Democrats, Republicans Face Off During U.S. House Hearing on COVID Origins and Possible Cover-Up
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 12, 2023
Two coauthors of the March 2020 Nature Medicine paper that asserted, just months into the pandemic, that COVID-19’s origins were “clearly” natural rather than lab-made faced questioning Tuesday during a hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus pandemic.
The hearing investigated “whether government officials, regardless of who they are, unfairly and perhaps biasedly tipped the scales toward a preferred origin theory,” Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), committee chair, said in opening remarks.
“We are examining whether scientific integrity was disregarded in favor of political expediency, maybe to conceal or diminish the government’s relationship with the Wuhan Institute of Virology or perhaps its funding of risky gain-of-function coronavirus research,” he said.
Tulane virologist Robert Garry, Ph.D., and Scripps Research evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, Ph.D., denied the allegations in written testimony submitted prior to the hearing as “absurd and false.” And in more than three hours of questioning Tuesday by committee members, they insisted their conclusions in the paper were based solely on the “scientific process.”
Republicans’ questioning focused on demonstrating the Nature Medicine paper was coordinated and unduly influenced by government officials.
Lawmakers laid out evidence that all of the authors initially expressed serious concerns the virus may have leaked from a lab and of how that position changed just a few days later after a Feb. 1, 2020, teleconference with Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Francis Collins and Jeremy Farrar, Ph.D.
The scientists drafted their paper “The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2” within a few days of the call and published it the following month. The early drafts were shared with Farrar, Collins and Fauci, Paul Thacker reported.
Prior to yesterday’ hearing, the panel’s Republican majority issued a report, “The Proximal Origin of a Cover-up,” asserting a coordinated effort by Fauci and others to downplay the lab-leak hypothesis and suppress scientific discourse.
The report was based on 25 hours of testimony by the authors of the Proximal Origins paper and a review of 8,000 pages of documents, including subpoenaed emails and slack messages that had not yet been revealed publicly.
The evidence showed that in conversations with one another, the Proximal Origin authors expressed a lack of certainty about their singular conclusion but feared the political fallout of giving credence to the lab origin hypothesis.
Democrats vehemently countered the Republican assertions, insisting Fauci and Collins had no role in the findings. They produced their own report — “They Played No Role” — drawing on the same evidence to conclude that “that there was no cover-up of the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and no suppression of the lab leak theory on the parts of Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins.”
In the highly partisan hearing, the Democrats used their time to accuse Republicans of having a “vendetta,” of “weaponizing” the origin discussion, using “extreme rhetoric” and of making “baseless allegations” that they claimed were responsible for the public’s loss of faith in public institutions.
Ranking Democrat Dr. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.) repeatedly accused the Republicans of “confirmation bias” in their assertion that the lab leak is the more probable origin of the virus and of making “conspiratorial accusations without proof,” rather than “pursuing an objective analysis of the virus’s origins that is free from political interference.”
The ‘Proximal Origins’ fallout
The paper in question, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” played a key early role in shutting down debate about the origin of the virus.
Top public health officials used the paper as “independent science” to influence public discussion of the topic. Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) posted the findings on the agency website. And in an April 17, 2020, press briefing at the White House, when asked whether COVID-19 had come from the Wuhan lab, Fauci cited the paper’s conclusions as definitive.
The paper had a major impact in the scientific community and the popular press, spurring thousands of articles declaring the lab-leak theory to be implausible or a conspiracy theory.
But communications obtained via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by U.S. Right to Know, and a memo released in March by the congressional subcommittee have since showed that Collins, Fauci and Farrar of the Wellcome Trust played a key, previously undisclosed role in persuading the scientists to write the paper.
The FOIA requests also revealed that all of the paper’s authors had privately expressed suspicions that the virus was engineered or about the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s store of novel coronaviruses and work on them at low biosafety levels, US Right to Know reported.
‘Proximal origin of a cover-up’ vs. ‘they played no role’
Republicans questioned the scientists on their rapid shift from thinking that the virus was likely lab-made to their certainty, professed in both drafts and final versions of the paper, about its natural origins in a matter of days.
Representative Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) quoted a communication from Garry where he said:
“I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario where you get from, from the bat virus or one very similar to it to, uh, COVID-19 where you insert exactly four amino acids, 12 nucleotides and all have to be added at the exact same time to gain this function.
“I just can’t figure out how this all gets accomplished in nature.”
She said, “So then within a matter of days, something changed, and that’s what this committee is trying to get to the bottom of, what happened within that three day period between the conference call and the paper that all of a sudden you did a 180.”
In response to repeated questioning on this topic, Andersen and Garry insisted their change in thinking was based on “the scientific process.”
They said new evidence emerged that changed their thinking, that their shift in thinking “evolved over time from early hypotheses to later conclusions published in the paper.” And that their shift had nothing to do with pressure from Fauci, Collins or Farrar.
Rather, Andersen said their paper presented “an agnostic view of what the evidence actually does tell us.”
Garry testified that Collins and Fauci had very little input at the Feb. 1 teleconference and he thought they were just on the call “to gather information” from the experts.
Andersen and Garry along with several of the Democratic committee members repeatedly emphasized that Farrar — not Fauci or Collins — coordinated the call and provided the authors with significant guidance on the paper. Andersen said, “I describe him as a father figure” for the paper, Andersen said, “because I think that captures it.”
Ruiz and Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) both suggested Farrar’s role in organizing the call exonerated Fauci and Collins, effectively disproving the idea that there was political interference in the findings.
But, Farrar — former director of the Wellcome Trust and currently chief scientist at the World Health Organization — has been a central figure in dismissing the lab leak theory as a “conspiracy theory,” Sam Husseini reported.
In February 2020, along with Peter Daszak, 25 other scientists signed a letter in The Lancet that dismissed the possibility of a lab origin of COVID-19.
“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” the letter said.
Rep. David Joyce (R-Ohio) questioned whether this continued certainty about natural origins today made sense given that it contradicted the testimony by former director of the National Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe.
Ratcliffe told the committee that, “If our intelligence and evidence supporting a lab leak theory was placed side by side with our intelligence and evidence pointing to a naturally occurring spillover theory, the lab leak side of the ledger would be long and overwhelming while the spillover side would be nearly empty, nearly empty.”
Ruiz claimed that most government agencies — four of them — deny the lab leak theory with low confidence. But the FBI and the Department of Energy have also determined with moderate confidence that the virus most likely originated in a lab.
Democratic members alleged the Republicans’ effort to investigate the politicization of the investigation of the origins of the pandemic inhibited the work of preparing for “the next pandemic.”
Ruiz said the Republicans’ actions had also led to “threats against scientists and public health officials.” Anderson agreed, saying “the misinformation, dis and conspiracy theories around the paper have resulted in significant harassment and threats” similar to those undergone by Peter Hotez, and alleged that he is on a “kill list.”
