By Aaron Maté | August 1, 2022
On June 10th, The Guardian’s Mark Townsend published an article headlined “Russia-backed network of Syria conspiracy theorists identified.” (“Russia-backed” has since been removed).
The article is based on what Townsend calls a “new analysis” that “reveals” a “network more than two dozen conspiracy theorists, frequently backed by a coordinated Russian campaign.” This network, Townsend claims, is “focused on the denial or distortion of facts about the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons and on attacking the findings of the world’s foremost chemical weapons watchdog,” the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). According to Townsend, I am named “as the most prolific spreader of disinformation” among the nefarious bunch.
In hawking this purported exposé of “disinformation”, Townsend violated every basic standard of journalism. He did not contact me before publishing his allegations; fails to offer a shred of evidence for them; and does not cite a single example of my alleged “prolific” disinformation. Instead, Townsend bases his claims entirely on a think-tank report that also provides no evidence, nor even assert that I have said anything false. In the process, Townsend failed to disclose that the report’s authors — the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) and the Syria Campaign — are groups funded by the US government and other belligerents in the Syria proxy war. To top it off, Townsend fabricates additional allegations that his state-funded sources do not even make.
As a result, Townsend and the Guardian have engaged in the exact sort of conduct that they falsely impute to me and others: spreading Syria-related disinformation with coordinated support from state-funded actors. The aim of this propaganda network is transparent: defaming journalism that exposes the OPCW’s ongoing Syria cover-up scandal and the dirty war waged by Western powers on Syria.
The OPCW cover-up is arguably the most copiously documented pro-war deception since the US-led drive to invade Iraq. In Western media, as The Guardian’s behavior newly demonstrates, it is also without question the most suppressed.
At the center of the story are two veteran OPCW scientists, Dr. Brendan Whelan and Ian Henderson. The pair were among a team that deployed to Syria in April 2018 to investigate an alleged chemical attack in the town of Douma. They have since accused senior OPCW officials of manipulating the Douma probe to reach a conclusion that baselessly implicated the Syrian government in a chlorine gas attack. Their claims are backed up by a trove of leaked documents and emails that show extensive doctoring and censoring of the Douma team’s findings.
The Douma cover-up extends far beyond the OPCW’s executive suite. It also implicates NATO governments led by the US, which bombed Syria over the Douma chemical weapons allegation, and then, weeks later, privately pressured the OPCW to validate it. Since the OPCW scandal became public, the US and its allies have thwarted efforts to address it.
At the most criminal level, the scandal implicates sectarian death squads armed and funded by the US and allies during their decade-long campaign for regime change in Syria.
At the time of the incident, Douma was occupied by the Saudi-backed jihadi militia Jaysh-al-Islam and under bombardment from Syrian army forces attempting to retake control. Shortly before their surrender, local allies of Jaysh-al-Islam accused Syrian forces of using chemical weapons. They released gruesome footage of an apartment building filled with slain civilians. A gas cylinder was filmed positioned above a crater on the roof. Concurrently, the White Helmets, a NATO and Gulf state-funded, insurgent-adjacent organization, released footage of what it claimed were gas attack victims in a Douma field hospital. Several journalists, including Riam Dalati of the BBC, Robert Fisk of the Independent, and James Harkin of the Intercept, found evidence that the hospital scene was staged. (In February 2019, Dalati claimed that he can “prove without a doubt that the Douma Hospital scene was staged.” Oddly, more than three years later, he has not released his findings).
The White Helmets’ alleged fakery of a chemical attack aftermath, coupled with the censored OPCW findings showing no evidence that a chemical attack occurred, suggest the inescapable conclusion that insurgents in Douma carried out a deception to frame the Syrian government. And given the unexplained deaths of the more than 40 victims filmed in the Douma apartment building, that deception may have entailed a murderous war crime.
Unlike the Iraq WMD hoax, the very existence of the OPCW’s Douma scandal is unknown to much of the Western world. With few exceptions, establishment media outlets have refused to acknowledge the OPCW whistleblowers and the leaks that brought their story to light.
After largely ignoring the OPCW cover-up since it first surfaced in May 2019, the Guardian has now published defamatory claims about journalists, myself included, who have dared to report on the censored facts.
When I wrote The Guardian about the Townsend article’s journalistic lapses, I did not get a response. One week later, I phoned Townsend, who was now back in the office but had yet to reply. In our conservation, which I recorded and recently published, I repeatedly asked Townsend to substantiate his claims about me and identify even a single example of my alleged disinformation.
Townsend did not attempt to defend his article’s assertions, beyond claiming that they were based on what was “in a report.” When I pressed further, he claimed that he had to “dash for a meeting” and promised that I would soon hear from the paper’s reader’s editor. (Before I published our phone call, and this article, I emailed Townsend a detailed list of questions and invited him to offer any additional comment. He did not respond).
“Deadly Disinformation”
Townsend could not provide any evidence for his assertions because the report that he parroted offers none as well.
The report, titled “Deadly Disinformation” and authored by The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) and the Syria Campaign, contains bare references to my reporting and makes no effort to refute it. Nowhere does the report even claim that I have said anything false. It simply claims to have “identified 28 individuals, outlets and organisations who have spread disinformation about the Syrian conflict,” and that I am “the most prolific spreader of disinformation” among them.
When the report bothers to mention of anything that I have actually said, it engages in distortion. In its first mention, the report states that I wrote an article that “attacks Bellingcat for its contributions to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).” Here, they not only fail to assert that I said anything false, but offer a false portrayal of what happened.
As for “attacking” Bellingcat — a website that, like the report’s authors, is funded by NATO states that were belligerents in the Syria dirty war – what I really did was expose its disinformation.
In this case, Bellingcat fraudulently attacked Whelan (the key OPCW whistleblower), along with several journalists (myself included) by falsely accusing us of concealing an OPCW letter that, I quickly revealed, did not in fact exist. Bellingcat was forced to add a correction, delete embarrassing tweets, and apologize to one of the article’s targets, the journalist Peter Hitchens (who resides in the UK, home to strict libel laws). I later exposed that Bellingcat copied a hidden, external author for some of their false material.
In short, the ISD/Syria Campaign’s first purported example of my alleged “disinformation” is an easily verifiable case where I’ve exposed state-backed lies.
The report’s only other substantive example comes when it notes that I have argued that the OPCW probe’s Douma probe “was flawed.” This far understates my case: the OPCW’s Douma investigation wasn’t “flawed”; it’s a scandalous cover-up worthy of global attention. Regardless, yet again, the report does not even assert that my argument is false, let alone try to explain why.
