US officials admit to major violations during 2020 election
RT | December 22, 2025
Election officials in the US state of Georgia have admitted to major violations of vote certification procedures during the 2020 presidential race. US President Donald Trump, who lost to Joe Biden, has repeatedly claimed that the election was “stolen” and marred by widespread fraud and irregularities.
The admission, made earlier this month, emerged from a complaint filed by election integrity activist David Cross, who accused Fulton County, Georgia’s most populous county, of illegally certifying at least 315,000 ballots in 2020.
Biden beat Trump in Georgia – which has 16 electoral votes – by fewer than 12,000 votes, before going on to win the Electoral College 306–232.
The dispute centers on tabulator tapes produced by voting machines during early voting. Under state rules, each tabulator must generate closing tapes signed by poll workers to certify the recorded vote totals.
After filing an open records request with Fulton County, Cross found at least 134 tabulator tapes with no signatures, meaning that the associated ballots could not have been legally certified.
Cross also raised allegations of missing “zero tapes” meant to confirm that machines began counting from zero at the start of polling, along with discrepancies involving scanner serial numbers and unusually late poll closing times.
During a recent State Election Board hearing, Ann Brumbaugh, an attorney for the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections, said the county “does not dispute the allegations,” acknowledging the failure as a violation of election board rules.
Members of the state board described the findings as “very troubling” and referred the case to the Georgia Attorney General, seeking potential civil penalties of $5,000 per unsigned tape and other enforcement action.
The Georgia result has remained a focal point of Trump’s broader complaints about the 2020 election, which have been rejected by Democrats and formed the basis of multiple legal cases against him.
Since returning to office, Trump has vowed to overhaul the US voting system, pledging stricter voter identification requirements, limits on mail-in voting, and a shift toward paper ballots, arguing that these changes are necessary to restore confidence in elections.
Hepatitis B Vaccination of Newborns: Seriously Misleading Media Reports
By Peter C. Gøtzsche | Brownstone Institute | December 19, 2025
Fiction or faith. It is a major failure to give equal prominence to people presenting scientific facts and people talking about their feelings or beliefs with no evidence in their support, or to allow them to contradict unchallenged the most reliable evidence we have.
However, virtually every time I know something about a healthcare issue considered controversial, this is what I see in the news, and the hepatitis B vaccine controversy illustrates this abundantly.
On 5 December 2025, with a vote of 8 versus 3, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) ended the recommendation that all newborns in the United States receive a hepatitis B shot at birth. The birth dose was recommended only if the mother had tested positive for the virus or if her infection status was unknown.
The change was very rational, and as in Western Europe, only Portugal recommends a universal birth dose, it would seem difficult to argue against it. But the media did and failed us badly. Two days after the vote, I downloaded news stories from 14 major media outlets, and they were all very negative. The media used three main tactics to support their beliefs:
They denigrated the Secretary of Health, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the members of ACIP he had selected, and some of the presenters at the meeting.
They gave undue prominence and praise to the three dissenting ACIP voices and outsiders, who were depicted as experts or scientists, as if to say that they must be right, and they were widely quoted for their remarks, which were rarely rational or evidence-based.
They didn’t check if what the critics of the policy change claimed was correct.
The Denigration of Kennedy
Of the 14 news outlets, only Nature did not denigrate Kennedy.
Reuters started its press release by saying it was “a major policy win” for Kennedy that vaccine advisers named by him reversed a decades-long recommendation “that disease experts say will reverse decades of public health gains.” So, Kennedy’s advisers were not experts, and as the critics were experts, they must be correct, right?
Reuters noted that the CDC is “now run by a Kennedy-appointed acting head, Jim O’Neill, who is not a scientist;” that Kennedy founded the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense; fired ACIP’s previous 17 “independent” experts and replaced them with a group that largely supports his views; dropped broad recommendations for the Covid vaccine and cut funding for mRNA vaccines.
The facts are that several of the previous experts at the ACIP were not independent but had conflicts of interest in relation to vaccine manufacturers and other drug companies; that recommending Covid vaccines only to high-risk groups brought the US on par with Europe; and that cutting funding for mRNA vaccine research was well motivated. Kennedy said that his team had reviewed the science and found that these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like Covid and flu. His department was therefore shifting the funding toward “safer, broader vaccine platforms that remain effective even as viruses mutate.”
Reuters misrepresented the ACIP meeting entirely, claiming that “many of Kennedy’s committee members criticized the vaccine as unsafe.” What they said was that safety had not been adequately studied, which was correct.
The other media called Kennedy a vaccine sceptic (The Hill, Health Policy Watch, CBC), a vaccine activist (CNN, the Guardian), or an anti-vaccine advocate (PBS), who fired all 17 previous members of the ACIP, replacing them with people who largely shared his scepticism (New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio, CNN, PBS, CBS News, Time, Health Policy Watch, CBC, BBC, Guardian ) with a “goal of upending vaccine policy” (New York Times ), and the vote fulfilled a long-held goal of the anti-vaccine movement (The Hill ).
The CBC, the largest news broadcaster in Canada, noted that Kennedy had promoted debunked theories linking vaccines to autism. It is correct that studies of the MMR vaccine and aluminium adjuvants did not find a link, but the aluminium study is seriously flawed, some studies have claimed a link, and as it has not been studied if the extensive US childhood vaccine program might cause autism, the CDC has suggested additional research projects.
The Washington Post said that aluminium had become a focal point for anti-vaccine groups that claim cumulative exposure may harm neurological development and that vaccine researchers note that aluminium is present naturally in breast milk, food, and water at far higher levels than in vaccines and is rapidly cleared from the body. It is highly misleading to compare dietary intake with injections, as very little aluminium is absorbed from the gut and the rest is effectively eliminated via the kidneys, and as aluminium adjuvants in vaccines are harmful.
The Hill and CNN noted that aluminium adjuvants in vaccines have been proven to be safe (which is false), but that vaccine sceptics like Kennedy have long said they are linked to allergies and other health conditions (which is correct). Natural infection protects against allergies, and studies comparing vaccinated with unvaccinated children have shown vaccines increase the occurrence of asthma and other atopic diseases.
The Denigration of ACIP Members and Meeting Presenters
Nature noted that several panel members continued to express broad criticism of vaccines.
The New York Times lamented that most of the new ACIP members and some of the presenters have no experience in vaccine research or clinical practice and that the divisiveness and dysfunction of the committee in making the decision raised questions about the reliability of the advisory process.
This is terribly misleading. People who have learned to read can assess the merits of vaccines, and scientific debate is what furthers science. Acting ACIP chair Robert Malone said that the committee’s work must be guided by evidence, transparency, and a willingness to scrutinise assumptions rather than protect them.
Health Policy Watch wrote that Malone has been criticised for vaccine misinformation, which is a meaningless comment without any mention of what the issues were. Some of the most outstanding vaccine researchers in the world, professors Peter Aaby and Christine Stabell Benn from Copenhagen, have been criticised for misinformation and have had lectures and interviews removed from YouTube even though everything they said was correct.
CBS News noted that ACIP member Retsef Levi, a mathematician with no medical training (so what?), had falsely claimed that experts had never tested the vaccines appropriately, and the New York Times called it incorrect when lawyer Aaron Siri, a presenter, said that “not one” of the shots administered to children had been compared against a placebo or an inert substance. But Levi and Siri were correct. No childhood vaccine on CDC’s schedule was studied in placebo-controlled trials or relied upon before licensure.
