Navalny and Handlers Lose the Plot… He Is a Convicted Felon on Probation
By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | January 2, 2021
Russia’s federal prison authorities were right to jolt Alexei Navalny this week by warning him to return immediately from Germany or else face a suspended sentence being made into jail time.
The “professional” opposition activist claims to be convalescing in Germany after he was allegedly poisoned by a Soviet-era nerve agent in August. Western news media dutifully repeat the claim that Navalny is “recuperating” in Germany after having survived an assassination plot by Kremlin agents. Navalny has personally accused Russia’s President Vladimir Putin of ordering the alleged hit.
Last week, a team of medics from the Berlin hospital where Navalny had been staying published a paper in The Lancet medical journal in which they claimed he had been poisoned with Novichok nerve agent. Their findings are dubious because the medics acknowledged the involvement of German military intelligence laboratories in conducting their analysis.
But one thing the German doctors did let slip was that a 55-day follow-up check on Navalny ascertained that he had made a “near-complete recovery”.
The Russian dissident figure was flown to Berlin on August 22, two days after he was treated in a hospital in Omsk, Russia. Thus, the German medical team are indicating – no doubt inadvertently – that Navalny’s health recovered nearly two months ago, if not before that.
That means there is no medical reason why he should remain at large in Germany. His claims of “convalescing” and the Western media’s indulgence of those claims are false, if the German doctors are correct about his “recovery”.
Despite Navalny’s arrogant disdain for Russian state laws, he is nevertheless answerable to those authorities as a citizen. While in Germany he was on probation for a suspended jail sentence concerning a fraud conviction in 2014. His so-called Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) has a checkered history of shady financing, from allegations of foreign funding by the U.S. State Department to charges of embezzling millions of dollars. Ironically, the blogger and media activist produces slick programs accusing the Russian government of corruption.
In any case, under the laws of the Russian Federation, the 44-year-old Navalny was on probation during the past four months of his stay in Germany. For the last two months, he is in good health, according to his German doctors. So there are no grounds for why he should abscond from Russian territory and evade the laws for which he is answerable.
Not only is Navalny living as if he above the law, he has also shown flagrant contempt for the Russian authorities.
Last week, he published a video on his website claiming that he had pranked a named member of Russia’s security service, the FSB, into admitting that agents had poisoned him while he was visiting the Siberian city of Tomsk on August 20. He was later flown in an emergency to Omsk where he was treated after having apparently fallen ill onboard a flight to Moscow.
The FSB dismissed Navalny’s prank telephone claim as a “deep fake”. The Russian doctors who treated him in Omsk – and who probably saved his life – have repeatedly stated that their tests showed there was no poison in Navalny’s body, and specifically no traces of nerve agent. They said his illness was due to a metabolic disorder. Perhaps self-induced as a ruse to later transfer to Germany?
The transcript of Navalny’s purported prank call to the FSB agent reads like a comic set-up. Posing as a senior member of Russia’s national security council, Navalny affects to bully the supposed agent as if he is a pathetic stooge.
A telling segment is where the self-styled super sleuth fishes for compliments about his own character from the purported FSB man, betraying the narcissism of a megalomaniac.
Again, incredibly, we are expected to believe that someone who had a near-death experience with a lethal nerve poison and who is “convalescing” still in Germany somehow managed to find the energy and mental reserves to pull off a daring 45-minute telephone sting.
If Navalny is fit enough to participate in such practical jokes – regardless of their credibility – then he is surely fit enough to abide by Russian laws and respect his probation terms. As the Russian Federal Prison Service stated this week: “The convicted man is not fulfilling all of the obligations placed on him by the court, and is evading the supervision of the Criminal Inspectorate.”
One gets the unerring impression that Navalny and his foreign handlers have become so self-intoxicated with hubris that they are blind to their own absurd implausibilities.
Why was he permitted to fly by air ambulance to Berlin in the first place if the Russian authorities had evil designs against him?
While there, as a guest of the German government, Navalny has wildly accused President Putin of ordering his alleged assassination. The European governments have subsequently and rashly imposed sanctions on Russia in support of Navalny’s unfounded claims. Then we have the media activist mounting further provocations parlayed into even more outlandish accusations against President Putin and the Kremlin.
All the while there has been no evidence of poisoning presented to support these claims, other than unverifiable assertions by German doctors working with German military intelligence labs, as well as two other NATO laboratories and the Organization for the Prohibition on Chemical Weapons. All of them including the OPCW (the latter compromised over complicity in NATO false-flag provocations in Syria) have refused to share their analytical data and samples with Russia, and yet they are demanding that Moscow launch a criminal investigation into the Navalny case.
The abdication by European governments of due process and of respect for Russian state laws, its government, and its president is astounding. They are indulging a foreign-sponsored gadfly as if he is the sovereign representative of the Russian Federation.
Navalny and his foreign allies have lost the plot in their own telling of an alleged assassination plot.
First things first: he is a convicted felon who is answerable to Russian law. Pushing false flags and slanderous falsehoods from abroad with the intent of damaging Russia’s sovereignty is an abuse of his rights.
Arrogant and overindulged Navalny is patently incapable of even understanding his obligations under law as a Russian citizen. He evidently feels above the law, like many of his Western backers. That’s why Russia is right to tell him to put up or shut up.
To Promote Climate Alarm, Good News Is Regularly Portrayed as a Disaster
By H. Sterling Burnett | Watts Up With that? | January 1, 2021
Dishonesty has seemingly become the hallmark of reporting on climate research. In 2020, the dishonesty reached new heights as multiple studies which actually presented (or that could have presented) good news, were portrayed by the researchers involved and media hacks covering them as if they showed purported human-caused climate change was causing various disasters. The truth is, time and again, the data—often including data provided by the studies—refutes the claimed climate disaster, instead showing the environment getting better. Below I’ll deconstruct a few examples of this fearmongering habit.
Recently, The Guardian and other media outlets have claimed an updated atlas of bird habitats shows global warming is “pushing” birds further north. The Guardian’s story would lead one to believe birds en masse are being forced out of shrinking natural habitats into unsuitable locations by climate change. This is not true. As The Heartland Institute’s President James Taylor wrote in a Climate Realism post responding to The Guardian’s article, the atlas itself tells a completely different story.
“Rather than ‘pushing’ birds out of their normal ranges and forcing them north, birds are benefiting from a warming climate by expanding their overall ranges—thriving in new, northern regions while still flourishing in southern regions as well. The result of climate change is not a negative ‘pushing’ of birds out of their habitat, but rather birds enjoying larger habitat ranges, while adding to biological diversity in their new ranges.”
Indeed, despite the misleading, alarm-raising, title of the story, “Atlas reveals birds pushed further north amid climate crisis,” if you dig deeper into the story, The Guardian admitted the atlas records: “Overall, 35 percent of birds increased their breeding range, 25 percent contracted their breeding range and the rest did not show any change, or the trend is unknown.” This is good news since, as the newspaper acknowledged, according to the atlas, “Generally, if a species is present in more areas it is less likely to go extinct.”
