While there has been a great deal of hullabaloo concerning Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, one would probably not have expected senior officials at the United Nations to find it necessary to have their say on the matter. Yet on November 5th Volker Türk, the new UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, did indeed weigh-in, sending an open letter to Mr. Musk to express his “concern and apprehension” about Twitter’s role in the “digital public square”. He urged Musk to make sure human rights would be “central to the management of Twitter”, and to “address harms” associated with the platform, and also took the time for a bit of finger-wagging at Twitter’s new CEO for sacking Twitter’s human rights team (no, I had no idea it had one either).
The letter was almost certainly only sent so that Türk, who assumed office in mid-October and is a comparative unknown (some UN insiders were apparently hoping for Michelle Obama or Angela Merkel), can get a bit of recognition. But it is instructive nonetheless in giving stark expression to the awkward position which human rights advocates have found themselves adopting when it comes to one of the most salient issues of the day – the regulation of speech online and particularly the subjects of disinformation and misinformation.
This happens in the course of two short paragraphs. Starting off, Türk is keen to emphasise the importance of protecting free speech. Twitter, he notes, is being pressed by governments to take down content or use upload filters, and he urges it in clear terms to “stand up for the rights to privacy and free expression to the full [sic] extent possible under relevant laws”. So, on the one hand, he adopts a strong position against censorship, implying that speech should only be restricted online where it would cross the border into illegality.
Yet on the other hand, in the very next breath, he declares that “free speech is not a free pass” and that the “viral spread of harmful disinformation…results in real world harms”. Therefore, in his view, Twitter must take responsibility to “avoid amplifying content” that results in harms to people’s rights – whether or not, by implication, it is technically legal. Hence, for example, scepticism about the efficacy of vaccines, legally expressed, ought nonetheless to be supressed given the impact it might have on the right to health.
This can only be described as cakeism. For Türk, it is apparently desirable both to protect freedom of expression to the fullest extent possible under the law, and yet also to restrict lawful speech where it might result in ‘harms’. It is easy to see the appeal in the abstract of the idea that these positions can be reconciled, and Türk indeed concludes his letter by suggesting that “our shared human rights offer a unifying way forward”. But it is difficult to see from its content how this could be so. Does Türk believe that freedom of speech should be protected insofar as it is possible to do so? Or does he believe lawful speech should be suppressed to prevent harm? He can believe in one, but he surely cannot coherently believe in both.
The wider point is that human rights advocates like Türk have rather lost faith in their own model. For decades, it has been orthodox human rights doctrine that all human rights are, in UN-speak, “indivisible and interdependent”. The rights to freedom of expression, freedom of association, non-discrimination, health, food, housing, education, and so on, all support one another and, indeed, cannot properly be enjoyed without the others. It is therefore not only possible to secure (say) freedom of expression and the right to health – they actually bolster each other.
The rationale for this can be readily understood: if freedom of expression is secure, then people will have access to the full range of information and opinion available on any given topic, and therefore policymakers, healthcare providers, doctors and patients will be able to make better health-related decisions than they would otherwise. There is therefore a direct link between securing freedom of speech and the right to health. (And conversely, of course, securing the right to health means increasing opportunities for people to express themselves freely – one will find it much easier to actively participate in public discourse if one is in good health than not.) What is true in this example is true across the round, and the orthodox position in the UN human rights system has long been that these mutually-supportive linkages can be found throughout the human rights corpus.
This is not, however, the position that Türk adopts in his letter. To reiterate, for the new High Commissioner, freedom of expression and the right to health are not in fact “indivisible and interdependent”, but incommensurate. If people are able to express themselves freely, they will circulate dangerous disinformation about vaccines, and harm will result. Freedom of expression does not reinforce the right to health; it undermines it.
Türk is no loose cannon. As short as his letter to Musk is, it essentially summarises the position adopted in a recent report to the UN General Assembly by the Secretary-General himself. This report manages somehow to express a robust defence of the “right to hold opinions without interference” and an insistence that “free communication of information and ideas about public and political issues… is essential”, while at the same time advocating for state intervention to prevent the spread of inaccurate information concerning “public health, electoral processes or national security” and the demonetisation of legal-but-harmful content. The same schizophrenic attitude is adopted as in Türk’s letter, but the message is clear enough: while it is necessary to pay lip service to the importance of freedom of expression, the system as a whole now disavows the “indivisible and interdependent” doctrine, and instead sees freedom of expression as being potentially antagonistic to other rights.
What are we to make of this? The clue is in the types of harmful inaccurate information that both Türk and the Secretary-General identify as particularly dangerous and hence warranting state suppression – i.e., those implicating public health, electoral processes and national security. It is no accident that these subjects map pretty closely to the issues that are of greatest concern to the global bien pensant class in which these figures are so firmly entrenched – Covid vaccines, ‘election denialism’, and Russian disinformation. And it is not really a great surprise that when the chips are down and the consensus within that class is that oppositional views on those topics represent a genuine threat, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and Secretary-General suddenly find that freedom of expression is not so “indivisible and interdependent” with respect to other rights at all. Indeed, it is to be sacrificed where those particular concerns are raised. Human beings, as we know, can be remarkably flexible on points of principle when peer pressure is applied – even, it turns out, senior human rights lawyers and UN Secretary-Generals.
More broadly, if one were being especially cynical, one might say that this is further evidence supporting the long-term criticism of the international human rights system – that it is essentially a forum for pharisaical expressions of right-on opinions which vary in accordance with whatever the ‘current thing’ is. This would not be entirely fair – the UN human rights organs do very important work – but it is sometimes easy to see how this view proliferates. Türk’s letter is suggestive not so much of a commitment to the letter of human rights law, but rather only to the contemporary concerns of a particular elite constituency. This in turn indicates that the UN human rights apparatus as a whole is geared more toward addressing the anxieties of that constituency than it is towards standing up for human rights across the board. Is it any wonder, then, that ordinary people generally take a sceptical view about human rights in the round?
Dr. David McGrogan is Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School.
The spectacular crash of FTX, discussed in TCW yesterday, is developing into a scandal of epic proportions. On Friday November 11 FTX filed for bankruptcy, owing in excess of $3.1billion to more than a million customers, including major institutional investors such as BlackRock and Sequoia Capital. After a brief two and half years of trading, FTX’s rise and fall has left many with more questions than answers. Not least because the scandal is revealing more than just a loss of money, exposing much that the globalists might prefer to remain hidden.
There are two schools of thought. One is that FTX, the world’s second biggest crypto exchange, was run by youthful MIT graduates who got out of their depth. The second is that FTX may have been set up as a scam from the beginning. Without doubt, FTX had the fingerprints of the globalists all over it. It was once heavily promoted by the World Economic Forum, with its own page on their website describing FTX as a ‘cryptocurrency exchange built by traders, for traders’ and its founder regularly attended Davos gatherings. The key question that needs answering is cui bono, who benefited from FTX’s activities? Knowing that might give some clue as to its purpose.