The CBC also described Levi as a person with no medical degree who had questioned the safety of the Covid-19 vaccines and called for Covid vaccine programs to be halted. Well, I have observed repeatedly that Levi’s arguments were far more persuasive than those offered by people with medical degrees, e.g. by ACIP member Cody Meissner, a paediatric infectious-disease specialist (see below).
And Covid vaccines are definitely not safe; they have killed children who developed myocarditis and adults who developed blood clots. It was very prudent to change the “all-inclusive” US Covid vaccine programs when by far most people have been infected, whether vaccinated or not, and because repeated boosters can weaken the immune system and increase the risk of respiratory infections, also for flu shots. Healthcare workers themselves have already delivered a verdict. According to the CDC’s own data, fewer than 10% received a booster in the past year.
National Public Radio denigrated Siri: an anti-vaccine lawyer with no medical or scientific training, and the Washington Post failed their readers, too: “Aaron Siri, a Kennedy ally and lawyer for the anti-vaccine movement, delivered a presentation for more than 90 minutes. Siri said clinical trials for vaccines have not been properly performed, that safety surveillance after vaccines are licensed is lacking and that the efficacy of vaccines in reducing deaths and spread of disease has been overstated. Siri and Kennedy-aligned activists argue that the cumulative number of shots places an undue burden on child immune systems. Scientists counter that… the immune system can safely handle far more antigens than vaccines contain.”
Siri is correct and the reason why he was given so much time is that he is evidence-based and very knowledgeable. His book about vaccines is outstanding. And “scientists” have no evidence that the immune system can safely handle many vaccine antigens injected simultaneously. This is unknown and needs studying.
The Washington Post also noted that “Siri petitioned the government in 2022 on behalf of the anti-vaccine group Informed Consent Action Network, which is run by Kennedy’s former communications director, to reconsider its approval of Sanofi’s stand-alone polio vaccine. Siri argued that the government had relied on inadequate data, a claim regulators rejected.”
However, the petition notes that “the clinical trials relied upon to license this product did not include a control group and only assessed safety for up to three days after injection. These trials therefore did not comply with the applicable federal statutory and regulatory requirements necessary to prove the product was ‘safe’ prior to licensure.” As live, attenuated polio vaccines can mutate and cause polio, I agree with Siri that this drug had not been adequately studied before licensure.
The New York Times and National Public Radio wrongly implied that Siri wanted to remove all polio vaccines (“polio vaccines” or “the polio vaccine”).
Praising “Experts” and Giving Them Undue Prominence
Safety was a major issue. Dissenting ACIP member Cody Meissner said at the meeting that we know that the vaccine is safe, and his reassurances were quoted by the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Public Radio, Nature, the BBC, and Time.
However, when the Institute of Medicine in 2013 was commissioned to review the safety of the CDC childhood vaccine schedule, they could not find a single study that had compared health outcomes in vaccinated children with those in children who had not received any vaccines and they concluded: “There is no evidence that the schedule is not safe.” Similarly, Time wrote about the hepatitis B vaccine that there is “no evidence in regard to lack of safety.” My comment on this kind of reasoning was: “If the brakes in a new car model have never been tested, the reassuring conclusion would be: ‘There is no evidence that the brakes don’t work.’”
At the ACIP meeting, Meissner accused Siri of presenting “a terrible, terrible distortion of all the facts” (New York Times, National Public Radio, The Hill, CNN, Time ) and of making “absolutely outrageous statements about safety.” This was totally false and Meissner should know better. ACIP members were shown that the clinical trials underpinning approval of the hepatitis B vaccine were small, lacked a placebo group, and followed infants for no more than seven days after vaccination, which would not detect any long-term adverse outcomes. Normally, such findings would have shocked people and prompted caution, but Meissner insisted that “There is no evidence of harm.” Well, if you don’t look, you won’t find.
Levi hit the nail on the head: “What is the number needed to vaccinate – among babies born to hepatitis B-negative mothers – to prevent one case of chronic hepatitis B?” No one supplied an answer. But if the true number was “in the millions,” then any credible harm-benefit analysis would require showing a number-needed-to-harm one infant seriously even higher.
Meissner, however, opined that the move was rooted in baseless scepticism and that we will see more hepatitis B infections (Washington Post, Nature ). He was also against possibly using fewer than three doses of the vaccine (New York Times, The Hill ), arguing that antibody titres are not a good correlate of protection and did not have scientific backing (Nature ). The inconsistency was unmistakable. Antibodies are embraced as proof of vaccine efficacy when convenient, e.g. in drug regulation, otherwise not.
Another dissenting ACIP member, psychiatrist Joseph Hibbeln, was quoted a great deal although he said nothing of substance: The revised guidance was “unconscionable” (Washington Post ), “the decisions should be based on data” (The Hill ), “Those are all speculations” (Time ), “Is there any specific evidence of harm of giving this vaccination before 30 days?” (Guardian ). Not a single journalist wondered why a psychiatrist sat in a vaccine committee.
Dr Tracy Beth Høeg, a presenter at the meeting, noted that the US was an outlier recommending around 72 childhood vaccine doses, while countries like Denmark use fewer than 30. PBS and Time argued that the US is not an outlier in recommending hepatitis B vaccines for newborns because 116 of the 194 WHO member states did the same. This is not a proper comparison, and, as noted above, in Western Europe, only Portugal recommends a universal birth dose.
Levi noted that “The policy in the US is completely misaligned with many countries that… care about their children just as much as we do,” and when Meissner viewed the growth of the childhood vaccine schedule as an achievement for child health, Siri countered correctly that the US “has the worst health outcomes amongst all developed countries.”
The media quoted three previous CDC directors. Rochelle Walensky said that over the past few months, she had observed “a systematic undermining of the nation’s vaccine program” (National Public Radio) and that the “US vaccine-safety monitoring system can detect very, very rare safety events“ (Nature ). Maybe, but she ignored them. In April 2021, cases of myocarditis after Covid-19 vaccination, particularly among young male vaccine recipients, had been reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System at the CDC, but Walensky said by the end of the same month: “We have not seen a signal and we’ve actually looked intentionally for the signal in the over 200 million doses we’ve given.”
Tom Frieden provided a doomsday statement: “The ACIP recommendation… puts millions of American children at greater risk of liver damage, cancer and early death.” He advised everyone to “stand up for fact-based care” and “not accept this misguided and dangerous recommendation” (Time).
Demetre Daskalakis had a weird argument: “This will signal to clinicians that there is something wrong with the vaccine – there is not” (Reuters, CNN). It could also signal greater responsibility at the CDC than under previous directors. But the BBC and the Washington Post joined the folly arguing that public health experts, representatives of medical organisations, and some ACIP members worried the vote could raise unfounded safety concerns about the vaccine and undermine hard-won trust in vaccines leading to more sickness.
The media gave organisations undue prominence without ever considering if they were impartial. They urged people to look to “independent recommendations,” e.g. from the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, for “science-based advice” (National Public Radio).
I would call it advice based on money. The Academy would continue to support the birth dose of the vaccine (Reuters, CBS News, Health Policy Watch, CNN, Time, CBC) but all journalists forgot to say that it receives many millions of dollars from vaccine manufacturers and other drug companies. Unsurprisingly, hepatitis B vaccine makers Merck, Sanofi, and GSK defended their products as safe, and Merck was “deeply concerned by the vote” (Reuters ). Perhaps because Merck’s shares dropped?
“Don’t listen to ACIP at all… listen to the American Academy of Pediatrics” (CNN), which said that the “irresponsible and purposely misleading” guidance would harm children; called it a “deliberate strategy to sow fear and distrust among families” (CBC); and delivered a gigantic falsehood: “Vaccine recommendations are largely similar across developed countries” (CBS News).
