NATO Expansion: Blinken and Stoltenberg lie intentionally and the media let them
By Jan Oberg | The Transnational | January 13, 2022
To deceive, telling half-truths, or a complete lie is nothing new in politics, particularly security in politics. But until some 20-30 years ago, I would – perhaps naively – see it as an exception. Tragically – and perhaps to many readers’ surprise – it is now the rule. At least in U.S. and NATO circles, and that is particularly regrettably since The West professes to be a democratic system with specific values and even a moral leader to The Rest.
Lying systematically about facts – historical facts – and other countries and cultures should be incompatible with The West’s perception of itself. But, today, it isn’t.
Lies are widespread in so-called security politics when some militarist project doesn’t make any (common) sense to intelligent people, when the real motives have to be covered up and war is being prepared or when the sociological cancer called the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex, MIMAC, and the elites it consists of, try to squeeze out even larger military expenditures from their taxpayers.
You lie to manufacture an enemy that can justify what you will do and enrich yourself. With 40+ years of experience in security politics in general and NATO/US policies in particular, I know too much – sorry for the arrogance – and have become too cynical to believe that what goes on goes on for the sake of self-defence, security or peace.
Some quick examples of gross empirically-revealed lying to the word – all the liars still at large:
• In the 1990s, Yugoslav President Milosevic was Europe’s new Hitler (Bill Clinton) and planned a genocide on the Albanians in Kosovo.
• Saddam Hussein’s soldiers threw babies out of their incubators in Kuwait City.
• Afghanistan had to be destroyed because of 9/11.
• Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
• The US-led Global War On Terror – GWOT – has been about reducing terrorism.
• The US/NATO orchestrated regime-change attempt in Syria from 2011 to 2016 was exclusively about Dictator al-Assad’s sudden sadist “killing of his own.”
• Gaddafi was just about to murder all who lived in Benghazi.
• The conflict around Ukraine was started by Putin’s “aggression” on Crimea, nothing preceded it.
• Iran has always plotted and lied to acquire nuclear weapons.
• There are only bad things to say about Russia and China and…
You may continue on your own.
A recent lie is particularly nasty because it is not about some limited event or pretext. It is a cynical attempt to rewrite contemporary history to justify (even further) NATO expansion and intimidate Russia.
The lie is this:
• The West’s leaders never promised Mikhail Gorbachev and his foreign minister Edvard Shevardnadze not to expand NATO eastward. They also did not state that they would take serious Soviet/Russian security interests around its borders. And that, therefore, each of the former Warsaw Pact countries has a right to join NATO if they decide to freely.
It is this lie I am going to deal with below, and you can hear these lies presented by Antony Blinken and Jens Stoltenberg – in slightly different versions – with crystal clarity in the following two videos.
Before I start, let me say that it has never been my style to focus on or attack individuals. I’ve always been more interested in structures and processes and in how they shape people. But there comes a time when leaders must be held accountable because they choose to lie repeatedly, although they do have the choice not to.
And because lies have often been war crimes in the making.
Antony Blinken
First, US Secretary-of-State, Antony Blinken on January 7, 2022 – scroll the video below to 38:30 where he begins to speak and distorts the Ukraine conflict history and then, at 43:00-45:00, continues to say that Russia is driving the false narrative that the West had given assurances to Russia/Gorbachev about not expanding NATO back in 1989-90. It wouldn’t and couldn’t, he says. And all the claims Russia makes are false and shall not permit “us” to be diverted from the main thing: Russia’s unprovoked aggression against Ukraine.
Right after (45:40) comes another lie – Russia also invaded Georgia. Anyone who has studied the U.S. Congressional Research Service’s analysis of 2009, “Russia-Georgia Conflict in 2008: Context and Implications for U.S. Interests“, knows that this issue was vastly more complex and that it was Georgia – led by hotheaded U.S. friend Mikheil Saakashvili whose political life ever since has resembled a tragicomic farce – that had occupied the larger part of South Ossetia before Russia intervened massively. The responsibility for the war and violence can not seriously be placed on the Russian side alone.
And he continues his self-righteous accusations. Blinken’s list is long, and he reads his accusation list with a submachinegun speed, sometimes so stumbling and unclear that one must wonder whether he is uncomfortable because he is subconsciously aware that he lies, deceives and omits to make his psycho-political projections of the U.S.’s own dark sides sound intelligent, logical and truthful.
This U.S. Secretary of State can’t be bothered by facts or nuances. Neither could his predecessor, Mike Pompeo, who was proud to say that at the CIA, he directed “We Lied, We Cheated, We Stole. We had entire training courses…“. Mr Blinken continues reading his obsessive, hateful listing of all the sins of Russia. As if the US/NATO did not exist and, therefore, there was no conflict which normally takes a least two parties. In his comprehensive conflict illiteracy, this conflict has only one party: Russia.
The intellectual level is deplorable. NATO allies and mainstream media have no public opinion or critical views on any of it. One must assume that they agree and can make no better analyses themselves.
Now, take a look – at least at the sequences, I’ve mentioned above. Then, I show you how Mr Blinken is lying deliberately under the video.
If this link doens’t functionanymore, please use this. You may also see it on C-Span and YouTube here.
Now, how can Mr Blinken flatly deny that assurances were given to Gorbachev?
The only source I have been able to find is an article by Steven Pifer from 2014, which argues that Gorbachev himself denies that NATO expansion was ever discussed, “Did NATO Promise Not to Enlarge? Gorbachev Says “No” which refers to an interview with Gorbachev in Russia Beyond.
But this is a piece of citation fraud.