Certainly, in respect of the age of those running the company, FTX was ideal. Globalists have a penchant for youth (vide WEF’s Young Global Leaders programme). Having the young nominally run things is a useful ploy. They attract other young who then form armies of ‘wokeists’ to play the role of useful idiots, as we see in Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil. Youthfulness also creates its own tyranny in the sense that it cannot be challenged without appearing to stand in the way of ‘progress’. Thus the adults in the room become so overawed by the presence of these wunderkind that they forget to ask the obvious questions, such as ‘how much help did you have to get started?’
In the case of the Swedish doom goblin, we are supposed to believe that she spontaneously started skolstrejk för klimatet. Yet curiously she has moments when she appeared incapable of answering questions about climate without a script.
Back in the USA, Mark Zuckerberg apparently built Facebook on the back of some Harvard campus networking in 2004, even though coincidentally the Pentagon had begun work on something similar called Lifelog. Facebook, of course, has the great advantage in terms of collecting data that its users voluntarily provide so much detail. This summer, as if to emphasise the close ties with intelligence services, Zuckerberg confessed to Joe Rogan that Facebook had followed FBI guidance over the Hunter Biden laptop affair and in effect ‘shadow banned’ the story. Even before that, the shine had come off Zuckerberg as his holding company Meta has continued to lose value; now 11,000 employees have been sacked.
Then we have FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried (aka SBF or as some are calling him ‘less bankman; more fried’ and even ‘Sam Bankster Fraud’), the 30-year-old founder of the crypto exchange.
SBF ticked a lot of boxes for the globalists. He was part of the ‘Effective Altruism‘ movement which claims to be about ‘doing good better’. Which meant that he could use some of his $16billion net worth on not-for-profit charities dear to the globalists focused on planet-saving projects. In July 2021 he set up the FTX Foundation which spawned a number of initiatives such as research into stopping future pandemics; FTX Climate, a fund for research into climate change; the FTX Future Fund with areas of interest such as Artificial Intelligence and the risks from bioweapons, and FTX Community, concerned with poverty, animal welfare and community outreach. All good philanthropic stuff, the sort that globalists like.
Institutional investors were reassured by SBF’s collaboration with Congress to develop regulation for the crypto sphere. With such high moral standards and lots of virtue-signalling – saving the planet, working to improve regulation around crypto, hanging out with Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, what could possibly go wrong?
Unfortunately for investors, as bankruptcy proceedings are currently revealing, SBF and his colleagues were involved in an unethical and fraudulent operation. Little did investors realise that SBF was in effect running a Ponzi scheme which secretly reallocated client funds out of FTX into Alameda Research, SBF’s trading company, as collateral to cover risky trades. Because there was no oversight (FTX lacked a board of governance) and no one asked hard questions, FTX ran out of liquidity and became insolvent.
It could be said that SBF’s absence of moral boundaries was reflected in his unconventional lifestyle living in the Bahamas in a polyamorous set-up with several of his colleagues. His supposed girlfriend who was running Alameda Research, Caroline Ellison, is on record describing it as being like an ‘imperial Chinese harem’. He also had no problem being a slush fund for the Democrat Party, being the second largest donor after George Soros; or being involved in financing Ukraine. FTX helped the Ukraine government to set up a crypto donations website, ‘Aid for Ukraine‘, which has led to accusations of US tax money sent to Ukraine being cycled back to the US via FTX.
Those who believe that FTX was a deliberate scam from the start point to SBF’s work with Congress as the main reason for FTX’s creation. It suited those who regard the decentralised nature of crypto as a threat to centralised financial controls to have a Trojan Horse insider who could work to undermine the crypto space. Even crashing FTX helps their cause as now all crypto is tarred with the Ponzi accusation and, having lost money, institutional investors will stay away from the space. At the end of the day, these are all power games. SBF may well have been a victim of larger forces. He served his purpose and had his fun in the sun.
Meanwhile we should all be more wary of wunderkinder. Not least the World Economic Forum, which has deleted FTX from its website and doesn’t seem keen to discuss the matter further. I wonder why?
One week ago, the Ukrainian government may have deliberately attacked neighbor Poland in an attempt to draw the NATO alliance into its war with Russia. The incident involved a missile that hit a grain processing site inside Poland and killed two farmers. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky immediately blamed Russia for the incident even though he surely must have known that the missile had been fired from Ukraine, meaning that he may have been using a so-called “false flag” to create a false narrative of what had occurred. He also immediately called upon NATO to intervene, citing Article 5 of the NATO treaty which requires all members of the alliance to come to the aid of any individual member that is attacked. An attack on one is an attack on all. Poland is a NATO member and it currently hosts a permanent US military base.
The US mainstream media, most particularly the Associated Press and NBC News, immediately repeated the tale being told by Zelensky, but the “blame the Russians” narrative began to unravel. The remains of the missile revealed that it was of a type used for air defense that is in the Ukrainian arsenal, but not currently used by the Russians, and both Moscow and Washington surely had access to satellite imagery that would demonstrate the actual flight path of the missile that struck Poland.
Those in government and the media who wanted to be supportive of Zelensky began to suggest that the Ukrainian missile must have somehow malfunctioned to land in Poland, making it an unfortunate accident. But others more familiar with the performance characteristics of the weapon were skeptical, seeing something possibly more sinister in the tale.
By last Thursday the story had effectively disappeared in much of the mainstream media as it no longer conformed to the acceptable narrative that it was a Russian-launched missile, which Zelensky has since continued to insist to be the case. President Joe Biden, who was at the G-20 Summit conference in Indonesia at the time, to his credit, responded to the news by stating that there was no intelligence to confirm that the missile had come from Russia and that its apparent trajectory did not support that view. Ironically, Biden had authorized an additional $37 billion in aid for Ukraine the day before the incident in Poland took place.
Biden’s message seeking to deescalate the potential crisis was repeated by Pentagon and intelligence personnel during the day, though Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin emphasized that the US would continue to support Ukraine “for as long as it takes.” He also added that even though the missile was Ukrainian, the incident was Russia’s fault. He did not explain why that was so. NATO’s secretary general Jens Stoltenberg also promoted the same line as Austin, commenting that the incident was “likely caused by a Ukrainian air defense missile fired to defend Ukrainian territory… This is not Ukraine’s fault. Russia bears responsibility for what happened in Poland yesterday because this is a direct result of the ongoing war.”
Given the fact that Zelensky has been saying and doing everything possible to draw the US and NATO into fighting Russia on his behalf, I believe that the missile strike was quite plausibly a deliberate “false flag” attempt to start a much broader war. That such a war could easily turn nuclear reveals just how reckless Zelensky can be. One NATO country foreign diplomat based in Kiev told the Financial Times that “This is getting ridiculous. The Ukrainians are destroying [our] confidence in them. Nobody is blaming Ukraine and they are openly lying. This is more destructive than the missile.”
