By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | June 20, 2024
The State of Kansas on Monday sued Pfizer, alleging the pharmaceutical giant misled the public by marketing its COVID-19 vaccine as “safe and effective” while concealing known risks and critical data on limited effectiveness.
The lawsuit, filed by Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach in the District Court of Thomas County alleges that beginning in 2021, shortly after the vaccine rollout, Pfizer covered up the fact that the vaccine was connected to serious adverse events, including myocarditis and pericarditis, failed pregnancies and deaths.
The complaint also alleges the company falsely claimed that its original vaccine retained high efficacy while knowing that efficacy waned over time and didn’t protect against new variants.
Pfizer also misled the public by claiming the COVID-19 vaccine would prevent transmission, even though the company never studied the vaccine’s capability to prevent transmission.
By marketing the vaccine as safe and effective despite its known risks, Pfizer violated the Kansas Consumer Protection Act because millions of Kansans heard those misrepresentations, the complaint alleges.
More than 3.3 million Kansans received the Pfizer shot, accounting for more than 60% of all vaccine doses given in the state.
Pfizer denied the allegations, telling The Hill, that the case has “no merit” and that the company plans to respond to the suit in “due course.”
“We are proud to have developed the COVID-19 vaccine in record time in the midst of a global pandemic and saved countless lives. The representations made by Pfizer about its COVID-19 vaccine have been accurate and science-based,” the company said.
Covering up data on vaccine’s safety for pregnant women
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) monitor adverse events in several ways, including through the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a passive reporting system that healthcare providers and patients can use to report vaccine injuries.
A total of 1,898,829 reports of adverse events following COVID-19 vaccines have been submitted to VAERS between Dec. 14, 2020, and May 31, 2024. Of those, 983,178 are associated with the Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccines.
The complaint said that in addition to VAERS, Pfizer maintained its own database that “contained more adverse event data than VAERS.” The data were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit after Pfizer refused to release it publicly.
That database, the case alleged, contained 1,223 reported fatalities as early as Feb. 28, 2021.
Pfizer concealed or omitted data related to the vaccine’s safety for pregnant women, its association with heart conditions, its effectiveness against variants and its ability to stop transmission, the lawsuit alleges.
“Pfizer marketed its vaccine as safe for pregnant women,” Kobach said in a press statement posted on X. “However, in February of 2021 Pfizer possessed reports for 458 pregnant women who received Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine during pregnancy. More than half of the pregnant women reported an adverse event, and more than 10% reported a miscarriage.”
Early reporting in 2021 by the CDC’s Dr. Tom Shimabukuro in the New England Journal of Medicine claiming the shots were safe for pregnant women based on the CDC’s own VAERS and vaccine safety monitoring system (V-safe) data has been shown to be statistically flawed.
Kobach also referred to Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla’s comment in January 2023 about myocarditis. Bourla said, “We have not seen a single signal, although we have distributed billions of doses.”
That was after internal documents showed the company had detected a safety signal and the FDA in June 2021 added a warning regarding myocarditis and pericarditis, both rare heart inflammation conditions, to Pfizer and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines.
The CDC has acknowledged that those conditions have most frequently been seen in adolescent and young adult males.
Kobach said that while Pfizer was claiming the vaccine was effective against variants, the company had data showing that effectiveness was less than 50%.
“Pfizer urged Americans to get vaccinated in order to protect their loved ones, clearly indicating a claim that Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccination stopped transmission,” Kobach said. “Pfizer later admitted that it never even studied transmission after the recipients received the vaccine.”
Pfizer engaged in ‘civil conspiracy’ with government agencies
The lawsuit also alleges Pfizer engaged in censorship attempts with social media companies to silence people criticizing its safety and efficacy claims.
The lawsuit charges “civil conspiracy” between Pfizer, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Virality Project and others “to willfully conceal, suppress, or omit material facts relating to Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine.”
During a press conference, Kobach pointed to comments Bourla made on “Face the Nation,” explaining why Pfizer declined to accept government funding for developing the vaccines under Operation Warp Speed.
Bourla said he didn’t want to have to submit to the government oversight that would be required.
“When you get money from someone that always comes with strings,” Bourla said. “They want to see how we are going to progress, what type of moves you are going to do. They want reports. I didn’t want to have any of that.”
Similar case filed in Texas last year, more coming
Kansas isn’t the first state to sue Pfizer over alleged false marketing claims. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in 2023 sued the drugmaker alleging it made “false, misleading and deceptive claims” about its COVID-19 vaccine and tried to intimidate and censor critics who questioned those claims or cited facts that countered them.
According to that lawsuit, Pfizer’s marketing claims about the efficacy, duration of protection and ability of its COVID-19 vaccine to prevent transmission violated the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act.
Pfizer moved to dismiss the case, claiming it is protected under the federal Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP Act), which grants protections to drugmakers who make “medical countermeasures” authorized for emergency use.
However, in his opposition to Pfizer’s motion, Paxton said the immunity protection provided under PREP and invoked by Pfizer in this case extends only to possible personal injury claims, not to deceptive marketing claims brought by a state.
Ray Flores, senior outside counsel to Children’s Health Defense, told The Defender the major difference in the Kansas case is that Kansas alleges a conspiracy with officials at the HHS and others to conceal or suppress information about the shot.
He also said the monetary damages Kansas seeks could be hundreds of times more than what is sought in the Texas suit.
Flores said Kansas has a strong case, based on the evidence of previous payments the company was ordered to make to multiple states for marketing violations related to other drugs.
He said:
“The exhibits alone should give pause to us all: the chronology of Pfizer’s false statements, a payout $137.9M to resolve previous violations, three separate stipulations that Pfizer not engage in deceptive promotions of its products, censorship and Pfizer’s denial of any wrongdoing.