In a July 13th email, I asked the ISD to substantiate their claim that I have spread disinformation, and provide even one example of it. On its website, the ISD claims to “take complaints seriously,” and promises a response “within ten working days.” As of this writing, after 13 working days, I have not heard back.
At The Guardian, OPCW leaks are “problematic”
When I emailed a complaint about Townsend’s reporting, The Guardian admitted fault only on failing to contact me before publishing his evidence-free allegations. This was the result, they claimed, of a “breakdown of communication internally.” I was then offered the chance to respond to the article in 200 words.
A key point in my reply (which can be read here) was that The Guardian and its state-funded source is unable to identify any falsehoods in anything I’ve written “because my reporting on the OPCW’s Douma cover-up scandal is based on damning OPCW leaks.” These leaks, I added, “reveal that veteran inspectors found no evidence of a chemical attack in Douma, and that expert toxicologists ruled out chlorine gas as the victims’ cause of death. But these findings were doctored and censored by senior OPCW officials.”
At The Guardian, this passage set off an apparent alarm. After disparaging my reporting on the OPCW leaks, The Guardian informed me that they would now prevent me from even mentioning them. In a July 8 email, a Guardian editor wrote that the “the part about the OPCW” in my reply “continues to be problematic.” My reference to the OPCW leaks, the editor claimed, “makes an assertion that has been rebutted by an independent inquiry.”
I responded by asking the editor to specify exactly which “assertion” of mine has been rebutted. I also proposed that, if they believe that I have said anything “problematic,” they publish their own rebuttal.
In multiple follow-up emails, the editor failed to identify any “rebutted” assertion of mine. Despite that, the Guardian proceeded to publish my reply without its reference to the OPCW leaks. But this raised a new problem: in censoring my statement, they misquoted me. When I pointed out that error, they updated my reply to finally allow a (minimal) mention of the OPCW leaks.
The Guardian also took me up on my proposal that they publish their own rebuttal:
Editor’s note: Both the ISD and the Syria Campaign list a diverse range of funders and describe themselves as “fiercely independent”. In 2020 the OPCW rebutted claims about its investigation into the Douma incident (Inquiry strikes blow to Russian denials of Syria chemical attack).
As for the “inquiry” that The Guardian claims “rebutted claims about its investigation into the Douma incident,” the inquiry was not independent, and did not rebut anything.
The “inquiry” was appointed by the OPCW’s Director General’s office, the very body that presided over the cover-up. It was also staffed by two “investigators” from the US and UK. These happen to be the two states that bombed Syria based on the Douma allegations that the OPCW fraudulently validated, and that have since tried to bury the scandal at every stage.
Accordingly, the OPCW “inquiry” avoided the allegations of censorship in the Douma probe and instead disingenuously minimized the whistleblowers’ role. The whistleblowers themselves have rebutted the inquiry’s claims about them, as have I in subsequent reporting.
A network of NATO disinformation
As for what the Guardian calls the ISD and Syria Campaign’s “diverse range of funders,” both groups indeed enjoy a diverse range of funders: everyone from NATO governments to NATO government-funded organizations. They also receive support from billionaire-funded foundations that often work in concert with these same NATO governments’ foreign policy objectives.
The ISD’s “diverse” funders include the US State Department, the US Department of Homeland Security, three other US state-funded organizations, and more than two dozen other NATO government agencies. On the private side, the ISD’s funders include the foundations of three of the world’s richest oligarchs: Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Group, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
In using the ISD as a source, The Guardian has a conflict of interest that its article did not disclose. The latter two ISD donors have also given sizeable grants to The Guardian: at least $625,000 from Open Society Foundations since 2019, and at least $12.9 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation since 2011.
Omidyar’s foundation has a direct role in the ISD/Syria Campaign report. The Omidyar Group’s Luminate Strategic Initiatives is listed alongside the German government-funded Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung foundation as the report’s fiscal sponsor.
Omidyar’s sponsorship of an attack on journalism about the OPCW scandal is highly fitting. The Intercept, the self-described “fearless and adversarial” outlet that Omidyar also funds with his vast fortune, has never once acknowledged the OPCW leaks or whistleblowers’ existence. While ignoring the OPCW scandal for more than three years, The Intercept has published multiple articles promoting the allegation that Syria committed a chemical attack in Douma.
Like the ISD, the Syria Campaign is also funded by governments and other belligerents in the Syria dirty war. As The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal reported in 2017, the Syria Campaign was founded by Ayman Asfari, a Syrian-British billionaire oil tycoon and leading financial supporter of the Syrian National Coalition, the largest government-in-exile group established after the Syria conflict erupted in 2011. The Syria Campaign has also done extensive P.R. and fundraising for the White Helmets, the insurgent-adjacent, NATO state-funded organization implicated in the Douma incident.
That these two state-funded groups “describe themselves as ‘fiercely independent'” is apparently enough for The Guardian. I trust that the Guardian would feel differently if they were dealing with self-described “fiercely independent” groups funded by the Russian and Syrian governments.
Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of sources quoted in the ISD/Syria Campaign report are funded or employed by the same NATO state and private sponsors. This includes the White Helmets; the Global Public Policy Institute; Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS); self-described journalist Chloe Hadjimatheou of the BBC, who produced a podcast series that disparaged the OPCW whistleblowers and whitewashed the Douma cover-up; and James Jeffrey, the former US Special Envoy for Syria.
For a report that claims to be concerned with protecting Syrians from “real-world harm,” Jeffrey is a particularly interesting interview subject. Few US officials have been as candid about their willingness to immiserate Syrian civilians in pursuit of hegemonic US goals in their country.
Jeffrey has declared that al-Qaeda is a US “asset” in Syria, and has admitted to misleading the Trump White House to undermine an effort to withdraw the US military, whose illegal occupation deliberately deprives Syria of its own wheat and fuel. Jeffrey has openly bragged about his “effective strategy” to ensure “no reconstruction assistance” in Syria — even though the war-ravaged country is “desperate for it.” And he has also taken credit for helping to impose crippling US sanctions on Syria that have “crushed the country’s economy.”
Jeffrey’s proudly self-acknowledged real-world harms on millions of Syrians don’t seem to bother the study’s authors, presumably because their Western state sponsors implement them.
The report is so invested in its state funders’ aims in Syria that it approvingly airs frustration that other governments are failing to toe the NATO line. A “former Western diplomat” complains that “disinformation” on Syria is helping states “avoid making the decisions that we want them to make, say in the Security Council or elsewhere.” (emphasis added). From the point of view of Western officials, the anonymous diplomat is employing an accurate operative definition of what constitutes “disinformation”: any information that causes those deemed subordinate to “avoid making the decisions that we want them to make.”