Steven Pifer quotes from it but stops right before the well-known statement in the interview article by then U.S. Secretary of State, James Baker, that “NATO will not move one inch further east.” He also omits these words by Gorbachev himself:
“The decision for the U.S. and its allies to expand NATO into the east was decisively made in 1993. I called this a big mistake from the very beginning. It was definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990. With regards to Germany, they were legally enshrined and are being observed.”
Can this really be interpreted to mean that Gorbachev says that no assurances were ever given?
We get a key to why Blinken uses a fake analysis: Because it fits his posturing as a paragon of truth and because Mr Pifer is a senior fellow at Brookings but also a former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine and adviser to one of the most hawkish think-tanks, Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington.
A slight twist, omission or interpretative casuistry isn’t that important, is it? Well, if you are not yet convinced that Mr Blinken lies deliberately, I ask you to now go to the authoritative National Security Archive at George Washington University. It’s an incredible source of facts, and we should thank it for making the truth available through comprehensive documentation on so many security-related issues.
TFF has reproduced two essential pieces from that archive of irrefutable documentation that Gorbachev indeed was given such assurances – “cascades” of them! as is stated in the article – by all the most influential Western leaders at the end of 1989 and into 1990:
“NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev heard” – and
“NATO Expansion: The Budapest Blow Up 1994”
Read them, and you’ll be shocked.
You’ll find that they have lots of notes and, in sum, no less than 48 original historical documents. For instance, here is just one of the 48 informing us about then NATO Secretary-General Manfred Woerner’s view and statement:
“Woerner had given a well-regarded speech in Brussels in May 1990 in which he argued: “The principal task of the next decade will be to build a new European security structure, to include the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact nations. The Soviet Union will have an important role to play in the construction of such a system. If you consider the current predicament of the Soviet Union, which has practically no allies left, then you can understand its justified wish not to be forced out of Europe.“
Now in mid-1991, Woerner responds to the Russians by stating that he personally and the NATO Council are both against expansion – “13 out of 16 NATO members share this point of view” – and that he will speak against Poland’s and Romania’s membership in NATO to those countries’ leaders as he has already done with leaders of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Woerner emphasizes that “We should not allow […] the isolation of the USSR from the European community.”
This is just one of the “cascades” of statements and assurances given to the Russians at the time. Over 30 years ago, 13 out of 16 members were against NATO expansion because they respected Russia’s crisis and legitimate security interests! Today – 2022 – NATO has 30 members.
Is the U.S. Secretary of State, his advisors and speechwriters unaware of the next-door National Security Archives and what is in them concerning one of contemporary history’s most important events: the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact? Are we really to believe that they have no clue about the conditions and dialogues at the end of the first Cold War? If so, they ought to resign or be fired for their unbelievable incompetence.
If not so – if they know the content of these historical documents – Mr Blinken, his advisors and speechwriters know that they lie.
Their words, therefore, should never be trusted. Neither should the media that avoid highlighting these lies and thereby become complicit. The task of a supposedly free press is to reveal the power abuse of democratically elected people who deliberately fill their constituencies with lies.
Simple as that.
Jens Stoltenberg
In this press conference video from January 7, 2022, NATO’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg states some of the same rhetoric, distortions, simplifications and lies. Not to mention platitudes accompanied by an almost funny body language of bombastic gestures to compensate for his weak content, mantras and repetitions.
Listen at around 19:00 minutes how he maintains that NATO enlargement has been “extremely important for stability and peace and freedom and democracy in Europe” where it can indeed be argued that that enlargement is the main reason that Europe is now in a situation which can reasonably be called the 2nd Cold War.
Why else has NATO not created the desired and stipulated peace and stability since it was created in 1949? So, no, Mr Stoltenberg, you cannot continue – like your masters in Washington – to argue that the present war risks are caused by Russia and Russia alone? If that’s what they order you to say, you have the option to choose decency and resign.
The NATO Secretary-General repeats that each state has a sovereign right to decide its own course and choose its own security arrangements. And that NATO has not dragged in anybody, and they have all just decided democratically to become a member.
That is simply not true.
NATO as an alliance has enormous resources to influence opinions in potential member states. Contrary to his open door talk, NATO’s Charter speaks only about inviting new members, not about holding a door open for anyone who might want to join.
It should be well-known by now – but isn’t – that in the late 1990s, Vladimir Putin asked to join NATO – but it didn’t happen, did it, Mr Stoltenberg? And why not? Because Putin – Russia – wanted to be invited as an equal partner and not sit and wait till Montenegro had become a member, to put it bluntly. NATO decided to close the door at Putin’s request.
This – fantastic – story is told by a former NATO Secretary-General, George Robertson; there is no reason to assume that is not credible or just a rumour. Or, for that matter, that Putin was not serious.
And what an exciting thought: Russia in NATO! Who would Mr Stoltenberg and Mr Blinken – and all the rest of the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex, MIMAC, then have to put all the blame on? How then legitimate NATO’s permanent armament and 12% higher military expenditures than Russia’s?
Mr Stoltenberg must know that he lies when saying NATO has an open door. It doesn’t for Russia. It doesn’t even have open ears for Russia’s security concerns (which each and every NATO member, the U.S. in particular, would consider reasonable if a Russian military alliance incrementally crept close to their borders).
And he must know that he lies when he acts as though he does not know that Russia has been against that very NATO enlargement that he fakes has been so positive for all of Europe during no less than 30 years.
Funnily, Stoltenberg first emphasises (around 19:30) that all new NATO members have freely decided to join. Then he boasts about all NATO does to train, help, support candidates and how important Ukraine is as a NATO partner while not a member. As he says, candidates need to carry through reforms to meet NATO standards. And NATO gives them “practical and political support” so they can – later – meet NATO standards and become members.