Rep. Jill Tokuda (D-Hawaii) said that such investigations “are actually creating a very chilling effect on the scientific process,” which hinders the ability of scientists and public health officials to thoroughly investigate and study future disease outbreaks.
She suggested that in the future the researchers should “double think what they put on their slack messages and channels and their emails and their text threads.”
But just last week the House subcommittee began investigating Dr. David M. Morens, a 25-year veteran of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), after it was revealed he used his personal email address to evade FOIA requests for communications related to the origins of COVID-19, The Defender reported.
Wenstrom broke the news in the meeting that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) was also involved in the investigation.
Near the end of the hearing, both Garry and Andersen confirmed that they had been consulted by the CIA and FBI about the origins of COVID-19.
Wenstrup concluded by saying,“We’re exploring a potential coverup. That is what we are doing.”
He added, “You receive federal dollars, we appropriate those. Congress appropriates those federal dollars. We have a responsibility of oversight on behalf of our constituents and the very taxpayers that pay you. Sorry about that. But it’s our job whether you like it or not. And I take it seriously.”
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
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.
The War on ‘Misinformation’: Outlawing Dissident Data on the Road to Tyranny
Judge Terry A. Doughty’s Defense of the Right to be Wrong
Michael Hoffman’s Revelation of the Method | July 12, 2023
“Misinformation” [noun]: Any data that contradicts Establishment dogma
Fittingly, on Independence Day, July 4, U.S. Federal Judge Terry A. Doughty in the Western District of Louisiana, issued a preliminary injunction in the case of Missouri v. Biden, documenting and excoriating the Federal government’s abrogation of the First Amendment with regard to policing social media.
The patricians assigned exalted status as “First Amendment experts” by their cronies in the legacy media, have lied about Judge Doughty’s ruling and presume to explain it to the rest of us mere plebians in the hope that we will not read the 155 pages of his decision.
Thus, His Eminence Laurence Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor of Constitutional Law Emeritus at Harvard University, together with Leah Litman, professor of law at the University of Michigan, contemptuously dismiss Justice Doughty’s decision as buncombe. They rely on their prestige to convince us of their evidence-free claim that, “The impetus behind the case is the now thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory that the government is somehow strong-arming Big Tech into censoring conservative speech and speakers in violation of the First Amendment.”
Words Intended to Trigger our Obeisance
Notice the words intended to trigger our obeisance to the anathema which Tribe and Litman have pronounced: “thoroughly debunked,” and the old reliable put-down, “conspiracy theory.”
No respectable true believer in the stature and renown of the Carl M. Loeb University Professor of Constitutional Law Emeritus will dare to think otherwise than as prescribed.
Tribe and Litman add to their pejorative-laden rant, stating, “the absurdity of different aspects of the decision…….Each step in the reasoning of the decision manages to be more outlandish than the last…”
“Absurd.” “Outlandish.”
They go further: “There is no shortage of errors in this opinion, which is trying to make the infamous ‘Twitter files’ into constitutional law. Who knows whether the equally infamous U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit will correct any of these mistakes…”
“Infamous.” “Equally infamous.”
A heretical thought occurs to the reader of Tribe and Litman’s invective: prove it. They can’t, so they don’t bother.
Ah, but there’s the rub, fellow plebe. This legal duo need not prove anything. They are famous legal scholars.
Musk’s Twitter file revelations are “infamous” and Justice Doughty is “absurd.” Therefore, predicated on their ad hominem adjudication, Tribe and Litman don’t stoop to offering a refutation because none is necessary. Their ipse dixit is sufficient. We are in the realm of the blind faith required of people by the secular religion that enforces a fundamentalist intellectual conformity which brooks no dissent.
Witness the 155 pages of Doughty’s decision dismissed without a single factual reply concerning the Federal government illegally threatening and pressuring social media which publish disfavored authors and data on the Internet.
But is misinformation really the crux of the issue? Witness the misinformation that pours forth daily from the presses of the sacrosanct New York Times. We need look no further than Michael Shear and David McCabe’s report July 5 in the Times regarding Judge Doughty’s ruling. The issue of government censorship, which concerns all civil libertarians across the political spectrum, is reduced to an “effort by conservatives to document what they contend is a liberal conspiracy.”
That’s not just misinformation, it’s a lie. Two victims of the government crackdown on social media who are plaintiffs in the case of Missouri v. Biden, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, are infectious disease epidemiologists, not conservative Republican politics wonks.
The Great Barrington Declaration of October 4, 2020, criticized lockdown policies and expressed concern about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of lockdowns. Shortly after being published, the Great Barrington Declaration, which was signed and endorsed by numerous health science personnel holding a variety of political views, was censored on social media by Google, Facebook and Twitter under the threat of reprisals from the Biden administration.
Jill Hines is Co-Director of Health Freedom Louisiana, a consumer and human rights advocacy organization. Hines was censored because she advocated against the use of mask mandates for young children. Health Freedom Louisiana’s social-media page was suspended on Facebook in January 2022 for sharing a display board that contained Pfizer’s preclinical trial data. Facebook did the government’s bidding.
There are dozens of examples like these. The New York Times is misinforming its readers into believing that Missouri v. Biden is mainly an issue of Republican partisanship, with no wider significance for all liberty-loving Americans. The Times expects us to believe that Justice Doughty ruled in favor of the victims of government-inspired viewpoint censorship because, in the words of Shear and McCable, he is “favorable to right-wing lawsuits.”
The New York Times is determined to engage in misinformation by falsely characterizing the paramount issue, interdiction of freedom of the press by agents of the Federal government, as something of concern to right-wingers who see “liberal conspiracies” under every bed.
As of July 12, in almost every instance of legacy media misinformation related to the judge’s ruling that we have encountered, at no time were readers provided a link to Justice Doughty’s decision, which is published online, in order to facilitate the now out-of-fashion principle that the people should be encouraged to decide for themselves, rather than being told what to think.
Instead, the Times referred its readers to Litman and Tribe’s splenetic fulmination, in which government censorship is “content moderation,” and ensuring the Biden administration doesn’t threaten online news media if they don’t submit to their censorship orders, becomes, “a huge blow to vital government efforts to harden U.S. democracy against threats of misinformation.”
Without apprehension, we ought to call a thing by its accurate description. In their report, which appeared on New York University’s website, JustSecurity.org, we regret to say that the University of Michigan’s Litman, and Harvard’s Tribe, lied about Judge Doughty’s ruling—as follows:
“… the district court made no effort to identify circumstances where the government came even close to coercing social media companies into doing something they didn’t want to do…”
How does one parse a mendacity that is so transparently false it is beyond chutzpagh? The duo who put forth the preceding statement are insulting the intelligence of their readers on the assumption that they are too lazy to find and study Justice Doughty’s ruling—in which he clearly “identifies” the points at which the Federal government coerced social media companies into censoring scientists, activists and vital alternative information.
