Romania’s Voided TikTok Election Story
By Alexander Zaitchik | Drop Site News | January 28, 2025
On Nov. 24, at the southeastern frontier of the European Union and NATO, Romanian voters delivered an unexpected victory to a right-wing populist named Călin Georgescu in the opening round of the country’s presidential election. Always considered a longshot, Georgescu had been polling in the single digits just weeks before surging to claim first place with 23 percent of the vote. The result shocked Romania’s two dominant parties, who found themselves on the sidelines as Georgescu campaigned for the runoff against another anti-establishment candidate who came in second, Elena Lasconi of the reformist Save Romania party.
Then, on Dec. 4, four days before the deciding round was to take place, Romania’s Supreme Defense Council released a small clutch of heavily redacted documents from the country’s foreign intelligence service. The documents outlined allegations of a Kremlin-backed social media campaign that supported Georgescu in violation of national election laws. “Data were obtained,” the accompanying government statement read, “revealing an aggressive promotion campaign that exploited the algorithms of some social media platforms to increase the popularity of Călin Georgescu at an accelerated pace.”
Within hours, the U.S. State Department expressed its “concern” over the allegations. Two days later, on Dec. 6, Romania’s Constitutional Court unanimously ruled the Nov. 24 vote invalid. “The entire electoral process for electing the President of Romania is annulled,” the court announced, citing government claims of irregularities on social media. Six weeks passed before a redo date of May 4 was announced on Jan. 16.
Thus did Romania become the first member state in the history of the European Union to cancel an election. The government had not called into question the legitimacy of the votes or vote-counting process. At issue is social media activity, primarily on TikTok, that boosted Georgescu’s profile and amplified his Euro-skeptical, far-right campaign in the final days before the tally. The cancellation of an election on these grounds marks a milestone in the development of Internet-age information war — one that underscores the fragility of the West’s collective commitment to democracy.
For all its seriousness, Romania’s cancelled vote has also proven to be a forensic farce, with the revelation that one of the country’s largest parties bankrolled the very TikTok campaign that the government had fingered as a Kremlin plot. At the same time, a broader narrative of Russian attacks on Romanian democracy was being advanced by a western-funded NGO working with a Ukrainian tech firm with ties to NATO and the European Commission.
“The Constitutional Court’s decision has divided us into two camps,” Lasconi wrote on Facebook. “Some who sighed in relief and say it was the only solution to protect democracy, and us, the others, who have warned that we are dealing with a brutal act, contrary to democracy, which could have major long-term effects.”
The declassified documents released on Dec. 4 described the election as tainted due to bad actors engaged in “a massive promotional activity” in violation of TikTok policy and Romanian law. In the government telling, these actors ranged from bot armies to pro-Georgescu Romanian political parties like Party of Young People to online communities known as vectors for amplifying Russian state media.
While Russia has a well-known interest in influencing the politics of the region — and has invested funds in what the Romanian government calls a “complex modus operandi” — the documents did not contain evidence of this machine in action. Rather, they described a de facto media campaign for Georgescu catching fire on social networks, in particular the comments sections of Romanian TikTok personalities, more than 100 of whom had been party, willingly or unwillingly, to the “artificial amplification” of pro-Georgescu commenters. Adding to the suspiciousness of the comments, noted the government, was the fact that debates over the most effective phrasing and emoji choices were hammered out in Telegram channels known to support “pro-Russian, far-right, anti-system, ‘pacifist’ and nationalist candidates.”
Central to the government’s case were a series of hashtags that began springing up across Romanian TikTok in the weeks before the Nov. 24 vote. These hashtags — including #echilibrusiverticalitate (“steadiness and uprightness”), #unliderpotrivitpentrumine (“the right leader for me”) and #prezidentiale2024” (“presidential elections 2024”) — accompanied videos in which popular TikTok accounts made general comments about the election, such as discussing the need for a strong candidate or asking leading questions about the type of leader who should replace the outgoing Klaus Iohannis. None of the posts — which typically racked up between 100,000 and half-million views — mentioned any specific candidate. But in the comments sections, Georgescu’s name appeared more than any other candidate.
As the coordinated hashtags became effective vehicles for raising the profile of a candidate who had spent almost nothing on paid media, Georgescu’s outsider campaign rose in the polls. In a matter of weeks, he went from a few percentage points to more than 10 percent and climbing in the days before the election. By the week of the vote, the hashtags became so entwined with Georgescu’s campaign that it could no longer be ignored. On Nov. 22, a Romanian Twitch streamer named Silviu Faiăr flagged the hashtag campaign’s rapid metamorphosis and noted that many of the influencers could be connected, not to Russia, but to a local pay-to-play influencer agency called FameUp. Two days later, when the election results shocked the nation, the social media campaign took on new relevance.
Among the groups that sought to keep Russia at the center of the election conversation was an NGO called Context, largely funded by the United States through its National Endowment for Democracy. On Nov. 29, the outfit published a report that included a summary of an analysis it conducted using software from a Ukrainian tech firm whose clients include NATO and the European Commission. In other words, five days after the election, a U.S.-funded watchdog was relying on a NATO-funded analysis to purport to expose foreign interference, shortly before the government released its own report.
When the government declassified its “top secret” documents on Dec. 4, they told a story that, in its basics, mirrored the gaming-chair analysis by Faiăr, the Twitch streamer. Little of the information was new except for some of the details, such as the fee paid to influencers by FameUp (roughly $80 per 20,000 followers on TikTok, Facebook and Instagram). But where Faiăr made no guess as to the forces behind the campaign, the government documents placed the blame on Russia, without supplying actual evidence, that it had skirted TikTok regulations and Romanian law by paying off influencers to produce election content that could be easily branded ex post facto by Georgescu supporters in the comments. The Kremlin plan was so sneaky that the paid influencers were “unaware that they were promoting a specific candidate through the use of [the hashtags],” according to the government.
Two days later, on Dec. 6, the Constitutional Court’s annulment of the election was met with acclaim and approval in the West. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported Romania had become the latest victim of an “aggressive hybrid war” waged by the Kremlin. Four U.S. senators issued a statement condemning “Vladimir Putin’s manipulation of Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-controlled TikTok to undermine Romania’s democratic process.” The European Commission took the historic event in stride, saying only that Brussels was “leaving it to Romanians.” Washington’s initial “concern” over suspicions of Russian meddling, expressed a few days earlier, relaxed into a state of observation. “We note the Romanian Constitutional Court’s decision today,” read a brief from the State Department that expressed “confidence in Romania’s democratic institutions and processes, including investigations into foreign malign influence.”
In Romania, the cancelled vote was more controversial. And the backstory, it turned out, was far from settled.
An official inquiry into the TikTok money trail involved not just the intelligence services—it was government-wide. Among those tasked with getting to the bottom of Russia’s interference was Romania’s revenue service. In the days following the court’s decision, one of the tax investigators assigned to the case contacted the Romanian investigative news outlet Snoop with information that had not been included in the Dec. 4 cache of declassified documents.
On Dec. 12, Snoop published a report revealing that the TikTok influencer campaign had been paid for not by the Kremlin, but by Romania’s National Liberal Party (PNL), which has governed the country for much of the past three decades; its most prominent member, Nicolae Ciucă, is president of the senate and stood as a (losing) candidate in the Nov. 24 election. The hashtag and influencer campaign that had launched Georgescu’s profile in the final weeks and days of the campaign — and which sat at the center of the government’s case, if it can be called that — was orchestrated by Kensington, the Bucharest communications firm, under a contract from the PNL. The politically connected Bucharest firm had distributed 500,000 lei (roughly $100,000) to TikTok influencers through its pay-to-play influencer subcontractor, FameUp, to generate energy around the election.
Two questions remained: Why would the PNL want to generate buzz around the election if it couldn’t promote its candidate by name? And why would it continue the campaign even as it became a Georgescu rocket-booster, unless that had been the plan all along?
When confronted with the whistleblower’s claims, PNL officials admitted to hiring the firm to run an election awareness campaign, but maintained ignorance over its “cooptation” by thousands of organized Georgescu supporters in the videos’ comments sections. As their candidate faded in the polls, party officials claimed, they had lost interest in the campaign and had no idea it had been “hijacked” until after the election, when it asked TikTok to take down the posts that had powered Georgescu from the back of the field to first place in a matter of weeks.
Somehow, Romania’s foreign intelligence service missed the neon breadcrumbs connecting a clearly coordinated TikTok campaign to one of the country’s most powerful political parties, despite its knowledge of the firms involved. The documents released on Dec. 4 contained no mention of the PNL; the word “Kensington” had been redacted.
“Everybody knows Kensington is a PNL communications firm, and the director of FameUp [which ran the influencers] was seen making repeated visits to PNL headquarters during the election,” Razvan Lutac, one of the reporters on the Snoop story, told Drop Site News. “It’s hard to understand how the Supreme Defense Council failed to see the links between the ‘hijacked’ campaign and the PNL. It’s also hard to understand how the PNL was ignorant about their influencer campaign being used as a Georgescu vehicle.”