“It is astonishing that the U.S. Government does business with Pfizer and grants special protections when Pfizer has a proclivity to flout the law.
“The allegations in the complaint are referenced-citation gems that every lawyer around the country should incorporate in this war for our health freedoms.”
Kobach told the press that five other states will be filing similar lawsuits, the Kansas Reflector reported.
“More suits may follow, depending on Pfizer’s reaction,” Kobach said.
As of April of last year, over 400,000,000 Pfizer COVID-19 shots had been administered in the U.S. according to Statista.
Watch John Campbell, Ph.D., discuss the latest lawsuit against Pfizer:
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
By Ramona Wadi | MEMO | June 20, 2024
Greek Foreign Minister George Gerapetritis said earlier this week that, “We have offered ourselves to host injured people from Palestine but also children from Palestine to come to Europe and stay here until the war is over.” Israel would be thrilled at such an idea, for sure. “Voluntary migration” in the guise of humanitarian aid could not get any better for Israel’s colonial expansion plans.
In October last year, Gerapetritis declared his government’s pro-Israel stance: “Greece, from the very first moment, supported the right of Israel to defend itself in line with international law.” No such right exists for an occupation state against the people living under its brutal military occupation.
In the same month, Greece also abstained from the UN General Assembly vote calling for a humanitarian ceasefire. A month earlier, the Greek government purchased 300 precision-guided munitions from Israel, known as spice bombs, for $130 million. And in a move aimed at curbing activism on university campuses, nine EU and UK individuals are facing deportation for participating in protests against the Gaza genocide, with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis stating that the authorities would forbid “universities from becoming sites for protest”.
As the genocide continues, the ways that politicians and diplomats try to make amends are becoming even weaker. The suggestion by Gerapetritis plays directly into the humanitarian paradigm which the EU hides behind, even as it continues to invest in Israel’s military and surveillance systems, all field tested on Palestinians in Gaza, of course.
There is not a single European country that can speak with honesty about Gaza and Israel, because investment in the latter has generated high stakes in terms of profit and complicity.
Humanitarian gestures, meanwhile, are becoming meaningless for Palestinians and strategically valuable for Israel, because there is no deterrent, no measure that forces Israel to stop the genocide.
Keeping in mind that Israel wants Gaza empty of Palestinians, why would the EU, which is complicit in arming the apartheid state, offer a humanitarian gesture that would help the settler-colonial entity in its ethnic cleansing? This begs a bigger question: why do diplomats insist on depoliticising humanitarian aid for the recipients, when the donors are involved in human rights abuses, war crimes and crimes against humanity?
Offering temporary safe haven for Palestinian children maimed by the war might be an acceptable humanitarian gesture if European countries weren’t complicit in the genocide conducted by the settler-colonial state which maimed them in the first place. “We have to remind ourselves of one thing: It is not enough to build only settlements,” said far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir recently, in the context of emphasising the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians, otherwise known as normalised ethnic cleansing.
A look at the recent statement by the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy shows how the Gaza genocide is not called to attention, but rather focuses on specific Israel violations while still recognising “Israel’s right to defend itself”. Josep Borrell also called for “the unconditional release of all hostages held by Hamas,” which essentially tells Palestinians that, as the colonised population, they should remain voiceless and not articulate any demands. Palestinians are facing genocide, and the EU’s statement is careful to protect Israel’s ability to act with impunity.
Any plan for EU states to host Palestinian children from Gaza cannot be allowed to pass unchallenged. Such a safe haven in Europe is part of the colonial framework that aids Israel, as does Europe’s complicity in Israel’s bombing and destruction of hospitals in Gaza, and murder of medical personnel. Apart from the fact that the number of Palestinian children taken in by Greece would be symbolic more than anything else, politicising medical treatment to aid Israel’s “voluntary migration” scheme is depraved and self-serving. Gerapetritis should have been more honest and said that his country will not stop the genocide, but will host and treat an insignificant percentage of its victims that will not jeopardise its relationship with Israel.
No political gesture will disguise the fact that Europe has much bigger obligations than playing humanitarian saviour to a relatively few wounded and severely traumatised Palestinian children.
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | June 19, 2024
The Chairman of the US House Committee on Small Business Roger Williams last week subpoenaed the State Department and Global Engagement Center (GEC) after they refused to turn over requested documents related to accusations of “censorship-by-proxy.”
We obtained a copy of the subpoena for you here.
GEC was used to flag posts that would then get censored by social media platforms and was also involved in giving grants to fund online blacklisters.
The documents and communications the committee requested but failed to obtain concern the latter activity, specifically an investigation into government bankrolling companies that hindered US small businesses from competing simply because they engaged in lawful online speech.
The material the committee wants for its probe goes back to grants awarded since 2018. The request names almost two dozen entities – the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) and NewsGuard among them.
In a statement, Chairman Williams explained that the investigation has been ongoing for a year, with the focus on how the US government may be using taxpayer money to put roadblocks in the way of the country’s small business development – namely, by hampering them online.
“All Americans deserve a fair shot to compete in the marketplace, and the government should not be tipping the scales against any business for their legal speech on the internet,” Williams is quoted as saying while explaining the need to hit the GEC and the State Department with a subpoena after they repeatedly refused to cooperate.
Williams described this attitude by the government as unacceptable, given that (with the importance of unhindered presence on the internet), “the livelihoods of many small businesses are on the line.”
The Committee’s investigation focuses on how what is described as “censorship-by-proxy” (i.e., the government circumventing constitutional prohibitions to censor online speech by looking for “friendly” non-governmental entities to put pressure on social platforms) – affects US small businesses’ bottom line.
And logically, impeding them from gaining exposure and reach online, especially, but not only, during the pandemic, would have caused serious consequences.