Judge for yourself:
Excerpts from Missouri v. Biden documenting Government Coercion of Social Media Companies
“On May 5, 2021, then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki (“Psaki”) publicly began pushing Facebook and other social-media platforms to censor COVID-19 misinformation. At a White House Press Conference, Psaki publicly reminded Facebook and other social-media platforms of the threat of ‘legal consequences’ if they do not censor misinformation more aggressively.
“Psaki further stated: ‘The President’s view is that the major platforms have a responsibility related to the health and safety of all Americans to stop amplifying untrustworthy content, disinformation, and misinformation, especially related to COVID-19 vaccinations and elections.’ Psaki linked the threat of a ‘robust anti-trust program’ with the White House’s censorship demand: ‘He also supports better privacy protections and a robust anti-trust program. So, his view is that there’s more that needs to be done to ensure that this type of misinformation; disinformation; damaging, sometime life-threatening information, is not going out to the American public.”
“On January 23, 2021, three days after President Biden took office, Clarke Humphrey (“Humphrey”), who at the time was the Digital Director for the COVID-19 Response Team, emailed Twitter and requested the removal of an anti-COVID-19 vaccine tweet by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.2 Humphrey sent a copy of the email to Rob Flaherty (“Flaherty”), former Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of Digital Strategy…
“On February 7, 2021, Twitter sent Flaherty a ‘Twitter’s Partner Support Portal’ for expedited review of flagging content for censorship. Twitter recommended that Flaherty designate a list of authorized White House staff to enroll in Twitter’s Partner Support Portal and explained that when authorized reporters submit a ‘ticket’ using the portal, the requests are ‘prioritized’ automatically. Twitter also stated that it had been ‘recently bombarded’ with censorship requests from the White House and would prefer to have a streamlined process. Twitter noted that ‘[i]n a given day last week for example, we had more than four different people within the White House reaching out for issues…”
“On March 15, 2021, Flaherty…demanded a report from Facebook on a recent Washington Post article that accused Facebook of allowing the spread of information leading to vaccine hesitancy…Flaherty followed up by making clear that the White House was seeking more aggressive action on ‘borderline content.”
“On March 22, 2021, Flaherty responded to this email, demanding more detailed information and a plan from Facebook to censor the spread of ‘vaccine hesitancy’ on Facebook. Flaherty also requested more information about and demanded greater censorship by Facebook of ‘sensational,’ ‘vaccine skeptical’ content.”
“On April 13, 2021, after the temporary halt of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine…Flaherty also requested that Facebook monitor ‘misinformation’ relating to the Johnson & Johnson pause and demanded from Facebook a detailed report within twenty-four hours. Facebook provided the detailed report the same day.”
“On April 14, 2021, Flaherty demanded the censorship of Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Tomi Lahren because the top post about vaccines that day was ‘Tucker Carlson saying vaccines don’t work and Tomi Lahren stating she won’t take a vaccine..”
“Two days later, on April 16, 2021, Flaherty demanded immediate answers from Facebook regarding the Tucker Carlson video…Facebook…gave the video a 50% demotion for seven days and stated that it would continue to demote the video.”
“…examples of posts that did not violate Facebook’s policies but would nonetheless be suppressed included content that originated from the Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit activist group headed by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.” (Mr. Kennedy’s group was abeled by the government as one of the “Disinformation Dozen”).
“On April 21, 2021, Flaherty, Slavitt, and other HHS officials, met with Twitter officials about ‘Twitter Vaccine Misinfo Briefing.’…Twitter discovery responses indicated that during the meeting, White House officials wanted to know why Alex Berenson (“Berenson”) had not been ‘kicked off’ Twitter. Slavitt suggested Berenson was ‘the epicenter of disinfo that radiated outwards to the persuadable public.’ Berenson was suspended thereafter on July 16, 2021, and was permanently deplatformed on August 28, 2021.”
“On April 23, 2021, Flaherty sent Facebook an email including a document entitled “Facebook COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation Brief” (“the Brief”)…The Brief recommended much more aggressive censorship of Facebook’s enforcement policies and called for progressively severe penalties.”
“From May 28, 2021, to July 10, 2021, a senior Meta (Facebook’s parent) executive reportedly copied Andrew Slavitt (‘Slavitt’), former White House Senior COVID-19 Advisor, on his emails to Surgeon General Murthy (‘Murthy’), alerting them that Meta was engaging in censorship of COVID-19 misinformation according to the White House’s ‘requests’ and indicating ‘expanded penalties’ for individual Facebook accounts that share misinformation…”
“Eric Waldo (‘Waldo’) is the Senior Advisor to the Surgeon General and was formerly Chief Engagement Officer for the Surgeon General’s office…Waldo and the Office of the Surgeon General received a briefing from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (‘CCDH’) about the “Disinformation Dozen.” The Center for Countering Digital Hate gave a presentation about the Disinformation Dozen and how they (CCDH) measured and determined that the Disinformation Dozen were primarily responsible for a significant amount of online misinformation.”
“At the July 15, 2021 press conference, Murthy described health misinformation as one of the biggest obstacles to ending the pandemic; insisted that his advisory was on an urgent public health threat; and stated that misinformation poses an imminent threat to the nation’s health and takes away the freedom to make informed decisions….Murthy also stated that people who question mask mandates and decline vaccinations are following misinformation, which results in illnesses and death. Murthy placed specific blame on social-media platforms for allowing ‘poison’ to spread and further called for an ‘all-of-society approach’ to fight health misinformation. Murthy called upon social-media platforms to operate with greater transparency and accountability, to monitor information more clearly, and to ‘consistently take action against misinformation super-spreaders on their platforms.’ Notably, Waldo agreed in his deposition that the word ‘accountable’ carries with it the threat of consequences.” (Emphasis supplied)
“…on July 20, 2021, at a White House Press Conference, White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield (‘Bedingfield’) stated that the White House would be announcing whether social-media platforms are legally liable for misinformation spread on their platforms and examining how misinformation fits into the liability protection granted by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (which shields social-media platforms from being responsible for posts by third parties on their sites). Bedingfield further stated the administration was reviewing policies that could include amending the Communication Decency Act and that the social-media platforms ‘should be held accountable.’ The public and private pressure from the White House apparently had its intended effect. All twelve members of the ‘Disinformation Dozen’ were censored, and pages, groups, and accounts linked to the Disinformation Dozen were removed…”
“Murthy made statements on the following platforms: a December 21, 2021 podcast threatening to hold social-media platforms accountable for not censoring misinformation; a January 3, 2022 podcast with Alyssa Milano stating that ‘platformers need to step up to be accountable…”
“In addition to ‘misinformation’ regarding COVID-19, the White House also asked social-media companies to censor misinformation regarding climate change, gender discussions, abortion, and economic policy. At an Axios event entitled ‘A Conversation on Battling Misinformation,’ held on June 14, 2022, the White House National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy (‘McCarthy’) blamed social-media companies for allowing misinformation and disinformation about climate change to spread and explicitly tied these censorship demands with threats of adverse legislation regarding the Communications Decency Act.”