Fittingly, another anonymous “senior diplomat” laments that supposed Syria disinformation is intended “ultimately to cast doubt upon the legitimacy and integrity of the people doing this kind of [policy] work.” Daring to question the “legitimacy and integrity” of Western policymakers who oversaw a multi-billion dollar CIA-led dirty war on Syria that knowingly empowered al-Qaeda and other sectarian death squads while leaving hundreds of thousands dead — another intolerable act that can only result from “disinformation.”
A member of the US-funded, insurgent-adjacent White Helmets is also given space to lament that alleged “disinformation” is hurting its donations. “We hear about billions of dollars for aid at conferences on Syria but most of that funding goes to the UN,” a White Helmets manager complains. Unmentioned is that European governments have cut funding to the group after their late founder, the lavishly paid UK military veteran James le Mesurier, admitted to pocketing donor funds and financial fraud right before he took his own life.
Having promoted the hegemonic agenda of its state sponsors, the report closes with a thinly veiled call to censor the dissenting voices it targets.
The ISD and Syria Campaign urge policymakers to “adopt a whole-of-government approach in tackling disinformation” and “ensure that loopholes or special privileges are not created for ‘media’ which would only exacerbate the spread of disinformation.” These “privileges” presumably refer to free speech. The report also notes favorably that platforms have addressed “thematic harms such as public health disinformation or foreign interference in elections.” As a result, the report calls on these platforms to “commit to applying similar levels of resourcing… in the context of the ongoing Syrian conflict.” Perhaps they have in mind the censorship of journalism about Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election, on the fake grounds that the story was “Russian disinformation.”
The fact that this network of state-funded actors is devoting energy to disparaging journalism about the OPCW’s Syria cover-up — and even advocating that it be censored – reflects their powerful sponsors’ desperation to bury a damning scandal.
In public, OPCW Director General Fernando Arias has provided misleading and outright false answers about the Douma probe, including why he refuses to meet with the dissenting inspectors and the rest of the original investigative team.
On top of the two known whistleblowers, Arias has ignored calls for accountability from his original predecessor, founding OPCW chief Jose Bustani, as well as four other former senior OPCW officials. Along with Bustani, former senior UN official Hans von Sponeck has spearheaded the Berlin Group 21, a global initiative to address the OPCW scandal. The US has responded to Bustani by blocking his testimony at the United Nations. Arias meanwhile refused to open a letter that he received from Sponeck’s group, returning it back to sender.
The response of Western media outlets like the Guardian to the stonewalling of these veteran diplomats and senior OPCW officials has simply been to ignore it.
In whitewashing the OPCW cover-up, the preponderance of state sources parroted by The Guardian reveals the ultimate irony in its allegations. While claiming to “identify” a fictional network of Russia-backed disinformation actors about Syria, The Guardian’s Townsend is himself spreading the disinformation of a NATO-funded network that defames voices who expose the dirty war on Syria.
In fact, one of Townsend’s central allegations goes well beyond his state-funded sources. Although Townsend’s article is premised on identifying a “network of conspiracy theorists,” Townsend’s sole source – the ISD/Syria Campaign report – never alleges that such a “network” exists. Nowhere in the report does the word “network” even appear.
Thus, Townsend has not only parroted state-funded sources, but concocted an additional allegation in the service of their narrative. This is not just an ordinary fabrication: in creating the fantasy of a “coordinated”, “Russia-backed”, “network of conspiracy theorists,” Townsend also reveals himself to be the very thing that he accuses his targets of being: a conspiracy theorist.
And given that Townsend not only parrots his state-backed sources but works for an outlet funded by some of the same sponsors, it is fair to say that The Guardian and these state-funded think tanks are a part of the same network.
Consequently, reading the article’s headline — “Network of Syria conspiracy theorists identified”—as a description of The Guardian and the NATO-funded sources that it relied on, the claim is no longer inaccurate.
By Meryl Nass, MD | August 1, 2022
Here are a few of the lies they have backed off:
1. As of July 28, CDC has ceased claiming the monkeypox vaccine(s) is 85% effective. It now admits it does not know its effectiveness.
2. CDC has stopped recommending the OFF LABEL use of moneypox vaccine post-exposure (even up to 14 days post-exposure was the recommendation earlier). They are now telling the truth, which is that the vaccine is only approved as a two dose series and it is licensed as effective only 2 weeks after the second dose, which is 6 weeks after starting the series. There is no data to support post-exposure prophylaxis, which is OFF LABEL use.
3. CDC finally admits that everyone getting vaccinated is a guinea pig in a big experiment.
4. However, CDC still OMITS what it knows about the dangers of these vaccines, information it provided to its advisory committee a mere month ago. ACAM 2000 vaccine causes myocarditis in one in every 175 recipients. And Jynneos seems to cause myocarditis too, as well as making HIV worse, according to the FDA review issued when the vaccines was licensed in 2019. We just don’t have the Jynneos statistics to say how often these problems occur, but in one study more than one in 6 subjects had elevation of cardiac enzymes, which requires some heart muscles cells to die.
Below is the new CDC messaging.
https://www.cdc.gov/poxvirus/monkeypox/considerations-for-monkeypox-vaccination.html
By Thomas Lambert | The Counter Signal | August 1, 2022
During the height of lockdowns and mandates, when Albertans were fed daily fear propaganda, Chief Medical Officer of Health for the province of Alberta Deena Hinshaw received hundreds of thousands of dollars as a cash bonus.
Last year, Hinshaw reportedly received $227,911 in “cash benefits,” nearly as much as her base salary of $363,634. This brings Hinshaw’s total annual earnings to over half a million at $591,545.
“The scale of the response to this unprecedented public health emergency required an extraordinary amount of additional work from the Office of the Chief Medical Officer, the Vaccine Task force, the Pandemic Response Team and others, which is reflected in the recent disclosure,” explained Ministry of Health spokesperson Mark Feldbusch in an email.
As previously reported by The Counter Signal, earlier this year, Hinshaw admitted that Alberta Health Services (AHS) reported non-ICU patients as ICU patients throughout the pandemic.
“As we have been doing continual quality assurance work with our data, it was identified over time some units in some hospitals have shifted back and forth between being available for use as an ICU unit or a non-ICU unit,” Hinshaw said.
“In some of our historical data, patients admitted for COVID treatment were categorized as being in ICU when the unit they were on, in fact, had been changed back to a non-ICU unit at that time.”