To be sure, Zelensky is capable of anything and no lie is too mendacious for the former comedy actor who is now basking in the glow of his celebrity. Hollywood personalities like Sean Penn and Ben Stiller are increasingly making the pilgrimage to Kiev to shake hands, embrace and do photo ops. And Zelensky’s calendar is also featuring some trips to the United States. On November 30th, he will reportedly be in New York City at a “live event” hosted by the New York Times with Sam Bankman-Fried, Larry Fink (CEO of Blackrock), and US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen as the main speakers.
Yes, Zelensky will be side-by-side with THAT Sam Bankman-Fried, if he shows up, who has also been much in the news lately for his having pulled off the largest currency fraud in history, creating losses for investors totaling multi-billions of dollars as a consequence of the collapse of his exchange-trading company FTX! And it just might be that Zelensky and Bankman-Fried already know each other. Bankman-Fried has been a major financial supporter of Democratic Party politicians, having donated $40 million for “get out the vote” projects in the recently completed election cycle. He is second only to George Soros as a Democratic Party funder, and also has separated donated to causes like unconditionally supporting Ukraine that the Democrats overwhelmingly favor. In April he hosted a conference at his $40 million home in the Bahamas which featured appearances by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton and he has also been a generous supporter of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
There has been considerable speculation that the unregulated and unmonitored flow of billions of dollars of US taxpayer provided money through Ukraine’s notoriously corrupt government provided a perfect mechanism for large scale money laundering. Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson has been following the FTX-Ukraine story closely and observes that “The financial collapse of FTX… is exposing evidence that the Democrats, some Republicans, the Ukrainians and FTX organized an elaborate financial kickback scheme. The scheme involved promising members of Congress who sent money to Ukraine a hefty contribution from a Democrat benefactor. In this case, the owner of FTX [Sam Bankman-Fried]. Once the US dollars were credited to Ukraine’s account, President Zelensky and his partners diverted some of the proceeds to purchase crypto currency from FTX. FTX, in turn, sent some of those funds back to the cooperating members of Congress and the Democrat National Committee.”
Other reporting reveals that Bankman-Fried had established a crypto donation “partnership” with the Ukrainian government which provided an estimated $60 million in “assistance” to Zelensky. The Ukrainian government website that reported some details of the arrangement mysteriously was “disappeared” two days before the FTX disaster was made public. The FTX tale, if it turns out to be largely verifiable, underlines just how corrupt a “money pit” called Ukraine is. Hunter Biden gets a well-paid sinecure place on a company board to get to his father and now Ukraine may be directly involved in a massive financial fraud. And Joe Biden obligingly is sending billions of dollars more to that crook Zelensky.
But the real issue is the war. Even assuming that the Ukrainian missile strike on Poland was due to some malfunction, Zelensky comes out of the process smelling really bad as he has worked assiduously at blaming Russia, which clearly is not true. He is using his contrived narrative to dramatically expand the war by creating a situation which would bring NATO directly into the conflict and which could easily go nuclear. Indeed, he is attempting to compel NATO participation. But potentially far worse, if it was a deliberate “false flag” provocation to bring about that end, his tactics should be harshly condemned by all the parties that are currently supporting Ukraine. Beyond that, the US and NATO, burdened with such an “ally,” should take immediate steps to disengage from supporting the fighting and call for a negotiated settlement of the conflict. Joe Biden, if he has any integrity left, and whoever is pulling his strings should not hesitate to take that step.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
Long before COVID-19 arrived, I was a close observer of the pharmaceutical industry. My great grandparents believed that pharmaceutical labs were at the forefront of progress, relieving suffering and extending life, and for the most part they were right. My paternal great grandfather owned a large chain of drugstores and was a benefactor of UT Southwestern Medical School. At the time of my birth, my maternal great grandmother gave me a generous gift of Pfizer stock. She had been impressed by Pfizer’s key role in discovering how to mass produce penicillin during World War II (in which her son was killed in action). Eighteen years later her gift paid for my university education. And then, in 1998, Pfizer received FDA approval to sell Viagra.
Pfizer initially developed the drug to treat high blood pressure and angina pectoris. However, as Pfizer’s researchers discovered in clinical trials, the drug was better at inducing erections than managing angina. And so, the company repurposed the drug for erectile dysfunction and launched a massive, global PR and marketing campaign—including seeking moral approval from Pope John Paul II and contracting the war hero and 1996 presidential candidate Bob Dole to be the brand’s poster gentleman—that succeeded in making Viagra a blockbuster. Fortunately for me, I still owned a large chunk of Pfizer stock. The price spiked in late 1998 and reached an all-time high in April of 1999. I sold my entire remaining position, which financed my early years as a freelance author, before my first book was published.
So, I learned firsthand why pharmaceutical companies seek to develop blockbuster drugs with fanatical zeal. Formulating a safe and effective new medicine to address a large, unmet need is very difficult and expensive. Performing clinical trials and obtaining FDA-approval is an arduous process that normally takes several years. Thus, if an opportunity for a new blockbuster presents itself, a big drug company like Pfizer will go to extreme lengths to seize it.
Three years after the release of Viagra, I learned that Pfizer was not the entirely respectable company my great grandmother had believed it to be. I arrived at this realization through my interest in British spy novels. In 2001 I lived in Vienna, around the corner from the Burgkino (Burg Cinema) which still played the 1949 film noir classic The Third Man on its big screen every weekend. I spent many a dreary winter Sunday afternoon watching the film. Based on the novella and screenplay by Graham Greene, The Third Man is a crime story about Harry Lime—an American running a medical charity in Vienna, who makes a killing selling penicillin on the bombed out, impoverished city’s black market. To increase his profits, he cuts the drug with other substances, thereby destroying its efficacy and causing the patients (including children) to die horribly from their infections.
In the film’s most iconic scene, the good guy (played by Joseph Cotton) meets his old friend Harry Lime (played by Orson Welles) on the Giant Ferris wheel in the Vienna Prater amusement park and tries to appeal to his conscience. At the wheel’s apex, the charismatic Harry opens the door, points down to people walking on the ground below, and says:
Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax. … Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t, why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat; I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It’s the same thing. They have their five-year plans, and so have I.
I sensed that Graham Greene might have based the story on something he’d witnessed or heard about. Doing some research, I learned that Harry Lime was probably based on the British spy Harold “Kim” Philby, with whom Greene worked in British intelligence during World War II. Greene, it seems, discovered that Philby was a Soviet double agent long before he was exposed as such in 1963. Instead of ratting out his friend, he kept it to himself and left the intelligence service in 1944. Several pieces of evidence suggest that when he wrote The Third Man a few years later, he based it on his conflicted friendship with Philby.
John le Carré was also fascinated by Graham Greene and Kim Philby, and his thriller Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy—one of my all-time favorites—was inspired by the Philby story. His novel The Constant Gardener was published in 2001, and I read it with great interest. The story wasn’t set in Cold War Europe, but in Kenya, where a British diplomat’s wife is brutally raped and murdered. Upon closer examination, the diplomat realizes that she was about to reveal a horrifying crime committed by a pharmaceutical company, which murdered her in order to prevent the exposure.