Reuters noted that ACIP members had said that the birth dose “was out of step with peer countries, particularly Denmark,” but then quoted “a CDC disease expert” for saying that the US is not comparable to Denmark with its universal healthcare and more thorough screening for the virus. The Washington Post said that “public health experts” had noted that European countries recommending fewer shots for children were smaller and had better health care systems, and that medical associations had argued that the US schedule had been thoroughly studied (which is blatantly false). None of the media quoted Levi, who mentioned that the US and Denmark have the same background rate of hepatitis B despite different policies on the birth dose.
The American Medical Association is also heavily corrupted by industry money and said that ACIP’s decision was “reckless and undermines decades of public confidence in a proven, lifesaving vaccine. Today’s action is not based on scientific evidence” (CNN).
The American College of Physicians said that “This vote… will only endanger children and increase risk of death for millions,” and a hepatitis researcher urged people to “go back to our true experts… our CDC colleagues” (Health Policy Watch).
Time noted that “A group of several dozen professional medical organizations and health advocacy groups, including the American Medical Association” expressed alarm over the committee’s decisions: “Previously, we could expect science to drive decisions.”
Some panellists and media noted that universal hepatitis B vaccination at birth had helped to nearly eliminate cases among newborns in the United States, and that there was no evidence of harm (New York Times, Washington Post, The Hill, Guardian ). However, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. When Levi countered that the risk for a child of getting infected was extremely low, supporters of the birth dose noted that the virus can be spread by household objects like toothbrushes, razors, or combs used by an infected person. This is a fake argument and the CDC website is explicit: “Although HBV can be found in saliva, it is not spread through kissing or sharing utensils. It is also not spread through sneezing, coughing, hugging, breastfeeding, or food or water.”
Levi also said that the decline in hepatitis B cases occurred long before the birth-dose policy was introduced and was concentrated in older age groups, not among infants, which supported a risk-based policy, focused on infants born to hepatitis B-positive mothers and on high-risk adult populations. When ACIP liaison Dr Flor Muñoz of the Infectious Diseases Society of America claimed that much of the discussion amounted to “misinformation,” Levi responded: “It’s not misinformation… this is CDC data.” When Muñoz pushed back, presenting her disagreement as established fact, Levi replied: “I appreciate your beliefs and feelings about this, but these beliefs and feelings are not supported by the data that were presented.”
Levi also pointed to ACIP’s prior recommendation of Covid-19 vaccination for healthy, extremely low-risk children, which he described as “one of the most outrageous” examples of framework failure.
ACIP’s decision sparked anger from Republican Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a doctor, who said the vaccine is safe and effective (BBC, CBS News, Time, Health Policy Watch). He wrote on X that “Siri, a prominent anti-vaccine lawyer, makes his living suing vaccine manufacturers and is presenting as if an expert on childhood vaccines. The ACIP is totally discredited” (Washington Post, The Hill ).
The Hill was particularly critical. It wrote about an ardent objection from major medical organisations, internal spats among ACIP members, and a stark lack of data to support altering decades-long vaccine guidance, in fact, “There’s been great data and studies done on these vaccines, and they are safe and effective.” The Hill quoted top figures from Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York City for their rants, which included that they would not abide by ACIP’s “irresponsible attacks on clear, evidence-based science.”
When journalists “dial-a-quote,” they call organisations or people whom they know will respond in a way that mirrors their own bias pretending they have asked an “independent expert.”
The media were full of evidence-free, derogatory comments that were meaningless because they could not be contested:
- “We can no longer trust federal health authorities when it comes to vaccines,” “heartbreaking to see this science-driven agency turn into an ideological machine” (New York Times );
- “Medical experts have argued that it’s important to vaccinate all newborns for hepatitis B” (Washington Post );
- “The vaccine is incredibly safe,” experts decried the move (Reuters );
- the American Association of Immunologists is “extremely disappointed” in the decision;
- the American College of Physicians called the meeting “completely inappropriate” (CBS News); “many experts expressed dismay at today’s decision” (CNN);
- “A long lineup of medical experts…strongly urged against changing the vaccination schedule” (Health Policy Watch);
- “Public health experts decried the move,” CDC and the ACIP are no longer trustworthy sources and are becoming increasingly irrelevant (CBC);
- “a forum for the discussion of falsehoods,” ACIP members promoted their own sceptical views on vaccines, looking for a bogeyman, and you’re not going to find something if it doesn’t exist (Time );
- “Experts say any change to the current hepatitis B vaccination recommended schedule could have significant and far-reaching consequences for childhood health in the US” (Guardian ).
When the media presented statements that could be contested, they were usually wrong or seriously misleading, e.g. “Siri’s presentation was replete with ‘falsehoods and misrepresentation of the data,’ and he conflated informed consent with mandates” (New York Times ); “fierce objections from medical groups that said the recommendation had proved a successful public health strategy, nearly eradicating the dangerous virus among U.S. children” (Washington Post); a “Minority of members argue the change is not supported by data” (Reuters ).
Persuasion by Big Numbers
Like the drug industry does, the media used big numbers in their propaganda.
Globally, the vaccine has prevented millions of infections (Health Policy Watch). Before the vaccine, around 200,000 to 300,000 people were infected each year; since the vaccines began being universally administered to babies, overall cases are down to around 14,000 annually (PBS).
After a birth dose was recommended in 1991, the shots have prevented an estimated 90,000 deaths in the US (BBC) and reduced hepatitis B infections among infants and children by 99% (CBS News, Time, Health Policy Watch, Nature ).
All these claims are false or seriously misleading. Data presented at the meeting showed that much of the decline in hepatitis B infections over past decades occurred before the birth dose was recommended and it was largely driven by behaviour change, screening, and targeted vaccination of high-risk groups.
Senator Cassidy wrote on X that “Before the birth dose was recommended, 20,000 newborns a year were infected with hepatitis B. Now, it’s fewer than 20” (CBS News, CNN, Health Policy Watch). This was an error of 133 times. CDC data show that in 1990, only around 150 children below one year of age became infected.
Vaccinologist Paul Offit Lied on CNN
The most high-profile vaccinologist in the world, after vaccine “Godfather” Stanley Plotkin, is Paul Offit, but that may be a thing of the past after Siri’s recent revelations and his self-destructing appearance on CNN on the second day of the ACIP meeting.
Offit told viewers he had not been invited to speak at the meeting but internal documents show his claim is false. CDC officials had contacted him repeatedly – via emails, phone calls and a speaker-request form – inviting him to present.
Offit warned viewers that “50% of people in this country have chronic hepatitis B and don’t know it” (only about 0.3% have chronic disease) and suggested newborns were at risk through everyday contact with nannies, daycare workers, and family members because of sharing toothbrushes, towels, or simply being held by an infected adult, which the CDC denied could happen.
Offit described ACIP as a “clown show,” an “anti-vaccine advisory committee” that “puts children in harm’s way.” He lied monstrously saying that before universal infant vaccination, “30,000 children under the age of 10” contracted hepatitis B each year. CDC data presented at the ACIP meeting showed that new hepatitis B cases in children under the age of 10 were around 400 per year before the universal birth dose was introduced.
I am very indebted to journalist Maryanne Demasi, PhD, who wrote many of the articles I quoted above. She gave Offit the opportunity to clarify his remarks but he did not respond. This silence contrasts sharply with the certainty he brings to national television, where his claims are delivered without scrutiny and his financial ties to vaccine manufacturers are almost never mentioned.