Another scary, but demonstrably untrue, climate-alarm narrative pushed this year came in the form of dozens, if not hundreds, of stories asserting climate change (supposedly of human origin) is responsible for an increase in the number and severity of both hurricanes and wildfires. An example of this flawed analysis/bad-reporting combo can be seen in a story published by Bloomberg titled, “Climate Change Led to Record Insurance Payouts in 2020.”
Bloomberg writes, “Christian Aid, the relief arm of 41 churches in the U.K. and Ireland, ranked the 15 most destructive climate disasters of the year based on insurance losses.” Christian Aid’s study, which The Guardian also covered as if it were divinely inspired revealed truth, claims the world’s 10 costliest weather disasters of 2020 alone accrued $150 billion in damages, with the total figure for all climate change related disasters setting new records in 2020. In particular, Christian Aid’s study blamed climate-change-exacerbated wildfires and hurricanes for the increased damages and higher insurance payouts. Lo and behold, once again, real-world data on wildfires and hurricanes tells a different story, but the good news was ignored.
Concerning wildfires, long-term data show the number of and acreage consumed by wildfires has declined dramatically over the past century. Just looking at 2020, the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service reports “that 2020 was one of the lowest years for active fires globally.”
Indeed, NASA reports on a recent study in Science which found, “[g]lobally, the total acreage burned by fires each year declined by 24 percent between 1998 and 2015. In total, the global amount of area burned annually has declined by more than 540,000 square miles, from 1.9 million square miles in the early part of last century to 1.4 million square miles today.”
Wildfires have declined sharply over the course of the past century in the United States, as well. As reported in Climate at a Glance: Wildfires, long-term data from the U.S. National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) show wildfires have declined in number and severity since the early 1900s. Assessing data on U.S. wildfires from as far back as 1926, NIFC reports the numbers of acres burned is far less now than it was throughout the early 20th century, with the current acres burned running just one-fourth to one-fifth of the amount of land that typically burned in the 1930s.
Data on hurricanes is equally clear and compelling: Despite 2020’s busy hurricane season, contrary to The Guardian’s claims—and as reported in an earlier Climate Realism article—it is quite possible 2020 did not set a record for Atlantic hurricanes. Before 1950, hurricane tracking was relatively primitive and sparse and it was uncommon to name a storm unless it made landfall somewhere.
In addition, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports there is, “only low confidence for the attribution of any detectable changes in tropical cyclone activity to anthropogenic influences.” And data from the National Hurricane Center (NHC), as Climate at a Glance: Hurricanes notes, show that “The United States recently went more than a decade (2005 through 2017) without a major hurricane measuring Category 3 or higher, which is the longest such period in recorded history. The United States also recently experienced the fewest number of hurricane strikes in any eight-year period (2009 through 2017) in recorded history.”
The Christian Aid study focuses on the possibly record-breaking costs of 2020’s weather related natural disasters. But in doing so it ignores what Bjorn Lomborg refers to in his book, False Alarm, as the “expanding bulls-eye effect.” The increased costs of natural disasters in recent decades is due to communities increasingly expanding into areas historically prone to natural disasters—such as flood plains, forests, and coastal areas, erecting increasingly expensive structures and infrastructure there. As a result, when extreme weather events strike, more and more expensive property is destroyed. Accordingly, the increasing costs of natural disasters stem not from human-caused climate change, but is rather a directly measurable anthropogenic factor: the rise in the number and value of assets placed in the bullseye as a result of demographic shifts in where people live and the lifestyles they pursue.
Another important “good news” story, climate alarmists tried to portray as a tragedy in 2020 can be found in the numerous news stories covering a World Bank report which claims water scarcity in the Middle East—caused by human induced climate change—threatens crop production. Once again, the authors of the World Bank report and the leftist media outlets publicizing it couldn’t be bothered to check the actual data. If they had done so, they would have found crop production in the Middle Eastern countries discussed in the report was booming, in large part due to the carbon dioxide fertilization effect.
The World Bank asserts water scarcity caused by climate change will reduce farm production in Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey, in particular. In point of fact, data show that, despite considerable political turmoil and ongoing conflicts in the region, the naturally arid Middle East has seen its crop production grow as the earth has modestly warmed.
Data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization show during the period of modest warming since 1989:
· Cereal crop production in Iraq increased 91 percent, even as the acreage being harvested fell 5 percent.
· Cereal crop production in Iran increased 187 percent, while the acreage harvested increased by just 2.6 percent.
· Cereal Crop production in Jordan increased 15 percent, even as the acreage harvested declined 30 percent.
· Cereal Crop production in Lebanon increased 115 percent, while acreage harvested increased 30 percent.
· Cereal Crop production in Syria increased 22 percent, even as acreage harvested declined 66 percent.
· Cereal Crop production in Turkey increased 46 percent, even though acreage harvested declined 19 percent.
That Middle Eastern countries have increased crop production—even as many of them have been embroiled in internal political strife, outright civil warfare, and external conflicts—is clearly good news. It is not evidence of a climate crisis.
Global warming lengthens growing seasons, reduces frost events, and makes more land suitable for crop production. Also, carbon dioxide is an aerial fertilizer for plant life. In addition, crops use water more efficiently under conditions of higher carbon dioxide, losing less water through transpiration. The latter fact should have allayed the World Bank’s concern about climate change-induced water shortages leading to crop failure.
Sadly, for claim after claim, power hungry bureaucrats and leftist mainstream media organizations embrace unsubstantiated speculations that various climate disasters are occurring—while ignoring facts indicating no such climate catastrophes are in the offing. I can only speculate they do this because good news does not encourage a stampede towards authoritarian climate change policies giving elites control over businesses and peoples’ lives.
SOURCES: Climate Realism; The Guardian; Phys.org; Climate Realism; World Bank; Bloomberg; Food and Agriculture Organization
10 Facts From the UK Government Pfizer Vaccine Guidance that Promote “Vaccine Hesitancy”
By Johnny Vedmore |
Unlimited Hangout| December 29, 2020
Official government guidance has been released in the United Kingdom to assist healthcare professionals in administering the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine BNT162b2. While the UK government goes to war against supposed misinformation, the official narrative is clearly based on very little to no supporting data from incomplete clinical trials. This article examines the document “Reg 174 Information for UK Healthcare Professionals” and narratives being pushed in the mainstream media that directly contradict that document.