The House Committee said that over the year of the investigation, GEC “slow-rolled document production and ignored legitimate oversight document requests.”
And so, 12 months into it, and after repeated accommodations – such as giving GEC extra time and even narrowing the scope of the requests – the Committee now feels it’s time to “escalate the issue at hand, and issue the subpoena.”
As they say – “nice just doesn’t work with some people.”
By Ian DeMartino – Sputnik – 19.06.2024
On Tuesday, US special envoy Amos Hochstein met with Lebanese officials, including Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, a day after visiting with Israeli officials. The trips were made in an attempt to prevent a full-on war between the two countries after exchanges escalated in the region.
Hezbollah and Israel have been exchanging fire since Israel launched its siege on Gaza following Hamas’ surprise attack on October 7. Hezbollah said it launched its campaign in response to Israel’s actions in Gaza and that it will stop once a ceasefire is implemented in the area.
Hochstein stated that Hamas needs to “just say yes and accept” the ceasefire deal outlined by US President Joe Biden nearly three weeks ago. Those comments are part of a trend among high-ranking US officials that Israel has accepted the ceasefire deal and only Hamas is preventing a pause in fighting.
“[With] the statements from the White House officials, they seem to live in a parallel reality from everyone, including Israeli officials,” Esteban Carrillo, a Beirut-based journalist and the editor of The Cradle, told Sputnik’s Fault Lines.
While Hamas has reportedly made some amendments to the deal, it has responded positively while Israel has refused to say if it will accept it and promised to keep fighting until Hamas is defeated. Israeli officials have also refused to confirm if the ceasefire deal presented by Biden was their creation, as US officials claim.
“Just today, a top Israeli negotiator told the Israeli media that there would be absolutely no room to negotiate any of the amendments that Hamas asked for in response to the ceasefire proposal,” Carrillo explained, adding that the negotiator said the war will continue after the Israeli assault on the southern city of Rafah is completed. “These are their words. This is not anybody putting words in their mouth.”
While the US continues to provide political cover for the Israelis by insisting that Israel has accepted a deal, its officials have been clear that they expect their actions in Gaza to continue for the foreseeable future. The day after Biden gave his speech outlining the ceasefire deal, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted that their conditions for ending the war “have not changed.” Days earlier, Israeli national security adviser, Tzachi Hanegbi said Israel expects at least “another seven months of fighting,” extending the killing until 2025.
An estimate by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) said that they expect the war to continue until 2026 and that a full-scale war with Lebanon will begin in September.
“[US Secretary of State Antony] Blinken and [US Defense Department spokesperson Matthew] Miller [are] saying that Hamas is the one being intransigent. No, it’s Israel that is being completely intransigent and they have been so for the past several decades,” Carrillo argued.
In 2006, Israel and Hezbollah fought to what is generally described as a tie, with more than 1,200 IDF soldiers wounded and another 120 dead, including the two soldiers who were captured at the Zar’it-Shtula incident, Israel failed to meet its objectives in that conflict and in the meantime Hezbollah has become increasingly sophisticated and powerful.
“This is what the US has also been warning them,” Carrillo said. “It’s time to de-escalate the North because you’re going to get your asses kicked.”
On Tuesday, Hezbollah released drone footage of Haifa and other parts of northern Israel, highlighting critical Israeli military and civilian infrastructure, including weapon depots, military bases and sea and airports.
Netanyahu said earlier this month that his country is “prepared for a very intense operation” against Lebanon.
Haifa, about 17 miles (27km) from the closest Lebanese border, is Israel’s most active port. Its importance has increased since the Ansar Allah (Houthi) movement in Yemen successfully shut down the Port of Eilat through its blockade of Israel in the Red Sea.
More than 60,000 Israelis have been ordered to evacuate from communities near the border with Lebanon, and many of the towns have been virtually abandoned since October.
The Vaccine Story told through a New Blockbuster Movie
BY JUSTUS R. HOPE | JUNE 13, 2024
If you thought the documentary about Ivermectin suppression and Dr. Pierre Kory was eye-opening, perhaps you will find Dr. Wakefield’s newly released movie, Protocol 7, a drama starring Eric Roberts, even more astonishing. Life truly imitates art, and sometimes the two are indistinguishable, especially when it comes to Big Pharma’s protection of profitable vaccines at all costs.
Dr. Andrew Wakefield has been the lightning rod for vaccine injury since he published his 1998 Lancet study concerning the connection between autism and the MMR vaccine.
Dr. Tess Lawrie recently interviewed Dr. Wakefield’s mother in Bath, United Kingdom, and she told Wakefield’s story using facts from his childhood, early adulthood, and medical career. She tells the story of a high achiever who set records at his private school regarding leadership, character, and academics, the son of two physicians who grew up a stone’s throw away from where Tess Lawrie lives. She described his research that touched such a sensitive Big Pharma nerve.
“In 1998 Dr Andrew Wakefield, a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons and a senior researcher in the University Departments of Medicine and Histopathology at the Royal Free Hospital and School of Medicine published a paper in the Lancet with his colleagues entitled: Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children.
Dr Wakefield’s special interest was inflammatory bowel disease and this paper reported a case series of 12 children with developmental disorders whose mothers also described a constellation of bowel symptoms appearing shortly after their child’s vaccination.”
However, the mainstream media prefers not to deal with facts that are troublesome to their argument. Instead, they use the more effective technique of name-calling.
The MSM used Wikipedia, Anderson Cooper, and Brian Deer to character assassinate Wakefield. Cooper, the son of Gloria Vanderbilt, is the broadcast journalist, embraced by mainstream media, who graduated from Yale University in 1989. He also served two internships at the CIA. Cooper’s interview with Wakefield was punctuated with this cheap phrase, “But, sir, if you’re lying, then your book is also a lie. If your study is a lie, your book is a lie.” Here is the transcript.