What an extraordinary altruism NATO radiates! Are we really to believe that NATO certainly drags in no one, as he maintains?
NATO set up an office in Kyiv, Ukraine, already in 1994, and here you can see how – incrementally – Ukraine has been dragged in, seduced, and promised a great Euro-Atlantic future in one document after the other.
And here you’ll see how Olga Stefanishyna, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, standing at NATO’s H.Q. with Stoltenberg, consistently talks about NATO as Ukraine’s “allies,” expect all kinds of guarantees and – in Foreign Policy of course – argues that Ukraine Needs a Clear Path to NATO Membership in the face of Russian aggression.
And now, the integration process has probably gone so far that neither NATO nor Ukraine would be able to see any other alternative but full membership at some point. Being fiancées, why not marry through a formal membership – as has been said about Sweden?
In its Russia-humiliating policies, NATO has not even seen it coming: That with all the promises, structures and processes accumulating and creating expectations, the alliance would, at some point, run into serious conflict with Russia. If so, the entire alliance suffers from conflict illiteracy and a tremendous lack of foresight.
An that is why you have to construct Russia as a huge militarily aggressive state with an unsympathetic leader – one “we” can freely demonise and don’t even have to listen to.
Now, listen then to this Stoltenberg statement about the – real – importance of NATO’s help (20:45): “…It also makes the societies of Ukraine and Georgia stronger. So resilient, well-functioning societies are also less vulnerable from interference from Russia.”
Just a welcoming open NATO door to countries that decide freely and democratically that they want to knock on it?
It’s time for a reality check in NATO Realpolitik’s – outdated – world. If you do not manifestly want to provoke and increase war risks, you would do it completely differently every day since 1989.
The NATO expansion basis is obvious: Get as many as possible into NATO, demonise Russia and Putin and make it impossible for Russia to have any influence in Europe and on its future.
How strange, indeed, that Russia perceives the Alliance’s expansion right up to its borders as a deliberate military threat and a politically motivated undermining of its status and power!
How surprising that it thinks its security interests in its near-abroad should be respected, just because it has been invaded historically from the West and contained all along its borders since the Second World War in which, by the way, it lost some 24 million people!
It is tragic beyond words that the West has not a single politician today like Willy Brandt, Egon Bahr, Olof Palme or any of the real statesmen who gave Gorbachev cascades of assurance because they possessed two essentially important qualities: intellectual competence and empathy, a wish and ability to try to live themselves into the situation of “the other” and thereby think in terms of common security at lower military levels.
They were mature personalities basing their policies on analysis and consultations. They knew that you can only achieve security with and not against “the other”.
Instead, NATO has only anti-intellectual, self-centred and -aggrandising militarists running the self-defeating “know-everything-listen-to-nobody” show foolproven by history to lead to war.
And it is tragic beyond words that the peoples of Europe do not debate these issues and that all alternatives to militarism have been deprived of all their resources while NATO militarism costs trillions of dollars what are desperately needed in all other sectors of Western society.
In summary, the US/NATO world threw away the most significant and precious opportunity to create peace in Europe after 1945, when it decided to take advantage of Russia’s weakness. As suggested by Gorbachev and many security and peace intellectuals at the time, the members of the old blocs could have joined forces and created an entirely new all-European security and peace architecture.
We are now facing the tragic consequences of the arrogant winner-takes-it-all policy manifested by the US Clinton administration’s decision to ignore all the assurances and begin expanding NATO eastward in 1994, helped by submissive European allies that had neither the intellectual capacity nor political will to manifest their own interests.
That is why they have to lie to us today.
Notes
1. Over the years, TFF has published numerous analyses that can serve as supplements to this article. Several of them contain predictions and early warnings about the situation we are now facing:
TFF PressInfo # 390 – Ten articles on the new Cold War and a reflection (2016)
NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev heard and how he was cheated (2017)Various on Ukraine
Jan Oberg’s blog: Maktspelet vid Rysslands gränser – Power games at the borders of Russia (2021) Containing also a series of highly relevant links
2. When you see the two videos above, note that all questions from the media are very understanding of the two speakers’ statements. Like – how will NATO ensure that it can react swiftly if Russia should invade Ukraine, etc. Press conferences have become carefully planned stage events with written statements being read allow and carefully selected pro-military media – critical questions a prior cancelled by organisers and reinforced by self-censorship. Where did we see that before? In the Soviet Union, but just done more clumsily.
3. The Guardian, January 12, 2022
Russia’s belief in Nato ‘betrayal’ – and why it matters today
A new book on this problem.
How the CDC fooled the world
CDC: Science or Politics? (Pat Cross)
SWISS POLICY RESEARCH | January 15, 2022
Throughout the pandemic, the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) published numerous false and misleading studies that bolstered national and international political goals and guided social media censorship. Three recent examples illustrate the issue.
1) Covid, kids and diabetes
A recent CDC study falsely suggested that covid increased the risk of type 1 or type 2 diabetes in children, see reviews here and here (the study didn’t consider obesity rates, for instance). The misleading CDC study was published in parallel to the ongoing covid child vaccination campaign.
In reality, it is covid vaccines that have been shown to cause, in some cases, elevated (pre-diabetic) blood sugar levels and life-threatening diabetic ketoacidosis, while ineffective lockdowns and school closures have led to an unprecedented increase in childhood obesity (and possibly diabetes).
2) Face masks in schools
In September, the CDC published a study falsely claiming that masks reduced coronavirus infections in schools, see reviews here and here (“profoundly misleading”, “very shaky science”).
In reality, face masks have had no impact at all on coronavirus infections; in fact, the official CDC school study from May 2021 confirmed this, but the result was never publicized.