Healthcare professionals globally have begun the controversial campaign to vaccinate large swathes of their respective populations with various experimental medical products. The vanguard of the mainstream pro-vax extremists have been busy enacting mass censorship tactics and committing blatant acts of digital book burning on a scale never before seen in the internet era. So-called “trusted sources” have become indistinguishable from the state-run media apparatus of your bog-standard dictatorship with the usual MSM outlets working non-stop to skew any information that threatens their hyper-aggressive official narrative. Throughout 2020, our basic civil liberties have been quickly stripped away by countless unelected officials from a wide array of unaccountable global power structures, all of them connected to a small group of elites who are sitting aloft the COVID-19 money train and using the heavily exaggerated epidemic to achieve their own long term goals.
Any useful data, scientific paper, or other credible research contradicting the official narrative is being purposely hidden from view. Too many uncomfortable, yet ultimately necessary, questions for vaccine companies such as Moderna, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, and their many collaborators, are being heavily censored by those pushing their own various COVID-related agendas. The promised “war on truth” is in full swing throughout all nations globally and their respective state media machines are nearly all towing their official government lines. Mainstream talk shows and podcasts worldwide are also in lockstep, and have often been caught publicly guilt-tripping their easily swayed audiences to help push them deeper into queues for mass medical trials for vaccines and other products that lack research studies on their long term effects. This inconvenient lack of completed research will not stop the money men from pumping this milky white liquid into the arms of hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
At this point in the process, the medical professionals who are administering these heavily rushed vaccines are being given the opportunity to defer responsibility and accountability for their actions to the government’s vaccine-related guidance. As the Stanley Milgram experiments have proven, when the option to defer responsibility is present, then roughly 65% of participants will follow the orders they have received regardless of the risk to their subjects. In 1974, Stanley Milgram detailed the behaviour of his participants in his famous study and suggested that people have two basic states of behaviour when they are in a social situation: “The autonomous state”, where people direct their own actions and ultimately take responsibility for the results of those actions and “the agentic state”, where people allow others to direct their actions and then pass off the responsibility for the consequences to the person giving orders, in essence acting as agents of another person’s will.
The majority of the people who are injecting these experimental drugs into their trusting patients are not likely to question the official guidance, as the overwhelming majority will often simply be in an agentic state. Thus, it should be in the best interest of anyone thinking of receiving an mRNA vaccine to first study the guidance offered by the various government sources. And, when one does study the official guidance given to healthcare professionals, one will find many different glaring contradictions and shocking admissions.
While all official bodies are attacking any inconvenient fact as misinformation, they are all busy defrauding the global population with their own misinformation campaigns that surely would have inspired awe in the likes of Joseph Stalin. So, let’s study their own words and examine the NHS guidance given to the medical professionals in the UK for the administration of the recently approved Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
An Introduction to Reg 174 Information for UK Healthcare Professionals (#1-4)
The short ten page official guidance being given to UK healthcare professionals contains many interesting admissions. In fact, the document, released in early December 2020 to accompany the vaccine rollout, appears to advise healthcare practitioners not to risk giving the experimental injection to the majority of the people who are due to receive the vaccine, particularly “prioritized” populations. Those in charge are pushing to vaccinate as much of the population as possible, before any critical public questions can be asked and answered, a situation that has left the safety and ethics of the vaccination campaign questionable at best and inhumane at worst.
In going through the Reg 174 document, it becomes very clear that there are many issues and recommendations that are being hidden from the general public. Here are ten of the most notable causes for concern contained within the official UK guidance document.
The authorisation to produce and supply this experimental vaccine in the UK was given by the UK Department of Health and Social Care, led by Matt Hancock – the UK Secretary of Health, and also by the Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). While the MHRA is part funded by the Department of Health and Social Care for the regulation of medical devices, the costs of medicine regulations are met through fees paid by the pharmaceutical industry. The agency’s financial reliance on Big Pharma has led to suggestions by some Members of the UK Parliament that the MHRA is not actually independent. Being in associated roles at the MHRA since 1985, June Raine was officially appointed as CEO in September 2019 and had previously been the Director of Vigilance and Risk Management in the Medicines Division.
2. The official Phase III safety trials will not be completed until 2023
Section 1 of the medical guidance clearly states that this vaccine guidance refers specifically to the “Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 concentrate for solution for injection.” On 2 December 2020, the MHRA became the first medicines regulator in history to approve an mRNA vaccine for human use, granting emergency authorisation for BioNTech and Pfizer’s BNT162b2 COVID-19 vaccine for widespread use only a week after its first Phase III eight-week trial had finished. However, the Phase III trials for BNT162b2 will not actually be fully completed until January 2023 meaning that, if you’re ready to take the vaccine now, then you should be informed that the safety trials for these experimental vaccines have at least two more years before the results are in. Regardless of that fact, Raine told reporters “no corners have been cut in approving it” and that “the benefits outweigh any risk”.
3. Will you be truly “protected” from COVID-19?
The official guidance clearly states that individuals may not be protected until at least 7 days after their second dose of the vaccine. This fact has again been ignored by various reckless pro-vax media campaigns where powerful elites such as Tony Blair have contradicted this specific recommendation, suggesting recently in an interview that people should only be given a single dose of any vaccine. Mr Blair told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that “Does the first dose give you substantial immunity, and by that I mean over 50 percent effectiveness? If it does, there is a very strong case for not, as it were, holding back doses of the vaccine.” Blair, writing in the Independent, stated that the current vaccination strategy needed to be “altered and radically accelerated”. In responding to Blair’s call for radical acceleration, Professor Wendy Barclay, chair of virology at Imperial College London and member of the UK government’s NERVTAG, said: “I think that the issue with [Mr Blair’s suggestion] is that the vaccine is on the basis of being given in two doses, and the efficacy is on that basis.” Barclay went on to point out that “To change at that point, one would have to see a lot more analysis coming out from perhaps the clinical trial data.”
It is very important to pay attention to the wording of Reg 174 because the Pfizer vaccine purportedly boosts the immune system, rather than stopping the transmission of the virus. This would suggest that you will not be fully “protected” from COVID-19 and that you will still be able to catch the virus and could still suffer complications. The official guidance also states that “Immunocompromised persons, including individuals receiving immunosuppressant therapy, may have a diminished immune response to the vaccine,” with the guidance admitting “No data are available about concomitant use of Immunosuppressants.”
Reg 174 goes on to make this most pertinent of points when it states “As with any vaccine, vaccination with COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 may not protect all vaccine recipients.” The guidance also states clearly that “administration of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 should be postponed in individuals suffering from acute severe febrile illness and that individuals receiving anticoagulant therapy or those with a bleeding disorder that would contraindicate intramuscular injection, should not be given the vaccine unless the potential benefit clearly outweighs the risk.”