Wakefield’s prolonged vilification and lifelong persecution by Big Pharma make Pierre Kory’s battle look like a cakewalk.
However, like Pierre Kory, Wakefield relied on facts rather than name-calling and emerged stronger than ever. He now reaches his audience through what can only be termed America’s most effective medium, the Big Screen.
“Protocol 7 is a medico-legal thriller based on the true story of two Merck lab scientists who, in 2010, blew the whistle on the company’s fraudulent manipulation of lab data to support the company’s efficacy claim about the mumps component of its MMR vaccine. The case has been tied up in courts ever since.
Rachel Whittle plays a small-town attorney and mother of an autistic child. British star Matthew Marsden plays a doctor with a history of being a lone voice in the wilderness about MMR vaccines and autism. Another British actor, Harrison Tipping, delivers what struck me as the film’s best performance —that of a Merck lab scientist who is a willing participant in the fraud, but also one who is tormented by his recognition that he is debasing his work and talent in the service of an ugly lie. Eric Roberts elegantly plays Dr. Errani, the head of Merck’s MMR division, who demands that the lab team figure out a way to support the company’s efficacy claim by whatever means necessary.”
Sound familiar?
Here is the Official Trailer to Protocol 7, and the film’s SHOWING SCHEDULE. This limited showing is selling out fast. Book your tickets now!
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | June 17, 2024
If it looks like a duck… and in particular, quacks like a duck, it’s highly likely a duck. And so, even though the Stanford Internet Observatory is reportedly getting dissolved, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public (CIP) continues its activities. But that’s not all.
CIP headed the pro-censorship coalitions the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) and the Virality Project with the Stanford Internet Observatory, while the Stanford outfit was set up shortly before the 2020 vote with the goal of “researching misinformation.”
The groups led by both universities would publish their findings in real-time, no doubt, for maximum and immediate impact on voters. For some, what that impact may have been, or was meant to be, requires research and a study of its own. Many, on the other hand, are sure it targeted them.
So much so that the US House Judiciary Committee’s Weaponization Select Subcommittee established that EIP collaborated with federal officials and social platforms, in violation of free speech protections.
What has also been revealed is that CIP co-founder and leader is one Kate Starbird – who, as it turned out from ongoing censorship and speech-based legal cases, was once a secret adviser to Big Tech regarding “content moderation policies.”
Considering how that “moderation” was carried out, namely, how it morphed into unprecedented censorship, anyone involved should be considered discredited enough not to try the same this November.
However, even as SIO is shutting down, reports say those associated with its ideas intend to continue tackling what Starbird calls online rumors and disinformation. Moreover, she claims that this work has been ongoing “for over a decade” – apparently implying that these activities are not related to the two past, and one upcoming hotly contested elections.
And yet – “We are currently conducting and plan to continue our ‘rapid’ research — working to identify and rapidly communicate about emergent rumors — during the 2024 election,” Starbird is quoted as stating in an email.
Not only is Starbird not ready to stand down in her crusade against online speech, but reports don’t seem to be able to confirm that the Stanford group is actually getting disbanded, with some referring to the goings on as SIO “effectively” shutting down.
What might be happening is the Stanford Internet Observatory (CIP) becoming a part of Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center. Could the duck just be covering its tracks?
By John Miles – Sputnik – 17.06.2024
A Texas political candidate for county commissioner has been charged with faking an online harassment campaign after he spent months sending racist messages to himself on Facebook.
“Whether Republican or Democrat, such tactics should be unequivocally condemned by all who value integrity and accountability in politics,” said local Republican Party chair Bobby Eberle.
Taral Patel, a Democratic Party candidate running in the third precinct of Fort Bend county, was arrested and charged with one third-degree felony count of online impersonation and a Class A misdemeanor charge of misrepresentation of identity after an investigation by the county district attorney’s office revealed he was responsible for a string of online hateful and derogatory comments purportedly directed at himself.
“As your Democratic candidate for County Commissioner, I am always open to criticism of my policy positions and stances on issues,” Patel said in an online post in September, posting a collage of the alleged harassing comments. “However, when my Republican opponents supporters’ [sic] decide to hurl racist, anti-immigrant, Hinduphobic, or otherwise disgusting insults at my family, faith community, colleagues, and me – that crosses a line.”
Patel’s Republican Party opponent incumbent Commissioner Andy Meyers requested an investigation of the comments after recognizing one of the partially-concealed usernames as an account that had previously launched attacks at himself.
The investigation revealed Patel had used an image of an actual local resident as the profile photo for one of the accounts, leading to the online impersonation charge.
Patel paid a total of $22,500 bond to leave county jail Thursday, with his court date scheduled for July 22.
By Laurie Calhoun | The Libertarian Institute | June 17, 2024
The word “democracy” is bandied about rhetorically by politicians on a regular basis to rationalize whatever it is that they want to do. This tendency has increased markedly in recent times as so-called wars of democracy and campaigns to save or preserve democracy are cast as the most pressing priorities of the day.
In the U.S. presidential election campaign currently underway, both members of the War Party duopoly claim to be the champions of democracy, while depicting their adversaries as loose cannon authoritarians. President Joe “Our Patience is Wearing Thin” Biden attempted in 2021 to force free people to submit to an experimental pharmaceutical treatment which many of them did not need. The Biden administration also oversaw what was one of the most assiduous assaults on free speech in the history of Western civilization. Social media platforms were infiltrated by agents of the federal government with the aim of squelching criticism of regime narratives, even, remarkably, facts recast by censors as malinformation for their potential to sow skepticism about the new mRNA shots never before tested on human beings.