Offit is not an impartial commentator. He earned millions from the sale of his stake in Merck’s rotavirus vaccine, RotaTeq, and has long been aligned with the pharmaceutical industry whose products he routinely defends. Yet major news outlets present him as a neutral authority and take his statements at face value.
Conclusions
The media’s reporting on the hepatitis B issue was seriously misleading and their advice that we should trust the “experts” who condemned the ACIP committee’s wise decision is horribly misguided.
The new ACIP’s first chair was biostatistician Martin Kulldorff. He developed the monitoring system the CDC uses for quick detection of vaccine harms, considered the best in the world. On 1 December, Kennedy announced that Kulldorff was appointed to a senior role at the Department of Health and Human Services after he had “transformed ACIP from a rubber stamp into a committee that delivers gold-standard science for the American people.” NIH director Jay Bhattacharya said that “Five years ago, Martin Kulldorff and I co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration calling for an end to pandemic lockdowns. That evidence-based approach to public health now permeates HHS.”
What the media presented was what we call eminence-based medicine, and the medical journals’ reporting on vaccine issues is also a disaster. I shall end with the abstract of an article I published on 10 November:
The reactions to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s initiatives to improve vaccine safety have been almost uniformly negative. I studied how the narratives were framed in a cohort of 33 articles in the BMJ of which 30 were written by journalists or the editor. I focused on whether the reporting was balanced and informative, and whether the articles saw any merit in Kennedy’s reforms in his role as Secretary of Health and Human Services or supported the status quo.
The reporting in the BMJ was highly biased. Much of the information provided in Kennedy’s disfavour was misleading, and some was wrong. All initiatives at improving vaccine safety were condemned, without any analysis of their merits in an evidence-based fashion. Instead, the BMJ cited people who had their own agendas and who condemned Kennedy without providing any evidence in their favour while expressing faith in vaccines, with the industry mantra that they are safe and effective, although all drugs will harm some people.
The BMJ did not take any interest in the widespread and lethal corruption in US healthcare institutions – one of Kennedy’s focus points – but toned it down.
Despite the constant ad hominem attacks, Kennedy has succeeded to introduce important changes and plans related to vaccine safety, guidance about how vaccines are used, and about avoiding neurotoxic metals in vaccine adjuvants.
Dr. Peter Gøtzsche co-founded the Cochrane Collaboration, once considered the world’s preeminent independent medical research organization. In 2010 Gøtzsche was named Professor of Clinical Research Design and Analysis at the University of Copenhagen. Gøtzsche has published over 100 papers in the “big five” medical journals (JAMA, Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, British Medical Journal, and Annals of Internal Medicine). Gøtzsche has also authored books on medical issues including Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime.
Whistleblowers accuse CPJ of ‘shielding’ Israel to appease donors
The Cradle | December 20, 2025
Current and former staff at the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) have accused the organization of deliberately downplaying Israel’s war crimes in Gaza to placate pro-Israel donors, according to a report by Electronic Intifada published on 18 December.
The whistleblowers claim CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg personally controls all Gaza-related research, blocking work that would reveal that the Israeli army deliberately targets journalists.
One research piece backed by military experts reportedly concluded Israel knowingly kills journalists, but Ginsberg shelved it.
An employee was reportedly fired after disputing Ginsberg’s refusal to classify journalist killings as targeted murders—a war crime under international law.
Despite an internal memo stating CPJ should call Israel’s actions “genocide,” whistleblowers say this is misleading.
The memo instructs staff to use qualified language like “what human rights groups deem a genocide” to talk about the mass murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians.
A website review found that in only two of 15 Gaza-related items does CPJ use “genocide” without attribution, with the first appearing in October 2025, two years into Israel’s genocidal war.
The CPJ denied the allegations, saying staff were never told to avoid “genocide” and could use any language on personal social media, citing examples of Ginsberg publicly using the term and accusing Israel of war crimes.
The annual CPJ fundraising dinner draws major media donors, including five Rupert Murdoch-owned outlets, which contributed $250,000 total.
Rupert Murdoch is a longtime supporter of Israel who has routinely advanced pro-Israel positions via his platforms.
He previously described Israel as a front-line defender of “western democratic civilization” at the peak of Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign.
This year’s awards honored journalists from China, Ecuador, Kyrgyzstan, and Tunisia, with no Palestinian nominees.
Ginsberg explained CPJ doesn’t award journalists from the same country consecutively, noting last year’s recipient was Palestinian journalist Shrouq Al Aila.
Whistleblowers called Al Aila a “safe choice” whose background was extensively vetted, and said proposals to honor slain Al Jazeera journalist Anas Al-Sharif were ignored.
Since the genocide began over two years ago, nearly 300 journalists have been killed by Israeli forces.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has declared Israel the world’s leading cause of death of journalists for three years in a row. Forty-three percent of the 67 journalists killed globally between December 2024 and December 2025 were killed by Israeli forces in Gaza.
The organization condemned the murders and designated them as targeted killings by state militaries.
Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham recently revealed that military intelligence created a “Legitimization Cell” to justify killing Palestinian journalists by falsely portraying them as Hamas operatives.
Reuters spreads lies and propaganda to prolong Ukraine conflict – Tulsi Gabbard

© Alex Wong / Getty Images
RT | December 21, 2025
US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has accused European NATO states of trying to pull Washington into a direct confrontation with Russia and slammed Reuters for “fomenting hysteria” in order to sell war.
Russia has consistently rejected claims that it plans to attack EU countries, describing them as warmongering tactics used by Western politicians to justify inflated military budgets. This week, President Vladimir Putin once again dismissed such claims as “lies and nonsense.”
Yet in a report published on Friday, Reuters claimed that “Putin intends to capture all of Ukraine and reclaim parts of Europe that belonged to the former Soviet empire,” citing anonymous sources allegedly “familiar with US intelligence.”
“No, this is a lie and propaganda Reuters is willingly pushing on behalf of warmongers who want to undermine President Trump’s tireless efforts to end this bloody war that has resulted in more than a million casualties on both sides,” Gabbard retorted in a post on X.
Dangerously, you are promoting this false narrative to block President Trump’s peace efforts and foment hysteria and fear among the people to get them to support the escalation of war, which is what NATO and the EU really want in order to pull the United States military directly into war with Russia.
According to Gabbard, US intelligence assessments instead indicate that Russia “seeks to avoid a larger war with NATO” and lacks the capacity to wage one even if it wanted to.
Moscow insists it is defending its citizens in the Ukraine conflict and has accused NATO of provoking hostilities and derailing US-backed peace initiatives. Putin, who has repeatedly dismissed any intention to restore the Soviet Union, has accused NATO countries of “preparing for a major war” by building up and modernizing offensive forces while “brainwashing” their populations with claims that a clash with Russia is inevitable.
Putin’s special envoy Kirill Dmitriev, who is currently engaged in Ukraine peace talks with US interlocutors in Miami, praised Gabbard as a rare voice of reason.
“Gabbard is great not only for documenting the Obama/Biden origins of the Russia hoax, but now for exposing the deep-state warmonger machinery trying to incite WW3 by fueling anti-Russian paranoia across the UK and EU,” Dmitriev wrote on X. “Voices of reason matter – restore sanity, peace, and security.”