In other words, the figures were wrong. The entire time that ICU numbers were used as a key point to justify lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and vaccine passports in Alberta, the government intentionally or unintentionally utilized eschewed data, if not outright manipulated data.
Now, it looks like misreporting figures used in a fearmongering campaign apparently made Hinshaw worthy of a taxpayer-funded bonus.
By Toby Rogers | July 31, 2022
I. Fauci fires Trump
Think back to July 2020. Trump and Fauci were at war with each other. Key leaders within the Trump administration, including Peter Navarro, wanted to fire Fauci. There were riots in the streets as people protested the murder of George Floyd. And new evidence shows that behind the scenes, Fauci was working to torpedo Trump’s chances for re-election.
We already knew that Fauci, the FDA, CDC, and the pharmaceutical industry went to great lengths to block safe and effective treatments including hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin in order to prolong the pandemic and create the market for Covid-19 vaccines. But a new book reveals that Fauci also forced Moderna to delay their clinical trial by three weeks — which pushed the release of their preliminary results until after the presidential election.
This key piece of information comes from The Messenger: Moderna, the Vaccine, and the Business Gamble That Changed the World published last week by Harvard Business Review Press. The author, Peter Loftus, is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and they published his essay about the book in their Review section on Saturday. What’s astonishing is that Loftus does not even realize the enormity of the story he just stumbled upon. Cultural capture and too many shots apparently prevent one from connecting the dots, so I will do it for him.
Most people already know the broad brush strokes of the Moderna story — they had never successfully brought a product to market before Operation Warp Speed. They were grifters — they took $25 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2013 to develop mRNA products that never worked and another $125 million from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) in 2015 for a vaccine for Zika that also failed. But Fauci really liked these grifters and so when the pandemic began in 2020, BARDA directed $483 million to Moderna for Covid-19 vaccine development — and Moderna cut NIH in on the patents. That gave NIH and especially Fauci control over what came next.
The key paragraphs from Loftus’ WSJ essay are here:
Dr. Zaks [Chief Medical Officer for Moderna] had wanted to use a private contract research organization to run the whole trial, but NIAID officials wanted their clinical-trial network involved. Eventually, Dr. Zaks backed off, and both entities participated. “I realized we were at an impasse, and I was the embodiment of the impasse,” Dr. Zaks said.
Next, when Moderna’s 30,000-person study began enrolling volunteers in July 2020, the subjects weren’t racially diverse enough. Moncef Slaoui, who led Warp Speed’s vaccine efforts, and Dr. Fauci began holding Saturday Zoom calls with Mr. Bancel and other Moderna leaders to “help coax and advise Moderna how to get the percentage of minorities up to a reasonable level,” Dr. Fauci recalled.
Drs. Fauci and Slaoui wanted Moderna to slow down overall enrollment, to give time to find more people of color. Moderna executives resisted at first. “That was very tense,” Dr. Slaoui said. “Voices went up, and emotions were very high.” Moderna ultimately agreed, and the effort worked, but it cost the trial about an extra three weeks. Later, Mr. Bancel called the decision to slow enrollment “one of the hardest decisions I made this year.”
The claim that Fauci cared about racial diversity in the clinical trial is a lie. How do we know this? Later “clinical trials” for Pfizer and Moderna in kids looked at antibodies in the blood, not actual health outcomes, in only about 300 study participants. The number of people of color enrolled in those undersized trials were in the single digits (literally two or three Black participants total) — so those results were not statistically significant. Yet this did not stop authorization. It appears that Fauci’s delay tactics were designed to accomplish a different goal.
Let’s do the math:
Moderna released their preliminary results — claiming 94.5% effectiveness — on November 16, 2020.
The presidential election was less than two weeks earlier — on November 3, 2020.
Trump lost by less than 1% of the vote in 4 key swing states.
Fauci’s demand to slow down enrollment in July 2020 cost Moderna 3 weeks.
If Moderna had released their results 3 weeks earlier — on October 25, 2020, Trump would have scored a major win in the final week of the campaign and won the election.
It does not matter how one feels about Trump or Biden. A massive political win in the week before the election would have convinced enough voters of Trump’s competence and thus pushed Trump’s vote total over the top.
What about Pfizer? They also could have published their preliminary results prior to the election which would have secured Trump’s re-election. According to Loftus, Pfizer “opted out of Operation Warp Speed for fear it would slow the company down.” Pfizer still took $2 billion off of the Trump administration for advance purchase orders. But Scott Gottlieb and Pfizer clearly preferred Biden and so they held their preliminary results until November 9, 2020 — just 6 days after the election. The Biden administration returned the favor by giving Pfizer a blank check and authorizing shots for additional age groups based on the worst “clinical trial” results anyone has ever seen.
The important thing to understand in all of this is that Fauci, the FDA, NIH, and CDC are political functionaries pretending to be scientists. Pandemics, vaccines, and public health are a way for the Democratic Party machine to direct billions of dollars to their base and reward large donors to the party. These companies and their bureaucratic enablers were happy to take money off of Trump. But they knew that they could get an even better deal from Biden.
As you know, the results of this criminal scheme are gruesome. The Covid-19 shots authorized right after the 2020 election have made no discernible impact on the course of the pandemic. Far more people have died of Covid-19 since the introduction of the shots under Biden than during the Trump administration when no Covid-19 shots existed. The Covid-19 shots have negative efficacy and even quadruple-dosed Biden and quadruple-dosed Fauci have contracted Covid-19, twice. These are the deadliest and most toxic shots in the history of the world.
So what started out as a grift turned into mass murder and a crime against humanity.
And now it’s happening again…
II. Pfizer and Moderna move up the release date for reformulated Covid-19 shots in the effort to help Democrats win the midterm elections
On Thursday of last week, the White House and the FDA told their favorite stenographers at the NY Times that Moderna and Pfizer are going to release their reformulated Covid-19 shots, that will completely skip clinical trials, in mid-September.
As readers of my Substack will recall, back on June 28, Pfizer said that the fastest the reformulated shots could be released was October; Moderna said “late October or November” — provided they could skip clinical trials (which of course the FDA granted because they work for Pharma). Did Pfizer and Moderna not understand their own production capabilities? How did Pfizer and Moderna suddenly speed up their production schedule by 6 weeks?
It appears that once again, the public health gatekeepers are doing politics not science. If shots go into bodies in the last two weeks of September, Democrats will claim progress against Covid during October right before the midterm elections on November 8. It’s basically the political win that these same actors denied to Trump (it’s not a public health win, as I will show below).