Biden & Co. nonetheless insist that voters must reelect him, because his rival is a dictator in waiting à la Hitler or Mussolini. This despite the fact that Donald Trump already served as president for four years, and never imposed martial law, not even at the height of the highly chaotic and destructive George Floyd and Black Lives Matters protests. Ignoring such conflicting evidence, Joe Biden and his supporters relentlessly proclaim that a Trump victory in November 2024 would usher in the likely end of democracy.
After the conviction of Trump on felony charges crafted through novel procedures and using legalistic epicycles in entirely unprecedented ways, obviously tailored to convict one and only one person, with the aim specifically of preventing his election as the president of the United States, Democratic party operatives and Deep State bureaucrats alike have voiced concern that, if Trump is elected in November, he will go after those responsible for what fully half the country views as his persecution. Given the manifold conflicts of interest involved in the case, in which he was found guilty of all thirty-four charges, it seems likely that, as in the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling to remove Trump’s name from the ballot in that state, the creative felony convictions of Trump will not stand on appeal. One thing is clear: the crime of “miscategorizing hush money payments” has arguably been committed by every member of Congress for whom taxpayer money was used to dispense “undisclosed” payments in suppressing allegations of sexual harassment and other forms of malfeasance. (Thanks to Representative Thomas Massie for sharing on Twitter/X that $17 million dollars were paid to settle 268 such lawsuits from 1997 to 2017.)
Meanwhile, the Russiagate narrative which dominated the mainstream media for the entirety of Trump’s presidency, and continues to this day to color people’s views of the Russian government—thus buoying support for the war in Ukraine—has already been thoroughly debunked for the Hillary Clinton campaign product that it was. The Clinton campaign and the DNC (Democratic National Committee) were fined by the Federal Election Commission for their use of campaign funds miscategorized as legal fees to conduct opposition research which found its way into the Steele dossier on which angry denunciations of Trump’s supposedly treasonous behavior were based. To this day, none of the individuals involved have been indicted for what endures in many minds as the fanciful idea that “Trump is inside Putin’s pocket!” as a man I met in rural New Zealand in 2017 so vividly put it. (I assume he watches CNN.)
Since Trump’s recent conviction for the erroneous classification on his tax form of a hush money payment as a legal fee, he has been busy making lemonade out of lemons, using his new, improved tough-guy “gangster” image to wheel in voters and financial supporters who relate more than ever to his plight, having themselves either been or known victims of the not-so-evenhanded U.S. justice system. To Trump and his supporters, of course, going after those who went after him would be tit-for-tat retribution, just the sort of sweet revenge which persons wronged may crave. But to the many Trump haters (and there is no other way to describe them at this point in history), any attempt to retaliate by using the legal system to press charges against individuals who used the legal system for diaphanously political aims would constitute a grave injustice and threat to democracy.
The situation differs in degree, not in kind, in Europe, where the results of the recent elections have inspired heartfelt exclamations by the usual suspects (European Union Commission president Ursula von der Leyden, et al.) that “democracy” is endangered by the right-wing political groups now in ascendance. Pointing out that those groups were voted in by the people (demo-) to rule (-cracy) does nothing to quell the hysterics, who are somehow oblivious of the fact that when new parties are voted into power, this is precisely because of the electorate’s dissatisfaction with their current government officials. Voting is the only way people have of ousting the villains currently holding elected positions, along with the bureaucrats appointed by them.
In Europe, many working people are disturbed by not only the immigration situation and the specter of totalitarian “wokeism” but also the insistence of their current leaders on provoking and prolonging a war with Russia. It does not seem to be a matter of sheer coincidence, for example, that French president Emmanuel Macron suffered a resounding electoral blow after having expressed the intention to escalate the war between Ukraine and Russia, thus directly endangering the people of France. Macron was also assiduous in excluding swaths of his population, who protested in the streets for months on end, from participation in civil society for what he decreed to be their crime of declining to submit to the experimental mRNA treatment during the height of the Coronapocalypse.
Protests tend not to have any effect on the reigning elites, primarily because the mainstream media no longer covers them to any significant degree, but when politicians are removed from office by the electorate, and replaced by persons who share the concerns of the populace, then change does become possible, at least in principle. Unfortunately, most viable candidates today are card-carrying members of the War Party, whatever divergent opinions they may hold about domestic issues such as whether persons in possession of Y-chromosomes should be considered biological males or whether non-citizens should be permitted to vote.
It would be nice to be able to believe, as some of Trump’s libertarian-leaning supporters apparently do, that his populist appeal reflects a genuine interest in preserving freedom and democracy. This notion is however impugned by the fact that it was under Trump’s administration that the active pursuit of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange commenced, when he was wrenched from the Ecuadorian embassy in London and thrown into Belmarsh prison, where he continues to languish today. It was also under Trump that Assange’s internet access was taken away, which already represented an assault on free speech. But by allowing then-CIA director Mike Pompeo to “mastermind” the eternal silencing of Assange, for the supposed crime of exposing U.S. war crimes (recast as serial violations of the Espionage Act of 1917), Trump betrayed his own commitment to the now octopoid MIC (military-industrial-congressional-media-academic-pharmaceutical-logistics-banking complex), notwithstanding his occasional moments of seeming lucidity with regard to reining in the endless wars. Among other examples, there is not much daylight between the platforms of Biden and Trump regarding Israel. President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken occasionally pay lip service to the innocent Palestinians being traumatized, wounded, and killed, but they nonetheless have furnished Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with the means to do just that.