Few in Romania buy the idea that the PNL was ignorant. Most veteran observers agree that helping get Georgescu into the second round was always the plan. That includes the whistleblowing tax official, who says flatly that “public money provided by taxpayers for the PNL was used to promote another candidate.”
“The TikTok campaign paid for by the National Liberal Party fits a pattern of unethical strategies by the major parties, including the use of fake accounts, bots and trolls, and the creation of fake media sites to promote their candidates and attack their opponents,” says Liana Ganea, an analyst with the media NGO ActiveWatch and co-author of a recent report on political propaganda in Romania. “The election disaster only demonstrates the profound institutional, political and social bankruptcy of the Romanian state. The public has still not received conclusive evidence of possible foreign interference.”
The PNL is not the only mainstream party suspected of advancing Georgescu’s candidacy as part of an electoral strategy, reminiscent of the Clinton campaign’s support of Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican primaries. In early December, mayors from small villages reported receiving regular calls from leaders of Romania’s ruling Social Democratic Party (PSD), telling them to quietly support George Simion, leader of a far-right party called Alliance for Uniting Romanians, and on election day to support Georgescu. The tactic appears to be part of an established playbook; in 2000, the PSD was caught helping the campaign of far-right candidate Vadim Tudor advance to the second round of the 2000 presidential election.
“Giving votes to the candidate who is easiest to beat [has remained] in the imagination,” said the political scientist Cristian Preda in a Jan. 19 interview with a Romanian news outlet. In the recent election, “the PNL wanted a controlled sharing of power. Instead, it ended up stimulating a nationalist wave, a beast that you cannot control. Beyond the lack of honesty, we are slipping into absurdity. You enter politics, you fight for your own camp, not for that of others.”
Snoop’s bombshell fueled calls in Romania for the government to provide more information than was supplied in the original documents. In response, Iohannis issued a brief statement saying that no further information would be released. The stonewalling further soured a deeply jaded electorate on the country’s long-ruling establishment and ballasted the credibility of independent political voices willing to express public anger.
“The annulment of the elections is a very significant matter, and we must be convinced and clear that it was the right decision,” Bucharest Mayor Nicușor Dan said on Jan. 5. “For now, we do not have that clarity.”
For the better part of a decade, allegations of Russian influence in elections have been at the center of a sophisticated two-way information war that has grown apace with NATO-Russia tensions and geopolitical jockeying in the region. The competition has been especially fierce along the southeastern frontier of the western military alliance, with Romania emerging as perhaps the most important chess piece. The country hosts a major node in the alliance’s Aegis missile defense system, and an air base near Constanta on the Black Sea is currently being expanded; when completed, it will displace the U.S. Air Force-NATO Ramstein base as the largest U.S. military outpost in Europe.
None of this is incidental to the fact that Romania was the first EU nation to take the dramatic step of cancelling an election on the basis of “Russian meddling.” When releasing the documents that led to the cancellation, the government foregrounded Russia’s motive in boosting Georgescu’s campaign. “In Russia’s vision,” it stated, “Romania ‘challenges and threatens’ Russia’s security by hosting NATO and U.S. military potential.” Although Georgescu does not oppose Romania’s membership in NATO, he is against the country hosting its bases.
Of course, the U.S. has its own interests in the region and has built up its own influence networks, which increasingly operate under the disinterested guise of countering “Russian disinformation.” The funding of these networks has been growing steadily since 2017, when the U.S. Congress created a $1.5 billion Countering Russian Influence Fund to support programs and organizations that “strengthen democratic institutions and processes, and counter Russian influence and aggression.” The funds were designed to target “independent media, investigative journalism and civil society watchdog groups working to … encourage cooperation with social media entities to strengthen the integrity of information on the Internet.” The dollar-spigot was loosened following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, allowing more media-related grants to flow through the USAID’s Strengthening the Foundations of Freedom Development Framework (formerly known as the Countering Malign Kremlin Influence Development Framework.)
Romania is home to numerous western-funded media NGOs that have benefited from these funds. Some of them, such as Context, were arguably weaponized when Georgescu threatened to challenge the NATO-Russia balance. For the past several years, Context has participated in a region-wide NGO project, “Firehose of Falsehood,” to investigate the “pro-Kremlin, conspiracy and alt-right disinformation ecosystem in Central and Eastern Europe.” The participating groups often have similar funding streams and various western institutional connections. In the case of Context, its budget is overwhelmingly covered by funding from the State Department-funded National Endowment for Democracy, and its executive director, Mihaela Armaselu, spent 20 years working in the press office of the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest. (Context is also a member of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a global reporting network also heavily funded by the U.S. government.)
On Nov. 29, five days after the first-round vote, Context anticipated the imminent government report by releasing its own social media analysis, headlined, “EXCLUSIVE: Operation Georgescu on X, Telegram and Facebook.” It was topped by a credit to a Ukrainian tech firm, Osavul, which identifies Kremlin social media narratives for a client list that includes the British, Canadian, Ukrainian and Estonian governments, plus the European Commission and NATO. According to the report, Osavul’s “AI-powered software” had detected “possible coordination between … a series of Russia-linked accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers and with obvious pro-Russian, anti-Western and conspiratorial sympathies that constantly promote Călin Georgescu.” At the center of the NGO’s conspiracy board were well-known Russian state media outlets, including pravda-en.com and pravda-es.com.
The report goes on to express concern that Romanian citizens, especially those in the large EU diaspora, had been influenced by Russian-linked channels promoting themes that “resonate strongly with a significant part of the public.” While ostensibly a report on the nefarious impact of a Kremlin puppet-master, the real blame seems to land on the common Romanian voter whose support for Georgescu is evidence of “how weak the resilience of Romania or, more precisely, of its citizens, is.”
Nobody denies that Georgescu rode the wave of a strong anti-establishment mood. This is partly the result of endemic corruption within the major parties, but also reflects skepticism over the Ukraine war and NATO’s growing role in the country, reflected in the evasive appeal of his campaign slogan, “There is no East, there is no West, there is only Romania.” Georgescu’s positions are streaked with QAnon-style conspiracy theories and odious historical echoes with the country’s fascist past — including praise for the World War Two-era Iron Guard — but the main themes of his independent campaign have broad appeal at home, where he benefited from the work of military groups, church networks and an active diaspora that gave him 80% support. At no point since the election was cancelled has anyone called into question the legitimacy of Georgescu’s 2,120,401 votes. Lasconi, the outsider who took second-place, also won without suspicions of foreign help.
“Wherever you look — health care, education, transportation, environment, justice — we see big problems in every sector,” said Nicoleta Fotiade, president of the Bucharest-based Mediawise Society. “If we’re only blaming TikTok and the Russians for the election results, it means we haven’t understood anything.”
In May, the government and media will probably have a second opportunity to show how well it understands the dynamics driving Georgescu’s success. On Jan. 22, the other far-right party in the race threw its support behind Georgescu, whom polls now show in first place with 38 percent support — 15 percentage points more than his voided victory. Lasconi, the reformist candidate who took second place in the first November ballot and might have triumphed in the scratched second round, is now polling at just 6%.
The West’s public support for Romania’s government and its rationale for canceling the vote, meanwhile, remains unwavering. It was re-stated at the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest during a mid-January press conference held by senior State Department official James O’Brien.
“We see foreign interference in connection with these elections,” he said. “If I were Romanian, I would ask who is paying for what, and who will benefit from a certain outcome. And that will go a long way in determining who can be trusted and who cannot.”
Fair and important questions. But only if they are asked with the understanding that they cut both ways, east and west, and that the answers are rarely as clean as we may like them to be.
Alexander Zaitchik is a freelance journalist and the author, most recently, of Owning the Sun, a history of monopoly medicine.
Did a Trump executive order just cripple the global US regime change network?
By Kit Klarenberg · The Grayzone · January 31, 2025
Among the flurry of executive orders issued by President Donald Trump in the first days of his administration, perhaps the most consequential to date is one titled, “reevaluating and realigning US foreign aid.”
Under this order, a 90-day pause was instantly enforced on all US foreign development assistance across the globe – excepting, of course, the largest recipients of US aid in Israel and Egypt. For now, the order forbids the disbursement of federal funding for any “non-governmental organizations, international organizations, and contractors” charged with delivering US “aid” programs overseas.
Within days, hundreds of “internal contractors” at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) were placed on unpaid leave or outright fired, as a direct result of the Executive Order. Washington Post contributor John Hudson has reported organization officials brand Trump’s directives on “foreign development assistance” a “shock and awe approach,” which has left them reeling, uncertain of their futures. One nameless USAID apparatchik told him, “they even removed all the pictures in our offices of aid programs,” as accompanying photographs attested.
While the Trump administration’s purge sent shockwaves through Washington’s international development corps and the Beltway Bandits which feed at its trough, the sudden severing of USAID money has sparked panic overseas. From Latin America to Eastern Europe, the US has pumped billions into NGO’s and media outlets to fuel color revolutions and assorted regime change operations, all in the name of “democracy promotion.”