The novel’s plot was reminiscent of a controversial drug trial performed by Pfizer in Kano, Nigeria in 1996 during a meningococcal outbreak. For the trial of its new antibiotic, trovafloxacin, Pfizer gave 100 children this new drug. The control group of 100 other children received the standard anti-meningitis treatment at the time—a drug called ceftriaxone. However, for the control group, Pfizer administered a substantially lower dose of ceftriaxone than the drug’s FDA-approved standard.
When the reduced dosing in the control group was discovered, it raised the suspicion that Pfizer did this in order to skew the trial in favor of its new drug. Five of the children who received trovafloxacin died, while six who received the reduced dose of ceftriaxone died. Other children apparently suffered grave injuries from the administration of the experimental antibiotic without their informed consent. The investigation and litigation that ensued was the stuff of a thriller, involving private investigators, bribery, blackmail attempts, and disappearing records. Thirteen years later, in 2009, Pfizer settled out of court with the plaintiffs.
In his author’s note, le Carré claimed that nobody and no corporation in the novel was based on an actual person or corporation in the real world.
But I can tell you this. As my journey through the pharmaceutical jungle progressed, I came to realize that, by comparison with the reality, my story was as tame as a holiday postcard.
In 2009, the same year that Pfizer settled with the trovafloxacin plaintiffs, the New York Times reported that a U.S. federal judge assessed Pfizer with the “largest health care fraud settlement and the largest criminal fine of any kind ever” for its illegal marketing of Bextra and three other drugs. The U.S. Department of Justice was unequivocal in characterizing Pfizer’s officers as guilty of grave criminal conduct at the expense of the American public.
Yesterday I wrote about the FTX scandal, which involves a thirty-year-old living in the Bahamas, usually clad in shorts and flip-flops, who received billions from people all over the world with the promise he would make them rich by investing it in crypto currency. Nobody understood how exactly he was making billions for himself, and he never tried to elucidate it. In spite of no one having the foggiest notion about what he was doing, he was hailed as “this generation’s JP Morgan.”
The sudden fall of Sam Bankman-Fried coincided with the sentencing of former Theranos CEO, Elizabeth Holmes, who was ordered to serve 11 years in prison for defrauding investors of billions. Like Bankman-Fried, Elizabeth Holmes—who dropped out of Stanford in 2004 and styled herself after Steve Jobs with the same signature black turtleneck—was hailed as a Wunderkind who’d boldly entered a new frontier in her field.
As was the case with Bankman-Fried’s cryptic crypto exchange, no one understood how Holmes’s blood testing machine worked. She claimed that with just a small pinprick of blood from the finger (instead of the standard 3 ml drawn from a vein on the inside of the elbow) her machine could rapidly and accurately run a large panel of diagnostic tests. The machine was literally and figuratively a black box—purportedly containing proprietary technology that only Theranos engineers were authorized to examine.
To people who’d long worked in the field of blood testing for companies like Siemans, Abbott, and Roche, Holmes’s claims seemed incredible. How could her machine accurately run so many tests on such a tiny quantity of blood? The proposition sounded like magic.
The fact that no one knew anything about the machine didn’t stop investors from pumping billions into the fledgling company, and by 2014, the then thirty-year-old Holmes’s 50% stake was worth $4.5 billion. Were these investors simply naive, or was there something apart from the magic black box that gave them confidence?
Perhaps the most notable thing about Theranos was the attention it drew from the Department of Defense and retired US government eminences including George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, William Perry, Bill Clinton, and Sam Nunn. All were old Washington hands, and they understood that the US government was considering Holmes’s little black box to be (potentially) a strategic asset with military and civilian applications.
These guys knew from experience that if Uncle Sam gets out his checkbook for what appears to be new product of strategic value, the sums transferred can be astronomical. And why not? Such a market does not consist of picky and finicky consumers, but unaccountable bureaucrats spending taxpayer money with reckless abandon.
In 2015, Holmes’s company became the subject of a Wall Street Journal investigation, and soon her fraudulent empire began to crumble. Three years later (in 2018) she was charged for committing massive acts of fraud.
Facing off against Elizabeth Holmes was the young and heroic whistleblower, Tyler Shultz—grandson of George Shultz—who was a key witness in exposing the fraud. For his principled action, he was shunned by his grandfather and subjected to an intimidation campaign by Theranos officers and their heavy-hitting attorneys. The Wall Street Journal’s report on this component of the story reads like a cinematic thriller.
Moderna CEO and billionarie, Stephane Bancel
Just two years after Holmes was charged for fraud, SARS-CoV-2 arrived. At this time, two biotech startups with no history of licensed products—Moderna of Cambridge, Massachusetts and BioNTech of Mainz, Germany—claimed that their experimental mRNA platform could rapidly produce a safe and effective vaccine by simply plugging the SARS-CoV-2 gene sequence into their formula. No long and laborious process of culturing viruses in eggs like conventional flu vaccines—real Star Trek Next Generation stuff.
In other words, We the People were obliged to pay for the mRNA vaccine program (transferring billions of taxpayer money to pharmaceutical executives) and many of us have been forced to receive the injections, but information about the precise nature of these products is not for us to know.
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has been caught telling bare-faced lies about a missile strike on Poland this week. Even the United States and NATO backers of the Kiev regime have repudiated initial claims blaming Russia. The missile came from the Ukrainian military as NATO acknowledges, yet Zelensky continued to assert that it wasn’t from his forces. It is clear that the deadly attack was a deliberate provocation by the Kiev regime to escalate the war into an all-out NATO-Russia conflict, even if that meant World War Three.
The Kiev regime’s proclivity for staging provocations is well documented, albeit assiduously covered up by the Western media. Further cover-up is bursting at the seams owing to the manic and utterly criminal conduct of the Neo-Nazi regime.
In nearly nine months of this conflict, which began on February 24 when Moscow launched its special military operation to end non-stop deadly provocations against ethnic Russians in the Donbass region, the NATO-backed Kiev regime has engaged in countless other criminal provocations. Those provocations include carrying out massacres like the one at Bucha at the end of March, shelling the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant, and plotting to detonate a dirty nuclear bomb. As our weekly editorial on October 28 headlined: “Dirty Nuke Bomb Fits Kiev Regime’s Record of Foul Tricks and Corruption”.
The Kiev regime was born out of a dirty trick. The Maidan Square sniper massacres in February 2014 against Ukrainian civilians and police officers culminated in a coup d’état.
It was fitting too that this week saw a Dutch court blaming Russia for the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner in 2014. The real culprits for the crime – in which 298 people onboard were blown out of the sky – were the Kiev regime forces who tried to blame it on Russia-backed Donbass separatists.
All such dirty tricks are purposed to criminalize Russia for “atrocities” and to escalate the war by invoking even more military support from the United States and its NATO partners. The Western states and their pliant corporate media have totally indulged in this propaganda to demonize Russia, if not at times author it.