In reality, highly seductive, albeit fraudulent, claims to be defending democracy have been the primary basis for waging, funding, and prolonging wars which have resulted in the deaths of millions of human beings in this century alone. For two decades, the war in Afghanistan was rationalized by appeal to the need to democratize that land, which is currently ruled by the manifestly authoritarian Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (formerly known as the Taliban), just as it was in 2001. Indeed, every country targeted by the U.S. military behemoth is claimed to be the beneficiary of what are the twenty-first-century equivalent of the missions civilisatrices of centuries past. Today, brutal bombing campaigns, invasions and occupations are invariably sustained through the rhetoric of democracy. Since every U.S.-instigated or funded war is said to support “democracy” (by definition!), this rhetorical strategy succeeds in garnering the support of politicians who know that their constituents know, if nothing else, that murder is evil, and democracy is good.
That wars imposed on people against their will—and in which they themselves are annihilated—serve democracy is a preposterous conceit, and yet it becomes ever more frequent as leaders continue to point to World War II as proof that sometimes people must die if freedom and liberty—and, of course, democracy—are to survive. Whoever is running Joe Biden’s Twitter/X account posted a suite of recycled versions of this fallacious notion not long after Memorial Day:
“American democracy asks the hardest of things: To believe we’re part of something bigger than ourselves. Democracy begins with each of us. It begins when one person decides their country matters more than they do.”
“Democracy is never guaranteed. Every generation must preserve it, defend it, and fight for it.”
“History tells us that freedom is not free. If you want to know the price of freedom, come here to Normandy, or other cemeteries where our fallen heroes rest. The price of unchecked tyranny is the blood of the young and the brave.”
Any sober examination of the historical record reveals that vacuous claims to be supporting “democracy” in wars abroad—the literal weaponization of that term—have as their primary result that the people being slaughtered lose not only their political voice, but also their very life, usually against their own will. War represents, in this way, the very antithesis of democracy.
The conflation of defense and offense codified in 2002 by the George W. Bush administration in its notorious National Security Strategy of the United States of America was made public in a pithy phrase: “Our best defense is a good offense.” This perverse rebranding of state aggression as somehow honorable has given rise to a global military system in which wars are funded by the U.S. government under the assumption that they are everywhere and always a matter of protecting post-World War II democracies. But if people are killed in these wars against their will, often because they are forbidden from leaving their country, and therefore subjected to a greatly increased risk of death through bombing, as was the case in Iraq and Afghanistan (and elsewhere throughout the Global War on Terror), and is currently the case in both Ukraine and Israel, then there is no sense in which the military missions which culminate in the deaths of those people constitute defenses of democracy. Instead, the prolongation of such wars ensures only that there will be fewer people voting than before.
Such flagrant assaults on democracy (rule by the people) in the name of democracy do not, however, end with the depletion of the civilians sacrificed by leaders for the lofty aims of securing the freedom of future, as-of-yet unborn persons. Notably, the idea that already existent young persons should be coerced to fight and die in such wars is often supported by the warmongers as well. The current British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, recently proposed that mandatory national service be reinstated, a clear sign of only one thing: that the British public has grown weary and wary of the endless regime-change wars waged and/or funded by the U.S. government and unerringly supported by its number one poodle ally, the United Kingdom. As a result of the willingness of the British government to deploy its military to serve the dubious purposes of the U.S. hegemon, the number of voluntary enlistees is naturally in decline.
Conscription, the use of coercive means to increase the number of persons to fight in wars, directly contradicts the very foundations of democracy. If democracy is rule by the people, then in order for a war to have any democratic legitimacy whatsoever (ignoring, as if it were somehow irrelevant, the “collateral damage” on the other side), it would have to be fought not only for but also by persons who support it. If it is not to be a contradiction in terms, a democratic war would involve only persons who freely agreed to sacrifice their own lives for a cause which they themselves deemed worth dying for. The fact that coercive threats of imprisonment or even death are used to enlist new soldiers shows that at least those persons, a clearly demarcated segment of the society, do not agree with what they are being ordered to do. A war does not become democratic because a majority of the persons too old to fight in it support sending their young compatriots to commit homicide and die in their stead.
This is the sense in which antiwar activists who exhort chicken hawks such as Senator Lindsey Graham and former Vice President Dick Cheney to go fight their own bloody wars are right. For in any conflict purported to be a “war of democracy,” only persons who freely choose to fight, kill and possibly die in it would be donning uniforms. By this criterion, neither World War I nor World War II were wars of democracy. All of the draft dodgers imprisoned or executed for evading military service were horribly wronged wherever and whenever this occurred.
Conscription is always floating about as a topic of debate in so-called democratic nations because of the list of wars capriciously waged with abstract and dubious aims, and incompetently executed, such as the series of state-inflicted mass homicides constitutive of the Global War on Terror. The prospect of active conscription is always looming in the background wherever more and more leaders, under the corrupting influence of military industry lobbyists, and seduced by “just war” rhetoric, exhibit a willingness to embroil their nations in war. Young persons understandably exhibit an increasing reluctance to serve in what since 1945 have proven to be their self-proclaimed democratic leaders’ nugatory and unnecessary wars.
Mandatory national service is a condition for citizenship in some countries, such as Israel, where at least some persons (the Israelis) can freely choose to leave or to substitute a form of civil service rather than agreeing to kill other human beings at the behest of their sanguinary leaders. In wars in progress, such as that in Ukraine, conscription is used in more of an ad hoc way, as it becomes clear that the forces are dwindling and must be replenished, if the war is to carry on. But the very fact that conscription has come to seem necessary to the leaders prosecuting a war itself belies their claims that what is at stake is democracy itself.
This antidemocratic dynamic is currently on display in Ukraine, where President Volodomyr Zelensky recently remained in power, effectively appointing himself monarch, after canceling the elections which would have given the people the opportunity to oust him, specifically on the grounds that they oppose his meatgrinder war with no end in sight—barring either negotiation or nuclear holocaust. In a true democracy, the people themselves would be able to debate and reject the government’s wars, but in a nation such as Ukraine, the president decides, based on “guidance” provided to him by the leaders of powerful and wealthier nations, above all, the United States and its sidekick, the United Kingdom, to carry out a war for so long as he is furnished with the matériel needed to keep the war machine up and running.