Bill Gates’ CEPI revives Moderna mRNA bird flu vaccine development with $54M investment after HHS terminated funding
Avian influenza jab “mRNA-1018” is in full pandemic flight
By Jon Fleetwood | December 19, 2025
The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) will invest up to $54.3 million to support a Phase 3 clinical trial for Moderna’s investigational mRNA-based pandemic H5 avian influenza “bird flu” vaccine candidate, mRNA-1018.
The move immediately follows the Gates Foundation’s $3.3 million award to a team of scientists at New York’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) to develop “breakthrough purification technologies” for producing mRNA-based vaccines, which are plagued with contamination and impurity issues.
Bill Gates, through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is a co-founder and major funder of CEPI since its 2017 launch at Davos.
A Thursday press release from CEPI emphasizes the new mRNA bird flu vaccine is for “pandemic preparedness,” as this website has been documenting gain-of-function experiments being conducted on bird flu pathogens around the world, warning about the supranational orchestration of a coming bird flu pandemic.
HHS had terminated its multi-hundred-million-dollar commitment to Moderna to produce mRNA-1018 in May, with Moderna vowing to explore “alternative paths for development of the vaccine program.”
Moderna—also Gates-funded—has now followed through on its promise.
This is despite the fact that Moderna submitted data in November 2017 proving their mRNA vaccine lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) accumulate in mammalian liver, spleen, plasma (blood), kidneys, heart, and lungs.
Per the new CEPI press release:
The funding marks a significant step forward in global pandemic preparedness that could enable fast, equitable access to vaccines for one of the world’s most pressing health threats.
This Phase 3 study would be the first mRNA-based vaccine targeting pandemic influenza to enter a pivotal trial. If the vaccine candidate is licensed, it would expand the current global portfolio of H5 vaccines with a rapid-response platform that could revolutionize future pandemic responses, making a significant contribution to CEPI’s 100 Days Mission, a global goal to develop safe and effective vaccines within 100 days of a new pandemic threat being identified.
Dr Richard Hatchett, Chief Executive Officer of CEPI, stated:
“Pandemic influenza remains one of the greatest threats to global health security. With this partnership, we are not just advancing vaccine science, we are fundamentally changing the game. By harnessing the speed and adaptability of mRNA technology, we could shave months off the response time, deliver vaccines at scale, and enable equitable access for all. This is how we plan to protect the world from the next flu pandemic.”
Stéphane Bancel, Chief Executive Officer of Moderna, said:
“We are proud to have the support of CEPI to advance our pandemic influenza vaccine candidate, research that is critical to our commitment to pandemic preparedness. mRNA technology can play a vital role in addressing emerging health threats quickly and effectively, and we look forward to continuing our partnership with CEPI as we advance our health security portfolio, and in parallel, further the 100 Days Mission.”
CEPI collaborates closely with the World Health Organization (WHO)—also Gates-funded—through a 2017 Memorandum of Understanding, meant to accelerate pandemic vaccine development.
The WHO has already:
- Established a WHO-backed influenza command framework that merges governance, operational authority, and outbreak-response assets into a single controlling entity for the next pandemic cycle.
- Approved a WHO–Gates influenza-adjacent global digital ID and surveillance architecture, designed to track vaccination status and population compliance across borders during respiratory-virus campaigns.
- Ran pre-COVID compliance-testing programs tied to future influenza vaccine deployment, using CDC-, Gates-, and Oxford-linked institutions to model population behavior toward lower-quality vaccines years before SARS-CoV-2.
- Activated a “Future Pandemic” plan positioning U.S. labs inside a WHO-directed influenza sentinel surveillance network, preserving global monitoring operations even after the U.S. attempted withdrawal.
- Deployed a national influenza surveillance grid in Egypt under WHO authority, installing 30 sentinel sites and training 270 officers for real-time detection, reporting, and response.
- Constructed an international influenza pathogen-sharing command system enabling rapid transfer of H5- and other high-risk influenza samples for sequencing, analysis, and vaccine design under centralized WHO control.
- Outlined an influenza-triggered governance model that explicitly mandates “integration—merger of assets” and “united governance,” transferring all national governance functions to a single authority under conditions of crisis, uncertainty, or sector failure.
The WHO is already dictating how the coming bird flu pandemic will be controlled, just as it controlled the authoritarian COVID-19 pandemic response.
Moreover, the Trump administration this year announced a $500 million “next-generation, universal vaccine platform” called ‘Generation Gold Standard’ that will focus on bird flu jab creation.
Taken together, the CEPI–Moderna Phase 3 push, Gates-funded efforts to address known mRNA impurity issues, and the WHO’s already-built influenza surveillance, sample-sharing, and compliance architecture suggest a coordinated, pre-positioned pipeline designed to move seamlessly from pathogen research to mass deployment—before a bird flu emergency is formally declared.
Government Minister Steps in to Defend Met Office as Fake Temperature Scandal Escalates
By Chris Morrison | The Daily Sceptic | December 19, 2025
In a couple of weeks’ time, the Met Office is likely to announce another ‘hottest year evah’ in the UK. The message will be broadcast faithfully by trusted messengers in mainstream media, keen to prop up the fading Net Zero fantasy, but greeted with howls of derision across social media. Eye-opening investigative research over the last two years has revealed a national temperature network mainly composed of ‘junk’ inappropriate sites and massive data inventions across over 100 non-existent stations. Now the British Government has stepped in with the suggestion that questioning the Met Office’s shoddy measuring systems “weakens trust in science”. Misinformation is said to have proliferated on “conspiracy networks”.
Step forward Lord Patrick Vallance, the former Government Chief Scientific Adviser at the heart of the Covid lockdown panic but now an unelected Science Minister in the Labour Administration. “There has been a growing online narrative in some online and social media spaces attempting to undermine Met Office observations and data,” he observes. Vallance’s conspiracy claims echo similar comments made earlier in the year by the Met Office. The investigative efforts of a small number of people were said by the state meteorologist to be an “attempt to undermine decades of robust science around the world ‘s changing climate”.
Only in the world inhabited by Vallance and the Met Office can a conspiracy be whipped up when rigorous examination and questioning is applied to scientific data. From Covid to climate, it seems the scientific process is a closed book to state scientists following the settled political narrative. One of the ‘conspirators’ is citizen sleuth Ray Sanders, who has undertaken a forensic examination of nearly 400 individual Met Office recording stations. Commenting on the official ministerial response, he observed that not one word constituted a scientific approach. “It is a political monologue of the lowest order,” he opined.
Regular co-conspiratorial readers will of course be aware of the reporting problems at the Met Office. Over the last 18 months, the percentage of sites in junk CIMO Classes 4 and 5 with ‘uncertainties’ due to nearby unnatural obstacles of 2°C and 5°C respectively has climbed from 77.9% to over 80%. In that period, the number of pristine Class 1 sites capable of measuring an uncorrupted ambient air temperature over a large surrounding area has fallen from 24 to just 19. Ray Sanders has catalogued most of the unsuitable sites producing measurements taken by airport runways, in walled gardens, near main roads and in the middle of solar farms. Daily high unnatural heat spikes, amplified by the recent introduction of more accurate electronic devices, are an obvious unaddressed problem, but they are often fed into the official statistics. One such 60-second spike in July 2022 pushed the temperature at RAF Coningsby up to 40.3°C, a declared national record that is widely publicised.
Meanwhile, temperature databases are awash with non-existent stations and invented data. Explanations that the ‘estimates’ are taken from ‘well-correlated neighbouring stations’ might be more convincing if those stations could be identified. Freedom of Information (FOI) efforts by Ray Sanders seeking such details have been dismissed as “vexatious” and “not in the public interest”. The picture has emerged of a very rough-and-ready network, suitable for specific local temperature reporting at places such as airports, but unconvincing in promoting widespread average temperatures down to one hundredth of a degree centigrade.