“On June 16, 2022, the White House announced a new task force to target ‘general misinformation’ and disinformation campaigns targeted at women and LBGTQI individuals who are public and political figures, government and civic leaders, activists, and journalists. The June 16, 2022, Memorandum discussed the creation of a task force to reel in ‘online harassment and abuse’ and to develop programs targeting such disinformation campaigns. The Memorandum also called for the Task Force to confer with technology experts and again threatened social-media platforms with adverse legal consequences if the platforms did not censor aggressively enough.”
End quote of excerpts from Missouri v. Biden, July 4, 2023. This judicial freedom document is worthy of study and publication in its entirety.
The War on “Misinformation” — Outlawing Dissident Data on the Road to Tyranny
The question of who is qualified to arbitrate what constitutes misinformation is seldom discussed and mostly neglected, for obvious reasons. If it were deliberated, the bias of the legacy media’s anointed “misinformation experts” (Stanford Internet Observatory, Virality Project, Center for Countering Digital Hate, etc.) would be apparent, along with a larger question: why is “misinformation” supposedly lethal to the commonweal?
In the claustrophobic corridors of conformity where roost our supposed intellectual superiors, there is little historical memory of ideas once denounced as the vilest heresy having been proved right over the course of time, unless those views were on the “progressive” side of the ideological scale.
A truly non-partisan recollection of the past would lead to tolerance and judicious latitude for ideas which the 21st century consensus considers outside the limits of acceptable belief.
Error Has Rights
The precept that error has rights is as old as the Jeffersonian democracy which the Biden administration and its friends in high places, claim to defend. The battle for this principle was successfully fought in the 1780s, and again in the 1960s and ‘70s. It has since been nearly overturned in the new millennium, where it now hangs by a thread.
“Free Press” Smokescreen
The free press debate is mostly a smokescreen for an ideological conflict in which one side of the political spectrum seeks to gain an advantage over the other. Concerning censorship, the Left and the Right are often partners in slime. Trying to find an authentic Jeffersonian on either side is like searching for a Baptist in Mecca. The right of scholars who analyze flaws in the Talmud and the atrocities of the Israeli government to be free of censorship and cancellation, has zero support among most of the Republican legislators, jurists and pundits who are indignant over the suppression of their viewpoints by Biden’s bureaucrats.
In America, much of the interdiction of ideas and obstruction of free inquiry is perpetrated by private companies, and more specifically, the usury industry, which monopolizes online payment systems. In resistance to their monopoly, dissident writers are paid and sustained by readers rather than corporations, which helps to encourage the widest possible diversity of opinion, as well as independent investigative reporting which is vital to the democracy which Prof. Tribe and our would-be Overlords cynically extol with seigneurial conceit, and simultaneously thwart.
In 1789 the Catholic idea that the Blessed Virgin Mary was conceived without sin and assumed bodily into heaven was considered a depraved belief in the eyes of the majority of the Protestant population of the United States. Had it not been for the liberty of conscience enshrined in the Bill of Rights that year, those Catholic beliefs may very well have been outlawed.
234 years later, modern science has discovered that babies in the womb share the cells of their mothers: “Mothers around the world say they feel like their children are still a part of them long after they’ve given birth. As it turns out, that is literally true… Fetomaternal transfer… occurs in all pregnancies and in humans the fetal cells can persist for decades. Microchimeric fetal cells are found in various maternal tissues and organs including blood, bone marrow, skin and liver” (cf. here and here).
Consequently, the Son of God who was of one flesh with the humble Israelite girl we know as His mother Mary, shared his very tissue with her. In light of that discovery by avant-garde science, it seems far less likely that God would have allowed the body that contained within it the flesh of Jesus Christ, to rot on earth. In 1950, when Pius XII declared the bodily assumption of Mary into heaven, it seems he was prescient indeed.
Nowadays, with the desacralization of our society, where the outcome of the colosseum sports game is of infinitely greater interest than the corporeal fate of the human that served as the vessel for the incarnation of God, the once hotly disputed veracity or falsehood of the pontiff’s declaration doesn’t necessitate First Amendment protection. Other controversies however, are ablaze in the white hot fire of zealotry and the certitude that one side is right and the other is not only wrong, it has no right to be wrong. For example, disputing trans claims and COVID orthodoxies are subject to intense proscription.
The Left pretends to want libraries free of censorship. Some of them support trans books in children’s libraries because they have faith in the inherent value of that literature as drivers of transformative thinking in children, not due to any allegiance to the civil libertarian tenets of the First Amendment. Not for a minute would most Leftists countenance the introduction of holocaust denial or white supremacist books in a library under their control. For these folks “freedom of the press” is a pretext for overcoming the censorship demands of one’s adversaries while practicing it oneself.
The Right wants libraries stocked with writings by Karl Rove, Ludwig von Mises, Glenn Beck, John Bolton, Hannity and O’Reilly. A majority actively oppose the presence of books in public libraries by Noam Chomsky, Margaret Atwood, Edward Said, Alexander Cockburn, and Maureen Dowd. Like the Left, the Right mainly operates by a dual standard.
Knowledge of the history of the struggle for intellectual freedom and the life stories of John Lilburne, Michael Servetus, John Tyndale, Edmund Campion, Ignaz Semmelweis, Eugene V. Debs, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Harry Elmer Barnes, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Norman Finkelstein, are instrumental in kindling a commitment to the American Way: •rights of conscience, •the necessity of a free press, and •toleration of opinions designated as “misinformation.”
The debate turns on whether or not a free people require intervention by “expert authorities” like fallible Fauci, who filter what would otherwise be unfettered access to information.
To prove his points in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson stated, “… let Facts be submitted to a candid world.” The Founders of our nation were unequivocal in proclaiming their confidence in the people judging for themselves, without a king, commissar or president—backed by propaganda conglomerates in New York and Hollywood— preventing them from undertaking this sacred civic responsibility and divine right.
That the interdiction of information online is termed by Lucifer’s lexicographers “a defense of democracy,” is among the most egregious evocations of doublethink since George Orwell put pen to paper.
Distilled to its first principle, the defense of democracy depends on the defense of the right to be wrong.
The New York Times, Laurence Tribe, Leah Litman, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Bobby Kennedy Jr., Alex Berenson and Tucker Carlson, all have a right to be in error. Without that Constitutional liberty guaranteed to every individual — whether heretic or grandee — Fascism from the Right or Communism from the Left will inevitably take control and sift our nation like wheat.