4. The complicated multistage dilution and thawing process of the vaccine vials opens the major possibility of human error
In investigating the official instructions for the vaccine’s administration, we can clearly see that there are plenty of opportunities for potential human error. Section 2 of this document describes the distributed vaccine as coming in “a multidose vial and must be diluted before use.” Confirming that each vial contains 0.45 ml (which equates to 5 doses of 30 micrograms) of BNT162b2 RNA embedded in lipid nanoparticles. The delicate preparation process will be repeated 100s of millions of times globally and the multidose vial will be stored frozen and must be thawed prior to dilution. The guidance describes the process for preparing the frozen vials stating that they should be transferred to temperatures of between 2 °C to 8 °C to thaw or, alternatively, the frozen vials may also be thawed for 30 minutes at temperatures up to 25 °C for immediate use. Once thawed, the undiluted vaccine can be stored for up to 5 days at 2 °C to 8 °C, and up to 2 hours at temperatures up to 25 °C. The thawed vial must then come to room temperature and be gently inverted 10 times prior to dilution.
Some of the featured diagrams and instructions found in Reg 174
The complicated thawing and dilution process will obviously leave room for individual error. Healthcare practitioners are also warned not to shake the vials and instead to gently turn them 10 times. Prior to dilution, the vaccine should present as an off-white solution with no particulates visible. The guidance states that you must discard the vaccine if particulates or discolouration are present. The thawed vaccine must be diluted in its original vial with 1.8 mL sodium chloride 9 mg/mL (0.9%) solution for injection, using a 21 gauge or narrower needle and aseptic techniques and this complex, multistage process isn’t completed there.
The healthcare professional should then equalise vial pressure before removing the needle from the vial by withdrawing 1.8 mL of air into the empty diluent syringe. Then they should gently invert the diluted solution 10 times, again being careful not to shake the solution. The official guidance continues: “The diluted vials should be marked with the dilution date and time and stored between 2 °C to 25 °C. After dilution, the vial contains 5 doses of 0.3 mL.” The healthcare professionals are then told to “withdraw the required 0.3 mL dose of diluted vaccine using a sterile needle and syringe and discard any unused vaccine within 6 hours after dilution.”
The instructions must be followed precisely to safely administer the mRNA vaccine; there are no data available on potential consequences for the vaccine recipient if anything goes wrong during this tedious and complex multistage process. On 19 December 2020, video emerged of an official drive-thru vaccination hub which had begun operating out of a car park of Hyde Leisure Centre in Greater Manchester. The video in question, shared by No Comment TV on YouTube, shows people being vaccinated outdoors at Hyde Leisure Centre by gloveless staff and in less than sterile conditions. In an article in the Manchester Evening News four days prior to the videos release the local news site stated that “The first batch of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine arrives in the borough on Tuesday, with vaccinations starting at Hyde Leisure Centre on Wednesday, December 15.”
No Data Available (#5-10)
When reading Reg 174, you will soon notice a recurring theme throughout the document. The guidance clearly states on multiple occasions that there are no data available concerning some of the most important questions surrounding the mRNA vaccine. As previously noted, the actual Phase III section of the safety trials will not be completed until January 2023, meaning that two years of trials are still to be run before the vaccine can be confirmed as safe, effective and ethical.
5. The safety and efficacy of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 in children under 16 years of age have not yet been established
Although the guidance states that the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine has not been established in children, it doesn’t mean that children have not been included within the studies. In fact, in the official Pfizer study entitled “Protocol C4591001”, one of the two main study groups included children as young as 12 years old. The inclusion of children in trials but not the guidance raises the important question, why were children included in the trial? If the vaccine is not to be given to those under the age of 16 years old, then why include children as young as 12 in the trials for an experimental vaccine technology never before authorised for use in humans?
The mainstream media, instead of raising concerns about the involvement of children in the Pfizer clinical trials, have been fully supportive of the move to test experimental pharmaceuticals on minors. CNN reported on children as young as 12 being involved in trials in an October 2020 article entitled “This 12-year-old is happy to be testing a Covid-19 vaccine” while Microsoft News recently announced that “China begins Covid test trials on children as young as age three.”
6. No data are available on the use of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 in persons that have previously received a full or partial vaccine series with another COVID-19 vaccine
We are currently witnessing the very first of many tailor-made vaccines being rolled out for general use, so don’t expect the COVID-19 jabs to be the only vaccines coming our way. With a 20 to 1 return on investment on many of these new technologies, most pharmaceutical giants will surely be lobbying governments across the globe for the next “necessary” vaccination program. The idea of multiple COVID-19 vaccinations throughout the year is already being presented as a very possible outcome for the future of humanity. Yet, no studies have been completed showing the risk of taking different types of vaccines. There have also been suggestions that people will have to have the same vaccine that they had previously taken every six months or so. This will leave Astrazeneca, Pfizer and Moderna picking up repeat vaccine contracts worth billions in secured future revenue before there are any real data on the results of the vaccines.
7. No interaction studies have been performed and there are no, or a limited amount of, data from the use of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2
Admissions like these should be a cause for concern for anybody reading the official guidance. While officials and carefully chosen “trusted sources” are telling you that “no corners have been cut” in the race to approve these vaccines, it is also true that no full length studies have been completed either. These two facts are juxtaposed and obviously contradict the official narrative that is being thrust upon the general public by all of those involved.
It is clear that the officials have no real data on what will happen next and that there is a tsunami of ethical questions that are not being answered. In the absence of data, there will be speculation.
8. It is unknown whether COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 is excreted in human milk and It is unknown whether COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 has an impact on fertility
It is vital to note the potential dangers posed by the BNT162b2 to unborn and newborn babies as well as the reproductive organs in general. There are so many parts of the Pfizer/BioNTech clinical trials that have not yet been completed. Dr. Peter Klatsky, the Director of Fertility Preservation at the Bay Area’s Spring Fertility, talking about the coming animal trials which are to be performed over the coming months was quoted in SFGate as saying, “It will reassure me an awful lot if the protein expression is not seen on the placenta. That the mRNA isn’t making it to the placenta in animals,” he said. “I don’t expect to see any.” The article goes on to explain that it will be about another 9 months until the data has been collected and analyzed.
Section 4.6 of the official guidance recommends pregnant women should not recieve the BNT162b2 vaccine
Big names in mainstream media have also been caught recklessly promoting the vaccine to pregnant women, such as Karen Weintraub writing for USA Today, whose recent article quickly states, “Although there are very little data on how pregnant and nursing mothers will respond to a COVID-19 vaccine, professional organizations and individual doctors say the benefits are very likely to outweigh the risks.” Even though the clinical trials intentionally excluded pregnant women, Weintraub went on to state that “23 women in the Pfizer-BioNTech trial and 13 in Moderna’s became pregnant during the trial.”
While the UK’s official guidance is left sounding ambiguous, on the European continent, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) states that “the Pfizer vaccine should be considered on a case by case basis for pregnant women”, but they also reserve the right to alter the guidance if more data becomes available. It seems there is no longer any erring on the side of caution with some regulators when it comes to the COVID-19 vaccinations.
