuit of ideological crusades. This is the kind of overreach populists dream of — an elite-driven project that can be portrayed, not entirely unfairly, as prioritizing geopolitical theater over the economic security of European citizens.
Then there is the Ukraine question itself. For many Europeans, supporting Kiev is neither a moral nor a strategic imperative. Ukraine’s deep governance problems are real and have been acknowledged by its own officials and Western auditors alike. Pouring unprecedented sums into the country without ironclad safeguards invites legitimate criticism that Brussels is acting on emotion rather than sober judgment.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Washington has every incentive to watch Europe stumble. If investors lose confidence in the euro, the dollar benefits. If European financial institutions face turmoil, American ones expand their reach.
Europe could still choose a wiser path. Instead of prolonging an unsustainable conflict by stealing sovereign Russian assets — a move that virtually guarantees escalation and risks spilling the war into the Eurozone itself, with unimaginable and utterly destructive consequences — European leaders could support genuine peace efforts.
The EU cannot afford to make the wrong choice. Yet that is precisely what it is doing, and for nothing more than short-term political posturing.
EU member’s government resigns amid anti-corruption protests
RT | December 11, 2025
Bulgaria’s government has announced its resignation following mass anti-corruption protests across the country. In a statement on Thursday, Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov said he and his cabinet would step down after facing their sixth no confidence vote.
The announcement comes just weeks before Bulgaria is set to join the euro zone on January 1. The government had previously proposed a controversial 2026 budget, drafted in euros, that included higher taxes and increased social security contributions.
The bill, however, was met with weeks of mass demonstrations as protestors accused the government of corruption and voiced frustration at the failure of successive leaderships to root it out. Bulgaria has held seven national elections over the past four years.
Although the government withdrew the budget proposal last week, protestors continued to demand Zhelyazkov’s resignation and the ouster of several other influential politicians.
On Thursday, Zhelyazkov’s government was set to face its latest motion of no confidence tabled by opposition parties. However, before the vote took place, the prime minister announced that although the motion would go ahead and be defeated by the ruling coalition, he and his government would nevertheless resign.
Bulgarian President Rumen Radev, who has limited powers under the country’s constitution, had previously backed the calls for the government’s resignation. Following Zhelyazkov’s resignation, Radev is expected to ask parties in parliament to form a new government. If they are unable to do so, he will be tasked with forming an interim administration until new elections can be held.
NATO corruption scandal triggers Israeli arms contracts cuts – media
RT | December 9, 2025
Multiple NATO-Israel arms contracts have been suspended over a massive bribery scandal in the heart of the US-led military bloc’s buying section that has already triggered multiple arrests across Europe, several investigative media outlets have reported.
The scandal has exposed a shadowy network of private operators exploiting a revolving-door system that allows former NATO Support and Procurement Agency (NSPA) staff to become consultants in the defense industry, where they flourish in “the new geopolitical situation” as a result of “the explosion in European defense budgets,” according to La Lettre.
The NSPA has been forced to suspend multiple contracts with Israel’s largest weapons producer, Elbit Systems, over mounting evidence that the Israeli company used a former NSPA staff member to bribe ex-colleagues to secure deals for the company.
A 60-year-old Italian national, Eliau Eluasvili, has been on the run since late September, when a Belgian court issued an international arrest warrant for him.
The decision was made over the summer in response to a multi-nation investigation into brivery allegations, with new details revealed on Monday by La Lettre, Le Soir, Knack, and Follow the Money.
An internal NSPA email dated July 31 lists 15 suspended contracts, 13 of them involving Elbit Systems or its subsidiary Orion Advanced Systems, according to investigative reporters. The deals under scrutiny include deals for fuzes, aircraft flares, 155mm artillery shells, and upgrades for Portuguese naval patrol ships, according to the outlets.
Documents also indicate that the Israeli manufacturer has been barred from bidding on new contracts until the inquiry concludes.
The sharp rise in defense spending among EU members has been driven by efforts to arm Ukraine against Russia and by Brussels’ claims that member states must prepare for a possible direct confrontation with Moscow.
Russian officials have long argued that corrupt interests within Europe are influencing the West’s increasingly confrontational policies.