Now, as the global apparatus of soft American power trumpeted by President George H.W. Bush as “a thousand points of light” goes dark, supposedly independent media outfits from Ukraine to Nicaragua are fretting about their future and panhandling for donations on their websites.
US-backed media and opposition face extinction in Ukraine
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US has pumped billions into Ukraine to create and propel a fervently anti-Russian opposition. As former State Department Assistant Secretary for Eastern European Affairs Victoria Nuland remarked to an oil industry-sponsored meeting in Kiev in 2009, “we’ve invested $5 billion to assist Ukraine” to “build democratic skills and institutions” allowing it to “achieve European independence.”
The US flooded Ukrainian civil society with grants on the eve of the 2014 Maidan coup, birthing a network of pro-Western media outlets almost overnight. Among them was Hromadske, a liberal broadcasting entity which pushed for the overthrow of President Victor Yanukovych and rallied for the subsequent war with pro-Russian separatists in the country’s east – including through the glorification of Nazis who fought the Soviet Red Army during World War II.
With Trump’s executive order cutting off USAID programs, Hromadske has suddenly been severed from its financial tube. So too have the top Ukrainian media outlets which emerged in the wake of the Maidan coup, including Ukrinform, Internews, and a signatory of the Poynter-run International Fact Checking Network called VoxUkraine.
The Ministry of Culture and Strategic Communications and the Service of the Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration, both created to propagandize for war against Russia, are also among USAID funding recipients now starving for cash.
Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky took to X to whine that “critically important programs” wholly dependent on “US support” were now “suspended” as a result of Trump’s executive order. He promised that “certain key initiatives” would “be financed through our internal resources,” while begging for donations from Kiev’s “European partners” to be “intensified.”
Given Ukraine’s near-total economic destruction since its proxy war against Russia erupted in February 2022, and complete reliance on USAID to pay the salaries of state employees, it is uncertain how the country’s “internal resources” can possibly be used to even vaguely offset its sudden deficit. Already, major Ukrainian media outlets are pleading for financial support from their readers just to keep their lights on.
According to Kiev’s foreign-funded Institute of Mass Information, around 90% of the country’s media is “dependent on American grants.”
Contra 2.0 gravy train paused in Nicaragua
Similar bleating has emanated from US-financed organizations in Nicaragua, where since the re-election of popular leftist Sandinista Front in 2006, Washington has pumped tens of millions of dollars into right-wing media outlets and opposition groups.
In tandem, these foreign-funded fifth columnists routinely disseminate disinformation, while inciting violence against the government and its supporters, and influencing Western media reporting on the country.
As The Grayzone reported, a USAID-funded Nicaraguan opposition outlet called 100% Noticias led a campaign of violent incitement throughout 2018, when a failed US-backed coup attempt left hundreds dead in the country. While the outlet repeatedly featured calls for the murder of President Daniel Ortega, its director, Miguel Mora, told The Grayone’s Max Blumenthal he wished for a US military intervention of the country to topple the elected government. When the Nicaraguan government finally shuttered the station and prosecuted Mora, Washington responded with accusations of repression and threats of heavy sanctions.
On January 21, an anti-Sandinista “news” operations called Nicaragua Investiga warned that Trump’s order “threatens to deal a severe blow” to the country and its anti-Ortega crusade, “which depends heavily on the financial and technical support provided by agencies” such as USAID. This backing, the outlet declared, was a “fundamental pillar” in the Nicaraguan right-wing’s efforts to undermine and depose the anti-imperialist President.
“Civil society organisations that rely on this assistance would be forced to reduce or cease their activities,” Nicaragua Investiga warned. The outlet further lamented that “uncertainty reigns over how and when assistance will be restored, and whether organizations critical of Daniel Ortega’s regime that still survive outside the country will be able to maintain their operations.”
Not coincidentally, Nicaragua Investiga was among the local outlets which largely depended on US government grants for their existence.
Has the US balked at balkanizing the Balkans?
Across the West Balkans, USAID, self-avowed CIA front the National Endowment for Democracy, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and the panoply of NGOs and media outlets have infiltrated every conceivable sphere of public life. Following the 1992 – 1995 civil war, Bosnia and Herzegovina was methodically transformed into a de facto EU and US colony, with all basic functions of the state hijacked by foreign interests.
Some concern about the imperial project found its way into mainstream media at the time. The New York Times warned in 1998 that US domination of Bosnia “raised troubling questions about how the state will work without continued infusions of outside aid and direct international supervision.” A senior foreign government advisor angsted over Washington’s lack of exit strategy in the country, or any plan to end “Bosnia’s culture of dependency.” Today, at least 25,600 Western-funded NGOs are active in Sarajevo.
The pause in “foreign development assistance” has placed countless jobs and beneficiary organizations at risk of permanent erasure across the Balkans. On January 30, Balkan Insight – an outlet exposed by The Grayzone as a tentacle of British intelligence – published an illuminating investigation into how the aid pause “has immediately affected a range of organisations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia.”
From 2020 until the end of 2024, Washington has funnelled a staggering $1.7 billion into the West Balkans, “supporting civil society organisations and state institutions and projects ranging from human rights and media to energy efficiency,” with next to no demonstrable social benefit. Now, “all projects have been halted… until the evaluation period is over.” Expenses up until January 27 will be covered, “while everything after that has to be stopped.” Already, layoffs and huge pay cuts have been enacted at recipient entities.
Nameless NGO workers consulted by Balkan Insight fretted that the US financing freeze would not be temporary. One source speculated the Executive Order could be “just a soft way of cutting these funds permanently.” The outlet noted Washington “has supported thousands of activities” in the region, and “the precise number of affected projects” remains “unknown”. When reporters contacted local USAID offices seeking clarity on the cuts, they were redirected in every instance to the agency’s Washington headquarters.
USAID base camp “responded by sending a link to its press release” on the funding pause. “President Trump stated clearly that the US is no longer going to blindly dole out money with no return for the American people,” it bluntly declared. “Reviewing and realigning foreign assistance on behalf of hardworking taxpayers is not just the right thing to do, it is a moral imperative.” Evidently, the new administration is not remotely concerned that entire sectors of local economies in the Balkans have been effectively shuttered.
Even in Albania – a doggedly pro-US country with an influential DC lobby – 30 Washington-subsidized projects have been suspended, including bankrolling of “courts, prosecutor’s offices and the ministries of Defence, Education and Sports, and Finance.” In Macedonia – where “most” US funding is distributed via USAID and NED – $72 million allocated to 22 projects is “now on hold.” Six wider regional USAID-backed initiatives in the Balkans, which also covers Macedonia, “worth some $140 million”, are likewise mothballed. In local terms, these sums are monumental.
Georgia not on the Trump admin’s mind
The Republic of Georgia has been the site of a series of color revolution efforts since the start of 2023, all in response to the government’s successful push to compel the more than 25,000 foreign-financed organizations in the country to disclose their funding sources. Western-backed NGOs and activist groups have been at the forefront of all these attempted putsches. Unsurprisingly, this shadow army of previously US-funded foot soldiers are furious about the Trump administration’s “foreign development assistance” cutoff.
By contrast, the Georgian government appears delighted. Parliamentary leader Mamuka Mdinaradze has even suggested the highly controversial law on foreign funding transparency “might not be needed at all anymore” after Trump’s executive order. Indeed, with untold foreign-sponsored chaos agents suddenly out of money, the color revolution coast is now clear in Tbilisi.
On January 30, local English language publication Georgia Today published a leader mourning that, “as the future of their funding hangs in the balance, aid organizations are already laying off or furloughing staff,” and “some programs” in Tbilisi “may struggle to restart after this temporary shutdown, with many potentially disappearing permanently.” It went on to note USAID financing “has been a cornerstone of the country’s development since 1992, with over $1.9 billion in assistance provided to date.”
Prior to the funding pause, USAID alone was “investing in 39 programs across the country, with a total value of $373 million and an annual budget exceeding $70 million.” These efforts overwhelmingly focused “on promoting economic reforms” and “fostering private sector investment,” which is to say facilitating foreign financial rape and pillage of Georgia.
While domestic critics of Trump’s Executive Order have lambasted Washington’s resultant loss of expansive “soft power” influence in the Global South, such retreat can only be to the enormous benefit of target countries. As a LeftEast essay noted, foreign-funded NGOs have for decades “eroded Georgian citizens’ agency and the country’s sovereignty and democracy.” Its authors explained, “Activists in Georgia know all too well what is expected of them and which behaviors are punished and rewarded: being critical of the government on Facebook will net you more grants than being out in the community helping people… Donors even monitor activists’ social media profiles, and there can be consequences for posting the wrong things.”
However, the relief could be premature for populations that have suffered decades of US “foreign development assistance,” and the attendant coups and unrest it has paid for. The “pause” on US aid may indeed be a temporary measure, or, spending on soft power could be redirected to harder options with even more grave repercussions across the world.