The problem for Zelensky is that no matter how many bombs, missiles, and planes are furnished to the government of Ukraine to bolster the purported defense of democracy, there will always be the need for personnel on the ground to deploy those means. When the voluntary members of the army are injured, exhausted, or dead, then the government, rather than taking a seat at the negotiation table, opts to create an artificial pool of soldiers by coercing able-bodied persons who are ill-inclined to participate, having already had the opportunity to volunteer to serve but declined to do so.
The primary support of both the war in Ukraine and the Israeli government’s assault on Gaza is based on a curtailed, amnesiac view of history, conjoined with the fiction that the states currently in existence are somehow eternal and sacred plots of land the borders of which may never be changed. In reality, states are artifacts, the perimeters of which were established by small committees of (usually) men who negotiated among themselves at some point to permit distinct states to exist. In order for a border war to be in any sense democratic, it would have to take into account the interests of all of the persons likely to be affected, not only the young people enlisted to fight, but also the hapless civilians forbidden from relocating, as in Gaza, and then summarily slaughtered by the government as it pursues its own agenda. The frequently recited refrain that it is necessary to continue to fund the commission of mass homicide in Ukraine and Israel in order to preserve democracy is self-contradictory and delusional, both a sham and a scam.
Laurie Calhoun is a Senior Fellow for The Libertarian Institute. She is the author of Questioning the COVID Company Line: Critical Thinking in Hysterical Times,We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age, War and Delusion: A Critical Examination, Theodicy: A Metaphilosophical Investigation, You Can Leave, Laminated Souls, and Philosophy Unmasked: A Skeptic’s Critique.
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 17.06.2024
Hollywood star George Clooney headlined the Biden campaign’s June 15 fundraiser alongside other celebrities, helping Joe Biden collect over $30 million. Clooney has long been in the vanguard of the Democratic party machine, including through his charity the Clooney Foundation for Justice (CFJ).
The ‘justice’ foundation set up by actor George Clooney and his human rights lawyer wife Amal is just a political slush-fund for globalist causes, Charles Ortel, Wall Street investigator, revealed to Sputnik.
Anna Neistat, the CFJ’s Docket Project legal director, told the US state-controlled Voice of America on May 30 that the organization was asking European countries to launch criminal proceedings against Russian journalists covering the Ukraine conflict.
Neistat said the NGO was deliberately not disclosing the names of targeted Russian reporters because it wanted them “to travel to other countries and be arrested there.”
However, Hollywood actor George Clooney, who founded the CFJ together with his wife Amal, denied on June 3 that his NGO was going after journalists. But the foundation’s apparent intent to suppress freedom of speech has already raised questions.
What is CFJ’s Agenda and Who is Behind It?
“Like the Clinton Foundation, this entity is a ‘public charity’,” Wall Street analyst and charity fraud expert Charles Ortel told Sputnik. “As such, it may not be controlled by one family and its board must be broadly representative of the public at large.”
Ortel noted that the foundation’s board was led by George and Amal Clooney as ‘co-presidents’.
“While substantial amounts are paid for ‘management’ to third parties, I suspect this is actually led primarily by Amal with George along for star power and fundraising,” he said.
“The Docket initiative does not provide details on revenues and expenses which are required,” continued Ortel. “The entity uses ‘cash’ accounting rather than required ‘accrual’ accounting — given its size — which is sloppy and more likely to create conditions prone to fraud.”
Ortel has previously run a private investigation into the Clinton Foundation’s alleged fraud — and sees similarities between the Clooneys’ and the Clintons’ charities.
The NGO’s major backers include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Co-Impact and the Ford Foundation. They promote a globalist liberal agenda and often cooperate with the Rockefeller Foundation and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. According to Influence Watch, the Clooneys also collaborate with the Obama Foundation.
Ranked first in the CFJ’s list of donors, the Gates Foundation has repeatedly drawn criticism over failed agricultural projects in Africa, Bill Gates’ ties with billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, participation in the Clinton Foundation’s supposed pay-to-play schemes, and the Gates-funded biotechnology company Oxitec’s apparent involvement in the Pentagon bioweapon program — as exposed by Russia’s Radiological, Chemical and Biological Defense (RCB) Troops in July 2023.
Clooney and Co Go After Conservatives
The CFJ and its founders have earned their membership of the club of liberal charities. During Donald Trump’s presidency, Clooney and other Hollywood celebrities were vocal in their criticism of the Republican and US conservatives in general.
In August 2017, the Clooney Foundation gave $1 million to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), known for attacking US conservative PACs as “hate groups.”
In March 2018, the SPLC went even so far as to accuse a left-wing Radio Sputnik podcast of pandering to white supremacists, but later retracted its claim and apologized.
Clooney wrote an op-ed for the Daily Beast in June 2020 in support of the controversial and highly-politicized Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, as part of what appeared to be a concerted effort by liberal Democrats and progressives prior to the November 2020 elections.
The same year, Clooney attacked conservative Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban while defending Hungarian-born US billionaire George Soros from criticisms from his home country.
The actor vehemently denied any connection to Soros or his son Alexander, claiming he had met the tycoon only once at a UN meeting and had bumped into the heir to his international NGO network at an event in Davos.
Coordinated Infowar in Ukraine
When the Ukraine conflict erupted, Hollywood celebrities including actor Sean Penn flocked to Ukraine to portray the Kiev regime and its leader Volodymyr Zelensky as Winston Churchill-style patriots and freedom fighters.
George Eliason, a US investigative journalist who lived and worked in Donbass at that time, told Sputnik then that the flocking of celebrities to Kiev was nothing short of a “coordinated infowar operation” on the part of the West.