More recently, the CDC has begun recommending N95/FFP2 masks to the general public, but data from Germany and Austria showed already in 2021 that these masks had no effect, either.
3) Natural immunity
In October, the CDC published a study falsely claiming that vaccine immunity was more robust than natural (i.e. infection-acquired) immunity, see reviews here and here (“highly flawed”).
In reality, natural immunity has been shown to be far more robust and durable than vaccine immunity, even against the omicron variant (albeit to a lesser extent).
Bonus: Covid vaccines and kids
In December, the CDC director publicly stated that “no safety problems” had been seen during the vaccination of young children (5-11), whereas the CDC’s own VAERS reporting system showed already numerous cases of serious cardiovascular, neurological and allergic adverse events in this age group at very low risk of severe covid (see image below).
Conclusion
In conclusion, pandemic guidance by the US CDC, as well as media reporting and social media censorship relying on it, have often turned out to be misleading and unjustified. To evade political misinformation campaigns, citizens should always double-check official claims.
British Medical Journal: Facebook urged to act over incompetent “fact check”
∗∗∗
CDC: Director vs. VAERS (Prasad)
Alberta just inadvertently confessed to fiddling the COVID vaccination stats
More than half the newly vaccinated deaths were dumped in the unvaccinated
By Joel Smalley | COVID Facts – Challenge the Narrative | January 13, 2022
Those who have done the slightest bit of research (really not a dirty word), will know that there is no claim of protection after the first dose of the COVID vaccine.
So imagine how you can conflate the vaccine effectiveness stats if you dump all the COVID events (cases, hospitalizations and deaths) that occur subsequent to infection within 14 days of the first dose into the unvaccinated.
Well, now we know for sure from the data published by the Government of Alberta1. Like everywhere else in the world they claim very impressive vaccine effectiveness by following the fraudulent standard set by the drug manufacturers in the pantomime clinical trials, i.e. to ignore the adverse outcomes in the first two weeks post administration.
But then they go one better and actually inflate the unvaccinated numbers too. And this is on top of dumping the events within 14 days of dose 2 in the partially vaccinated as well, of course.
Almost half of all COVID hospitalizations of the newly vaccinated occurred within 14 days which means they were treated as unvaccinated in the stats.
Fortunately, they inadvertently let us in on the magnitude of this duplicity by also publishing the time from dose to infection for each of the events, thereby allowing us to recalculate just how many events in the first 14 days were shifted from the vaccinated to the unvaccinated cohort.
Not only that but almost 80% occurred within 45 days. I’ll have to check with my friend, Jessica Rose, who is the expert on time-causality but it looks pretty positive to me.
In terms of deaths, the duplicity is even more severe with almost 56% of deaths of the newly vaccinated occurring within 14 days and almost 90% within 45 days.
As usual, if you are interested in public health information, you should be very wary of anything that comes from the public health authorities which is then heralded by the propaganda media and their other shills.
Your life might well depend on it.
Post Script
In reaction to reader comments, I am also including the case data.
It evidently follows the same pattern. However, in the first 14 days we range from 40% of cases, 48% of hospitalizations to 56% of deaths.
I guess it could be possible that the excess hospitalizations over cases and deaths over hospitalizations could be subject to prioritization of the sick but I don’t think it really matters. It’s the sick that needed protection anyway, not the healthy! And if it didn’t improve outcome for the sick then what exactly is the point??
Just for the record, here is the full history of cases, annotated with the start of the mass vaccination campaign. Interesting, eh?
(1) https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm#vaccine-outcomes
“How Bad is my Batch” The story of my vaccine injury – Robert W Malone MD, MS
By Robert W Malone MD, MS | January 13, 2022
In fact, I do have a personal life. My wife of of 42 years and I are actually pretty private. Sharing personal history is not something I do everyday. However, as many of you know – I was vaccinated with Moderna twice and had a pretty significant vaccine injury. This was pretty early in the roll-out of the vaccines. It was long before the FOIA Japanese pre-clinical trial data that had so many red-flags and irregularities, long before we learned of all the issues with the clinical trials, and long before the VAERs and adverse events began to be known.
To write it, I have never been an “anti-vax” person. I have spent my career working with vaccines. I also know that some vaccines are “hot,” and are less safe. Usually these types of vaccines are reserved for extremely dangerous viruses like Ebola or Yellow fever. Where the goal is to make the vaccine 100% effective. Other vaccines, that are distributed widely, like the flu vaccines need to be very safe. The trade-off being that they are less effective. There is a whole science and art to crafting vaccines to appropriately respond to the “threat.” So, I know to read the literature, do my own due- diligence, etc before taking an experimental product or any vaccine. That is what I thought I did. The government assured us that these vaccines were very safe. I could never imagine that clinical data would be corrupted and even falsified – as we now know it was.
Anyway, back to my story. I knew in the beginning of April, 2021, that I had to travel overseas and the word on the street was that the European Union was going to require full vaccination before entering any EU country by summer (that actually never happened BTW). I knew that a full vaccination protocol was a process of weeks – and that i had better get started! Furthermore, there was a lot of buzz around the idea that vaccination would help with “long-COVID.” I had already had COVID, and just couldn’t shake a number of chronic issues that I had developed after getting the disease. Frankly, I should have done more homework on that one- because this idea really didn’t hold up to scrutiny.
Be that as it may, in April, 2021, I got vaccinated. It was early enough in the cycle, that I had no choice but to take the Moderna vaccine, as that was available in my area The vaccine was distributed at a local college, with the Army Reserves administering the program.
The first shot was fine. No issues.
The second shot almost did me in. As in I almost died.