Kiev and Western backers trying to undermine Moscow’s ties with neighbors – FSB
Nikolay Kochmarik posing with a Ukrainian armored vehicle. FSB
RT | February 1, 2025
Ukrainian intelligence services and their Western handlers are creating fake online content in an attempt to spoil Russia’s relations with neighboring countries, the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) has alleged.
The agency announced in a statement on Saturday that it had identified a Ukrainian national who had offended the people of Uzbekistan while posing as a Russian blogger. The controversial clip had been uploaded to a YouTube channel “controlled by the Lithuanian special services,” it added.
A video featuring a man who claims to be a Russian citizen made headlines last month for comparing Uzbeks to dogs, sparking outrage among commentators in both Central Asia and Russia.
At the time, Rasul Kusherbaev, an advisor to the Uzbek ecology minister, urged the country’s foreign ministry to “take action” in response to the insults. “Our cooperation with Russia is based on the principles of equality and mutual respect. Discrimination is unacceptable in interstate relations,” Kusherbaev told the media outlet Daryo.
According to the FSB, the offensive blogger is a citizen and current resident of Ukraine named Nikolay Kochmarik, who has been actively supporting Kiev’s military during the conflict with Moscow.
“This incident is evidence of deliberate actions by the Ukrainian and Lithuanian special services as well as by their foreign handlers to create provocative content aimed at undermining relations between Russia and its partners in the CIS,” the FSB stressed. With such clips, Kiev and its Western backers are “attempting to form anti-Russian sentiment abroad,” it added.
The CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) is an intergovernmental organization comprised of many former Soviet Republics, including Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.
Why is the top US spy alliance afraid of Trump?
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 01.02.2025
America’s Five Eyes partners – Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand – fear that US President Donald Trump’s deep state crackdown and spy apparatus overhaul could destabilize their intelligence network, reports The Wall Street Journal.
What’s driving their concerns?
Free Riders
- Trump may see Five Eyes as a bloated racket exploiting US resources, per the WSJ. The US spends nearly $100 billion on intelligence – 10 times more than the other four combined.
Russia Collusion Hoax
- Five Eyes were entangled in the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, largely pushed by US intelligence.
- The FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane probe, later debunked, was triggered by an Australian tip in 2016.
- Britain’s GCHQ may have wiretapped Trump during his 2016 campaign, as the White House suggested in 2017.
- Trump hasn’t directly targeted Five Eyes lately, but their unease suggests they have plenty to hide.
What Triggered the Panic?
- The “world’s most powerful spy alliance” sounded the alarm as Trump’s intelligence picks, Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard, near confirmation in Congress.
- Gabbard, nominated for director of National Intelligence, vowed to fight weaponized intelligence, citing Iraq War lies and the Russia collusion hoax.
- Patel, set to lead the FBI, pledged to curb overseas operations and increase transparency.
The 99th Congress That Called Vaccines “Unavoidably Unsafe”
By Ginger Taylor | Brownstone Institute | January 28, 2025
Meet the original “Conspiracy Theorists,” Ronald Reagan and the members of the 99th Congress, who, in 1986, passed into law the “medical misinformation” that vaccines were “unavoidably unsafe” and potentially caused autism.
Last week Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) sent Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, a scathing letter accusing him of, among other things, “dangerous views on vaccine safety” and “false hysteria that vaccines cause autism.” The letter included 175 questions that she said he should be prepared to answer at his Senate confirmation hearings. But in her letter, she exposes her own ignorance of federal vaccine policy and the laws passed by her own legislative branch.
In 1986 the House of Representatives passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (42 U.S.C. §§ 300aa-1 to 300aa-34) by a voice vote. Senator Warren should know that her current Senate Minority Leader Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was, at the time, a member of the House and should presumably know that the bill that was passed to give vaccine makers liability protection from civil claims when a child was killed or seriously injured by a vaccine, and placed all vaccines administered to children in the legal category of “unavoidably unsafe” medical products, which means a product that cannot be made safe for its intended use.
In 2018, Mary Holland, JD, then the Director of the Graduate Legal studies program at New York University School of Law, and now Chief Executive Officer of Children’s Health Defense, a non-profit organization founded by Kennedy, remarked on the legal standing of the safety of vaccines:
The key language about “unavoidable” side effects comes from the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, 42 USC 300aa-22, re manufacturer responsibility (see bold text below).
That language was based on language from the Second Restatement of Torts (a legal treatise by tort scholars), adopted by most state courts in the mid-1960’s, that considered all vaccines as “unavoidably unsafe” products. The Restatement opined that such products, “properly prepared, and accompanied by proper directions and warnings, is not defective, nor is it unreasonably dangerous.”
Further the 2011 SCOTUS ruling in the Bruesewitz v. Wyeth case interpreted the highlighted text below from the National Vaccine Injury Act to find that it did not permit design defect litigation – that issue had been unclear since 1986, and different state high courts and federal circuits had decided the issue differently. So, [it] is correct that the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) never decided that vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe” directly, but it acknowledged that Congress considers them to be so.
Sec. 300aa-22. Standards of responsibility
(a) General rule
Except as provided in subsections (b), (c), and (e) of this section State law shall apply to a civil action brought for damages for a vaccine-related injury or death.
(b) Unavoidable adverse side effects; warnings
(1) No vaccine manufacturer shall be liable in a civil action for damages arising from a vaccine-related injury or death associated with the administration of a vaccine after October 1, 1988, if the injury or death resulted from side effects that were unavoidable even though the vaccine was properly prepared and was accompanied by proper directions and warnings.
(2) For purposes of paragraph (1), a vaccine shall be presumed to be accompanied by proper directions and warnings if the vaccine manufacturer shows that it complied in all material respects with all requirements under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. See https://www.ageofautism.com/2018/11/the-supreme-court-did-not-deem-vaccines-unavoidably-unsafe-congress-did.html
What few know, even among their own memberships and supporters, is that the following medical authorities consider vaccines unsafe:
The American Academy of Pediatrics (“AAP”)
The American Medical Association (“AMA”)
The American Academy of Family Physicians (“AAFP”)
The American College of Osteopathic Pediatricians (“ACOP”)
The American College of Preventive Medicine (“ACPM”)
The American Public Health Association (“APHA”)
The Association of State and Territorial Healthcare Officials (“ASTHO“)
The Center for Vaccine Awareness and Research at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston
Every Child By Two, Carter/Bumpers Champions for Immunization (“ECBT”)
Immunization Action Coalition (“IAC”)
Infectious Diseases Society of America (“IDSA”)
The March of Dimes Foundation
Meningitis Angels
The National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners (“NAPNAP”)
The National Foundation for Infectious Diseases
The National Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition
The National Meningitis Association, Inc. (“NMA”)
Parents of Kids with Infectious Diseases (“PKIDs”)
The Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society (“PIDS”)
The Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine (“SAHM”)
The Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (“CHOP”)
When the family of Hannah Bruesewitz, a child injured by Wyeth’s Tri-Immunol DTP vaccine, challenged the 1986 Act in the Supreme Court for the right to sue Wyeth for Hannah’s severely disabling vaccine-adverse event, these organizations filed an amicus brief in support of Wyeth, asking the court to uphold the law that protects vaccine makers from liability for injury or death arising from any vaccine licensed by the FDA and recommended for children by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (“ACIP”). They even went as far as to argue against the idea that each vaccine should be individually evaluated for the “unavoidably unsafe” status, stating in their brief
Case-by-case consideration of whether vaccines are unavoidably unsafe, on the other hand, would “undoubtedly increase the costs and risks associated with litigation and would undermine a manufacturer’s efforts to estimate and control costs.”(citing Bruesewitz v. Wyeth Inc., 561 F.3d 233, 249 (3d Cir. 2009).
Brief Amici Curiae Of The American Academy Of Pediatrics and 21 Other Physicians and Public Health Organizations In Support Of Respondent [Wyeth LLC], at 25.
The organizations’ position that vaccines are unavoidably unsafe taken before the legislative and judicial branches of the federal government has caused consternation in parents and vaccine safety and choice advocates for decades, because many of these same organizations argue the exact opposite – that vaccines are safe – when they appear before state legislatures in support of school vaccine mandates and in opposition to vaccine exemptions.
A lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry may argue over breakfast in Washington, DC that vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe” and then drive to Annapolis at lunchtime and testify that Maryland should remove religious exemptions to vaccines required for school entry because “vaccines are safe.”
Attempts to have these organizations explain their conflicting positions met with stonewalling.
In 2015, the Maine Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics argued for the removal of and/or restrictions to the religious and conscientious objections to mandated childhood vaccines. The Executive Director of the Maine AAP, Dee Kerry deHaas, testified in writing that this should be done because “vaccines are safe,” but when testifying in person, said that vaccines are “mostly safe.” In my response to her, as the then Director of the Maine Coalition for Vaccine Choice, I asked several questions arising from her testimony, including the following questions:
How can the AAP argue that vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe” in the Supreme Court in order to convince the federal government to grant you liability protection from vaccine injury, and then argue that, “vaccines are safe,” and “vaccines are mostly safe,” before this committee in order to convince the State of Maine to mandate that families receive counseling/buy vaccines from you?