9. Non-clinical data reveal no special hazard for humans based on a conventional study of repeat dose toxicity but animal studies into potential toxicity to reproduction and development have not been completed
Animal studies have not been completed and, as referred to in the previous section, the data on those animal trials will not be available for another 9 months. It is, of course, a very rare decision to approve an experimental medical technology before any animal studies have been completed. This should be a great cause for concern for any free thinking man or woman. The fact that they have had to use what they refer to as “non-clinical” data in these studies is also in conflict with the idea that the trials were conducted to the highest professional standard. The document also fails to clearly define what non-clinical data actually means.
10. In the absence of compatibility studies, this medicinal product must not be mixed with other medicinal products
Possibly the most fascinating admission in the entire document is the absence of any compatibility studies when somebody is given the vaccine while on any other medication or medical treatment. The guidance clearly states “this medicinal product should not be mixed with other medical products.” This completely jaw dropping sentence will lead many to assume that if you are on any medication at all, then you shouldn’t be given the vaccine. Whether this refers to the mixing of other medical properties directly together with the vaccine, or simultaneous dosing of any other medical product is unclear from the official guidance.
The Mail Online and The Guardian reported in 2019 that a staggering 1 in 4 people in England – nearly 12 million people – were taking what was described as “addictive” prescription medicines such as antidepressants, sleeping pills and opioid painkillers, saying that “the NHS must take action”. Those statistics throw into question the mass rollout of a vaccination with no compatability studies. This makes the fact that elderly care home residents, followed by those aged over 80, will be the first to recieve the experimental Pfizer vaccine an extremely risky strategy. Also in 2019, Age UK reported that nearly 2 million older people were on more that 7 prescription medicines and were at “risk of side effects that are severe in some cases, and occasionally even life threatening.” This worrying issue has been barely reported by the “trusted news sources”.
A Conclusive Lack of Real Data
After examining the official guidance, one fact becomes glaringly obvious — there is little to no data on the official Pfizer vaccine in key areas. In the clinical trials, children as young as 12 years old were used as unnecessary guinea pigs. There also wasn’t enough care taken to avoid pregnant women being involved in the initial clinical trials and under the cover of unyielding and uneducated mainstream propaganda, the safety of some of the most vulnerable people involved in the vaccine trials have been ignored by Pfizer and the politicians who have successfully pushed for the public vaccination campaign to essentially replace mass clinical trials. The stage has been set for a potential disaster on an unimaginable scale. It isn’t only the participants of the trials who are risking their health for the sake of big pharmaceutical companies’ hyperinflated profit margin, but it is also the medical professionals who could be risking their futures by collaborating in these risky experimental trials, which will certainly see many people dead and irreversibly injured.
In one section of Reg 174, the Big Pharma giant lays out the risk to people’s health from the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. The most common adverse reaction in participants 16 years of age and older was pain at the injection site, which affected a massive 80% of those taking part in the Pfizer trials. Fatigue came a close second with 60% of trial participants becoming sluggish and tired. Half of those involved in the studies suffered from a headache as the experimental vaccine went to work while myalgia was experienced by 30% of vaccine recipients, though the results do not indicate whether the myalgia was acute (short-term) or chronic (long-term). Almost a third of participants came down with chills, while just under 1 in 5 people suffered from arthralgia (joint pain) and 1 in 10 from pyrexia (increased body temperature).
Adverse reactions reported in clinical trials are listed in the study in decreasing order of frequency and seriousness. Just under 1 in 10 people who take the vaccine will suffer from the very common and common adverse reactions referred to in the latter paragraph, such as headaches, myalgia and chills, but the more serious issues are classified as uncommon – including Lymphadenopathy (which causes swollen or enlarged lymph nodes) and nervous system disorders – which may affect up to 1 in 100 people. Rare adverse reactions that could affect up to 1 in 1000 people and very rare adverse reactions that would affect less than 1 in 10,000 of the vaccine recipients were not included in Pfizer’s self-reported safety information. It has obviously been decided that this information should be kept out of the public domain as much as possible to avoid any further vaccine hesitancy.
Not only does the official guidance actively hide the types of rare and very rare adverse effects, but they have also been leaving out some of the adverse reactions reported during the clinical trials. As I write this, the Reg 174 guidance for healthcare professionals is on version 10.1 of the document and, since its release, they have yet to admit to the potential of a certain uncommon adverse reaction to the vaccine being a specific nervous system disorder. Structural nervous system disorders include brain or spinal cord injury, Bell’s palsy, cervical spondylosis, carpal tunnel syndrome, brain or spinal cord tumors, peripheral neuropathy, and Guillain-Barré syndrome. However, previous versions of the guidance gives no clue as to what type of nervous system disorders they were referring to. However, recent articles in the USA Today, heavily promoted by the Microsoft Network, suggested that the Bell’s palsy some people came down with in the vaccine trials wasn’t related to the Pfizer jab. The article states that on Dec. 10, the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research held the 162nd meeting of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee to discuss the emergency use authorization of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. The USA Today piece even goes on to admit that , “a 53-page briefing noted that there had been four cases of Bell’s palsy among the vaccinated group and none among the placebo group.”
Bell’s palsy causes drooping facial muscles similar to the effects of a stroke, image source PTHealth.com
Even though Miriam Fauzia, who wrote the USA Today piece, claims that the Bell’s palsy was not related to the experimental Pfizer vaccine, the 53-page briefing she sources clearly states, “Among non-serious unsolicited adverse events, there was a numerical imbalance of four cases of Bell’s palsy in the vaccine group compared with no cases in the placebo group, though the four cases in the vaccine group do not represent a frequency above that expected in the general population.” While it is true that 1 to 4 people in 10,000 will develop Bell’s palsy within the general population, it should be noted that the 4 cases in the vaccine trials and none in the placebo group makes for a statistical anomoly that must be examined more thoroughly. Instead, the mainstream media moved quickly to discredit the Bell’s palsy links to the Pfizer vaccine using various misleading tactics to achieve their aims.
Many mainstream outlets were caught spouting the same misleading information with articles entitled “Why you shouldn’t worry about a connection between Bell’s palsy and COVID-19 vaccines,” from Business Insider and a Reuters article from 14 December 2020 entitled, “Fact check: Photo does not show three recipients of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine that developed Bell’s palsy.”
In the case of the Reuters article, which is described as written by “Reuters Staff” rather than a specific journalist, the focus was not on the four Pfizer clinical trial participants who developed Bell’s palsy but instead the article discredits a random post on social media of three people with Bell’s palsy unconnected to the Pfizer vaccine. These type of misinforming mainstream media articles are commonly found to be using obvious fallacies to mislead their readership and with no individual taking responsibility for writing the misinforming piece, a trick repeated by many other media companies complicit with the official narrative. The Reuters article even goes on to admit that: “According to the FDA’s briefing document dated December 10, Bell’s palsy was reported in four vaccine participants and none in the placebo group, out of the 44,000 total participants of the late-stage vaccine trial.” However, the title of the Reuters article would mislead even some of the most keen eyed observers.