“This country is planted thick with laws… And if you cut them down… do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.” —Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons
FOR THE ADVANCEMENT TO KNOWLEDGE CONTRA CANCEL CULTURE
Michael Hoffman is the author of Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare (2001), The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome (2017) , Twilight Language (2021), six other books published in the United States, as well as overseas in Japanese and French translation, and 122 issues of Revisionist History® newsletter, 1997-2022. Since January, twenty-eight of his essays have been published on Substack. He is a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press. His podcast, Michael Hoffman’s Revisionist History,® is heard around the world.
Twitter: @HoffmanMichaelA
Copyright ©2023 Independent History and Research, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho 83816-0849
The Lies We Were Told
How long does it take to conclude some authority is lying? We don’t know this answer yet … apparently many years.
BY BILL RICE, JR. | JULY 11, 2023
I recently discovered an excellent Substack Newsletter authored by a registered nurse (Dee Dee) who has treated many (alleged) Covid patients. This nurse finally had enough and decided to share her stories and thoughts via her own Substack, which she started May 25th.
From reading a couple of her pithy posts, my take-away is Nurse Dee must feel like the main character in Joseph Heller’s classic novel Catch 22.
In that novel the experiences and observations of a fictional WW II bombardier tell readers the guidance and logic used by his superiors is complete madness.
Dee’s observations prompted my own question: When do citizens or employees finally realize that every supposedly-true thing they’ve been told is, in fact, a brazen lie?
For most people, at least with Covid proclamations, the answer seems to be “never.”
In other words, for many people, being lied to over and over doesn’t matter.
To put it mildly, such a revelation is a tad disconcerting.
Dee Dee’s observations from a June 2nd dispatch might show readers why I thought of “Catch-22,” where the message to bomber crews was “just do what you are told;” don’t try to figure out the logic.
With Covid, Nurse Dee identifies the goal of all orders. Instead of just “fly the dangerous mission,” the key message is: “Just take the shot.”
“The logic surrounding COVID-19 was circular. Every dictated premise, required blind faith and the goal was always the same; to take the shot.
“… You could not question the narrative and remain a good citizen …The mantra erupted, this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated.
“No argument could be interjected in the logic. It didn’t matter if you had not seen a new illness with unique symptoms … It didn’t matter if the science didn’t make sense. It didn’t matter if the measures were opposite to all your previous medical training.
… It didn’t matter that the vaccine did not stop transmission, and it didn’t matter if you had natural immunity. Essentially, we were told to accept every claim without evidence or reason. The orders had been given, just take the shot.”
In a recent dispatch, Dee listed about 30 truisms she (and all of us) were told. A few examples:
We were told the vaccine wouldn’t be mandatory.
We were told there would be two shots.
We were (then) told a booster was needed.
We were (then) told another booster was needed.
We were told there had been clinical trails conducted by the pharmaceutical companies that proved safe and effective.
We were told the vaccine would prevent the COVID-19 illness.
We were then told the vaccine would prevent serious illness.
We were told if everyone would just take the shot, it would be over.
We were (then) told there were breakthrough cases, where the vaccinated person became sick with COVID-19.
We were told even if you weren’t sick, you could give the disease to grandma.
We were told the unvaccinated are spreading the virus and creating mutations.
We were told, this is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
We were told vaccine passports were the new normal and would be required.
We were told the vaccine was mandatory for employment.
We were told nurses who refused the shot were stupid …”
Back to me: Forget the pronouncements of the CDC experts, of Dr. Fauci, or of Nurse Dee’s hospital supervisors … just think about people you’ve interacted with in your own life.
At some point, when someone has told you one falsehood after another, do you stop believing them?
For most people, three big lies and you’re out.
“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me …”
At some point, villagers did stop listening to the little boy who kept screaming, “A wolf is coming!”
Even politicians can take lying too far.
Here I recall John Edwards, a former U.S. Senator who was almost elected vice president of the United States.
Edwards lied repeatedly about an affair and then about fathering a baby with his mistress. Even when he “came clean” in a TV interview, his “confession” was replete with more lies.
I don’t know what John Edwards is doing with his life today, but I know he’s not running for political office. If he did, he’d be laughed off the podium. Everyone now gets that they can’t trust John Edwards.
The question I’m grappling with today is how many lies does someone have to tell before people conclude they’re listening to a serial liar? Is there a quota for one-lie-too-many, or a lie cut-off point?
In every-day normal life, it only takes a couple big whoppers before a friend becomes a “former friend,” a person to be avoided at all costs.
But not with our Covid liars. Apparently, there’s no limit to how many lies “trusted authorities” can tell … and still be considered “trusted” authorities.
In her very fist post, Nurse Dee wrote:
“Thrust upon our population was a labyrinth of lies. There were new daily mandates offering no explanation, making little if any, medical sense.
“… The medical interventions … coupled with preposterous statements from our leading experts, led me to personally, question everything. One question led to many questions until one day, I came to the realization, there were no answers.
“My questions met a variety of responses that included silence, laughter, and hostility. This was my first experience of being discouraged from asking questions.”
How does a person continue to function – as a sane human being – in a world that’s apparently insane?
Somehow, Nurse Dee (and me and you) … are still here, but we’ve had to adopt a new survival mechanism and are now functioning in a surreal new matrix where we know we have to live with insane notions; where we realize a never-ending cascade of “accepted” lies is our New Normal.
After reading Dee’s “Catch-22” anecdotes, I also had this question: How do serial liars keep telling all these lies? How do they get away with it?
This answer seems clear. Except for people like Dee, very few people call them out on their lies. (Thank you, mainstream media “watchdog” journalists).
Also, as I learned from a big story making the rounds today, the lying officials just keep doubling down on their lies.
An organization called the International Coalition of Medicine Regulatory Authorities (ICMRA) just issued a big press release telling everyone that the vaccines are still safe and effective and, just like we’ve all been told a million times … everyone should keep getting their next rounds of shots.
It’s clear to me that the purpose of this document is to counter the growing “spread” of world citizens who might, finally, be starting to question the pronouncements of trusted health authorities.
A few of the “Key messages from this group, which “brings together 38 medicines regulatory authorities from every region in the world, with the WHO as an observer” (In other words, a centralized, clearinghouse of expert liars):
* “False and misleading information about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines on social media often exaggerates the frequency and severity of side effects. Misinformation also wrongly attributes unrelated medical events to the vaccines.”
* “There is no evidence that COVID-19 vaccines have contributed to excess mortality during the pandemic …”
* Under the header, “Benefits of COVID-19 Vaccination,” the public is told that
“Millions of lives are estimated to have been saved by COVID-19 vaccination …”
I learned of this document from colleagues at the Brownstone Institute’s writer group.
A fellow Substacker added the link with this note: “A meticulous and immaculately supported take-down of this statement is needed. It’s been all over MSM today.”
I read the propaganda and immediately posted this reply:
“You could debunk/challenge every sentence …”
Two seconds before I made my post, another colleague posted this:
“Wow. Every single bullet point is a lie.”