This week, when the missile hit the village of Przewodow in the Lublin region of eastern Poland – killing two civilians – on November 15, the Kiev regime immediately blamed Russia. The comic-actor-turned-president Zelensky said it was an “act of terrorism” and an attack on NATO, thus justifying the bloc’s collective defense clause. His foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba clamored for NATO to impose a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine and to supply F-15 and F-16 fighter jets.
The hysterical claims, much like the missile itself, completely overshot credibility. There were no Russian air strikes anywhere near the Ukraine-Poland border area at the time. Video footage of munition fragments also quickly indicated that it was an S-300 air-defense missile that was fired by the Kiev regime’s forces.
Remarkably, however, Zelensky’s incendiary claims were promptly rebutted by U.S. President Joe Biden, the Pentagon and other NATO leaders. They firmly said the missile that struck Poland was not a Russian weapon but rather it came from a Ukrainian air-defense battery which, it was claimed, missed its target, accidentally landing on Polish soil.
But even that benign account does not hold water. For a start, the Russian military was not targeting the area with their precision-guided missiles. There were no incoming Russian rockets whatsoever. So what was the Ukrainian S-300 aiming at? The fact that the S-300 was fired westwards toward Poland shows that the act was a deliberate one to hit the neighboring country and a member of NATO.
The rapid rejection of the Kiev regime’s claims by the United States and other NATO powers not only exposes Zelensky and his cabal as liars. It also inadvertently exposes them as criminal provocateurs who are willing to kill civilians for propaganda and political expedience.
Are Washington and its European vassals perhaps beginning to realize that they have created a Frankenstein monster in Kiev whose criminality and corruption know no bounds? The United States and its imperial minions certainly want to undermine and subjugate Russia in a grand scheme of geopolitical control, but even the arrogant would-be hegemon must realize that World War Three is an insane no-win prospect. The Kiev regime has milked the U.S. and the European Union for all their worth and created a fabulous money racket for the NATO military-industrial complex. But this regime’s desperation and its reckless attempts to incite World War Three appear to have become too much even for its Western patrons.
It seems significant that lately, Washington appears to be coaxing the Kiev regime to enter into a peace process with Russia. The U.S. top military commander, General Mark Milley, who is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has urged Kiev to “seize an opportunity for peace”.
Separately, astute independent American military analysts, such as Scott Ritter and Douglas Macgregor, have pointed out that Russia has the decisive upper hand in the conflict. As the war drags on over winter and beyond, the real danger is that the NATO and transatlantic alliance will collapse from the stresses and strains ensuing from devastating economic repercussions. That is why the United States and NATO leaders appear to be feeling the pressure to extricate from the war, or at least to tamp it down.
It was notable that the Kiev regime angrily lashed out at any suggestions of opening a peace dialogue with Moscow.
This would explain why the Zelensky cabal decided to raise the stakes by firing a missile at Poland. The selected target of Przewodow village would have been a tacit concession to limit the casualties, although making the deliberately murderous act no less despicable or unconscionable.
The trouble is the cabal has become so corrupt and wanton that it didn’t sufficiently think through its obvious criminal plan. The missile strike ended up backfiring spectacularly to blow up the regime’s criminality.
The question is: what will the NATO sponsors do about their Neo-Nazi construct in Kiev? The regime is patently out of control and liability for the Western powers. They know they can’t win a conventional war against Russia never mind a nuclear conflagration. So, will we see Zelensky and his cronies being taken out, in one way or another, having become too problematic for their foreign masters?
History shows that the Western powers have used Nazis and fascists in the past as their proxies against the Soviet Union and other adversaries, only for these powers to eventually be compelled to liquidate their proxies when their usefulness expires or becomes overbearing.
When the US HHS invoked the Emergency Use Authorization and the Department of Defense offered COVID-19 vaccination to be administered by the US FDA and CDC, it was clear the FDA was going to play no role in stopping the vaccination freight train that was about to steamroll America. A recent paper from Dr. Maryanne Demasi points out that the FDA “checked-out” early in the COVID-19 pandemic:[i] “Regulatory documents show that only nine out of 153 Pfizer trial sites were subject to FDA inspection before licensing the mRNA vaccine. Similarly, only 10 out of 99 Moderna trial sites and five of 73 remdesivir trial sites were inspected. Now, facing a backlog of site inspections, experts have criticized the FDA’s oversight of clinical trials, describing it as “grossly inadequate.” They say the problem, which predated covid-19, is not limited to a lack of inspections but also includes failing to notify the public or scientific journals when violations are identified—effectively keeping scientific misconduct from the medical establishment. The FDA is “endangering public health” by not being candid about violations that are uncovered during clinical trial site inspections, says David Gortler, a pharmacist and pharmacologist who worked as an FDA medical reviewer between 2007 and 2011 and was then appointed as a senior adviser to the FDA commissioner in 2019-21.”
Demasi goes on to point out the FDA suspended inspections and despite having vast resources, does not utilize their discretionary budget to protect Americans from product safety threats. “With a total budget of $6.1bn in 2021, he [Gortler] suggests the agency needs to be leaner and more efficient, with employees interested in improving public health.” “The bottom line is that the FDA has over 18,000 full time employees, more than any other drug regulatory agency by far, so it could have retrained and retooled anybody to tackle the need for increased inspections,” he says. “Half of its budget, about $3bn, is discretionary, which means it could have hired contractors, retirees, or repurpose existing workers. It chose not to. The FDA was just yawning its way through the pandemic. The entire agency is broken.” “The lack of full transparency and data sharing does not allow physicians and other medical scientists to confirm the data independently and make comprehensive risk-benefit assessments,” continues Gortler, who is now a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington DC.”
The most egregious example of FDA malfeasance is the intent to withhold release of the Pfizer regulatory dossier on its COVID-19 vaccine for 55 years knowing it contained reports of 1,223 deaths shortly after administration of their vaccine. In a continued set of historic blunders, the FDA approved the COVID-19 bivalent vaccines with no randomized trials powered for clinical outcomes with Omicron, and no information on safety. I believe Drs Demasi and Gortler are correct, the FDA is broken beyond repair, officials and staff involved in malfeasance should be named as targets in federal investigations since so many lives have been impacted by their malfeasance.
A series of revealing texts and tweets by Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced CEO of FTX, the once high-flying but now belly-up crypto exchange, had the following to say about his image as a do-gooder: it is a “dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.”
Very interesting. He had the whole game going: a vegan worried about climate change, supports every manner of justice (racial, social, environmental) except that which is coming for him, and shells out millions to worthy charities associated with the left. He also bought plenty of access and protection in D.C., enough to make his shady company the toast of the town.
As part of the mix, there is this thing called pandemic planning. We should know what that is by now: it means you can’t be in charge of your life because there are bad viruses out there. As bizarre as it seems, and for reasons that are still not entirely clear, favoring lockdowns, masks, and vaccine passports became part of the woke ideological stew.
This is particularly strange because covid restrictions have been proven, over and over, to harm all the groups about whom woke ideology claims to care so deeply. That includes even animal rights: who can forget the Danish mink slaughter of 2020?