What’s likely driving this is that Fauci, Pfizer, Moderna, the FDA, CDC, and NIH all want Democrats to retain the House and Senate in order to prevent hearings into their bungling of the Covid-19 response. Of course they also want to keep the Covid-19 vaccine gravy train going as long as possible.
But, you’re surely saying to yourself, we know that these 5th dose reformulated shots are likely to cause catastrophic harms. We’re already seeing a 5% to 15% increase in all-cause mortality across the most heavily vaccinated countries as a result of non-specific effects from these shots. There are 29,790 VAERS reports of death following these shots and this is likely an underestimate by a factor of 41 (so actual death toll = 1,221,390). These reformulated shots are going to use a form of mRNA never tried before and skip clinical trials altogether, so the harms could be even worse. There also seem to be cumulative harms from these shots — the more doses, the more messed up the immune system, the more vulnerable one is to Covid and all sorts of other diseases including cancer.
So how exactly do they plan to get away with this, especially right before an election?
The same way they always get away with it — they own the media. Pfizer and Moderna will rush out press releases claiming that these reformulated shots are a miracle. The CDC’s in-house newsletter, MMWR, will rush out articles and janky studies claiming that these reformulated shots are a miracle. The mainstream media will dutifully report that these reformulated shots are a miracle. Meanwhile, people you know and love — coworkers, friends, neighbors, and family — will be getting injured and killed by these shots. Yet all of the stories in the news will be hosannas about the genius of Tony Fauci, Peter Marks, and the FDA. Billions of dollars of dark money from Pharma will flow into Democratic Congressional campaign coffers. If Democrats can retain the House and Senate they will reward Pfizer and Moderna by blocking any inquiry into the failed Covid-19 response. Win, win, win for Pharma. Everyone else loses.
Which brings me to my last point….
III. Republicans, you have to step up and fight for us or you will lose
Republicans thought that they could take back the House and Senate simply by not being Democrats. Most Republicans did not really fight for us, they just sat back and let Dems destroy themselves. That plan was working until the Supreme Court overturned Roe. Now the Republican advantage in the generic Congressional ballot (‘which party do you prefer’) has evaporated. Pelosi has passed a range of popular bills. Manchin has fallen in line so Biden will likely get some late legislative wins. Gas prices have declined somewhat. And now it appears that Democrats, who were left for dead just weeks ago, will retain the Senate and may retain the House.
IF REPUBLICANS WANT TO WIN THE MIDTERM ELECTIONS THEY HAVE TO MAKE IT ABOUT DEMOCRATS’ FAILED RESPONSE TO COVID!
No more sitting back. No more making warrior mamas do all of the emotional labor for our country. If Republicans want to win they have to make it clear that they will fire, arrest, and prosecute Fauci (and all of his lieutenants) as soon at Republicans take power. Fauci funded the creation of the chimera virus, blocked access to safe and effective treatments, and inflicted deadly toxic vaccines on the entire population. Over 2 million Americans are dead as a direct result of Fauci’s corruption (1 million dead from/with Covid, over 1 million dead from the shots). If Republicans cannot be bothered to sink this two-foot putt then they don’t deserve to win. If Republicans want the votes of the 18 million single-issue medical freedom voters who decide every national election these days — that’s what they have to run on: #ArrestFauci!
Free West Media | July 29, 2022
Sweden’s Minister of Social Affairs Lena Hallengren traveled to the US at the beginning of June to meet globalist politicians and vaccine companies, as well as to attend the Bilderberg Group meeting in Washington DC. The whole thing became an expensive trip for Swedish taxpayers. Hallengren not only chose to fly business class on all flights, but she also stayed in several different luxury hotels.
The bill of over SEK 50 000 was sent to taxpayers. Swedish weekly Nya Tider has obtained important documents and can now provide a unique insight into the Swedish government’s participation in the infamous globalist lobby organization the Bilderberg Group. On its website, the government chose to omit all information about Hallengren’s participation in the Bilderberg meeting. The government also marks large parts of the participant list as confidential for the media – even though the Bilderberg group themselves made it public.
The globalist Bilderberg group’s infamous meetings took a break in 2020 and 2021, meaning this year’s meeting in Washington DC was the first in three years.
Nya Tider can now offer a unique insight into Hallengren’s trip to the US and the parts that both the government and the rest of the establishment are discussing behind the backs of their voters.
The government tried to hide their involvement
On May 25, the government published a press release with the title “Lena Hallengren visits New York and Washington DC”. The purpose of the trip was said to be to “strengthen Sweden’s relationship with the United States linked to global health issues”. The government chose to publish a “selection” from her schedule for the first three days.
On May 31, she met with Amina J. Mohammed, UN Deputy Secretary-General, to discuss the 2030 Agenda. She also met with George Bickerstad, president of the International Vaccine Institute (IVI), Pfizer’s head of research Mikael Dolsten “for talks on future pandemic management”, and New York’s health commissioner for “exchange of experiences after the pandemic and talks about measures now being taken to prevent and detect infection earlier”.
Meetings were held in secrecy where the participants were not allowed to tell who said what.
On June 1-2, she met, among others, Andrea Palm, deputy health minister in the US, to “discuss the WHO’s upcoming pandemic treaty”. She also met with several US health authorities.
After that, the information on the government’s website about Hallengren’s trip dried up, and the reader gets the impression that there were no further engagements. What the government chose to cover up was that Hallengren had several more days booked in the US. After her official schedule ended in Washington DC on June 2nd, she immediately headed to the Bilderberg Group meeting which began that evening and continued for three more days, until June 5.
‘PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL’
Nya Tider requested all email correspondence between the Swedish government and the Bilderberg group, which showed how the contact between the parties proceeded. The Bilderberg Group is very keen that the discussions are kept secret. However, thanks to Swedish public policy, we have been able to bypass their wishes and have taken part in the conversation.
On March 11, the invitation came from the Bilderberg group to the government. “Sensitivity: Confidential”, it said in the classification of the email, which was sent to government official Sara Båging from “Secretariat Bilderberg Meetings”.
“PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL”, read the first words of the message.
“Dear Mrs Hallengren, attached you will find an invitation from Co-chairs Victor Halberstadt and Marie-Josée Kravis for the Bilderberg meeting 2022”.
Hallengren was asked to respond by March 25 at the latest. The message ends with a text stating that it is confidential and “intended exclusively for the recipient”. The content may not be passed on to third parties.
Swedish oligarch decided that Hallengren should be invited
The invitation itself was attached to the email as a separate file. It was signed by Victor Halberstadt. The latter has been in contact with Sweden’s leading businessman, SEB chairman Marcus Wallenberg, who has been called a Swedish oligarch by critics because of the enormous influence he had and has over Sweden’s government.