The mainstream media has been creating a flood of misleading stories, but it appears as though they have been given carte blanche to continue to do so, probably because they are sticking so tightly to the official narrative. It’s a narrative that is thick with irony, for it is the “trusted sources” who are being caught systematically misleading the general population again and again while also declaring a propaganda war against “fake news”.
The official guidance noted in Reg 174 doesn’t only highlight the serious lack of real data gained from Pfizer’s clinical trials for its Covid-19 vaccine so far, but it also exposes the wealthy medical professionals involved in these experimental vaccine development programs as complacent, reckless and very naive. It’s no secret that children are, more often than not, incapable of giving informed legal consent for such a risky and unethical enterprise. But the pro-vax extremists are using every tactic to coerce and manipulate children and their guardians into becoming human guinea pigs for Big Pharma. Pregnant women are also treated as acceptable collateral damage to advance the new science of gene, mRNA and DNA manipulation, a science and technology that pushes a sinister transhumanist agenda.
Don’t be fooled by the carefully worded vacuous celebrities, self-serving politicians, Big Pharma, and the mainstream medias authoritarian style misinformation campaigns. Keep your humanity intact and read their own words. The government guidance to healthcare professionals clearly states on multiple occasions that there are “no data available”.
Johnny Vedmore is a completely independent investigative journalist and musician from Cardiff, Wales. His work aims to expose the powerful people who are overlooked by other journalists and bring new information to his readers. If you require help, or have a tip for Johnny, then get in touch via johnnyvedmore.com or by reaching out to johnnyvedmore@gmail.com
Emergency Hospitals Dismantled Despite Claim Hospitalisations Worse Than ‘First Wave’
The hospitals have been almost completely empty for the duration of the health crisis
By Steve Watson | Summit News | December 29, 2020
A report has confirmed that emergency hospitals in the UK are being dismantled and removed, despite government claims that hospitalisations from coronavirus have hit a level HIGHER than they were during the first wave of the pandemic back in March and April.
The reports in the Daily Mail and the London Telegraph note that the facilities, known as ‘Nightingale hospitals’, set up at huge conference centres and other warehouse spaces are “being quietly taken apart” because there are not enough staff to run them.
Despite the seven facilities throughout the UK costing as much as £220million to set up and equip, the hospitals have been almost completely empty for the duration of the health crisis.
Indeed, just 57 Covid-19 patients were admitted to NHS Nightingale London between April and the start of May, according to Department of Health records. The facility was then put back into ‘standby’, and left empty.
The report states that the ExCeL Centre, which hosts the London facility, has confirmed that 90 per cent of the hospital has already been removed, including stripping 4000 beds and hundreds of additional of ventilators.
Videos of the facilities being dismantled first surfaced in the Summer:
The government has repeatedly pushed the narrative that the lockdowns have been necessary to ‘protect the NHS’, yet now it is taking apart the hospitals it says were set up to alleviate the strain.
It has been claimed that a third of major hospital trusts in England are now experiencing more Covid-19 patients than at the peak of the first wave. In the East and South West, more than half of all hospitals say they have more patients now than earlier in the year.
National Health Service data claims that over 20,000 beds are now occupied by COVID patients, up from 17,700 recorded last week, and surpassing the almost 19,000 recorded in mid April.
Throughout the crisis, we have been told that hospitals are on the brink of being overwhelmed, yet reports have continued to emerge suggesting that hospitals are up to four times emptier than usual.
Despite the claims that there are not enough NHS staff to man the facilities, there has been a resurgence of nurses posting dancing tik-tok videos:
France Accused of ‘Hysteria Over COVID Variant’ After Nearly 15,000 Truckers Tested Negative
21st Century Wire | December 29, 2020
Before Christmas, sensational reports of a new COVID “variant” in the UK prompted European neighbors France, Netherlands and Belgium – to close their international borders for fear of a dangerous new viral wave. As a result, ferries were unable to leave the Port of Dover until Christmas morning, with some 6,000 hauliers remaining in Kent over the subsequent days, and with many spending Christmas Day and Boxing Day parked, waiting to cross the English Channel. What was all the fuss about? Is there really a new “mutant strain” which UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock claims is still ravaging through the British Isles?
As part of this bio-security theatre, military personnel were then deployed to Kent, including a massive cohort of 1100 British troops, 30 French firefighters, and 60 Polish soldiers – all to supposedly to provide aid and services to the drivers, and to “speed up testing to 600 per hour” carried out at nearby Manston airfield.
As it turns out, all of this was completely unnecessary.
UK Transport Secretary Grant Shapps tweeted: “Update on Kent lorry situation: 15,526 #Coronavirus tests now carried out. Just 36 positive results, which are being verified (0.23%). Manston now empty and lorries should no longer head there please.”
What the Government and Mainstream Media will not tell the public is that if the highly dubious PCR Testing was used, then that tiny reported number of 36 ‘positive cases’ could have easily fallen within the margin of false positive errors – meaning all 15,000 plus drivers may have been ‘COVID free’ – an incredible but very telling data point – all but proving that the virus is likely to be severely over-hyped right now in the UK.
As 21WIRE already reported last week, Hancock’s claims of a new ‘dangerous and more transmissible’ virus were totally unfounded and based on sloppy science from the UK government’s NERVTAG science advisory committee.
Because of the near nonexistent COVID cases within this giant trucker sample, critics are now railing against France and other European countries for panicking and closing their borders based on irrational fear of an non-existent “mutant strain” of COVID-19. But the UK authorities have no business pointing the finger at anyone….
MSN reported on Dec 25th…
The French authorities slapped restrictions on hauliers crossing the Channel following the [alleged] emergence of the VUi202012/01 coronavirus mutation which is believed to spread faster than other strains.
The UK and France agreed to a testing regime to allow trucks to start flowing again on the Dover-Calais link.
The Standard has been told that out of the first 1,500 tests none came back positive.
A Whitehall source criticised the “over hasty” action by the French authorities, adding: “All of this trouble – there have been 1,500 tests – no positives.”
The EU’s Transport Commissioner Adina VÄlean criticised Emmanuel Macron’s government over the weekend’s freight ban.
She tweeted: “I am pleased that at this moment, we have trucks slowly crossing the Channel, and I want to thank UK authorities that they started testing the drivers at a capacity of 300 tests per hour.
“I deplore that France went against our recommendations and brought us back to the situation we were in in March when the supply chains were interrupted.”
Mind you, that’s more than a bit rich for anyone in the UK Government-Media Complex to accuse France of over-reacting – when it was Matt Hancock and the fawning mainstream press who for weeks shamelessly pumped-out incessant fear-based claims of an allege COVID “mutant strain” – absent of any actual evidence to back-up their wild assertions. Lesson learned?