Regardless, it’s just true. Masking became a symbol of being a good person, same as vaccinating, veganism, and flying into fits at the drop of a hat over climate change. None of this has much if anything to do with science or reality. It’s all tribal symbolism in the name of group political solidarity. And FTX was pretty good at it, throwing around hundreds of millions to prove the company’s loyalty to all the right causes.
Among them included the pandemic-planning racket. That’s right: there were deep connections between FTX and Covid that have been cultivated for two years. Let’s have a look.
Earlier this year, the New York Timestrumpeted a study that showed no benefit at all to the use of Ivermectin. It was supposed to be definitive. The study was funded by FTX. Why? Why was a crypto exchange so interested in the debunking of repurposed drugs in order to drive governments and people into the use of patented pharmaceuticals, even those like Ramdesivir that didn’t actually work? Inquiring minds would like to know.
Regardless, the study and especially the conclusions turned out to be bogus. David Henderson and Charles Hooper further point out an interesting fact: “Some of the researchers involved in the TOGETHER trial had performed paid services for Pfizer, Merck, Regeneron, and AstraZeneca, all companies involved in developing COVID-19 therapeutics and vaccines that nominally compete with ivermectin.”
For some reason, SBF just knew that he was supposed to oppose repurposed drugs, though he knew nothing about the subject at all. He was glad to fund a poor study to make it true and the New York Times played its assigned role in the whole performance.
It was just the start. A soft-peddling Washington Post investigation found that Sam and his brother Gabe, who ran a hastily founded Covid nonprofit, “have spent at least $70 million since October 2021 on research projects, campaign donations and other initiatives intended to improve biosecurity and prevent the next pandemic.”
I can do no better than to quote the Washington Post:
The shock waves from FTX’s free fall have rippled across the public health world, where numerous leaders in pandemic-preparedness had received funds from FTX funders or were seeking donations.
In other words, the “public health world” wanted more chances to say: “Give me money so I can keep advocating to lock more people down!” Alas, the collapse of the exchange, which reportedly holds a mere 0.001% of the assets it once claimed to have, makes that impossible.
Among the organizations most affected is Guarding Against Pandemics, the advocacy group headed by Gabe that took out millions in ads to back the Biden administration’s push for $30 billion in funding. As Influence Watch notes: “Guarding Against Pandemics is a left-leaning advocacy group created in 2020 to support legislation that increases government investment in pandemic prevention plans.”
Truly it gets worse:
FTX-backed projects ranged from $12 million to champion a California ballot initiativeto strengthen public health programs and detect emerging virus threats (amid lackluster support, the measure was punted to 2024),to investing more than $11 million on the unsuccessful congressional primary campaign of an Oregon biosecurity expert,andeven a $150,000 grant to help Moncef Slaoui, scientific adviser forthe Trump administration’s “Operation Warp Speed” vaccine accelerator, write his memoir.
Leaders of the FTX Future Fund, a spinoff foundation that committed more than $25 million to preventing bio-risks, resigned in an open letter last Thursday, acknowledging that some donations from the organization are on hold.
And worse:
The FTX Future Fund’s commitments included $10 million to HelixNano, a biotech start-up seeking to develop a next-generation coronavirus vaccine; $250,000 to a University of Ottawa scientist researching how to eradicate viruses from plastic surfaces; and $175,000 to support a recent law school graduate’s job at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “Overall, the Future Fund was a force for good,” said Tom Inglesby, who leads the Johns Hopkins center, lamenting the fund’s collapse. “The work they were doing was really trying to get people to think long-term … to build pandemic preparedness, to diminish the risks of biological threats.”
More:
Guarding Against Pandemics spent more than $1 million on lobbying Capitol Hill and the White House over the past year, hired at least 26 lobbyists to advocate for a still-pending bipartisan pandemic plan in Congress and other issues, and ran advertisements backing legislation that includedpandemic-preparedness funding. Protect Our Future, a political action committee backed by the Bankman-Fried brothers, spent about $28 million this congressional cycle on Democratic candidates “who will be champions for pandemic prevention,” according to the group’s webpage.
I think you get the idea. This is all a racket. FTX, founded in 2019 following Biden’s announcement of his bid for the presidency, by the son of the co-founder of a major Democrat Party political action committee called Mind the Gap, was nothing but a magic-bean Ponzi scheme. It seized on the lockdowns for political, media, and academic cover. Its economic rationale was as nonexistent as its books. The first auditor to have a look has written:
“Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here. From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.”
It was the worst example of a phony perpetual-motion machine: a token to back a company that itself was backed by the token, which in turn was backed by nothing but political fashion and woke ideology that roped in Larry David, Tom Brady, Katy Perry, Tony Blair, and Bill Clinton to provide a cloak of legitimacy.
Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, and Sam Bankman-Fried in the Bahamas April 2022
And you can’t make this stuff up anymore: FTX had a close relationship with the World Economic Forum and was the favored crypto exchange of the Ukrainian government. It looks for all the world like the money-laundering operation of the Democratic National Committee and the entire lockdown lobby.
I will tell you what infuriates me about these billions in fake money and deep corruptions of politics and science. For years now, my anti-lockdown friends have been hounded for being funded by supposed dark money that simply doesn’t exist. Many brave scientists, journalists, attorneys, and others gave up great careers to stand for principle, exposing the damage caused by the lockdowns, and this is how they have been treated: smeared and displaced.
Brownstone has adopted as many in this diaspora as possible for fellowships as far as the resources (real ones, contributed by caring individuals) can go. But we cannot come anywhere near what is necessary for justice, much less compete with the 8-digit funding regime of the other side.
The Great Barrington Declaration was signed at the offices of the American Institute for Economic Research, which, apparently, six years prior had received a long-spent $60,000 grant from the Koch Foundation, and thus became a “Koch-funded libertarian think tank” which supposedly discredited the GBD, even though none of the authors received a dime.
This gibberish and slander has gone on for years – at the urging of government officials! – and Brownstone itself faces much of the same nonsense, with every manner of fantasy about our supposed power, money, and influence swarming the darker realms of the social-media dudgeons. In fact, the actual Koch Foundation (probably unbeknownst to its founder) was funding the pro-lockdown work of Neil Ferguson, whose ridiculous modeling terrified the world into denying human rights to billions of people the world over.
All this time – while every type of vicious propaganda was unleashed on the world – the pro-lockdown and pro-mandate lobby, including fake scientists and fake studies, were benefiting from millions and billions thrown around by operators of a Ponzi scheme based on cheating, fraud, and $15 billion in leveraged funds that didn’t exist while its principle actors were languishing in a drug-infested $40 million villa in the Bahamas even as they preened about the virtues of “effective altruism” and their pandemic-planning machinery that has now fallen apart.
Then the New York Times, instead of decrying this criminal conspiracy for what it is, writes puff pieces on the founder and how he let his quick-growing company grow too far, too fast, and now needs mainly rest, bless his heart.