After the injection, I had the usual fatigue, muscle-ache and then the palpitations started, as well as shortness of breath. Within a couple days, it got worse – I am not someone who goes to the doctor easily, but luckily for me, I happened to have a routine appointment with my physician. She cuffed me and my systolic blood pressure was through the roof. As she is also a cardiologist, she had more tests run, started me on high blood pressure meds and we got it under control. I kind of feel like I owe her my life. A call out to the fantastic Dr. C. Bove.
Fast forward to today.
One of the people who comments on my Substack articles, pointed me to this website:
This site matches up vaccine batch codes with information from the VAERS system, which is the event reporting system run by the CDC. This site matches the vaccine batches to adverse drug reactions, death, disability and life threatening illnesses from the VAERS system
According to the website above, the data reported in VAERS, reproduced on the site, show that adverse events triggered by Moderna batches have varied widely.
- 5% of the batches appear to have produced 90% of the adverse reactions
- Some Moderna batches are associated with 50 x the number of deaths and disabilities compared to other batches.
With that knowledge, I entered my batch code in the search box. The first injection had almost no significant adverse events associated with it. The second jab, frankly shocked me
Here are the results:
Now, I don’t know how many doses are in each batch. But I do know my batch was most definitely in the top 5%. So, not really a surprise in retrospect that I had such a serious adverse event profile.
I always felt I was lucky that I happened to be going to my physician that day, who is also a cardiologist (she is my internist – so I wasn’t seeing her for that specialty).
But just think- our government had this data way back when in the VAERs system -even last summer. This data is so compelling and yet… crickets. How many people could they have helped by releasing this data? People like me, who if I wasn’t a physician and hadn’t gone to my physician could have easily dropped dead.
What is wrong with our government that a site like this is not available from the CDC or the FDA?
If anyone has any doubts about adverse events from these vaccines, take a look at some of the peer reviewed research or look at the VAERS data for deaths in young adults and children.
People have the right to be given informed consent of risks and benefits of a medical procedure. Informed consent is not given, if the risks are hidden.
WHERE THERE IS RISK, THERE MUST BE CHOICE
Why Biden gets my vote as the worst President in US history
I believe history will judge President Biden as the worst President in US history. Here’s why.
By Steve Kirsch | January 13, 2022
Biden’s approval rating has dropped to a new low of 33%. I think it’s going to go even lower. I think history will eventually judge him as the worst President in US history. Sure, Biden didn’t create COVID. But by enabling Fauci instead of firing him, he has turned a bad situation (COVID) into a national and worldwide disaster.
A wise chief executive will always solicit opposing points of view on any important decision
The most important quality in a chief executive is his decision-making ability.
Take, for example, the question as to whether or not to mandate the vaccination of the entire population of the US with a vaccine which was never properly tested on animals (they never did the amount, duration, and distribution studies of the spike protein on non-human primates, for example, and still haven’t) and where the safety signals in VAERS are off the charts (and nobody can explain the reason for that other than using hand-waving arguments without any evidence).
You’d think he might solicit input from at least a dozen experts who hold differing viewpoints before making the decision. People like Robert F. Kennedy, Robert Malone, Byram Bridle, Geert Vanden Bossche, and Peter McCullough should be at the top of the invite list for a decision like this.
Nope, not going to happen. Biden is just going to listen to one side of the story (NIH, CDC, and FDA) and go with it. It’s a good bet that Biden never read RFK Jr.’s book on Fauci.
Biden made sure nobody else would hear the other side of the story too
Biden didn’t stop at just poor decision making. He went one step further. A step that as far as I know, no other US President has ever taken. He actually has a Disinformation Dozen list of people to censor. Not only doesn’t he want to listen to differing viewpoints, but he also wants to make sure you don’t hear differing viewpoints either.
The surveys I’ve done all show that nearly 100% of Americans believe it is wrong for an American President to have a censorship list. Yet, not a single member of Congress has voiced any objection to Biden’s censorship list. That’s stunning to me.
And government censorship is not limited to just the people on the Disinformation Dozen list. The censorship directive extends to anyone who disseminates information that differs from the official government narrative.
Do you think the social media companies are doing this censorship on their own? No way. They are being instructed to censor the information by the government. This is why none of the social media companies will discuss the science with us; the decision was made above their heads so any discussion of the facts are irrelevant.
The same is likely true of medical boards. As far as I know, all of them resolved to take away the livelihood of anyone who dares to speak in opposition to what the CDC says. They all decided to do this within about a week of each other. No evidence of patient harm is required. The bottom line is that in America today, your license to practice medicine can be revoked for what you say, even if there is no proof whatsoever that anyone has been harmed.
In fact, I just learned last night that Dr. Meryl Nass had her license to practice medicine revoked for speaking out. This sends a chilling message to all medical professionals: say anything we don’t agree with and we’ll destroy both your reputation and your ability to earn and income.
How does President Biden feel about the censorship? He likes it. He thinks we should do more of it.
Contrast Biden’s views with that one of America’s most beloved Presidents:
Biden is now promoting the use of an intervention which does nothing more than make people believe they are being protected
This is outrageous. Masks do not work. There are only two randomized trials for masks relative to COVID specifically (the Denmark and Bangladesh studies) and both proved masks did nothing. Nobody will debate any of us on this.
Now Biden is compounding the error by spreading misinformation that masks make a difference. This lulls people into a false sense of security they are being protected which makes the problem worse.
If Biden really wanted to stop COVID misinformation, he could solve it in a heartbeat: stop talking.
There are no debates either: nobody can get a debate
America isn’t allowed to hear both sides of the most important story of the decade. They are only allowed to hear the government narrative unchallenged.
I can’t get a recorded video debate with anyone from the CDC, NIH, or FDA. They all refuse to debate any members of our team.