SEE MORE:
UK ‘Variant Fears’ Are Over-Hyped Says Leading US Microbiologist
BBC News Report Warning About “Fake News” Contains Fake News
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | December 28, 2020
An alarmist BBC News report warning about the dangers of “fake news” contained a claim which was itself a glaring example of fake news.
The article, entitled ‘The casualties of this year’s viral conspiracy theories,’ ominously warned that conspiracy theories were “destroying relationships and endangering lives.”
Prime amongst them according to Marianna Spring, the BBC’s “specialist disinformation reporter,” were a “flurry of online falsehoods about coronavirus.”
“We catalogued mass poisonings and overdoses of hydroxychloroquine – a drug that world leaders like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro falsely claimed cures or prevents COVID-19,” wrote Spring.
However, as LockdownSkeptics points out, the claim that hydroxychloroquine doesn’t cure or prevent COVID-19 or that it is a poison is itself completely fake news.
“I’m afraid that doesn’t pass the fact-checking test, Ms Spring. Over 200 studies have shown HCQ is an effective treatment for Covid. Trump and Bolsonaro may have exaggerated the preventative and curative properties of HCQ, but that doesn’t mean it’s completely ineffective and anyone taking it is likely to poison themselves. On the contrary, it’s almost certainly no more dangerous than any of the Covid vaccines.”
Despite the efficacy of the drug, hydroxychloroquine has been demonized by the mainstream media from the beginning, partly as a way of preventing Trump from claiming success in fighting COVID and partly because it would have reduced the urgency for a vaccine, which is set to be used as a reason to restrict people’s mobility and travel rights.
The Threat of Authoritarianism in the U.S. is Very Real, and Has Nothing To Do With Trump
The COVID-driven centralization of economic power and information control in the hands of a few corporate monopolies poses enduring threats to political freedom
By Glenn Greenwald | December 28, 2020
Asserting that Donald Trump is a fascist-like dictator threatening the previously sturdy foundations of U.S. democracy has been a virtual requirement over the last four years to obtain entrance to cable news Green Rooms, sinecures as mainstream newspaper columnists, and popularity in faculty lounges. Yet it has proven to be a preposterous farce.
In 2020 alone, Trump had two perfectly crafted opportunities to seize authoritarian power — a global health pandemic and sprawling protests and sustained riots throughout American cities — and yet did virtually nothing to exploit those opportunities. Actual would-be despots such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán quickly seized on the virus to declare martial law, while even prior U.S. presidents, to say nothing of foreign tyrants, have used the pretext of much less civil unrest than what we saw this summer to deploy the military in the streets to pacify their own citizenry.
But early in the pandemic, Trump was criticized, especially by Democrats, for failing to assert the draconian powers he had, such as commandeering the means of industrial production under the Defense Production Act of 1950, invoked by Truman to force industry to produce materials needed for the Korean War. In March, The Washington Post reported that “Governors, Democrats in Congress and some Senate Republicans have been urging Trump for at least a week to invoke the act, and his potential 2020 opponent, Joe Biden, came out in favor of it, too,” yet “Trump [gave] a variety of reasons for not doing so.” Rejecting demands to exploit a public health pandemic to assert extraordinary powers is not exactly what one expects from a striving dictator.
A similar dynamic prevailed during the sustained protests and riots that erupted after the killing of George Floyd. While conservatives such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK), in his controversial New York Times op-ed, urged the mass deployment of the military to quell the protesters, and while Trump threatened to deploy them if governors failed to pacify the riots, Trump failed to order anything more than a few isolated, symbolic gestures such as having troops use tear gas to clear out protesters from Lafayette Park for his now-notorious walk to a church, provoking harsh criticism from the right, including Fox News, for failing to use more aggressive force to restore order.
Virtually every prediction expressed by those who pushed this doomsday narrative of Trump as a rising dictator — usually with great profit for themselves — never materialized. While Trump radically escalated bombing campaigns he inherited from Bush and Obama, he started no new wars. When his policies were declared by courts to be unconstitutional, he either revised them to comport with judicial requirements (as in the case of his “Muslim ban”) or withdrew them (as in the case of diverting Pentagon funds to build his wall). No journalists were jailed for criticizing or reporting negatively on Trump, let alone killed, as was endlessly predicted and sometimes even implied. Bashing Trump was far more likely to yield best-selling books, social media stardom and new contracts as cable news “analysts” than interment in gulags or state reprisals. There were no Proud Boy insurrections or right-wing militias waging civil war in U.S. cities. Boastful and bizarre tweets aside, Trump’s administration was for more a continuation of the U.S. political tradition than a radical departure from it.
The hysterical Trump-as-despot script was all melodrama, a ploy for profits and ratings, and, most of all, a potent instrument to distract from the neoliberal ideology that gave rise to Trump in the first place by causing so much wreckage. Positing Trump as a grand aberration from U.S. politics and as the prime author of America’s woes — rather than what he was: a perfectly predictable extension of U.S politics and a symptom of preexisting pathologies — enabled those who have so much blood and economic destruction on their hands not only to evade responsibility for what they did, but to rehabilitate themselves as the guardians of freedom and prosperity and, ultimately, catapult themselves back into power. As of January 20, that is exactly where they will reside.
The Trump administration was by no means free of authoritarianism: his Justice Department prosecuted journalists’ sources; his White House often refused basic transparency; War on Terror and immigration detentions continued without due process. But that is largely because, as I wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in late 2016, the U.S. Government itself is authoritarian after decades of bipartisan expansion of executive powers justified by a posture of endless war. With rare exception, the lawless and power-abusing acts over the last four years were ones that inhere in the U.S. Government and long preceded Trump, not ones invented by him. To the extent Trump was an authoritarian, he was one in the way that all U.S. presidents have been since the War on Terror began and, more accurately, since the start of the Cold War and advent of the permanent national security state.
The single most revealing episode exposing this narrative fraud was when journalists and political careerists, including former Obama aides, erupted in outrage on social media upon seeing a photo of immigrant children in cages at the border — only to discover that the photo was not from a Trump concentration camp but an Obama-era detention facility (they were unaccompanied children, not ones separated from their families, but “kids in cages” are “kids in cages” from a moral perspective). And tellingly, the single most actually authoritarian Trump-era event is one that has been largely ignored by the U.S. media: namely, the decision to prosecute Julian Assange under espionage laws (but that, too, is an extension of the unprecedented war on journalism unleashed by the Obama DOJ).