It also turns out that Marcus Wallenberg was involved in deciding to invite Lena Hallengren.
The email to Lena Hallengren
“As kindly agreed with Marcus Wallenberg, we are very pleased to invite you to our meeting in Washington, DC, from noon on Thursday, June 2 to noon on Sunday, June 5”.
Marcus Wallenberg sits on the Bilderberg group’s steering committee, a kind of management body. His position there is also confirmed by the information in the list of participants, where everyone who is part of the committee has a star next to their name.
The fear of the information reaching the public is palpable in the communication. Participants are requested to treat the invitation, location and dates as confidential.
In addition, it is required that all participants are “fully vaccinated” and that they can also present a negative PCR test when they arrive at the Bilderberg Group’s designated hotel.
Brief program
Although the meeting runs over four days, from June 2 to June 5, the schedule is brief, almost rudimentary. It appears that the meeting begins on Thursday, June 2, 7 pm with “drinks and dinner”. On Friday and Saturday, talks take place in plenary from 8.00 am to 7.00 pm, then dinner both days. On Sunday 5 June, talks in plenary continue until 11.30, followed by lunch. The topics to be discussed can be found on one page:
● Geopolitical shifts
● NATO challenges
● China
● Indian Ocean
● Sino-US tech competition
● Russia
● Continuity of government and economy
● Disruption of the global financial system
● Disinformation
● Energy security and sustainability
● Post-pandemic health
● Fragmentation of democratic societies
● Trade and globalization
● Ukraine
Soft power
The Bilderberg Group provides all participants with guidelines on how the meeting will take place. Everyone must follow the rules set by the group. A participant’s official position is irrelevant. “Participants participate in a private role, regardless of their official position,” the rules state.
The purpose of the discussions is to have “an exchange of views on the topics that are on the agenda, based on this the participants can draw their own conclusions”.
The nature of the meeting is, if the document is to be believed, completely informal. It is clear that the Bilderberg group chooses “soft power” as a strategy for influence. The term was coined in 1990 by the Harvard professor Joseph Nye, but it is only in recent years that the term has really caught on, not least in analyzes of foreign policy.
The basics of soft power are influencing someone through attraction, and not through financial rewards, persuasion or coercion. The idea is that a country, organization or person is inclined to think and act like the person one is attracted to. The Bilderberg group creates its attractiveness by offering an exclusive context where politicians, business leaders, journalists and academics can meet each other.
It is clear from the invitation that it is a relaxed meeting being held. “No proposals are put forward, no votes are taken and no policy decisions are made,” the invitation states. The participants are given the feeling that they are special, and that it is an exclusive club of friends that meets.
“The Bilderberg group meetings offer fruitful discussions in an atmosphere of mutual trust where participants can express themselves freely. The aim is better understanding of trends and new developments among leading and emerging individuals in politics, business, work, media and academia.”
It is strictly forbidden to record anything from the meeting. The media is not allowed to participate, except for the trusted journalists and editors who have been invited, and who are not allowed to write anything about the meeting. They are there to be informed – some say it is more about being instructed – and not on behalf of their readers or viewers.
“All discussions are private and off-the-record, no recordings are made and the media is excluded from the meeting,” reads the information. The meetings are held according to the “Chatham house rule”, which means that one could divulge the information received, but never the source.
It is forbidden for participants to bring personal secretaries with them. Lena Hallengren traveled with her press secretary Elin Aarflot, who was with Hallengren on the entire trip but was not allowed to participate in the Bilderberg meeting itself.
“Personal staff may not attend the session or eat at the same table as the invitees. Family members are not allowed to come along either.”
It is also Aarflot that wrote the press release on the government’s website about Hallengren’s trip to the US, where all information about the Bilderberg meeting is omitted. Nya Tider has tried to contact Aarflot to ask why it was done that way, but she has not responded.
Book an exclusive hotel
The Bilderberg Group have themselves booked an entire hotel exclusively for the participants, who are not allowed to stay anywhere else but at the intended hotel. Room bookings are not made through the hotel but through the Bilderberg group’s secretariat. However, the cost of the luxury hotel, 460 dollars per night, must be borne by the participants. In Lena Hallengren’s case, it was the Swedish taxpayers who were left with the bill
“Minimum stay is three nights. Room bookings are arranged by the secretariat”, the invitation stated. They also added that the entire hotel had been booked for the group and that only accredited personnel have access there. Very high security would be guaranteed inside and outside the hotel.
The Bilderberg group also provided a special car service that picked up the participants after arrival in Washington DC. “Transportation between the airport or train station and the hotel will be provided. All participants will be met in the arrival hall by a VIP Service Assistant holding a sign that reads DC2022, not your name.”
The contact information that participants receive for the meeting, washington2022@bilderbergmeetings.org and the phone number +1 202 787 6932 “will only be active until Sunday June 5”.
Nya Tider has scrutinized the list of around 150 participants which was sent out to all those attending. While the Swedish government chose to mark many names as confidential, the entire list was published on the Bilderbergs’ official website bilderbergmeetings.org.
Some of the famous and influential participants are:
Peter Thiel, venture capitalist
Anne Applebaum, author
José Manuel Barroso, former president of the European Commission, now president of the global major bank Goldman Sachs
Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer
William Burns, head of the CIA
Ben van Beurden, CEO of Shell
Mustafa Suleyman, Google’s head of artificial intelligence
Charles Michel, chairman of the EU Council of Ministers
Jens Stoltenberg, NATO chief
Mark Rutte, Dutch prime minister
Sanna Marin, Finnish prime minister
Yuriy Vitrenko, CEO of Ukraine’s largest oil and gas company Naftogaz
Sweden had an unusually large delegation of three people. In addition to Hallengren and Wallenberg, Martin Lundstedt, CEO of Volvo, also participated. The government confirmed that they did not incur any costs for Wallenberg’s and Lundstedt’s participation.
Confidential communication
Hallengren’s secretary Theodora Jönsson informed the Bilderberg group secretariat that Hallengren was already in Washington the day before the meeting, and therefore wondered if Hallengren could be picked up from her hotel when she checks out. She also requested transportation to the Bilderberg meeting.
Hallengren flew business class and stayed in expensive luxury hotels on the taxpayers’ buck. “In addition, her international flight home to Sweden departs at 1:37 p.m. from Washington Ronald Reagan National. Therefore, it is very important that she arrives at the airport by 11.30 at the latest. Is it possible to get private transport to the airport? Thanks in advance!”