Are vaccines, “safe,” “mostly safe,” or “unavoidably unsafe?”
How do such widely contradictory statements engender trust in vaccines and in pediatricians?
Her response to my questions:
Ms. Taylor,
On behalf of the Maine AAP, I acknowledge receipt of your email and list of questions. I understand that our organizations have different perspectives in the vaccine debate. Each perspective has been aired in the legislative hearings and sessions with regard to these vaccine bills in the First Regular Session of the 127th Maine Legislature.
I respectfully decline to respond to your list of proposed questions or to continue the debate with you through electronic correspondence or social media.
Dee deHaas
Executive Director
American Academy of Pediatrics, Maine Chapter
Those advocating under this nonsensical construct quip that vaccines are unsafe, but only in DC.
Parent of a vaccine-injured son, Kim Spencer of The Thinking Moms’ Revolution, noted of the vaccine industry, “their claim that vaccines are ‘unavoidably unsafe’ won them liability protection, their claim that ‘vaccines are safe’ won them school and work mandates, but their claim that both are true has won them the distrust and contempt of parents.”
Senator Warren also accuses Mr. Kennedy of having, “spread false hysteria that vaccines cause autism.” But Kennedy has only done what Warren’s Congressional colleagues did 20 years before he began in vaccine safety advocacy; promote research into the vaccine-autism link and any link between vaccines and other childhood disorders.
Congress, while giving liability protection to vaccine makers with the 1986 Act, also ordered HHS to study links between the pertussis vaccine and more than a dozen conditions, including autism:
SEC. 312. RELATED STUDIES.
(a) REVIEW OF PERTUSSIS VACCINES AND RELATED ILLNESSES AND CONDITIONS.—Not later than 3 years after the effective date of this title, the Secretary of Health and Human Services shall complete a review of all relevant medical and scientific information (including information obtained from the studies required under subsection (e)) on the nature, circumstances, and extent of the relationship, if any, between vaccines containing pertussis (including whole cell, extracts, and specific antigens) and the following illnesses and conditions:
(1) Hemolytic anemia.
(2) Hypsarrhythmia.
(3) Infantile spasms.
(4) Reye’s syndrome.
(5) Peripheral mononeuropathy.
(6) Deaths classified as sudden infant death syndrome.
(7) Aseptic meningitis.
(8) Juvenile diabetes.
(9) Autism.
(10) Learning disabilities.
(11) Hyperactivity.
(12) Such other illnesses and conditions as the Secretary may choose to review or as the Advisory Commission on Childhood Vaccines established under section 2119 of the Public Health Service Act recommends for inclusion in such review. (Ante, p. 3771).
PUBLIC LAW 99–2660—NOV. 14, 1986 100 STAT. 3755
The pertussis vaccine injury inquiry ordered by law in 1986 was undertaken by the National Institutes of Health, carried out by the Institute of Medicine, published by the National Academy of Sciences in 1991, and edited by, among others, none other than Harvard’s Harvey Fineberg, who chaired the Committee to review the Adverse Consequences of Pertussis and Rubella Vaccines. PubMed (a database maintained by the United States National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health) gave the following summary of the final report, titled Adverse Effects of Pertussis and Rubella
Vaccines: A Report of the Committee to Review the Adverse Consequences of Pertussis and Rubella Vaccines:
Parents have come to depend on vaccines to protect their children from a variety of diseases. Some evidence suggests, however, that vaccination against pertussis (whooping cough) and rubella (German measles) is, in a small number of cases, associated with increased risk of serious illness. This book examines the controversy over the evidence and offers a comprehensively documented assessment of the risk of illness following immunization with vaccines against pertussis and rubella. Based on extensive review of the evidence from epidemiologic studies, case histories, studies in animals, and other sources of information, the book examines: The relation of pertussis vaccines to a number of serious adverse events, including encephalopathy and other central nervous system disorders, sudden infant death syndrome, autism, Guillain-Barre syndrome, learning disabilities, and Reye syndrome. The relation of rubella vaccines to arthritis, various neuropathies, and thrombocytopenic purpura. The volume, which includes a description of the committee’s methods for evaluating evidence and directions for future research, will be important reading for public health officials, pediatricians, researchers, and concerned parents. See https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25121241/ (emphasis added).
The report’s cursory summary on autism was this: The report’s cursory summary on autism was this:
No data were identified that address the question of a relation between vaccination with DPT or its pertussis component and autism. There are no experimental data bearing on a possible biologic mechanism. (p. 152.)
In other words, we don’t know; no one has ever looked.
But since there was no data to prove a link, because there was no data, they decided to reject the hypothesis and conclude:
There is no evidence to indicate a causal relation between DPT vaccine or the pertussis component of DPT vaccine and autism. (Id.)
Today there is a great deal more data than there was in 1991. This report was published before the dramatic rise in autism rates in the 1990s following the rapid expansion of the number of vaccines given to children once the industry had liability protection from vaccine-induced injuries.
Now, more than 200 papers showing multiple vaccine-autism links exist. You can review those papers at https://howdovaccinescauseautism.org/.
Senator Warren and all those skeptical of Mr. Kennedy’s vaccine critique must understand that he is more informed on vaccine law than the legislators questioning him. The political talking point that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is a “conspiracy theorist” if perpetuated, must now extend to the entire Legislative branch of the US Government starting with Democrats like former Congressman Henry Waxman, who wrote and introduced the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act.
Senator Warren might also consult with other current members of the US Congress who held seats when the 1986 Act was passed, such as Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Steny Hoyer (D-MD), Hal Rogers (R-KY), Ron Wyden (D-OR), Chris Smith (R-NJ, who also sponsored the Combating Autism Act of 2006), and most notably, her own fellow Democratic Senator from Massachusetts, Ed Markey. Warren, like most politicians and doctors, does not understand that the presumption at the foundation of American vaccine policy, and the landmark law that has underpinned that policy for 39 years, is that vaccines are unavoidably unsafe. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. does.
Ginger Taylor is an author, speaker, writer and activist. She writes on the politics of health, vaccination, informed consent and both corporate and government corruption from a biblical perspective.
WhatsApp accuses Israeli spyware firm of targeting journalists, civil society members
RT | January 31, 2025
Meta’s popular messaging platform WhatsApp has alerted nearly 100 journalists and civil society members to potential device breaches involving spyware from Israeli firm Paragon Solutions, a company official told Reuters on Friday.
These individuals have likely been compromised through a zero-click attack, possibly initiated via a malicious PDF sent in group chats, according to WhatsApp.
The identity of the attackers remains unknown, though Paragon’s software is typically used by government clients. After detecting and disrupting the hacking effort, WhatsApp issued a cease-and-desist letter to Paragon. The incident has been reported to law enforcement and Citizen Lab, a Canadian internet watchdog.
Paragon declined to comment on the accusations, according to Reuters.
Citizen Lab researcher John Scott-Railton told the outlet that the incident “is a reminder that mercenary spyware continues to proliferate and as it does, so we continue to see familiar patterns of problematic use.”
Paragon’s website advertises “ethically based tools, teams, and insights to disrupt intractable threats,” and claims to only sell to governments in stable democratic countries. The company’s products include Graphite, spyware that allows total phone access.
Despite Paragon’s claims of ethical practices, WhatsApp’s findings suggest otherwise, Natalia Krapiva, senior tech-legal counsel at Access Now, told Reuters. She emphasized that such abuses are not isolated incidents, saying, “This is not just a question of some bad apples – these types of abuses (are) a feature of the commercial spyware industry.”
This incident follows a series of legal challenges against Israeli spyware firms. In December 2024, a US judge ruled that NSO Group, the maker of Pegasus spyware, was liable for hacking the phones of 1,400 individuals through WhatsApp in May 2019, violating US state and federal hacking laws, and WhatsApp’s terms of service. A separate trial in March will determine what damages NSO Group owes WhatsApp.
Legal documents from ongoing US litigation between NSO Group and WhatsApp have revealed that it is the Israeli cyberweapons maker NSO Group, not its government clients, that installs and extracts information using its spyware. This disclosure contradicts NSO’s prior claim that only clients operate the system without NSO’s direct involvement.
A Republic of Spies
By Andrew P. Napolitano | Ron Paul Institute | January 30, 2025
In 2021, to his credit, President Joe Biden warned the American public against the dangers of zero-click spyware manufactured by an Israeli corporation. Zero-click is unwanted software that can expose the entire contents of one’s mobile or desktop device to prying eyes without tricking one into clicking on to a link. Biden banned its importation and use in the United States.
Last week, as an inducement to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept the Israel/Hamas ceasefire agreement, President Donald Trump secretly agreed to lift the embargo on zero-click.
Here is the backstory.