The Vallance explanations are contained in a letter written to the Conservative MP Sir Julian Lewis following concerns raised by Derek Tripp, a local councillor in his constituency. He notes that in September, the Met Office decided to remove estimated data from three non-existent stations on its historic temperature database. “They recognised that confusion could be caused when there appears to be a continued flow of data on this website from stations that have closed,” he said.
In fact the confusion was caused by the Daily Sceptic seeking FOI details in November of well-correlated neighbouring stations responsible for data at one of the stations, namely Lowestoft. The well-correlated explanation is often used by the Met Office and formed the basis of an earlier ‘fact check’ by Science Feedback that seems to have relied exclusively on text provided by the Met Office. Sanders had earlier determined that there were no such stations within a reasonable distance of Lowestoft. The Met Office admitted under FOI that it did not use such stations but rather made estimates using its HADUK-Grid. This was little more than passing the buck since HADUK-Grid inputs temperature information from nearby stations, none of which it seems can ever be identified.
Vallance went on to note that the historic dataset was for “general interest only and is not intended for climate monitoring purposes”. Curiously, Vallance failed to point out that this was a very recent explanation since it only appeared on the Met Office historic page after the Daily Sceptic submitted its FOI.
On the 80% junk nature of the Met Office’s temperature sites, Vallance rushes to the aid of the party. “It is misleading and inappropriate to interpret the CIMO classifications in isolation to question the quality of the Met Office’s observing network or the integrity of the UK’s climate record,” he states. What pompous piffle. In-house activists have been allowed to leverage the reputation of the Met Office to produce a flood of dubious measurements and statistics designed to create mass climate psychosis with the aim of promoting a hard-Left Net Zero agenda. The World Meteorological Organisation could not be clearer in stating that a CIMO Class 1 location can be considered as a “reference” site giving a true air temperature over a wide surrounding area. “A Class 5 site is a site where nearby obstacles create an inappropriate environment for a meteorological measurement that is intended to be representative of a wide area,” it notes. A site with a poor class number can still be valuable for a specified application, it adds.
In other words, a Class 5 is useful for giving jet pilots a vital runway temperature, but less so for telling us that the annual temperature in the UK was 0.06°C cooler in 2023 than the ‘record’ year of 2022.
Vallance also claims that the Met Office “follows a structured, requirements-driven process to identify and establish new land observing stations”. It is reasonable to ask what “requirements-driven” process is being used by the Met Office, given that a large majority of sites started over the last 30, 10 and five years are to be found in the junk 4 and 5 Classes. Even worse, the Daily Sceptic has disclosed using FOI information that 20 new sites have opened since April 2024, and of the 17 that have received CIMO classifications, a frankly incredible 64.7% started life in the Class 4 and 5 junk lane.
And they say we are the conspiracy nuts.
Stop The Hate UK: The Shadowy Israel-Aligned Group Targeting MintPress staff & anti-genocide organizers
Mint Press News | December 9, 2025
In October, MintPress graphic designer and field photographer, Ibrahim Abul-Essad opened his door to find Patrick Sawer of The Daily Telegraph demanding answers.
A prolific writer who has penned 28 pro-Israel articles in the past two months alone, Sawer asked the British Palestinian journalist to respond to pro-Israel pressure group Stop The Hate U.K.’s campaign for him to be prosecuted for “anti-Semitic hate crimes.”
Abul-Essad’s “crime” was attending an October 2024 demonstration in London protesting an event featuring former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert speaking on the future of Gaza – a case that the Metropolitan Police have already looked into and dismissed.
Sawer has previous connections to Stop The Hate U.K. A 2024 Daily Telegraph article framing pro-Palestine marchers as racists, for instance, appears to have been based largely on intelligence gathered by Stop The Hate U.K., and features multiple images of protestors taken without their knowledge.
But who are Stop The Hate U.K.? And where did they come from? MintPress News explores the group’s rise, its agenda, and its scandalously close links to both the British and Israeli governments.
Israeli Front Group?
Stop the Hate U.K. was founded in early 2024, at the height of the Israeli attack on Gaza, in order to stymie and oppose the growing wave of support for Palestinian liberation across Great Britain. The group has attempted to equate support for human rights with terrorism.
As their official Twitter bio reads, “We stand in opposition to the hate marches that have swamped our country since the 7.10 massacre. We shall not be cowed. Terrorist supporters off our streets!” The organization has repeatedly pressured the British government to ban demonstrations, and condemned the police for their insufficient vigor in suppressing the movement.
Although it states that it is a non-profit organization, MintPress could find no registration of the group with the Charity Commission for England and Wales.
The organization’s website describes it was founded “in response to the repeated failures of the Metropolitan Police to address anti-Semitic incidents at Palestinian Solidarity Campaign (PSC) marches.”
This will be news to many in the U.K., where police have arrested over 2300 people under the Terrorism Act of 2000 for peacefully opposing the designation of activist group Palestine Action as a terrorist entity, putting it on a par with the likes of ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra. So aggressive has British authorities’ repression of free speech been, that it was officially rebuked by Amnesty International as a grave breach of human rights.
Stop the Hate U.K. organizes their own demonstrations. However, they have not been successful in attracting mass participation. Unlike pro-Palestine marches that can draw in as many as one million Britons, an image posted by Stop The Hate U.K. of their recent protest in Brighton shows fewer than 40 attendees. They have, however, had more success disrupting solidarity events, filming or harassing protestors and pushing for their prosecution. In this role, The Canary notes, they serve as unofficial “police informants.” Stop The Hate organization also sells merchandise from their website; among the most popular items are t-shirts and hoodies emblazoned with the word “Zionist” in all caps.
While trying to expose the identities of pro-Palestine marchers, Stop The Hate U.K. appears to try to keep their own a secret. There is no information about their key members on their own website, only multiple egregious typos. For example, their “About Us” section offers little about their background, except that their organization is “is a call to action for a world without racism or anti-Semitism. Every voice counts in rejecting intolerance and fostering understandinWho We Are” (sic).
Nevertheless, pro-Israel outlet Jewish News identified two Israelis, Itai Galmudy and Yochy Davis, as among the founders. Born in Rishon LeZion and raised in Re’ut, near Modi’in, Galmudy lived in the United Kingdom between 2004 and 2008, returning to Israel to study at university and serve in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). He participated in Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s 2014 bombardment of Gaza, wherein the IDF is widely accused of carrying out serious war crimes, including deliberately targeting civilians. Images from Galmudy’s social media show him proudly in uniform, serving in what appears to be a tank brigade.
The British government formally condemned Israel for its actions; Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg describing them as “collective punishment” of a civilian population. Despite this, Galmudy himself was able to move back to London immediately after Operation Protective Edge, and works in the pub industry, where he proudly notes that he refuses to serve anyone wearing Palestinian clothing.
In 2024, he co-founded Stop The Hate U.K., a group that has gained plaudits from the Israeli government itself. Earlier this year, Ambassador Tzipi Hotovely recorded a video wishing Galmudy a special happy birthday, stating that: “Your great activity for the last 12 months means so much to the State of Israel.”
“It is concerning that a former Israeli soldier who represented a military which is being investigated for genocide responsible for killing 150 members of my family is part of an organization targeting me and other British citizens in the U.K. calling for a free Palestine,” Abul-Essad told MintPress.