Both of these requests were heeded by the Bilderberg group.
“Everything is possible. We arrange pick-up from the Georgetown Hotel and transport to the airport in good time,” Marlies ter Haar assured the secretary.
Before the meeting, all participants had to upload vaccination certificates to the Bilderberg group. “Dear Mrs. Hallengren, attached you will find information about the Bilderberg meeting 2022 as well as the link to upload your vaccination certificate,” writes secretary Ter Haar to Hallengren.
No one reported on the meeting
Social Affairs Minister Lena Hallengren’s participation in the meeting went unnoticed in the Swedish mainstream media. Nya Tider was the only media to pick up on the event despite the fact that no less than five editors of well-known newspapers such as the British The Economist were present. They chose not to write a word about the matter, let alone review the trip, for example how it rhymes with the principle of publicity to use tax money to stay in luxury hotels while the discussions are kept secret and the list of participants is censored for the public by Swedish authorities.
No member of the opposition in the Riksdag has yet asked Hallengren or the government about the purpose of the meeting.
Samizdat | July 28, 2022
The FBI is instructing its agents to reclassify cases as ‘domestic violent extremism’, Republican Representative Jim Jordan has claimed, citing agency whistleblowers. Jordan argued that the FBI may be inflating the statistics to satisfy the Biden administration’s crackdown on the supposed threat of homegrown terror.
“From recent protected disclosures, we have learned that FBI officials are pressuring agents to reclassify cases as ‘domestic violent extremism’ even if the cases do not meet the criteria for such a classification,” Jordan wrote in a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray on Wednesday.
“Given the narrative pushed by the Biden administration that domestic violent extremism is the ‘greatest threat’ facing our country, the revelation that the FBI may be artificially padding domestic terrorism data is scandalous,” Jordan continued.
In the days after he took office in January 2021, Biden repeatedly talked up the threat of “domestic terrorism” in the US, describing the pro-Trump riot on Capitol Hill earlier that month as a prime example of this threat. He followed this rhetoric with a domestic terrorism strategy that increased funding to the Department of Homeland Security and Justice Department, while the former agency issued a memo classifying a broad range of dissidents and criminals – from racial extremists to animal rights activists and all others with “personal grievances and beliefs with political bias” – as domestic violent extremists.
This crackdown was necessary, Wray told Congress last summer, stating in June that the FBI had a “very, very active domestic terrorism investigation program,” and that it had “doubled the amount of domestic terrorism investigations.” Attorney General Merrick Garland cited this apparent doubling of investigations as proof that domestic extremism, particularly that involving white supremacists, was the “most lethal” threat facing the US at the time.
However, whistleblower testimony indicates “that the Biden administration’s narrative may be misleading,” Jordan, who is the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote to Wray.
“One whistleblower explained that because agents are not finding enough DVE [domestic violent extremism] cases, they are encouraged and incentivized to reclassify cases as DVE cases even though there is minimal, circumstantial evidence to support the reclassification,” Jordan continued, adding that the agent in charge of one field office offered awards and promotions to subordinates who could reclassify the most cases as domestic extremism.
“This information … reinforces our concerns regarding the FBI’s politicization under your leadership,” Jordan told Wray. Citing an alleged “purge” of FBI employees with conservative views, the Ohio Republican argued that the FBI seems “more focused on classifying investigations to meet a woke left-wing agenda” than addressing his committee’s concerns.
As of Thursday afternoon, the FBI has not publicly addressed Jordan’s allegations.
By Jonathan Turley | July 28, 2022
New disclosures are demolishing the continued denials of President Biden that he had no knowledge and nothing to do with his son’s business interests. The emails (reviewed by Fox and The Daily Mail ) include exchanges with at least 14 of Hunter Biden’s business associates while Joe Biden was vice president. They cast further doubt on the president’s repeated claims that he had no knowledge of his son’s foreign business dealings. In one almost plaintive email, Hunter actually complains to an associate that he had delivered on everything that was demanded of him in getting access to his father and the White House.
President Biden and the White House continue to repeat his denial from the campaign trial in 2019: “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” These denials have continued even after an audiotape surfaced showing President Biden leaving a message for Hunter specifically discussing coverage of those dealings.
Some of us have written for two years that Biden’s denial of knowledge is patently false. Indeed, it is baffling how Attorney General Garland can ignore the myriad of references to Joe Biden in refusing to appoint a special counsel.
There are emails of Ukrainian and other foreign clients thanking Hunter Biden for arranging meetings with his father. There are photos from dinners and meetings that tie President Biden to these figures, including a 2015 dinner with a group of Hunter Biden’s Russian and Kazakh clients.
People apparently were told to avoid directly referring to President Biden. In one email, Tony Bobulinski, then a business partner of Hunter’s, was instructed by Biden associate James Gilliar not to speak of the former veep’s connection to any transactions: “Don’t mention Joe being involved, it’s only when u [sic] are face to face, I know u [sic] know that but they are paranoid.”
Instead, the emails apparently refer to President Biden with code names such as “Celtic” or “the big guy.” In one, “the big guy” is discussed as possibly receiving a 10 percent cut on a deal with a Chinese energy firm; other emails reportedly refer to Hunter Biden paying portions of his father’s expenses and taxes.
The new disclosures only add details to the the extent of his knowledge and involvement. It appears that Biden met with at least 14 of Hunter’s business associates from the U.S., Mexico, Ukraine, China and Kazakhstan over the course of his vice presidency. That includes Hunter’s Mexican business associates, Miguel Aleman Velasco and Miguel Aleman Magnani who visited the West Wing on Feb. 26, 2014, and Joe was later photographed with Hunter giving Velasco and Magnani a tour of the White House Brady Press Briefing room.
Hunter is clearly eager to get photos as a deliverable for the visits. In one email in April 2014 to David Lienemann, Biden’s official photographer, Hunter asks “Do you have pictures from the lunch I had in dad’s office (I think on 2/26) with Miguel Alleman [sic] Sr. And Jr. And Jeff Cooper? If so let me know and I can send someone to pick them up. Thanks. How was Kiev?”
Other emails show Hunter using trips with his Dad to arrange meetings with business associates like Magnani. Indeed, in one exchange with Magnani, Hunter complains that he is not getting responses on his business dealings, objecting
“I have brought every single person you have ever asked me to bring to the F’ing White House and the Vice President’s house and the inauguration and then you go completely silent,. I don’t know what it is that I did but I’d like to know why I’ve delivered on every single thing you’ve ever asked – and you make me feel like I’ve done something to offend you.”