Key take-away: The lies Nurse Dee was told every day – or almost immediately figured out on her own – are still being told today.
The damn liars have simply worn us down. I could debunk every one of those bullet points, but I’m growing tired of writing the same rebuttals over and over.
And as Dee observes, what’s the point? Even if someone does debunk all of these whoppers, these people are just going to keep lying … and keep telling us what to do.
The only conclusion I can make is that – especially regarding topics that might involve “life and death” – people, for some surreal reason, simply want to keep believing the liars.
Most people in the world must feel “safer” believing lies, lies that have killed and injured millions of their fellow citizens, including family members, friends and neighbors.
In our “Catch-22” world, the bigger the lies – and the more often serial lies prevaricate, the better.
For the liars, the benefits of lying are impressive. For the world’s skeptics, the costs of calling out liars are quite unpleasant.
Anyway, the lies aren’t going to stop.
Erdogan still firmly in NATO bloc despite blackmailing EU
By Ahmed Adel | July 11, 2023
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan urged the European Union on July 9 to open the doors for his country to join the bloc if they want to secure support for Sweden’s accession to NATO. His blackmailing of the EU, which ultimately produced results, comes only days after he controversially broke an agreement with Moscow by releasing neo-Nazi Azov Battalion members under Turkey’s custody to Ukraine.
“Turkey has been waiting at the door of the European Union for over 50 years now, and almost all of the NATO member countries are now members of the European Union. I am making this call to these countries that have kept Turkey waiting at the gates of the European Union for more than 50 years,” Erdogan said. “First, open the way to Turkey’s membership of the European Union, and then we will open it for Sweden, just as we had opened it for Finland.”
Turkey has been an EU member candidate since 1999. Since 2016, negotiations on a visa-free regime between Turkey and the EU have been on hold. The country’s bid for EU membership has been stalled due to democratic backsliding and an unrelenting occupation of the northern portion of EU-member Cyprus since 1974.
Ultimately, Erdogan backflipped just mere hours after issuing his blackmail.
“I’m glad to announce … that President Erdogan has agreed to forward the accession protocol for Sweden to the grand national assembly as soon as possible, and work closely with the assembly to ensure ratification,” said NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg on the eve of the alliance summit in Vilnius, which will be held on July 11-12.
Finland and Sweden applied to join the bloc in May 2022. Finland gained its membership on April 4, 2023, while the Swedes await approval from Hungary and Turkey. As Turkey will never surrender its occupation of northern Cyprus, its EU membership will be forever stalled, making Erdogan’s ultimatum either a desperate action or a calculated manoeuvre to advance other interests.
Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billström told public broadcaster SVT that he expects Turkey will eventually signal that it will let Sweden join the alliance, though he could not say whether that would happen at the NATO summit in the Lithuanian capital. Sweden’s top diplomat said he expects Hungary, which also has not ratified Sweden’s accession, to do so before Turkey.
Turkey and Hungary remain the only NATO members still standing in the way of Sweden becoming the 32nd member of the US-led bloc, with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban strongly signalling he will follow Erdogan’s lead and approve Sweden’s membership only if Turkey does the same.
Now that Erdogan has reportedly unblocked Sweden’s path, the question is what was offered to appease the Turkish leader. Presumably, Erdogan would have only unblocked the accession process with the promise of receiving F-16 fighter jets, advancing EU membership talks without altering domestic oppression and ethnic cleansing abroad, or securing Western funding as the Turkish economy continues to tank with Gulf money all dried up.
The NATO summit will be dominated by how the alliance will see its future relationship with Kiev amid endless efforts by President Volodymyr Zelensky for Ukraine to become a member and a signatory to the mutual defence pact. Evidently, though, Sweden’s situation will also be discussed since Turkey is the main hindrance to their accession.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, for his part, joined a chorus of other European leaders and officials who said Sweden’s NATO membership should not be tied to Ankara’s stalled EU membership bid.
“Sweden meets all the requirements for NATO membership. The other question is one that is not connected with it. And that is why I do not think it should be seen as a connected issue,” the German chancellor said.
Stoltenberg also expressed before announcing Erdogan’s unblocking that the two issues have nothing to do with one another, reminding that while he supports Ankara’s bid for EU membership, it was not one of the conditions in the agreement signed by Turkey, Sweden, and Finland in 2022 at the NATO summit in Madrid.
Despite Erdogan initially adding another condition to Sweden’s accession, it is not a sign that Turkey has gone rogue within NATO, but rather it is the Turkish president blackmailing the alliance and EU to gain advantages for his country – what they are specifically since EU membership is not realistic, remains to be seen.
Erdogan broke a deal he had with Moscow by releasing on July 8, only days before the NATO summit, five Ukrainian Azov Battalion officers, who returned to Ukraine on a presidential plane. The Azov Battalion militants had been prisoners since the battle of Azovstal following the Russian liberation of the port city of Mariupol. Erdogan had no obvious reason for breaking the deal, meaning that he will now want something at the NATO summit for doing this.
Although it may appear that Erdogan has gone rogue by attaching an impossible condition for Sweden to become a NATO member, he is just leveraging to gain some advantage for Turkey. The release of the Azov Battalion members for seemingly no good reason demonstrates that Turkey is still firmly within the NATO bloc.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
White House opposes independent oversight of Ukraine aid
RT | July 11, 2023
President Joe Biden’s administration has objected to plans by US lawmakers to establish an independent inspector general who would scrutinize Washington’s massive military and economic aid packages for Ukraine.
At issue is a provision added to the $874 billion US defense budget for the government’s next fiscal year, calling for an additional oversight layer on Ukraine aid modeled after the inspector general established for reconstruction in Afghanistan. Conservative lawmakers, including Representative Matt Gaetz, a Republican from Florida, have argued that the White House lacks adequate controls to prevent fraud and other misuse of the $113 billion in aid approved by Congress to support Ukraine in its conflict with Russia.
However, the administration argued on Monday that the Pentagon inspector general and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) are already working with relevant congressional committees to “ensure accountability” for Ukraine aid. The Pentagon inspector general and the GAO are currently conducting investigations of “every aspect of this assistance,” the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said in a statement.
The White House also opposes an amendment to the defense bill that would expand the authority of the Afghanistan reconstruction inspector general. “This expansion is both unnecessary and unprecedented” because inspectors from both the US State Department and the US Agency for International Development already oversee the aid, the OMB said.
John Sopko, the independent inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, warned in February that strong safeguards were needed to prevent corruption from undermining Washington’s aid packages for Ukraine. Failure to learn from the US mistakes in Afghanistan, where much aid was “diverted or stolen,” could lead to a repeat in Ukraine.
“You’re bound to get corrupt elements of not only the Ukrainian or host government, but also of US government contractors or other third-party contractors to steal the money,” Sopko told Fox News.