Even TrialSiteNews called for a debate on vaccine safety and not a single qualified person responded.
Jake Tapper insulted RFK Jr, and RFK challenged him to a debate. Jake refused.
Ever see Robert Malone interviewed on CNN or in the The NY Times? Not going to happen. You aren’t allowed to hear any views that differ from the government narrative. Reminds me of how China and North Korea operate.
And there are Americans like Dr. Ben Rein of Stanford University and Taylor Nichols MD who both want to tighten things down even more. Nichols wants to revoke the medical license of anyone who says anything counter-narrative. Rein wants Malone censored. I asked Rein and Nichols if they would debate us. No answer from either.
None of the people promoting the myth that the vaccines are safe and effective is willing to be challenged on their assertions in a neutral public forum
It’s clear why:
It’s getting even worse… if you have differing views, they’ll lock you up
The impact of not soliciting divergent views: at least 150,000 dead Americans… maybe over 400,000
At least 150,000 Americans have been killed by the COVID vaccines. The benefit? We might save 10,000 deaths from COVID, but probably not that high since the virus mutated since the Phase 3 trials. We kill 15 people to maybe save 1 life. That’s insane.
Note that 150,000 is a minimum. The actual number is likely larger than that; probably larger than all the Americans who died in World War II.
In this case, these people died for nothing. They died because of a poor decision by a US President to deploy an unsafe and inadequately tested vaccine on America.
Mark my words, the immediate deaths and disability are just the tip of the iceberg. There are going to be very severe repercussions of these vaccine that will be felt for years to come including deaths from myocarditis, increasing cancer rates, prion diseases, lack of fertility, and negative vaccine efficacy causing us to be more vulnerable to diseases.
The decision to deploy and mandate these vaccines is going to go down in history as the worst mistake ever made by a US President.
President Biden is not going to correct it either, even after it is obvious that he’s now killing our kids.
Ernest Ramirez lost his only son, 16-years-old, just 5 days after the first shot. It was determined that the vaccine killed him. Did the CDC care? No. They ignored it, just like all the vaccine injuries and deaths. They still tell people that nobody has died from the vaccine. OK, fine, if nobody died from the vaccine then tell us what caused the death of his son?
How many kids do we have to kill or permanently disable (like Maddie de Garay) before Biden admits he screwed up?
Biden will never admit he made a mistake. Presidents never like to admit they were wrong. He’s never going to admit he’s killed 150,000 Americans. But we all know.
At best, he’ll drop the mandate. But even that is unlikely.
I’m not getting any more shots. My wife isn’t either. But two of our kids are still convinced that the vaccines are safe and effective. Their argument is typical, “Dad, none of my friends have died from the vaccine.” They are both adults and I can’t change their minds. Not only that, they are being forced to take the booster by their schools (Harvard and University of Rochester). They could end up dead or disabled.
I’m sure other parents are in similar situations.
So that’s why Biden has lost all my trust. Apparently, I’m not alone as his approval rating is at an all time low. I am certainly trying to do my part to drive his approval rating to zero.
The Five Deadly Lies of Jacinda Ardern and her Government
By Guy Hatchard | TCW Defending Freedom | January 14, 2022
The Government should be your single source of truth
SEPTEMBER 4, 2020 – New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said in Parliament: ‘I want to send a clear message to the New Zealand public: we will share with you the most up-to-date information daily. You can trust us as a source of that information. You can also trust the Director-General of Health and the Ministry of Health . . . dismiss anything else. We will continue to be your single source of truth.’
This is one of the most oft-repeated and misleading lies of Jacinda Ardern. Whistleblowers from within government departments including nurses, doctors and officials have reported that they have been instructed to refrain from revealing to the public the true extent of adverse events and deaths following vaccination, thus hiding the real risks. The excuse presented to employees by the government was that ‘a medical emergency’ justifies the expedient of hiding the truth. Moreover the risks of Covid itself have been consistently overblown to stoke the fear narrative. Based on this lie, the government has refused to acknowledge the import of published research.
The virus spreads because of the unvaccinated
October 4, 2021 – Jacinda Ardern quoted in Stuff: ‘The vast majority of New Zealanders eligible now are being vaccinated, but the virus is finding our unvaccinated individuals. A boundary is not an ironclad way of protecting ourselves against Covid; a vaccine is.’
Even before the start of the NZ vaccination roll out in February 2021, the government was warned that the vaccine allowed transmission. Dozens of published papers since show that there is little or no correlation between transmission and vaccination.
The government failed to call out false information in articles published by the media and sponsored by vaccine interests pretending that Covid spreads 20 times more easily among the unvaccinated. This created unnecessary fear of the unvaccinated and overconfidence among the vaccinated. It has divided our nation. It has led to an economic disaster for businesses who are required to discriminate against the unvaccinated. It has caused personal hardship for thousands of highly qualified and experienced NZ professionals and greatly reduced the pool of qualified individuals in NZ. This lie was the false basis for mandates.
The vaccine is entirely safe
22 October 2021 – Jacinda Ardern quoted in the NZ Doctor: ‘The vaccine we are using in New Zealand is safe and effective.’
This lie has been repeated again and again in the saturation government advertising which has cost millions. Individuals known to be vulnerable to vaccination adverse effects including people with a history of anaphylactic shock, past reactions to vaccination etc, have been denied information which might enable them to make informed choices. They have also been denied exemption to vaccination. Young people who have very little risk of serious Covid outcomes, yet a relatively high risk of vaccine injury, have been left completely uninformed.
There is no need to require reporting of vaccine adverse events
December 15 2021 – Astrid Koorneeff, Director, National Immunisation Programme: ‘An accurate measurement of all adverse events [subsequent to vaccination] is not required.’