The Clooney Foundation’s Docket Project has been gathering “evidence” of alleged “war crimes” by the Russian military in Ukraine since the beginning of the conflict.
But the NGO has overlooked the Kiev regime’s eight-year-long war against the civilian population of the Donbass and the secret torture chambers run by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), neo-Nazi Mirotvorets website’s kill list targeting Russian and foreign journalists, politicians and children, and many other abuses human rights and media freedom of speech by Ukrainian authorities.
In October 2023, the Hollywood Reporter revealed that HiddenLight Productions, co-founded by Hillary Clinton, Sam Branson and Chelsea Clinton, was working with the Clooneys on their effort to investigate Russian war crimes in Ukraine.
The series, with the working title “The Swallows Will Return”, will follow Neistat in her search for stories of how Russians “murdered”, “raped” and “tortured” Ukrainian civilians and their families in a bid to smear and de-humanize Russians as was done the ‘Bucha massacre” hoax.
The Bucha provocation in early April 2022 was used as a pretext to tear up the peace deal struck between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul. In December 2023, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov highlighted that no list of alleged victims in the town near Kiev had yet been published, and the incident had not been thoroughly investigated despite intensive media coverage in the spring of 2022.
The OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) said in response to a request from Sputnik that it is not in contact with the Ukrainian authorities on the issue of the list of ‘Bucha victims’.
The lack of interest from international organizations shows that the incident was a staged provocation carried out by the hands of the Kiev regime, a Russian Foreign Ministry source told Sputnik, comparing it to Nazi Germany’s attempt to blame its massacre of civilians at Nemmersdorf in late 1944 on the advancing Red Army.
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | June 13, 2024
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | June 13, 2024
Unlike COVID, the bird flu has one distinctly different feature that is threatening American food security. As nearly 100 million birds and counting have been culled, will governments use this tragic opportunity to push net zero goals?
Sputnik – 14.06.2024
NATO has sought to turn Ukraine into a staging ground and has done everything it could to pit nation against nation, Russian President Vladimir Putin said.
“There have been five, now six, rounds of NATO expansion. They tried to turn Ukraine into their staging ground, to make it anti-Russia. To achieve these goals, they invested money, resources, bought politicians and entire parties, rewrote history and educational programs, nurtured and cultivated neo-Nazi and radical groups. They did everything to undermine our state ties, to divide and pit our peoples against each other,” Putin said at a meeting at Russia’s Foreign Ministry in Moscow.
He emphasized that the Ukrainian crisis is not a conflict between two nations but a result of the West’s aggressive policy.
“Let me say this right off the bat, the crisis regarding Ukraine is not a conflict between two states, much less two peoples, caused by some problems between them… The matter is different, though. The roots of the conflict are not in bilateral relations. The events unfolding in Ukraine are a direct consequence of global and European developments at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century. It’s the West’s aggressive, unscrupulous, and absolutely reckless policy that has been pursued for all these years, long before the start of the special operation,” he explained.
Putin pointed out that if the conflict had been solely about disputes between Russia and Ukraine, then the mutual history, culture, spiritual values, and the millions of familial ties that both peoples share would have facilitated a fair resolution.
Russia had initially sought a peaceful resolution to the Ukrainian crisis, but all proposals put forth were ultimately rejected.
“We took the Minsk agreements seriously, hoping to resolve the situation through a peaceful process and international law,” he said. Moscow expected this would address the legitimate interests and demands of Donbass and secure the constitutional status of these regions, along with the fundamental rights of the people living there. However, he added, “But everything was ultimately rejected.”
Russia, in spite of seeking to resolve the Ukrainian crisis, was, nonetheless, deceived and misled.
“The ex-German Chancellor and former French President, essentially co-authors and, as it were, the guarantors of the Minsk agreements, later admitted that they never intended to fulfill them. They just needed to buy time to build up the Ukrainian armed forces, and to supply them with weapons and equipment. They simply deceived us once again,” Putin remarked.
Putin highlighted that that Russia did not start the war in Ukraine, rather, it was Kiev that launched military assaults against its own citizens who declared independence.
The Russian leader declared that those who assisted Ukraine in its punitive operation against Donbass are the aggressors.
“Russia did not initiate the conflict [with Ukraine]. That was the Kiev regime. After the residents from a part of Ukraine, in line with international law, had declared their independence, they [the Kiev regime] launched military operations and have kept them going ever since. This is an act of aggression, given that the right of these territories to declare independence has been recognized. Those who have supported the Kiev regime’s military machine all these years are accomplices of the aggressor,” he clarified.
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Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
National Archives of Australia
World War I
During World War I, for security reasons the Australian Government pursued a comprehensive internment policy against enemy aliens living in Australia.
Initially only those born in countries at war with Australia were classed as enemy aliens, but later this was expanded to include people of enemy nations who were naturalised British subjects, Australian-born descendants of migrants born in enemy nations and others who were thought to pose a threat to Australia’s security.
Australia interned almost 7,000 people during World War I, of whom about 4,500 were enemy aliens and British nationals of German ancestry already resident in Australia.
Records of World War I internment camps
World War II
During World War II, Australian authorities established internment camps for three reasons – to prevent residents from assisting Australia’s enemies, to appease public opinion and to house overseas internees sent to Australia for the duration of the war.
Unlike World War I, the initial aim of internment during the later conflict was to identify and intern those who posed a particular threat to the safety or defence of the country. As the war progressed, however, this policy changed and Japanese residents were interned en masse. In the later years of the war, Germans and Italians were also interned on the basis of nationality, particularly those living in the north of Australia. In all, just over 20 per cent of all Italians resident in Australia were interned. … continue
Aletho News If Americans Knew No Tricks Zone
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