Last year, Congress blocked an initiative spearheaded by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, to audit the aid to Kiev.
Ukraine consistently ranks as one of the most corrupt countries in Europe. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky fired a number of top officials earlier this year for profiteering. An August 2022 report by CBS News indicated that only about 30% of the Western weaponry sent to Kiev was actually making it to the front lines because of waste and corruption.
Hunter Biden Reportedly Has Extensive Ties With a Dozen Senior US Officials
Sputnik – 10.07.2023
WASHINGTON – US President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, has reportedly maintained “extensive ties” with almost a dozen of current and former senior government officials since the time when his father served as vice president under the Obama administration.
A digital analysis carried out by Fox News detailed a list of officials with whom Hunter Biden was or continues to be in close contact, and includes US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, senior Biden adviser Michael Donilon, and a close aide to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, among several other people.
Hunter Biden and Sullivan were cooperating with each other during their joint work on the board of the Truman National Security Project, a liberal foreign policy think tank. Sullivan worked there in 2017-2019, while Hunter was also serving on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings and the Chinese private equity fund BHR Partners. The US is currently investigating those and his other foreign business activities.
The outlet noted that former White House official Mike McCormick accused Sullivan of being a “conspirator” in the Biden family’s “kickback scheme” in Ukraine at the time.
The report also cites an extensive email exchange between Hunter Biden, at the time when he was with Burisma, and then-Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken. That correspondence shows the two men scheduled at least one meeting with each other.
Moreover, their communications go back at least a decade. For instance, Hunter contacted Blinken’s wife, Evan Ryan, in June 2010 asking for Blinken’s non-government email address, the report said. “Can I get Toni’s non-govt email? I wanted to send him something,” the message read.
Ryan is currently serving as White House cabinet secretary.
The report also mentioned email exchanges between Hunter Biden and several other cabinet members.
US House Oversight Committee launched an investigation into alleged criminal acts committed by the Biden family, including corruption and influence peddling. Earlier this month, panel chairman Rep. James Comer (R-KY) characterized the alleged actions as “organized crime.”
The committee’s probe is partially based on accusations from a confidential FBI informant, who alleges Joe and Hunter Biden received millions of dollars from a Ukrainian energy company. Lawmakers are also investigating deals tied to China.
In June, Hunter Biden’s attorneys and the US Justice Department announced an agreement under which he will plead guilty to misdemeanor tax charges and enter a pretrial diversionary agreement on a felony firearms offense in an effort to resolve the criminal probe against him and avoid prison time.
Elizabeth Tsurkov Was Up To No Good When She Went Missing In Iraq
BY ANDREW KORYBKO | JULY 10, 2023
It was just reported that US-based Russian-Israeli academic Elizabeth Tsurkov went missing in Iraq, where she was conducting fieldwork as part of her research at Princeton. She reportedly arrived in the country on her Russian passport since Iraq doesn’t allow Israeli citizens to enter. Iran is accused of organizing her kidnapping via its local allies, which one outlet speculated was to set up a high-profile prisoner exchange for an IRGC operative who Israel claimed last month was captured inside the Islamic Republic itself.
The Mainstream Media is portraying Tsurkov as an innocent victim after an unnamed senior Israeli official denied that she’s a member of Mossad like some had begun to suspect. Regardless of whatever her ties with that country’s intelligence agency may or may not be, she was up to no good when she went missing in Iraq. From the perspective of local patriotic groups, it would have been legitimate to detain Tsurkov for the five reasons that will now be explained.
For starters, she should never have entered a country that prohibits entry to Israeli citizens like herself. By arriving in Iraqi on her Russian passport, she deliberately deceived the authorities. Once this was discovered, it immediately put her and everyone who she’d hitherto come into contact with there under suspicion of being spies. She therefore behaved highly irresponsibly, which is unbecoming of an Ivy League researcher like she presents herself as and thus casts further doubt on her credibility.
The second point is that the very nature of her work makes her suspicious. According to the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy where she’s a Non-Resident Fellow, “Her research is based on a large network of contacts – ordinary civilians, activists, combatants and communal, political and military leaders – which she has established across the Middle East and particularly in Syria, Iraq and Israel-Palestine.” The Iraqi counterintelligence service therefore had grounds to be concerned by her activity.
Third, she was clandestinely cultivating her vast regional network with sources whose countries prohibit their people from having any ties with her country or its nationals. She as an Israeli would have certainly known this, which means that she purposely put these people at risk for reasons that only she herself can account for. Researchers are supposed to operate according to a code of ethics whereby they never do anything that could bring harm to their subjects, though Tsurkov did precisely the opposite.
The fourth point is that she was conscious of her work advancing Israeli interests, whether the way she subjectively understands them as being or per speculative orders from suspected handlers, as evidenced by the fact that her Twitter handle @Elizrael explicitly references that country. She has the right to publicly self-identify with any country and thus be associated with it by others, especially if she’s its national, but this just goes to show that she knew that everything she was doing put her sources at risk.
And finally, local patriotic groups might not have trusted their corrupt country’s security services to properly deal with the counterintelligence threat posed by Tsurkov upon discovering her ties to Israel and the suspicious nature of her work, which is why they might have acted unilaterally as vigilantes. No value judgement is being made either way about the scenario in which such groups might have been responsible for her disappearance, but just to point out why they might have acted outside legal bounds.
Tsurkov should have known better than to visit Iraq seeing as how it’s illegal for Israeli citizens to do so, yet she still went anyway in order to expand her network of sources there on the pretext of conducting fieldwork as part of her research at Princeton and deceptively entered on her Russian passport. Even if she had nothing to do with Israel, her work would have still placed her on the radar of regional counterintelligence services, who investigate foreign-connected networks inside their countries.
Nobody who’s truly up to any good would ever enter a country where they’re legally prohibited from visiting by using another passport, let alone to clandestinely expand their network of sources there. She knowingly misled the authorities and then put her contacts at risk by meeting with them in person afterwards. Even worse, she did all this while publicly self-identifying on social media with the same country that they’re legally prohibited from having any ties.
One can still support Tsurkov and remain convinced that she’s supposedly an innocent victim exactly as the Mainstream Media claims, but it’s dishonest to deny that she behaved highly irresponsibly at great risk to herself and her sources inside Iraq, which contradicted expectations of an Ivy League researcher. For that reason, there are indeed plausible reasons to suspect her of conducting espionage under that cover, though whether or not she should have reportedly been detained remains a matter of debate.
Biden Admin Lying to Americans ‘About Everything to Do With Ukraine’ – RFK Jr
Sputnik – 08.07.2023
Robert F Kennedy Jr, the present 2024 presidential hopeful and nephew to assassinated former US President John F Kennedy, previously said at a town hall event that the Ukraine crisis had been turned by Washington into “a proxy war between Russia and the United States”.