This is among the most damaging of lies. Faced with a novel vaccine with a short period of testing developed by a company with a history of medical harm lawsuits against it, the government refused to institute mandatory procedures which would correctly evaluate the extent of any adverse effects. Instead they continued with a voluntary system. A Medsafe website records that only 5 per cent of adverse effects are reported. This has enabled Jacinda Ardern and the government to deny the extent of adverse events and death following vaccination by pleading insufficient information.
Heart disease affects only 3 out of 100,000 vaccinated individuals
15 December 2021 letter – Dr Ashley Bloomfield, Director General of Health: ‘In New Zealand, the true incidence of vaccine-associated myocarditis is unknown as the onset of symptoms occurs in the first few days after vaccination and is potentially under-reported. However, the overall rate of this event in New Zealand is reported to be around 3 per 100,000 vaccinations.’
How can any rational person say in the same paragraph that incidence of myocarditis and pericarditis is underreported in NZ, but also assert an absurdly low rate for incidence? In fact a new study puts the risk of myocarditis to be higher among vaccinated males under 40 than from Covid itself. The latest careful assessment of incidence of perimyocarditis in the published literature puts the incidence as high as 1 in 2,000, not 3 in 100,000.
Multiple reports from individuals reveal that it is common practice to turn away recently vaccinated individuals experiencing symptoms of myocarditis from NZ general practices and hospitals without treatment or a report of cardiac problems. This is mediated by another myth that myocarditis is a ‘mild’ disease that is short-lived. That’s a frightening lie. The damage to the heart from acute viral myocarditis is typically permanent, and the three- to five-year survival rate for myocarditis has historically ranged from 56 per cent to 83 per cent.
Whistleblowers from emergency rooms around NZ report that facilities are being overwhelmed with cardiac cases among vaccinated individuals.
Taken together, the misinformation effort by the NZ government led by Jacinda Ardern has irreparably changed the character of our society and caused needless suffering for thousands.
FT Says “Anti-Vax Sentiment” in the West Being Fueled by Russia & China
Advocates governments using “psychological operations” against their own people
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | January 13, 2022
In a report that advocates governments using “psychological operations” against their own population, the Financial Times asserts, with no proof, that Russia and China are responsible for pushing “anti-vax sentiment” and criticism of lockdown measures in the west.
The article quotes Mikael Tofvesson, head of the Swedish Navy’s new Psyops division, who says “foreign aggressors” are trying to “sow division by targeting areas of public concern such as crime, Covid vaccinations, the government’s response to the pandemic, and immigration.”
“The most important task in psychological defence is to inoculate the population against believing false information,” states the article, which is written by Elisabeth Braw of the American Enterprise Institute, a neo-con think tank.
Such measures were deployed in the United Kingdom during the first lockdown, when scientists in the UK working as advisors for the government admitted using what they now admit to be “unethical” and “totalitarian” methods of instilling fear in the population in order to control behavior during the pandemic.
One scientist with the SPI-B admitted that, “In March [2020] the Government was very worried about compliance and they thought people wouldn’t want to be locked down. There were discussions about fear being needed to encourage compliance, and decisions were made about how to ramp up the fear.”
Of course, contrary to the claims in the article, the primary goal of psychological operations, whether directed against an enemy or a domestic population, is to instill fear and change behavior – telling the truth is hardly a priority.
Far from dispelling “false information,” psychological operations routinely rely on using false information to influence and manipulate “the enemy.”
“Psychological operations have long been a part of military operations, and are typically defined as the use of propaganda and other methods to influence the attitudes and behavior of foreign adversaries,” writes Allum Bokhari.
“What the FT is advocating — and what many have long suspected — is the use of these techniques by western military, security, and intelligence forces against their own citizens.”
“Hostile states including Russia, China and Iran have increased their use of disinformation and online propaganda to amplify anti-vax sentiment and foment political tensions in Europe and the US,” Braw claims.
However, the report contains no evidence whatsoever that Russia and China are responsible for any coordinated attempt to sow doubts about COVID-19 vaccines or lockdown measures.
Indeed, the mere fact that the newspaper complains about “disinformation” in the context of COVID-19 conspiracy theories is pretty rich given that the constantly invoked ‘Russian collusion’ charge is itself a baseless conspiracy theory.
In reality, concerns about vaccine side-effects, giving vaccines to children and mandating vaccines and COVID passports as part of the growing bio-security police state are perfectly valid concerns shared by millions of people across the west.
The FT is a staunchly globalist newspaper of record for the international elite and is routinely represented at the annual Bilderberg conference.
It can hardly be trusted to represent the interests of the common man.
Biden admin flip-flops on tracking Covid jab refusers
RT | January 13, 2022
A US government agency in Washington, DC has said it will make a list of those who refuse to get vaccinated against Covid-19 for religious reasons. The move goes against earlier promises by the Biden administration.
The Pretrial Services Agency (PSA) for the District of Columbia announced its intention to create what it called the “Employee Religious Exception Request Information System” in a notice on Tuesday.
According to the agency, which assists officers in DC with formulating release recommendations and supervising defendants awaiting trial, the new system will store the names and “personal religious information” of employees who file “religious accommodation requests for religious exception from the federally mandated vaccination requirement.”
The PSA didn’t specify the reasons for compiling such a list, or how the personal data on it would be used.
It only said vaguely that the system would “assist the Agency in the collecting, storing, dissemination, and disposal of employee religious exemption request information collected and maintained by the Agency.”
The PSA is a small local agency, but conservative outlet the Daly Signal suggested that “likely, the Biden administration is using it to stealth test a policy it intends to roll out across the whole government.”