Like Galmudy, Yochy Davis is from Israel; her Facebook profile identifying her as from Kiryat Motzkin, near Haifa. Describing herself as a “passionate” adherent of Zionism, Davis first came to public attention in 2023, when she and three other pro-Israel activists disrupted Roger Waters’ London show. The rock star is a high-profile supporter of progressive causes, including Palestinian statehood. Davis shouted at Waters, unfurling an Israeli flag and calling his views “disgusting.” The incident was well-covered in the British press, who appeared keen to undermine Waters’ message.

Yochy Davis, left, and Itai Galmudy | Photos from X and Facebook
Davis has long promoted Israeli causes. In 2019, for instance, she worked with Israeli organization, My Truth, to bring a squad of IDF soldiers to Britain to visit the Houses of Parliament and carry out a series of “educational” lectures promoting Israel and its military as benevolent forces.
Israeli charity website, Israel Gives, describes My Truth as “an educational organization that is comprised of Israeli Defense Force reservists that educate about the IDF operations and the moral standards it holds,” adding that:
’My Truth’ reservists speak up openly and with a firsthand perspective about their army experiences in response to those who attempt to slander Israeli soldiers in the name of so-called ‘full disclosure.’”
And like Galmudy again, Davis’ activism has earned her official praise from Israeli government officials. In 2019, former Shin Bet official and then-Minister of Justice, Amir Ohana, recorded a video expressing his deep gratitude, stating:
I want to tell Yochy Davis and the My Truth organization: thank you for providing justice. Thank you for providing truth to the world, and thank you for everything you are doing for the State of Israel and for the people of Israel. Thank you.”
Davis recently met with Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, and both she and Galmudy attended an official event at the Israeli Embassy in London last month. Earlier this year, the pair also traveled to Israel and the Golan Heights – Syrian territory illegally occupied by Israel – where they liaised with and took photos with IDF soldiers.

Yochy Davis and Itai Galmudy pose for a photo in front of an Israeli military vehicle during a visit to the Golan Heights, as posted on social media. (Instagram)
Stop The Plagiarism
The choice to name a pro-Israel advocacy group “Stop The Hate U.K.” clearly attempts to equate support for Palestine and opposition to genocide with anti-Semitism. Yet it has also caused significant confusion, as a well-known and respected charity, “Stop Hate U.K.” (SHUK) already exists.
SHUK was established in the wake of the Stephen Lawrence affair. Stephen Lawrence was a Black British teenager murdered in London in a racially motivated killing in 1993. The attack, and the subsequent inadequate response from the Metropolitan Police, made Lawrence a cause célèbre, the George Floyd of his day. An official inquiry found that the police force was “institutionally racist” and needed to be radically reformed. Since 1995, SHUK has carried out vital work challenging hatred and intolerance. Lawrence’s mother serves as its patron.
Pro-Israel group Stop The Hate U.K. is frequently misidentified as the more legitimate body, including in Sawer’s aforementioned Daily Telegraph article, where it attributes the intelligence provided to SHUK. It is eminently possible that this sort of confusion was deliberate, and Stop The Hate U.K. is trying to bask in the legitimacy of an established anti-racist charity. MintPress contacted SHUK for this investigation, but did not receive a response.
Gaza and the rise of Stop The Hate U.K. provokes a number of important questions. How is it that a pro-Israel pressure group, co-founded by two Israeli citizens, can have such an outsized effect on British public life? How can a former member of an army carrying out a massacre put such successful pressure on U.K. authorities to arrest journalists exposing the IDF’s crimes? And who gets to decide who and who is not a terrorist: British citizens or pressure groups allied to a foreign nation carrying out a genocide?
Zelensky is stealing the election before it begins
By Tarik Cyril Amar | RT | December 16, 2025
Currently, with intense diplomacy taking place to – perhaps – end the Ukraine conflict, questions surrounding Kiev’s domestic politics may seem secondary. However, in reality, they are as important as the search for peace.
There are two reasons: First, Ukrainians have a right to finally be released from their perverse bondage to what is, in effect, a long-ago failed Western proxy war against Russia. Those still in denial about this fact should check out a recent interview with a former Biden administration policy official. Amanda Sloat has casually admitted that much now: The war could have been avoided if the West had not insisted on NATO membership prospects for Ukraine, which never really existed anyhow.
Observers not blinded by Western propaganda – including this author – were warning that, for Ukraine, this fake NATO perspective was a road to catastrophe. But the Sloats of this world refused to listen. Why then did the West want the war? To diminish Russia by using Ukraine as a battering ram and Ukrainians as cannon fodder.
Secondly – and more practically – no peace will last without an end to Ukraine’s ultra-corrupt current authoritarian regime. Talk about defending “democracy” in Ukraine is absurd. Under Vladimir Zelensky, there is no such thing left. By now, even some Western mainstream commentators are starting to admit Zelensky’s authoritarianism. Yet the former entertainment producer and vulgar comedian started systematically undermining what little democracy Ukraine used to have well before the escalation of February 2022, as Ukrainian observers and critics at the time widely discussed and deplored.
Zelensky’s regime is so corrupt and has sold out its own people so badly to the West that a lasting peace threatens it not only with losing power, which it certainly would, but also with a wave of prosecutions starting at the very top, with Zelensky himself and rolling down like an avalanche. Put differently, this is a regime that would always be tempted to re-start the war to distract from the retribution it must fear.
That is why US President Donald Trump is right to call for presidential elections in Ukraine. Moreover, Zelensky has extended his mandate on flimsy grounds and thereby usurped power even formally. The often-heard claim that Ukraine cannot hold presidential elections in wartime, by the way, is badly misleading, and a thoroughly politically motivated misrepresentation of the facts: In reality, the Ukrainian constitution only prohibits parliamentary elections in time of war. Elections for the presidency are impeded by ordinary laws which can, of course, easily and legally be changed by the majority which Zelensky controls in parliament. That is merely a question of political will, not legality.
By now, even Zelensky and Kiev’s political elite admit the above. Indeed, Zelensky has charged parliament with devising procedures for such elections. So, you may ask, what about his regime and its Western propagandists claiming for over a year that this is simply illegal and can’t be welcome? Simple: that was a big fat lie. Welcome to Zelensky world and its crooked reflection in the mirror cabinet of the Western mainstream media.
Yet curb your enthusiasm. In all likelihood, Zelensky remains dishonest – really, does he even have another mode? – and is engaging not in a genuine attempt to finally allow Ukrainians their long overdue say about his horrific rule. Instead, it is – alas! – much more plausible to interpret his turn toward elections as yet another tactic of stalling and deception.
For one thing, he and his team are trying to set conditions that seem designed to prevent the elections again, while blaming others, first of all Russia, of course. In essence, their demands boil down to, once again, pushing for either more Western arms or a ceasefire that they can abuse instead of the full peace agreement that is actually needed. Moscow will not agree to such a scheme, as Kiev knows very well.
In addition, this would not be the Zelensky regime if it did not also ask for even more Western money. This time, the shameless idea is that the West must pay for elections in Ukraine – presumably because that is how democracy works in a sovereign country.
Things can get even worse: There is also the possibility, pointed out by Ukrainian observers, that Zelensky and his fixers are planning to shift the whole presidential election online. If they do, falsification in Zelensky’s favor is de facto guaranteed.
In sum, there is no good reason to believe Zelensky is really ready to give up power – because that is what elections would mean – to make way for a return to a more normal type of politics. His current statements and gestures seemingly indicating the opposite are meant to deceive, most of all, the West. Neither Ukrainians nor Russia is likely to believe him anyhow.