Though America has employed spies since the Revolutionary War, until the modern era, spying was largely limited to wartime. That changed when America became a surveillance state in 1947 with the public establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency and the secret creation of its counterparts.
The CIA’s stated public task at its inception was to spy on the Soviet Union and its satellite countries so that American officials could prepare for any adverse actions by them. This was the time of the Red Scare, in which both Republicans and Democrats fostered the Orwellian belief that America needed a foreign adversary.
We had just helped the Russians defeat Germany in World War II, and our Russian ally — which was bankrupt and had just lost 27 million troops and civilians — suddenly became so strong it needed to be kept in check. The opening salvo in this absurd argument was fired by President Harry Truman in August 1945 when he used nuclear bombs intentionally to target civilians of an already defeated Japan. One of his targets was a Roman Catholic cathedral.
But his real target — so to speak — was his new friend, Joe Stalin.
When Truman signed the National Security Act into law in 1947, he also had Stalin in mind. That statute, which established the CIA, expressly stated that it shall have no internal intelligence or law enforcement functions and all its collections of intelligence shall come from sources outside the United States.
These limiting clauses were vital to passage of the statute, as members of Congress who crafted it feared the U.S. was creating the type of internal surveillance monster that we had just confronted in Germany.
Of course, no senior official in presidential administrations from Truman to Trump has taken these limitations seriously. As recently as the Obama administration, the CIA boasted that it had the capability of receiving data from all computer chips in the homes of Americans — such as in your microwave or dishwasher.
As well as its presence in your kitchen, the CIA is physically present in all 50 state houses in America. What is it doing there?
The feds admit to funding and empowering 18 domestic intelligence agencies — spies next door. The most notorious of these is the National Security Agency, which, when it last reported, employs 60,000+ persons, mostly civilians, with military leadership.
What do they do? They spy on Americans. We know this thanks to the personal courage of Edward Snowden and others who chose to honor their oaths to uphold the Constitution. NSA spying has produced so much data that the NSA built the second-largest building in the U.S. — after the Pentagon — for use as a storage facility of the data it has collected, and it is running out of room.
What has it collected? Quite simply, everything it can get its hands on. These domestic spies have access to every keystroke and all data on every digital device everywhere in the United States, without a warrant. This is computer hacking, a federal crime; but the feds don’t prosecute the spies they have hired to spy on us.
It also represents an egregious violation of the Fourth Amendment, which guarantees the right to privacy of all persons. The operative language is “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.”
The law defines all searches and seizures conducted without a warrant as unreasonable and thus violative of not only this amendment but also the uniquely American value it was enacted to protect — the right to be left alone. Surely the computer chip in every desktop, mobile device, dishwasher and microwave is an “effect” protected by the Constitution.
The spies and, sadly, the presidents for whom they have worked don’t see it that way. They have claimed in federal courts and elsewhere that the Fourth Amendment does not pertain to them because they are not law enforcement and because they work directly for the president, who, when he is operating as the commander in chief, is free to employ government assets as he wishes, without constitutional constraints.
This argument has been used to justify the CIA’s violent killings of Americans and others in foreign lands using drones and its agents dressed as military. It has justified the brutal torture of foreign nationals, even those whom the CIA deemed were being truthful during their interrogations. And, of course, it has justified ignoring the Constitution and the rights it protects and the values that underlie it.
This argument was also used to justify foreign and federal spying on Trump. Now he wants to make it easier for America’s spies to spy on the rest of us.
Spying belies the very purpose of the Constitution — to keep the government off the people’s backs. Of course, when the late Justice William O. Douglas coined that phrase, there were no computer chips, the CIA was thought to be law-abiding and the NSA didn’t exist.
So, we can see how desirous of secrecy the Trump administration was last week when it agreed to lift the zero-click embargo.
We can try to avoid commercial spyware, but how can we avoid a totalitarian government that spies on everyone?
According to the Declaration of Independence, we can do so by altering or abolishing it.
To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.
COPYRIGHT 2025 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO
DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
‘Conspiracy Theory’ Now Fact: Greater Israel Has Arrived
By Kit Klarenberg | Mint Press News | January 28, 2025
Ever since Tel Aviv’s 1948 creation, much has been said and written about ‘Greater Israel’ – the notion Zionism’s ultimate end goal is the forcible annexation and ethnic cleansing of vast swaths of Arab and Muslim lands for Jewish settlement, based on Biblical claims this territory was promised to Jews by God. The mainstream media typically dismisses this concept as antisemitic conspiracy theory, or at most the fringe fantasy of a minuscule handful of extremist Israelis.
In reality, as The Guardian admitted in 2009, the idea of a Greater Israel has long-appealed to “religious and secular right-wing nationalists” alike at a state and public level in Tel Aviv. They have the shared objective of “[seeking] to fulfill divine commandments about the ‘beginning of redemption’, as well as create ‘facts on the ground’ to enhance Israel’s security.” The outlet acknowledged this motivation was a key contemporary driving force in mainstream Zionist entity politics, which “effectively turned the Palestinians into aliens on their own soil.”
The Nation has described the push to establish Greater Israel as “the central ideological goal” of Benjamin Netyahu’s Likud Party, which has dominated Israeli politics in recent decades. In July 2018 too, the Zionist entity passed the “Nation State of the Jewish People” law. It enshrines “the development of Jewish settlement as a national value.” Meanwhile, the state is legally obligated “to encourage and promote” the “establishment and consolidation” of settlements, in illegally occupied territory.
A proposed map of ‘Greater Israel’
This is based on the Jewish people’s “exclusive and inalienable right” to territory as far away from present Israel as Saudi Arabia. Old Testament terms such as “Judea and Samaria” are also employed. Markedly, this text is absent from the legislation’s official English translation. Zionist entity chiefs may not have wanted to make their irredentist, settler colonial ambitions quite so obvious at the time. Fast forward to today though, and Zionists at every level are wholly unabashed about their grand expansionist plans in West Asia.
The Syrian government’s fall has raised all manner of questions, concerns, and uncertainties locally and internationally. Can the country survive in its present form? Will Western-backed ‘former’ ultra-extremists be able to run a government? May the Iran-led Axis of Resistance, which inflicted such harm to the Zionist entity and its Western puppet masters throughout 2023/4, be under threat? The list goes on. But one thing is certain – Israel is seeking to profit handsomely from the chaos. If successful, the results will be revolutionary.
‘Defensive Position’
On December 8th, a triumphant, smart-casual-bedecked Benjamin Netanyahu made a public address from an Israeli Occupation Force observation point, in the illegally-occupied Golan Heights. Taking personal credit for Bashar Assad’s ouster, he hailed “a historic day” for the region, which offered “great opportunity.” The Israeli leader bragged that the Zionist entity’s “forceful action against Hezbollah and Iran” had “set off a chain reaction” of upheaval, showing no sign of abating. Nonetheless, he warned of “significant dangers”.
One of those hazards, Netanyahu declared, was “the collapse of the Separation of Forces Agreement from 1974.” This largely forgotten accord was signed by Damascus and Tel Aviv following the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Both sides agreed not to mount hostile military operations of any kind against one another from their shared Golan Heights border. Perhaps surprisingly, it was scrupulously adhered to for 50 years. Now, though, Assad’s fall has sparked a Syrian military withdrawal from the area, and, in turn, the IDF is moving in.
Netanyahu announced orders had been given to the IOF to push deep into the demilitarized zone created by the Agreement, which is legally and historically Syrian territory. He claimed this was merely a “temporary defensive position until a suitable arrangement is found.” Yet, ever since, it has become increasingly unambiguous that for the Zionist entity, Assad’s departure not only greenlights the tearing up of longstanding diplomatic agreements, but the entire map of West Asia as we know it.
For the time being, the IOF has captured strategically invaluable Mount Hermon, Syria’s tallest mountain, from which Damascus can be seen just 40 miles away. Concurrently, hundreds of Zionist entity airstrikes have obliterated what remained of Syria’s military infrastructure, leaving the country completely defenseless from any and all incursions by air, land, and sea. The stage is plainly set for a major escalation and attempt by Israel to absorb further territory, at its behest. Who or what could stop them?
IOF militants unfurl an entity flag on Mount Hermon
On December 10th 2024, while testifying at his long-running trial for industrial scale corruption in office, Netanyahu used the occasion to hint strongly at Assad’s defeat heralding a major reshaping of the region afoot. “Something tectonic has happened here, an earthquake that hasn’t happened in the 100 years since the Sykes-Picot Agreement,” the Israeli leader said, referencing the 1916 treaty under which Britain and France carved up the Ottoman Empire.
In an ironic twist, destruction of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which divided West Asia into artificial boundaries under Western colonial rule, was a regular feature of ISIS propaganda. The group cited the pact as a symbol of Western oppression against Islam, presenting its demise as a religious duty. With figures associated with ISIS now taking charge in Damascus, that vision could now be achieved, a prospect both serving Israel’s long-term goals, and aligning with Netanyahu’s long-standing ambitions.