There is no proof to support this assumption. However, the White House had previously promised that would not store data on the vaccination status of Americans at a federal level.
In August, President Joe Biden’s Covid-19 Response Coordinator Jeff Zients assured during a briefing that “there will be no federal vaccination database. As with all other vaccines, the information gets held at the state and local level.” Zients was replying to a question about ways to deal with the rise in counterfeited jab cards, after more businesses and education institutions across the US began demanding proof of vaccination.
On Monday, the Biden administration’s vaccine or test mandate for private employers entered into force despite still being contested in the US Supreme Court.
The White House, which had previously told millions of federal employees and contractors to be fully vaccinated, now demands that those working for companies with more than 100 employees receive two shots of a coronavirus vaccine or get tested at least once a week.
More than 60% of the population has been fully vaccinated against Covid-19 in the US, which has become the world’s worst-hit country, with more than 63 million infections and over 843,000 deaths related to the virus.
“We Failed”: Danish newspaper apologizes for publishing official COVID narratives without questioning them
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | January 12, 2022
In August, Germany’s top newspaper, Bild, apologized for the outlet’s fear-driven Covid coverage – with special message to children, who were told “that they were going to murder their grandma.”
Now, a newspaper in Denmark has publicly apologized for reporting government narratives surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic without questioning them.
“We failed,” reads the article’s headline from tabloid Ekstra Bladet, which goes on to admit that “For ALMOST two years, we – the press and the population – have been almost hypnotically preoccupied with the authorities’ daily coronavirus figures.” (translated).
Read the rest below:
WE HAVE STARED at the oscillations of the number pendulum when it came to infected, hospitalized and died with corona. And we have been given the significance of the pendulum’s smallest movements laid out by experts, politicians and authorities, who have constantly warned us about the dormant corona monster under our beds. A monster just waiting for us to fall asleep so it can strike in the gloom and darkness of the night.
THE CONSTANT mental alertness has worn tremendously on all of us. That is why we – the press – must also take stock of our own efforts. And we have failed.
WE HAVE NOT been vigilant enough at the garden gate when the authorities were required to answer what it actually meant that people are hospitalized with corona and not because of corona. Because it makes a difference. A big difference. Exactly, the official hospitalization numbers have been shown to be 27 percent higher than the actual figure for how many there are in the hospital, simply because they have corona. We only know that now.
OF COURSE, it is first and foremost the authorities who are responsible for informing the population correctly, accurately and honestly. The figures for how many are sick and died of corona should, for obvious reasons, have been published long ago, so we got the clearest picture of the monster under the bed.
IN ALL, the messages of the authorities and politicians to the people in this historic crisis leave much to be desired. And therefore they lie as they have ridden when parts of the population lose confidence in them.
ANOTHER example: The vaccines are consistently referred to as our ‘superweapon’. And our hospitals are called ‘superhospitals’. Nevertheless, these super-hospitals are apparently maximally pressured, even though almost the entire population is armed with a super-weapon. Even children have been vaccinated on a huge scale, which has not been done in our neighboring countries.
IN OTHER WORDS, there is something here that does not deserve the term ‘super’. Whether it’s the vaccines, the hospitals, or a mixture of it all, is every man’s bid. But at least the authorities’ communication to the population in no way deserves the term ‘super’. On the contrary.
* * *
Will other news outlets have the journalistic integrity to follow suit? Perhaps CNN’s ratings wouldn’t be down 90% from last year in the key 25-to-54 demographic if they simply owned up to their complicity in breathlessly spewing government propaganda.
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Book Review
Alarmist climate science as a textbook example of groupthink
By Paul MacRae | May 1, 2012
… Groupthink was extensively studied by Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis and described in his 1982 book Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes.
Janis was curious about how teams of highly intelligent and motivated people—the “best and the brightest” as David Halberstam called them in his 1972 book of the same name—could have come up with political policy disasters like the Vietnam War, Watergate, Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs. Similarly, in 2008 and 2009, we saw the best and brightest in the world’s financial sphere crash thanks to some incredibly stupid decisions, such as allowing sub-prime mortgages to people on the verge of bankruptcy.
In other words, Janis studied why and how groups of highly intelligent professional bureaucrats and, yes, even scientists, screw up, sometimes disastrously and almost always unnecessarily. The reason, Janis believed, was “groupthink.” He quotes Nietzsche’s observation that “madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups,” and notes that groupthink occurs when “subtle constraints … prevent a [group] member from fully exercising his critical powers and from openly expressing doubts when most others in the group appear to have reached a consensus.”[2]
Janis found that even if the group leader expresses an openness to new ideas, group members value consensus more than critical thinking; groups are thus led astray by excessive “concurrence-seeking behavior.”[3] Therefore, Janis wrote, groupthink is “a model of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”[4]
The groupthink syndrome
The result is what Janis calls “the groupthink syndrome.” This consists of three main categories of symptoms:
1. Overestimate of the group’s power and morality, including “an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their actions.” [emphasis added]
2. Closed-mindedness, including a refusal to consider alternative explanations and stereotyped negative views of those who aren’t part of the group’s consensus. The group takes on a “win-lose fighting stance” toward alternative views.[5]
3. Pressure toward uniformity, including “a shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view”; “direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes”; and “the emergence of self-appointed mind-guards … who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.”[6]
It’s obvious that alarmist climate science—as explicitly and extensively revealed in the Climatic Research Unit’s “Climategate” emails—shares all of these defects of groupthink, including a huge emphasis on maintaining consensus, a sense that because they are saving the world, alarmist climate scientists are beyond the normal moral constraints of scientific honesty (“overestimation of the group’s power and morality”), and vilification of those (“deniers”) who don’t share the consensus. … Read full article
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