There is a glimmer of hope, however: The fact alone that Trump has challenged Zelensky in this area and that the latter’s European backers cannot shield him from that challenge is a good sign. As is the fact, of course, that Zelensky has felt pressured and cornered enough to not revert to the old lie that presidential elections are not possible in wartime.
Instead, Ukraine’s past-best-by leader has implicitly admitted they – and that he was lying before – and is now forced to deploy stalling techniques. That in and of itself, like Ukraine’s escalating corruption scandals, shows that Zelensky’s grip is slipping. And that is good for everyone, including Ukrainians. For without an end to the Zelensky regime, it is likely that no peace can be made and certain that no peace can last.
Tarik Cyril Amar is a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory.
Trump Files Sweeping $10 Billion Lawsuit Against BBC — Exposing a Global Machinery of Narrative Suppression
By Sayer Ji | December 15, 2025
President Donald Trump has filed a sweeping defamation lawsuit against the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), alleging that the UK’s state-backed broadcaster deliberately edited his words to falsely portray him as inciting violence. You can view my report on the details of the initiating event here.
The 33 page suit, filed in U.S. federal court, seeks billions in damages and cites internal whistleblower documents, leadership resignations, and a documented pattern of prior misconduct to argue that the edit was not an error — but an intentional act of malice with real-world and political consequences.
The lawsuit stems from a BBC Panorama documentary that spliced together two separate portions of Trump’s January 6 speech — spoken nearly an hour apart — while omitting his explicit call for peaceful protest. According to the complaint, this manipulation created a false impression that Trump urged violence. The BBC has since issued a formal apology, withdrawn the documentary, and seen its Director-General and Head of News resign in disgrace.
But the significance of the case extends far beyond a single documentary or a single speech.
For the first time, a court filing squarely places legal scrutiny on the institution that has long functioned as a global arbiter of “misinformation” — and asks whether that authority has been weaponized against American political speech.
A Defamation Case With Systemic Implications
At face value, Trump’s lawsuit is a high-profile defamation action against one of the world’s most powerful media institutions. Yet embedded in the filing is a far more consequential allegation: that the BBC knowingly falsified political speech in pursuit of a narrative objective, and did so as part of a repeat pattern rather than a one-off lapse.
The complaint cites an internal memorandum by a former BBC editorial standards adviser who concluded that the edit “materially misled viewers,” as well as evidence that senior leadership was warned in advance. It also documents prior BBC broadcasts that used similar splicing techniques to misrepresent Trump’s words, including a 2022 Newsnight segment and a separate 2024 incident in which BBC presenters falsely suggested Trump had called for a political opponent to be shot.
In other words, the lawsuit alleges not mere negligence, but institutional intent.
That distinction matters — because it forces a broader reckoning with how narrative authority is exercised, exported, and enforced.
Why the BBC Matters More Than This Case
The BBC is not just another media outlet. It is a globally trusted, publicly funded broadcaster whose reporting is routinely cited by governments, technology companies, NGOs, and newsrooms worldwide.
Remarkably, US taxpayers have historically been compelled to fund BBC through USAID, as reported below.
USAID & BBC Caught Laundering Censorship—Unconstitutional & Unforgivable!
Moreover, British citizens are forced to pay the BBC license fees, even if they don’t use the service, with non-payment resulting in tens of thousands of prosecutions annually. You can find more details on this here.
When the BBC labels something “dangerous,” “extreme,” or “misinformation,” those labels do not remain confined to British television screens.
They travel.
For years, BBC investigations — particularly through programs like BBC Click — have been used to frame American websites, platforms, and political movements as threats to public order. In fact, their 2020 collaboration with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) and the US-Based NewsGuard listing 34 sites they wanted demonetized and removed from the internet including GreenMedInfo.com (yours truly), which I documented in detail here.
Those framings have then been echoed by advocacy groups, relied upon by technology companies, and quietly incorporated into content moderation policies, reputational risk assessments, and even intelligence briefings that labeled dissenting voices challenging medical orthodoxies as equivalent to domestic extremists.
This is how narrative power becomes operational power.
Trump’s lawsuit matters because it places that process — long taken for granted — under legal examination.
Before Trump: How the Architecture Was Built
Long before the BBC edited Trump’s speech, it had already positioned itself at the center of a transnational ecosystem that defines and enforces acceptable discourse.
Through partnerships with non-governmental organizations, alignment with “counter-disinformation” initiatives, and collaboration with philanthropic and government-adjacent funding streams, the BBC helped construct a system in which certain viewpoints could be labeled, marginalized, and suppressed — often without any judicial process or meaningful recourse.
That system did not begin with Trump.
Years earlier, similar mechanisms were deployed against U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., against independent media platforms, and against journalists whose speech was lawful under U.S. law but nonetheless treated as suspect once filtered through foreign media authority.
At the time, these actions were routinely dismissed as editorial disagreement or platform policy enforcement. In light of the Trump lawsuit, they now appear less accidental — and more like early applications of a model that would later be used against a sitting president.
From Narrative Framing to Enforcement
What the Trump case exposes is not simply bias, but a supply chain of suppression:
- Media institutions generate authoritative narratives
- NGOs and advocacy groups translate those narratives into risk frameworks
- Technology platforms operationalize them through moderation and deplatforming
- Targets — often U.S. citizens — absorb the consequences without due process
Once established, this architecture allows reputational harm and speech suppression to occur at scale, while responsibility remains diffuse and accountability elusive.
The BBC’s unique role in this system is precisely why Trump’s lawsuit is so consequential. It targets the node where authority originates — not merely where enforcement occurs.
A Personal Note of Corroboration
I have seen this system up close. Years before Trump filed suit, my own reporting and platforms were targeted following BBC-, ISD, Newsguard, and CCDH-linked reporting and targeting that framed lawful health and policy speech as dangerous. Some of these reports even made it into foreign court proceedings, to which I was not a party and had no standing, but nonetheless was named as a ‘shadow defendant.’ At the time, there was no mechanism to challenge those labels — only consequences to endure. More details of my plight can be found here.
Trump’s lawsuit does not vindicate any single individual. It does something more important: it makes visible the machinery that was previously invisible — and untouchable.
Why This Moment Is Different
Trump is not the first to be harmed by this system. But he may be the first with sufficient power, evidence, and legal standing to force it into the open.
Whether the lawsuit ultimately succeeds or fails on the merits, it has already accomplished something unprecedented: it has transformed what was once dismissed as “media controversy” into a matter of legal accountability.
That shift should concern anyone who cares about free expression, democratic self-governance, and the dangers of unaccountable narrative power — regardless of political affiliation.
Israeli army shoots Jewish man in occupied West Bank
MEMO | December 15, 2025
The Israeli army shot a young Jewish man on Monday morning near the Kedumim settlement, east of Qalqilya, in the northern occupied West Bank, after initial reports of a stabbing incident.
Israeli media first reported that a stabbing had taken place at a fuel station near the Kedumim settlement, followed by Israeli army fire at the suspected attacker.
Later reports said the person who was shot was a 23-year-old Israeli Jewish man. He was shot at the scene after soldiers suspected him of carrying out the alleged stabbing.
Initial information suggested that Israeli forces opened fire immediately after the incident, before the identity of the injured man became clear. Further details about the circumstances were not immediately known.
Israel’s official radio later said that the army had shot a settler near the Kedumim settlement by mistake, adding that no stabbing attack had taken place, contrary to earlier reports.
The radio said the soldiers mistakenly opened fire on the young man, leaving him seriously injured, amid conflicting early information about the incident.