The rest of us are left with the bill for this obvious scam that implausibly links crypto and Covid. But just as the money was based on nothing but puffed air, the damage they have wrought on the world is all too real: a lost generation of kids, declined lifespans, millions missing from the workforce, a calamitous fall in public health, millions of kids in poverty due to supply-chain breakages, 19 straight months of falling real incomes, historically high increases in debt, and a dramatic fall in human morale the world over.
So yes, we should all be furious and demand full accountability at the very least. Whatever the final truth, it is likely to be far worse than even the egregious facts listed above. It’s bad enough that lockdowns wrecked life and liberty. To discover that vast support for them was funded by fraud and fakery is a deeper level of corruption that not even the most cynical among us could have imagined.
Jeffrey A. Tucker, Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, is an economist and author. He has written 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press.
WASHINGTON – US Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) said the days of endless financial and security aid for Ukraine are numbered after the Republicans won a majority in the lower chamber of Congress.
“I’m here as a member of the House Armed Services Committee to say that the days of endless cash and military materiel to Ukraine are numbered,” Gaetz said on Thursday. “They’re numbered in the days that are required to act on Congresswoman [Marjorie Taylor] Greene’s well thought out resolution of inquiry and they are numbered when we get into the majority.”
Gaetz vowed not to vote for one more dollar or one more piece of military equipment for Ukraine. The congressman from Florida said the United States is far too entangled in the Ukraine conflict and has effectively extended it.
Gaetz also called on the US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to declassify the Inspector General’s report on compliance with the existing regulations regarding the chain of custody of material going to Ukraine.
On Thursday, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene said she is introducing legislation alongside other US House Republicans to audit funding provided to Ukraine. “We’re asking for everything to do with military, civilian and financial aid. We want it all,” she remarked at a conference.
Aside from Greene and Gaetz, House Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Matt Rosendale (R-MT) have co-signed the move to undertake audits of funds appropriated by Congress.
Green has stated that if the resolution is struck down, she intends to reintroduce the measure in the new year once the new Congress is brought in. “For next year, absolutely I’ll introduce this resolution again, but I’ll also be calling for a full audit. That’s what we want, we want to audit Ukraine,” she said.
On October 11, FTX Group, the world’s second largest cryptocurrency exchange, filed for bankruptcy in the United States. The company’s CEO Sam Bankman-Fried resigned, leading to a mind-blowing collapse of one of the top entities in the cryptocurrency industry. The company said that Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, “will remain to assist in an orderly transition.” John J. Ray III, the lawyer who oversaw the liquidation of Enron, took his place. The fall of FTX sent shockwaves throughout the cryptocurrency market, as many became wary that a similar crash could happen to other companies in the industry. However, in the immediate aftermath of the crash, it became clear that there is an unexpected connection between FTX, the Democratic Party and the so-called “Ukraine aid, fueling speculation as to what might have caused the crash.
According to a report by The Epoch Times, back in March, the Kiev regime established a crypto donations website, allowing it to convert cryptocurrencies into fiat money that would then be deposited at the National Bank of Ukraine. The goal was to raise $200 million, of which $60 million was collected by October. The money was to be used to procure assets for the Neo-Nazi junta forces, including digital rifle scopes, medical supplies, field rations, fuel, military clothing, etc. The initiative, called “Aid for Ukraine,” gained the support of FTX, staking outfit Everstake, and the local Kuna exchange. It also has the direct support of the Kiev regime’s Ministry of Digital Transformation.
“At the onset of the conflict in Ukraine, FTX felt the need to provide assistance in any way it could. By setting up payment rails and facilitating the conversion of crypto donations into fiat currency, we have given the Central Bank of Ukraine the ability to deliver aid and resources to the people who need it most,” Sam Bankman-Fried said in a statement in March. “We are grateful for the opportunity to work with Sergey [Vasylchuk] and the Everstake team as they continue to work tirelessly in helping Ukrainians as they suffer from this conflict,” the former FTX CEO concluded.
The move seems to have become a perfect opportunity for the corrupt officials in both Washington DC and the Kiev regime to funnel much of the “Ukraine aid” funds back to the US. While it’s not entirely clear if reports that the Neo-Nazi junta officials ‘invested’ in FTX are accurate, there are credible issues regarding the possibility that the Kiev regime was using the funds donated through FTX to funnel money back to the DNC coffers. The fact that Sam Bankman-Fried was the second-largest Democratic Party donor in 2021-2022, donating nearly $40 million, makes this possibility even likelier.
The Epoch Times report further states that in the first half of 2022, the former FTX CEO donated $865,000 to the Democratic National Committee, $66,500 to the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, and $250,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. In addition, Sam Bankman-Fried made multiple visits to the White House, where he met with White House counselor Steve Ricchetti on April 22 and May 12, according to the visitors log. On May 13, he also met with Charlotte Butash, a policy adviser to the White House deputy chief of staff. Mark Wetjen, the head of policy and regulatory strategy at FTX, who served as a commissioner on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) under former US President Barack Obama, also attended some of the meetings.
The connections between FTX, the Kiev regime and the DNC are quite clear and raise a lot of questions. Billionaire Elon Musk was also puzzled by the revelation. As one Twitter user aksed whether FTX was being used to launder money for the Democratic Party, Musk replied it was “a question worth asking.” On November 14, Alex Bornyakov, the Kiev regime’s Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation, dismissed the claims, although he failed to explain how exactly they were a “false narrative”.
“A fundraising crypto foundation @_AidForUkraine used @FTX_Official to convert crypto donations into fiat in March,” Bornyakov tweeted. “Ukraine’s gov never invested any funds into FTX. The whole narrative that Ukraine allegedly invested in FTX, who donated money to Democrats is nonsense, frankly.”
However, Fox News political commentator Jesse Watters thinks the evidence, although not conclusive at the moment, cannot be ignored and that the DNC’s motives to send billions of dollars to the Kiev regime are not so altruistic after all.
“Democrats send money to Ukraine, Ukraine sends money to FTX, and FTX sends money to the Democrat’s campaigns. I don’t know if this is war profiteering or money laundering, I don’t even know, but it needs to be investigated.” Watters said.
Although cryptocurrency experts agree that the scheme most likely wasn’t the primary reason for the downfall of FTX, the consequences of the scandal cannot be ignored and will most likely cause further issues on cryptocurrency markets. It’s also yet another indicator of how corruption is hidden behind the “aid for Ukraine” narrative.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
Jonathan Greenblatt, the aggressive head of the Jewish advocacy group the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) recently attacked some comments on the Israel relationship made by former President Donald Trump, who prefaced his remarks by accurately observing that “No President has done more for Israel than I have.” Greenblatt nevertheless complained in a tweet that “We don’t need the former president, who curries favor with extremists and antisemites, to lecture us about the US-Israel relationship. It is not about a quid pro quo; it rests on shared values and security interests. This ‘Jewsplaining’ is insulting and disgusting.”