‘Living Room’
In recent weeks, Israeli media has undergone a significant tonal shift. Historically, even critical Israeli news outlets and journalists have been careful to frame the Zionist entity’s most egregious actions – ranging from military operations against neighboring countries to settlement expansion and land confiscation – in terms of “security” and “defense”. However, in the days leading up to Tel Aviv’s invasion of Lebanon on October 1st 2024, The Jerusalem Post published a strikingly candid explainer guide for its readers, enquiring, “Is Lebanon part of Israel’s promised territory?”
The outlet leaned on a Brooklyn-based Rabbi to “graciously” explain in detail how, based on multiple passages in Jewish scripture, “Lebanon is within the borders of Israel,” and Jews are therefore “obligated and commanded to conquer it.” The article was subsequently deleted after mass backlash and condemnation. But lessons from the debacle evidently weren’t learned in some quarters.
On December 4th – four days before the Syrian government’s fall – The Times of Israel published an op-ed on how “Israel’s exploding population” urgently required “Lebensraum”, a notorious German concept meaning “living room”, typically associated with the Nazis. The piece noted the Zionist entity’s population was projected to grow to 15.2 million by 2048, meaning Tel Aviv’s territory rapidly needed to be greatly expanded – perhaps not to the size of Russia, but certainly considerably.
This extremist rant was likewise purged from the web, due to widespread public outcry and mockery. Yet, since Assad’s fall, the term “Greater Israel” abounds readily in Zionist media, and seizure of territory from Tel Aviv’s neighbors is openly and eagerly discussed on primetime entity TV. Geopolitical analyst and founder of The Cradle Sharmine Narwani tells MintPress News that in a sense, the blatant nature of these discussions is a welcome development, as it lays bare Tel Aviv’s most extreme ambitions. However, she warns, attempts to expand the entity’s borders could backfire in catastrophic ways:
“The good news is, Israel has completely dropped all its masks. The bad news is it will go for land grabs everywhere. But this will be done opportunistically, and without much forethought or strategic planning. In the end, which country besides the US will be able to support Israel publicly? Tel Aviv will corner itself because the dominant Western discourse and EU law are still premised on human rights and ‘rules’. Allowing Israel these land grabs will also sink the Western-led global order.”
‘Primary Target’
Academic David Miller concurs the Zionist mask is off once and for all. Gravely, he tells MintPress News, “the fact that the CIA backed regime in Damascus is openly saying it is no threat to Israel is another indication regime change in Syria is a planned attempt to destroy the Axis of Resistance, and finally genocide all Palestinians.” Furthermore, he believes the writings of Zionism’s founder Theodore Herzl make clear seizing Lebanese and Syrian territory was Israel’s plan all along.
This malign objective, Miller adds, was echoed in many statements of countless prominent Zionists over decades, and “even codified and published as the Yinon Plan.” Little-known today, this extraordinary document was published in February 1982 in Hebrew journal Kivunim, under the title “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s”. Its title is derived from author Oded Yinon, a shadowy former Israeli Foreign Ministry official and advisor to Zionisty entity leader Ariel Sharon.
Some sources claim the Yinon Plan provided a precise blueprint for major future events in West Asia, such as the illegal 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, Syrian dirty war, and rise of ISIS. It may be an exaggeration to suggest the Plan precisely portended all these developments, but nonetheless, much of the document’s contents are eerily prescient. Moreover, while many of its proposals failed to subsequently materialise, we are left to ponder whether they may now do so in future.
For example, the Plan noted there was significant potential for “domestic trouble” to erupt in Syria between “the Sunni majority and the Shiite Alawi ruling minority” – the latter constituting a “mere 12% of the population” – to the extent of “civil war”. While Damascus’ “strong military regime” was considered formidable, Yinon declared “the dissolution of Syria into ethnically or religiously unique areas” and destruction of its military power should be “Israel’s primary target” on its Eastern front, “in the long run”.
The Plan envisaged similar outcomes for other countries in Israel’s immediate vicinity. Lebanon was to be broken up into “five provinces” along religious and ethnic lines, partition “[serving] as a precedent for the entire Arab world.” Yinon wrote, “this state of affairs will be the guarantee for peace and security in the area in the long run,and that aim is already within our reach today.” Four months later, the Zionist entity invaded Beirut, carrying out ethnic cleansing, massacres, and land theft along the way.
Israel’s June 1982 invasion of Lebanon
Once the Zionist entity’s immediate neighbors were neutralized, Iraq was to be crosshaired “later on”. Baghdad, “rich in oil” while “internally torn” between its Sunni and Shiite population, was “guaranteed as a candidate for Israel’s targets.” Its destruction was “even more important for us than that of Syria,” due to its “power” and strength relative to other regional adversaries. Yinon hoped the then-ongoing Iran-Iraq war would “tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall”, preventing Baghdad from ‘[organizing] a struggle on a wide front against us”:
“Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon… It is possible that the present Iranian-Iraqi confrontation will deepen this polarization.”
‘Permissive Approach’
Yinon also considered it a “political priority” to regain control of the Sinai peninsula, over which the Zionist entity had fought its Arab neighbors since inception, before relinquishing all claims to the region to Egypt under the March 1979 Camp David accords. He slammed these peace agreements, and looked forward to Cairo “[providing] Israel with the excuse [emphasis added] to take the Sinai back into our hands,” due to its vast “strategic, economic and energy” value:
“The economic situation in Egypt, the nature of the regime and its pan-Arab policy, will bring about a situation after April 1982 in which Israel will be forced to act directly or indirectly in order to regain control over Sinai… for the long run. Egypt does not constitute a military strategic problem due to its internal conflicts and it could be driven back to the post 1967 war situation in no more than one day.”
We are now well-past April 1982. In the intervening time, successive Israeli governments have demanded Egypt allow the IOF to relocate Gaza’s population to the Sinai. Netanyahu is particularly taken with the prospect. In the immediate wake of October 7th 2023, official Israeli government and Zionist think tank policy papers openly advocated driving Palestinians into the neighbouring desert. It has been reported entity officials begged the US to pressure Cairo into allowing this mass displacement.
For the Zionist entity, this strategy’s appeal is self-evident. On top of emptying Gaza for settlement, forcing Palestinians into Sinai would inevitably create mass chaos and tensions there, which could in Yinon’s phrase provide “the excuse” for Tel Aviv to militarily occupy the region, in the manner of the West Bank. Just as a “temporary defensive position until a suitable arrangement is found” of course, as Netanyahu said of the IOF’s brazen creation of a prospective beachhead on Mount Hermon.
In December 2024, Haaretz observed Netanyahu was “angling for a legacy as the leader who expanded Israel’s borders”, and “wants to be remembered as the one who created Greater Israel.” Simultaneously, neoconservative Brookings Institute vice president Suzanne Maloney wrote for Empire house journal Foreign Affairs that the incoming Trump administration “will surely take a permissive approach to Israeli territorial ambitions.” After all, recent developments showed “a maximalist military approach yields spectacular strategic dividends along with domestic political benefits” for the Zionist entity.
We must hope, as Sharmine Narwani prophesied, Netanyahu’s megalomaniacal reveries of Greater Israel are just that, and come to nothing. Despite understandable mass anti-imperialist mourning over the Assad government’s demise, Tel Aviv faces a panoply of intractable internal problems. Contrary to claims of Tel Aviv’s population “exploding”, tens of thousands of dual-citizenship residents are routinely fleeing due to Resistance attacks, while its economy has perhaps permanently been relegated to the doldrums, the entity entirely dependent on US financial largesse to endure.
Ukraine wants EU to replace lost US aid
RT | January 30, 2025
Ukrainian lawmakers have appealed to non-US donors to fund local media outlets and NGOs following the suspension of Washington’s foreign assistance programs that has reportedly drastically impacted the sector.
Last week, President Donald Trump halted cash flows from the US and ordered a 90-day review of aid schemes. Many affected programs were run by USAID, Washington’s soft power agency that distributes billions of dollars each year for projects that promote US interests around the world, under the premise of humanitarian development. It spent over $60 billion in 2023 alone.
Ukrainian recipients of American grants were hit “worse than it may seem,” a statement by the parliamentary committee on humanitarian affairs said on Wednesday. Lawmakers anticipate that it will take up to six months for US funding to fully resume, and have urged EU donors to step in.
“Given the constraints on public funding, grants remain virtually the only way for cultural and media projects to function,” the statement said.
Oksana Romanyuk, executive director of a Kiev-based media research non-profit, warned that 90% of news outlets in Ukraine rely heavily on foreign grants. With USAID operations frozen, many of them are now soliciting emergency donations.
The Ukrainian MPs described foreign assistance as “an important part of our path to democratic development and sustainability”. They empathized that USAID was funding projects for children, with thousands of minors attending schools that depend on American taxpayer dollars.
According to media reports, senior officials in the Department of State have lobbied Secretary Marco Rubio to make exemptions for their preferred aid programs, arguing that they are essential for US interests. Meanwhile, at least 60 senior USAID officials reportedly have been placed on paid administrative leave.