The federal government under the Joe Biden administration has been blatantly lying to the Americans “about everything to do with Ukraine”, said Robert F Kennedy Jr, in an interview for Judge Andrew Napolitano on his Judging Freedom podcast.
“This was a sell job that they gave us on Ukraine,” insisted the 2024 Democratic candidate for US President.
“The Russians tried to avoid a war… wanted to sign the Minsk Accords – a reasonable document – to keep NATO out of Ukraine, with Ukraine remaining neutral… That [US] remove the Aegis missile systems from Romania, Poland, and that the murder… the wholesale killing of ethnic Russians in the Donbass by the Ukrainian government that America put in power stop. Those are all things that we should have agreed to,” stated the nephew of assassinated former US President John F Kennedy.
He added that Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky won in 2019 by promising to sign the Minsk accords. The complex series of measures negotiated by Russia, France, Germany and Ukraine in 2014-2015 in a bid to put an end to the armed conflict between the Kiev authorities and the breakaway region of Donbas. Moscow repeatedly stated that Kiev was not fulfilling the deal, for example not granting self-government to the Russian-speaking region of Donbass. In February, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky admitted he never intended to implement the Minsk agreements, with former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Former French President Franсois Hollande, who participated in the Normandy format, admitting the same.
“It is existential for the Russians… they have a legitimate national security interest,” Robert F Kennedy Jr pointed out, referring to Moscow’s ongoing special military operation in Ukraine.
“[The US] wanted the war, for the reasons that Biden has said… The real reason for the war in Ukraine is regime change in Russia,” Kennedy emphasized in the interview on the Judging Freedom podcast.
Kennedy previously slammed decades of policy conducted by the US and NATO toward Ukraine and Russia for fueling the current conflagration.
“We have neglected many, many opportunities to settle this war peacefully,” Kennedy said in June during a live town hall event with NewsNation. He added that Washington had turned the ongoing conflagration in Ukraine into a proxy war waged by the United States against Russia.
“We were told this was a humanitarian exercise… But when President Biden was asked why we are over there, he said for regime change of [Russian President] Vladimir Putin,” the 2024 White House hopeful underscored.
Weighing in on remarks by US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who said last year that Washington wanted “to see Russia weakened,” Kennedy scathingly remarked:
“That is the opposite of a humanitarian mission, that is a mission about a war of attrition.”
‘What Are They Hiding?’: RFK Jr. Unhappy Biden Delayed Release of JFK Documents
By Ian DeMartino – Sputnik – 07.07.2023
Despite a 1979 House review that concluded two or more shooters and co-conspirators were likely involved in the assassination, only Lee Harvey Oswald was accused of killing former US President John F. Kennedy. Oswald maintained his innocence until he was gunned down by Mafia-connected nightclub owner Jack Ruby before his trial.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the current 2024 presidential hopeful and nephew to assassinated former US President John F. Kennedy, is not happy that current President Joe Biden decided to delay the release of government documents related to the 1963 assassination.
On June 30, the Biden Administration quietly released a memo before the holiday weekend, announcing that some government documents related to the assassination would not be released as planned, a decision that angered Kennedy Jr. The White House has stated that to date, some 99% of the records have been released; however, multiple records include redactions.
“It’s not about conspiracy – it is about transparency,” the environmental and anti-vaccination figure said on Twitter on Sunday. “In a midnight Friday night announcement the White House has delivered the bad news that President Biden will be maintaining secrecy indefinitely on some JFK assassination related records.”
The 1992 John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act mandated the release of all government documents related to the killing by October 2017. However, the bill included a clause that allowed the release of documents to be delayed if it was “made necessary by an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations.”
Biden said in his memo that the “postponement of public disclosure of that information is necessary to protect against identifiable harms to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, and the conduct of foreign relations that are of such gravity that they outweigh the public interest in disclosure.”
That explanation, which was the same justification used by former President Donald Trump when he delayed the release of the records, was not enough to satisfy Kennedy Jr., who called the postponement “unlawful.”
“The assassination was 60 years ago. What national security secrets could possibly be at risk? What are they hiding?” he questioned.
Kennedy Jr. has become more vocal about the alleged involvement of the CIA in his uncle’s assassination. He recently said ex-CIA Director Allen Dulles helped cover up the CIA’s role in the former president’s death. Dulles was fired by President Kennedy, and was a member of the Warren Commission, which was established to investigate the fatal shooting.
He also recently stated that the first instinct of his father was that the CIA was behind the murder.
Bizarre New Attack on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr: He Promotes the ‘Ugly Message that Being Autistic is Bad’
By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | July 7, 2023
It seems clear that most parents of autistic children in America love the children and see great value in the children’s activities and thoughts. It also seems clear that most of these parents also would prefer that their children could live free from the effects of autism and that a way is found to prevent autism from developing in other children.
That is commonsensical.
But, when people in the media are looking for any and every basis to tar Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his presidential campaign, his dedication to the ordinarily perceived of as admirable goal of seeking to reduce the prevalence of autism is twisted by opponents into a vicious perspective.
MSNBC columnist Eric Garcia wrote in Sunday editorial focused on Kennedy that “the crux of his baseless claim that vaccines cause autism is the ugly message that being autistic is bad.”
Notice the language Garcia uses. He does not write that Kennedy says people with autism are bad people. Yet, it is just that misreading that would make the “ugly message” designation make any sense. What we have here is nonsense that many readers will fix in their minds into a condemnation of Kennedy for something the author did not state and offered no evidence to support.
Working to prevent autism is an activity rooted in the promotion of human happiness and health. If it is condemnable as an “ugly message,” it would seem that individuals working to prevent cancer, heart attacks, Alzheimer’s, and other serious medical problems should be similarly condemned.
Kennedy is a candidate for president, so it is right that he be criticized. But, media people, can you at least keep the criticism rational and not rooted in deception?
Copyright © 2023 by RonPaul Institute
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Book Review
The Greatest Threat to World Peace? A Review of Daniele Ganser’s ‘USA: The Ruthless Empire’
Review by Marilyn Langlois | November 10, 2023
If you regard the United States as perhaps flawed but overall a force for good in the world . . .
If you scoff at the notion that the US, a republic founded on principles of freedom and democracy, has morphed into a world empire, perpetrating assassinations, coups d’état, acts of terror and illegal warfare . . .
If you want to promote peace but haven’t yet explored deceptive events that precipitate US warmongering . . .
. . . here is a volume that will clear the air and paint an honest picture of the significant, not-so-rosy impact US foreign policy and actions have had in the world around us.
USA: The Ruthless Empire, by Swiss historian and peace researcher Daniele Ganser, is the newly published English language translation of his book Imperium USA, originally written in German and published in 2020. Here is a summary of key points — including some lesser-known ones — along with remedies for a more peaceful future, that are covered in the book. … continue
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