Greenblatt’s perpetual whine is also “insulting and disgusting” but he possesses little in the way of introspection or restraint. He and his predecessors in the Jewish lobby have historically been largely successful in selling a load of self-serving nonsense about why the United States has become a client state that has its Middle Eastern foreign policy run out of Tel Aviv by a racist regime. US political and national security interests in the region have been subordinated to those of Israel. Washington provides political cover for anything Israel chooses to do and, the ultimate absurdity, the American taxpayer gifts a relatively wealthy Israel with $3 billion in “aid” per year plus other trade and co-production benefits.
To justify it all, phrases like “the only democracy in the Middle East” and “Israel has a right to defend itself” roll off the lips of a host of bought-and-paid-for congress critters like the chorus in a Greek tragedy every time the Israelis see fit to kill a few more Palestinians, Syrians or Iranians. Even killing American citizens like Rachel Corrie, 34 members of the crew of the USS Liberty and Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh does not draw any censure from Washington. Beyond that, Israel has recently convinced the US government to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism, which incorporates criticism of the Jewish state as ipso facto the mark of an anti-Semite. And going still further, twenty-six state governments have chosen to penalize their citizens who, in seeking benefits or a job at local level, refuse to sign or swear to a statement that they will not support any boycotts of Israel.
It is all about the dual loyalty that many Jews have as relates to Israel. Indeed, one might argue that folks like Greenblatt have something amounting to singular loyalty, and it is at least questionable whether any of that applies to the good old U S of A. Recently Greenblatt and his host of perpetual complainers have been riding hard the alleged surge in anti-Semitism, as defined by them to justify everything they and their Israeli brethren do. They know they can get away with saying and doing almost anything when it comes to Israel, to include the shamelessly hyped alleged sad plight of perpetual Jewish victims worldwide, even in the United States where they enjoy unparalleled and grossly disproportionate privilege, power, status and wealth. Jewish power driven by Jewish money dominates much political interaction while also driving the accompanying media narrative. And the Jewish/Israeli viewpoint defines what are acceptable viewpoints within academia while also shaping the product that comes out of the entertainment industry, as well as the decision making in many business and financial services sectors.
Israel is about to put together its most extreme right-wing government ever, headed for the third time by Benjamin Netanyahu and including probable cabinet level ministers who have been described as “terrorists,” “racists,” and even “fascists.” The pressure on the Palestinians will no doubt intensify with the objective of first fully establishing control on the ground before ethnically cleansing the Arabs to produce an overwhelmingly dominant Jewish state. Settlements will expand and new ones will be planted while armed settlers destroy the livelihoods of the remaining Palestinians, compelling them to flee. And there will also be pressure from Netanyahu to force the United States to take the offensive against Iran, up to and including a military first strike to destroy its fictional nuclear weapons program. President Joe Biden has already committed the United States to do something like that, promising that Iran will not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon.
Articles in the Jewish media in particular but also in national publications like the New York Times and Washington Post suggest that many liberal Jews are concerned over the right-wing political shift in Israel, which might be described as being in the grip of “religious nationalism.” Diaspora Jews understand that it will become harder to defend the actions of the Jewish State and to sell the current “tie-that-binds” to both an American and international audience.
The perception that Israel, which in 2018 declared itself to be legally the nation state of the Jews with “exclusive right of self-determination,” is already an apartheid state that casually commits what many would describe as war crimes is growing and will almost certainly impact on the international acceptance of the Israelis. But in the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and France in particular, such concerns might be considered overwrought as Jewish hard power and money have effectively bought into and even dominate some aspects of their respective political and economic systems. A clear majority of British Members of Parliament are members of various “Friends of Israel” associations and in the US both parties are heavily dependent on Jewish/Israeli donors for campaign funding and also to ensure a friendly media. Most congressmen have learned the lesson that criticizing Israel is a red line that must not be crossed if one wants to remain in office, so it is most likely that the US love affair with Israel will continue no matter what Netanyahu and company do.
One might reasonably consider two things when it comes to the lopsided Israel-US relationship. First, how accurate is the Greenblatt boast that it rests on “shared values and security interests?” And second, to what extent are ADL, not to mention groups like the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), actually acting as directed agents of the Israeli government and therefore subject to the terms of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) of 1938 which would open up their books to scrutiny and also require some transparency vis-à-vis their contacts with the Israeli Embassy and the country’s Foreign Ministry and intelligence and security agencies?
First of all, Greenblatt’s claim of shared values is completely a fraud unless one considers corrupt elections to protect the likes of Hunter Biden and Netanyahu, who has been accused of corruption in Israel which the election result will enable him to avoid. Israel is no democracy unless one considers that disenfranchising many of the potential voters in the area that you control is somehow “democratic.” The United States is meanwhile becoming more like Israel. It is turning into a managed democracy where the party in control uses that power to attack and delegitimize the opposition. This occurred in 2016 with Trump vs. Hillary and has been taking place since the 2020 election through Democratic Party apparatchik attempts to link the GOP to the post-electoral January claimed insurrection. Of course, Trump himself has unfortunately hurried this process along through his ill-advised attempts to focus his support among Republicans based on how enthusiastically they support his insinuations, which is at least tactically a bad move.
Security interests? I was in the CIA overseas at a post where we would receive much processed Israeli intelligence. Believe me, it nearly all related to making Muslims look bad. Any “threat” information that Israel is able to collect legitimately the United States NSA and other intelligence organizations are able to do as well or better. The United States could drop Israel as an intelligence partner tomorrow and it would not make any difference vis-a-vis US national security. Greenblatt is as usual blowing smoke to enhance the value of the bilateral relationship, such as it is. In reality it is a rip-off all to the advantage of Israel.
Finally, there is the issue of the Israel/Jewish lobby serving as an active agent for the Jewish State of Israel, which clearly it is and does do. After last week’s election, AIPAC boasted that a pac that it had set up had raised $17 million to defeat candidates critical of Israel, while also supporting those politicians who were friends, 95% of whom were elected. To pretend that the Lobby exists to provide some kind of perspective or balance in foreign policy is a case of who is kidding whom on the issue. As one of my agents in Turkey used to describe it, “It is as the hand fitting into the glove.” The Justice Department should move to investigate and, if necessary, indict all Jewish organizations that have sustained contact with the Israeli government as foreign agents, no exception. Yes, I know, it will never happen, particularly with Attorney General Merrick Garland nee Garfinkel in charge as he is too busy investigating Russia.
So here we go again. A new government alignment will soon be in place in Washington but nothing changes. Israel’s friends will be firmly in control until someone in power has the guts to go after all the Jewish organizations that are part of the so-called Israeli lobby. Make them register, find out where their money comes from and check out their close and continuing relationships with the Israeli government. And by the way, forget all about that “shared values” and “security interests” nonsense, it’s all a sham. I would like to invite Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden to travel with their families to the Israeli army occupied West Bank and live as Palestinians for a few weeks. They would get a good taste of Israeli “values.” And as for “security interests,” it’s all about Israeli perceptions, isn’t it? Genuine American interests in the Middle East region have long been ground down under the heel of Jewish power in the United States and people like Jonathan Greenblatt will continue to use their bully pulpit to make sure that critics of the process are effectively silenced.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
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