The cringeworthy email only adds to the embarrassment not of Hunter Biden but Merrick Garland who continues to refuse the obvious need for a special counsel. Indeed, the public could raise the objection raised by Hunter: what does it take?
By Lucas Leiroz | July 27, 2022
The financial crisis in the US seems increasingly difficult to hide. The reality worries the Biden government, whose unpopularity creates a serious risk in the midst of this unstable scenario. In this sense, in order to avoid an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy, Washington’s officials seem to be betting on the redefinition of elementary concepts of the economic sciences as a way of masking the country’s social chaos.
According to US Treasury chief Janet Yellen, the current US economic status needs to be reassessed by experts as it would not be fair to classify it as a “recession”. Yellen said she considers the classical concept of recession “not technical”. Despite the decreasing numbers, Yellen thinks it is necessary to assess factors other than the national GDP in order to classify the situation more “appropriately”.
“That’s not the technical definition [of recession] (…) There is an organization called the National Bureau of Economic Research that looks at a broad range of data in deciding whether or not there is a recession. And most of the data that they look at right now continues to be strong. I would be amazed if they would declare this period to be a recession, even if it happens to have two-quarters of negative growth. We have a very strong labor market. when you are creating almost 400,000 jobs a month, that is not a recession”, she said during a recent interview.
The most interesting point is that this speech has been not limited to Yellen’s personal words but was also the topic of an article published on the US government website. The text was titled “How Do Economists Determine Whether the Economy Is in a Recession?” and its only objective is to point out directions for a “re-signification” of the concept of recession just to say that the American economic data for 2022 does not indicate what economists would call a recession.
“What is a recession? While some maintain that two consecutive quarters of falling real GDP constitute a recession, that is neither the official definition nor the way economists evaluate the state of the business cycle. Instead, both official determinations of recessions and economists’ assessment of economic activity are based on a holistic look at the data—including the labor market, consumer and business spending, industrial production, and incomes. Based on these data, it is unlikely that the decline in GDP in the first quarter of this year—even if followed by another GDP decline in the second quarter—indicates a recession. (…) Recession probabilities are never zero, but trends in the data through the first half of this year used to determine a recession are not indicating a downturn”, the article states.
Experts reacted to these White House’s pronouncements by accusing the current Administration of being “propagandistic” in its economic reports. And, in fact, the case really looks like an attempt to hide the gravity of the American situation through propaganda techniques. According to the economic sciences, recession is a period of downturn in the economic activity, caused by one or more factors. Usually, the result of this economic drop is the emergence of visible material impacts for the population: decrease in GDP and HDI, decline in the population’s purchasing power, bankruptcy of companies, indebtedness, unemployment, inflation, among others. These characteristics are currently part of the American reality and there is no way this situation can be “masked”.
The US economy contracted by 1.4% in the first quarter of 2022 and 1.6% in the second, according to the Fed. GDP is the clearest and most direct indicator of the economic situation and it is the data that can define whether or not the country is – or is heading towards – a recession. However, even considering factors other than GDP, the American social reality is clearly complicated. Inflation is already at 9%, a record in more than 40 years. The purchasing power of American citizens is dropping. So even analyzing it “holistically” – as the White House proposes – it is obvious that the optimism about the economy is totally unjustified.
If Washington is experiencing a decline in GDP for two consecutive quarters of the year, then the country is definitively in recession and economic crisis. Changing the meaning of words and concepts will not imply material improvements for the American people. Call it a “recession” or something else, the result is only one: the American economy is in dangerous situation. Instead of trying to hide the truth, the Biden Administration should look for real solutions to this problem.
Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.
Don’t worry, the economy is fine, we’re definitely not in a recession…according to the new definition
OffGuardian | July 27, 2022
Our new series of micro-articles deals with the newly everyday occurrence of the modern media simply changing what a word means. Today’s word is “recession”.
The United States is not in a recession. The government want to be very clear about that.
Yes, it’s true that a “recession” is generally defined as…
a period of temporary economic decline during which trade and industrial activity are reduced, generally identified by a fall in GDP in two successive quarters.
And yes, it’s true that the US has likely seen a “fall in GDP in two successive quarters”…but that doesn’t mean there’s a recession.
OK, it might technically be a recession but, apparently, there’s a difference between a “technical recession” and a “real recession”. The Whitehouse posted a blog about it a few days ago (as this reddit user pointed out):
What is a recession? While some maintain that two consecutive quarters of falling real GDP constitute a recession, that is neither the official definition nor the way economists evaluate the state of the business cycle.
There you have it – the US isn’t in a recession (not a real one, anyway), by this different definition of “recession”.
This does not constitute the Whitehouse changing the definition. They want to be very clear about that, too. And, as usual, the official “fact-checkers” have their back.
Newsweek headlines: Fact Check: Did The White House ‘Change Definition of Recession’?, which does a lot of prevarication and double-talking around the subject.
CNBC is both more forthright and more patronising, defending the Whitehouse position under the headline “Here’s how to know if we’re in a recession, and it’s not what you think”
Business Insider are even less subtle about it: “No, the White House isn’t changing the definition of a recession”
The point many of them are clinging to is that we can’t be in a recession because of all the “new jobs”. A startling piece of intellectual dishonesty, since the “new jobs” are not new at all, they’re all the old jobs everyone lost due to lockdown.
At the end of the day the price of energy is skyrocketing, inflation is hitting record highs all over the world, there’s a food crisis and a fuel crisis and a housing crisis and a general cost of living crisis.
… who cares what we call that? Does changing the name change the thing? A recession by any other name is still as deep.
The people in charge believe that as long as they keep changing the names of things it doesn’t matter that everyone is starving. They are wrong.
or go to
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Lies are Unbekoming | September 24, 2026
The label for Humira, once the best-selling drug in the world, lists its risks in plain print. One of them, in the label’s own words, is new “autoimmune” disease.
A drug prescribed for a condition labelled autoimmune carries a warning that it can cause a condition labelled autoimmune. That contradiction sits in every box, on a folded paper almost nobody reads.
My new book starts there.
No Autoimmunity: The Body Doesn’t Attack Itself
For seventy years, “your body is attacking itself, and we don’t know why” has ended the conversation for people diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, Hashimoto’s, Type 1 diabetes, Crohn’s and psoriasis. More than eighty conditions now carry the autoimmune label. The diagnosis comes with a prescription for life. It almost never comes with a question about cause.
This book asks the question and answers it from the framework’s own records: its drug labels, its journals, its regulatory filings, and its own experiments. … continue
Aletho News If Americans Knew No Tricks Zone