Elizabeth Warren’s False Accusation Against RFK Jr. at Senate Hearing Sparks Controversy
By Maryanne Demasi, PhD | January 29, 2025
Today, the Senate confirmation hearing for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. swiftly devolved into a political battleground, with partisan tensions overshadowing any serious examination of Kennedy’s qualifications.
Intended to assess his suitability, the hearing became a spectacle of accusation and counter-accusation, leaving little room for meaningful dialogue.
Kennedy, who has long advocated for drug safety and transparency in medical practices, has faced harsh criticism for his outspoken views on vaccines.
Lawmakers seized on his stance, accusing him of hiding his anti-vaccine beliefs and embracing conspiracy theories to dissuade the public from using life-saving vaccines.
Tensions escalated when Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren clashed with Kennedy in a heated exchange. She demanded that he promise not to financially benefit from any lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies if confirmed.
“I’m asking you right now that you will not take a financial stake in every one of the lawsuits [against pharmaceutical companies] so that what you do as secretary will also benefit you financially down the line,” Warren demanded.
Kennedy, visibly frustrated, responded, “Senator, you’re asking me not to sue pharmaceutical companies.” Warren retorted sharply, “No, I am not!”
Amid this verbal sparring, Warren also made a false accusation, claiming that Kennedy had pocketed $2.5 million from law firm Wisner Baum for recruiting plaintiffs in vaccine-related lawsuits.
Wisner Baum wasted no time in issuing a statement to categorically refute the baseless claim. The firm made it clear that Kennedy had never received any compensation in connection with vaccine litigation.
R. Brent Wisner, managing partner at the firm, quickly set the record straight: “The suggestion that Wisner Baum has paid Mr. Kennedy millions from vaccine cases is false and misleading,” he asserted.
Wisner explained that Kennedy’s earnings had been derived exclusively from lawsuits related to Monsanto’s Roundup and wildfire-related litigation.
“We have compensated Mr. Kennedy solely for his involvement in cases concerning Monsanto Roundup-induced non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, the Woolsey Fire, and the Paradise/Camp Fire cases,” Wisner clarified.
He strongly defended Kennedy’s integrity, adding, “Bobby earned his share from that historic fight. Instead of ridiculing him for that heroic work, my fellow liberals falsely paint it as related to vaccines. It’s simply not true. He has made no money from a single vaccine case.”
Senator Warren’s attack on Kennedy was seen as hypocritical. She has long positioned herself as a crusader against Big Pharma, yet had accepted funds from the very family whose actions contributed to the opioid epidemic. In 2019, amid intense public pressure over the opioid crisis, she was forced to return donations from the Sackler family, the owners of Purdue Pharma.
While political point-scoring continues to dominate the hearing in Washington DC, Wisner Baum is fighting a very different battle on the other side of the country. In a Los Angeles court, the safety of Gardasil is under intense scrutiny.
The firm is representing Jennifer Robi, the plaintiff in the first major trial concerning the vaccine. Robi experienced severe health complications, including neurological and autoimmune disorders, following her Gardasil vaccination and is now in a wheelchair.
“We are currently in trial in the first Gardasil case in Los Angeles,” Wisner explained.
“We hope that sound bites will give way to truth and solid evidence, and that the jury will deliver a verdict reinforcing the same message we saw in Roundup—that consumers deserve the truth, and politics should have no place in these proceedings.”
UNRWA Shutdown Risks Killing Gaza Ceasefire: Official
By Kyle Anzalone | The Libertarian Institute | January 28, 2025
The head of the UN’s Palestinian Aid Agency (UNRWA) said Tel Aviv’s decision to halt his agency’s assistance programs in Israel jeopardizes the Gaza truce and hostage deal.
On Tuesday, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN said UNRWA would have to cease its operations in Israel when Tel Aviv’s law banning the organization goes into effect on Thursday. “UNRWA must cease its operations and evacuate all premises it operates in Jerusalem,” Ambassador Danny Danon told the Security Council. “Israel will terminate all collaboration, communication and contact with UNRWA or anyone acting on its behalf.”
UNRWA Chief Philippe Lazzarini responded by saying the shuttering of UNRWA in Israel risked causing the Gaza ceasefire and hostage deal to end.
“In two days, our operations in the occupied Palestinian territory will be crippled, as legislation passed by the Israeli Knesset takes effect,” he told the UNSC. “At stake is the fate of millions of Palestinians, the ceasefire, and the prospects for a political solution that brings lasting peace and security.”
UNRWA serves as the most crucial aid agency for Palestinians who live as refugees or as second-class citizens in Israeli-occupied territory. Since the start of the Israeli onslaught in Gaza, UNRWA has provided a crucial lifeline to people living in deplorable conditions caused by the Israeli siege of the Strip.
Following the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, then-Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared a complete siege, including food, water, and medicine, of Gaza. UNRWA has been the key facilitator of bringing aid through the Israeli checkpoints to the people of Gaza.
Tel Aviv has attempted to portray UNRWA as another wing of Hamas, claiming its members helped to conduct the October 7 attack. However, an independent inquiry found that Israel could not provide evidence to back up that claim.
Lazzarini told the Security Council that Israel recently ramped up its global propaganda campaign against the agency. “The Government of Israel is investing significant resources to portray the Agency as a terrorist organization, and our staff as terrorists or terrorist sympathizers,” he explained. “Billboards and ads accusing UNRWA of terrorism recently appeared in major cities around the world. They were paid for by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”
The UNRWA chief went on to say that Tel Aviv is weaponizing Google ads as a part of its narrative warfare. “Google ad campaigns re-direct those seeking information about the Agency to websites replete with disinformation,” he added.
Lazzarini argued that the anti-UNRWA propaganda has had deadly effects, as 273 of his organization’s staff have been killed during the Israeli destruction of Gaza.
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Former Insiders Criticize Iran Policy as U.S. Hegemony
By GARETH PORTER | CounterPunch | February 27, 2013
“Going to Tehran” arguably represents the most important work on the subject of U.S.-Iran relations to be published thus far.
Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett tackle not only U.S. policy toward Iran but the broader context of Middle East policy with a systematic analytical perspective informed by personal experience, as well as very extensive documentation.
More importantly, however, their exposé required a degree of courage that may be unparalleled in the writing of former U.S. national security officials about issues on which they worked. They have chosen not just to criticise U.S. policy toward Iran but to analyse that policy as a problem of U.S. hegemony. … continue
Blog Roll
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- Why no power can undermine Iran’s eternal dominance over the Strait of Hormuz
- Is The War Against Iran Over?
- Iran war will leave long-term ‘scar’ on Wall Street, investors warn
- How Iran decimated US power projection in West Asia: Military lessons of 40-day war
- Iran’s report details US-Israeli war crimes in targeting schools, hospitals, livelihoods
- NATO’s Slow Fracture: How Trump’s Iran War Exposed the Instrument of Hegemony
- Chinese jet fuel and the myth of energy independence
- Ukraine Sea Drone Fired From Libya Hit Russian Tanker in Mediterranean
- IRGC: Iranian forces launched no attacks during ceasefire hours
- If Americans Knew
- Military aid to Israel emerges as the latest political litmus test for Democrats
- The only Palestinian children’s rights organization closes following years-long Israeli campaign against it
- ‘I Can’t Forget the Smell’: Lebanese Reel After Israel Kills Over 300 in Single Day
- DNC Shoots Down Resolutions Calling Out AIPAC and Limiting Arms to Israel
- TCN: Is Israel Blackmailing President Trump?
- Israel killed at least 303 Lebanese yesterday – who were they? Daily Update
- Amnesty: Urgent – Protect Lebanese civilians from brutal escalation in Israeli attacks
- Is The War Against Iran Over?
- Inside the Israeli army’s propaganda wing
- Hundreds of Gaza Amputees Stranded in Legal Limbo
- No Tricks Zone
- An Inconvenient Tree: Uncovered In Alps… Europe Much Warmer Than Today 6000 Years Ago
- New Study Reports A 60% Slowdown In Greenland’s Ice Loss Rate In The Last Decade
- Low Intensity Tornado Wrecks Major Solar Farm, Creating A Potential Toxic Dump
- New Study Finds Warming Saves Lives…Cold Temperatures 12 Times More Deadly Than Excess Heat
- German Science Blog Accuses PIK Climate Institute Of Hallucinating Climate Tipping Points
- Devastating Assessment Of Comirnaty Vaccine By Former Senior Pfizer Europe Toxicologist
- New Study: CO2 Is ‘Effectively Negligible’ As An Explanatory Climate Change Factor Since 2000
- Former Pfizer Toxicologist Dr. Helmut Sterz Tells Bundestag Hearing Pfizer Vaccine Should Have Never Been Approved
- Energy Expert: Germany’s Nuclear Phaseout Was A “500 Billion Euro Mistake”
- New Research: South Australia’s Mid-Holocene Sea Surface Temperatures Were 4°C Warmer Than Today
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