The last gasp for those clinging to the Trump-as-dictator fantasy (which was really hope masquerading as concern, since putting yourself on the front lines, bravely fighting domestic fascism, is more exciting and self-glorifying, not to mention more profitable, than the dreary, mediocre work of railing against an ordinary and largely weak one-term president) was the hysterical warning that Trump was mounting a coup in order to stay in office. Trump’s terrifying “coup” consisted of a series of failed court challenges based on claims of widespread voter fraud — virtually inevitable with new COVID-based voting rules never previously used — and lame attempts to persuade state officials to overturn certified vote totals. There was never a moment when it appeared even remotely plausible that it would succeed, let alone that he could secure the backing of the institutions he would need to do so, particularly senior military leaders.
Whether Trump secretly harbored despotic ambitions is both unknowable and irrelevant. If he did, he never exhibited the slightest ability to carry them out or orchestrate a sustained commitment to executing a democracy-subverting plot. And the most powerful U.S. institutions — the intelligence community and military brass, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the corporate media — opposed and subverted him from the start. In sum, U.S. democracy, in whatever form it existed when Trump ascended to the presidency, will endure more or less unchanged once he leaves office on January 20, 2021.
Whether the U.S. was a democracy in any meaningful sense prior to Trump had been the subject of substantial scholarly debate. A much-discussed 2014 study concluded that economic power has become so concentrated in the hands of such a small number of U.S. corporate giants and mega-billionaires, and that this concentration in economic power has ushered in virtually unchallengeable political power in their hands and virtually none in anyone else’s, that the U.S. more resembles oligarchy than anything else:
The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. Our results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
The U.S. Founders most certainly did not envision or desire absolute economic egalitarianism, but many, probably most, feared — long before lobbyists and candidate dependence on corporate SuperPACs — that economic inequality could become so severe, wealth concentrated in the hands of so few, that it would contaminate the political realm, where those vast wealth disparities would be replicated, rendering political and legal equality illusory.
But the premises of pre-Trump debates over how grave a problem this is have been rendered utterly obsolete by the new realities of the COVID era. A combination of sustained lockdowns, massive state-mandated transfers of wealth to corporate elites in the name of legislative “COVID relief,” and a radically increased dependence on online activities has rendered corporate behemoths close to unchallengeable in terms of both economic and political power.
The lockdowns from the pandemic have ushered in a collapse of small businesses across the U.S. that has only further fortified the power of corporate giants. “Billionaires increased their wealth by more than a quarter (27.5%) at the height of the crisis from April to July, just as millions of people around the world lost their jobs or were struggling to get by on government schemes,” reported The Guardian in September. A study from July told part of the story:
The combined wealth of the world’s super-rich reached a new peak during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a study published by the consulting firm PwC and the Swiss bank UBC on Wednesday. The more than 2,000 billionaires around the world managed to amass fortunes totalling around $10.2 trillion (€8.69 trillion) by July, surpassing the previous record of $8.9 trillion reached in 2017.
Meanwhile, though exact numbers are unknown, “roughly one in five small businesses have closed,” AP notes, adding: “restaurants, bars, beauty shops and other retailers that involve face-to-face contact have been hardest hit at a time when Americans are trying to keep distance from one another.”
Employees are now almost completely at the mercy of a handful of corporate giants, far more trans-national than with any allegiance to the U.S., which are thriving. A Brookings Institution study this week — entitled “Amazon and Walmart have raked in billions in additional profits during the pandemic, and shared almost none of it with their workers” — found that “the COVID-19 pandemic has generated record profits for America’s biggest companies, as well as immense wealth for their founders and largest shareholders—but next to nothing for workers.”
These COVID “winners” are not the Randian victors in free market capitalism. Quite the contrary, they are the recipients of enormous amounts of largesse from the U.S. Government, which they control through armies of lobbyists and donations and which therefore constantly intervenes in the market for their benefit. This is not free market capitalism rewarding innovative titans, but rather crony capitalism that is abusing the power of the state to crush small competitors, lavish corporate giants with ever more wealth and power, and turn millions of Americans into vassals whose best case scenario is working multiple jobs at low hourly wages with no benefits, few rights, and even fewer options.
Those must disgusted by this outcome should not be socialists but capitalists: this is a classic merger of state and corporate power —- also known as a hallmark of fascism in its most formal expression — that abuses state interference in markets to consolidate and centralize authority in a small handful of actors in order to disempower everyone else. Those trends were already quite visible prior to Trump and the onset of the pandemic, but have accelerated beyond anyone’s dreams in the wake of mass lockdowns, shutdowns, prolonged isolation and corporate welfare thinly disguised as legislative “relief.”
What makes this most menacing of all is that the primary beneficiaries of these rapid changes are Silicon Valley giants, at least three of which — Facebook, Google, and Amazon — are now classic monopolies. That the wealth of their primary owners and executives — Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai — has skyrocketed during the pandemic is well-covered, but far more significant is the unprecedented power these companies exert over the dissemination of information and conduct of political debates, to say nothing of the immense data they possess about our lives by virtue of online surveillance.
Stay-at-home orders, lockdowns and social isolation have meant that we rely on Silicon Valley companies to conduct basic life functions more than ever before. We order online from Amazon rather than shop; we conduct meetings online rather than meet in offices; we use Google constantly to navigate and communicate; we rely on social media more than ever to receive information about the world. And exactly as a weakened population’s dependence on them has increased to unprecedented levels, their wealth and power has reached all new heights, as has their willingness to control and censor information and debate.
That Facebook, Google and Twitter are exerting more and more control over our political expression is hardly contestable. What is most remarkable, and alarming, is that they are not so much grabbing these powers as having them foisted on them, by a public — composed primarily of corporate media outlets and U.S. establishment liberals — who believe that the primary problem of social media is not excessive censorship but insufficient censorship. As Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) told Mark Zuckerberg when four Silicon Valley CEOs appeared before the Senate: “The issue is not that the companies before us today is that they’re taking too many posts down. The issue is that they’re leaving too many dangerous posts up.”
As I told the online program Rising this week when asked what the worst media failings of 2020 are, I continue to view the brute censorship by Facebook of incriminating reporting about Joe Biden in the weeks before the election as one of the most significant, and menacing, political events of the last several years. That this censorship was announced by a Facebook corporate spokesman who had spent his career previously as a Democratic Party apparatchik provided the perfect symbolic expression of this evolving danger.
These tech companies are more powerful than ever, not only because of their newly amassed wealth at a time when the population is suffering, but also because they overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party candidate about to assume the presidency. Predictably, they are being rewarded with numerous key positions in his transition team and the same will ultimately be true of the new administration.
The Biden/Harris administration clearly intends to do a great deal for Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley is well-positioned to do a great deal for them in return, starting with their immense power over the flow of information and debate.
The dominant strain of U.S. neoliberalism — the ruling coalition that has now consolidated power again — is authoritarianism. They view those who oppose them and reject their pieties not as adversaries to be engaged but as enemies, domestic terrorists, bigots, extremists and violence-inciters to be fired, censored, and silenced. And they have on their side — beyond the bulk of the corporate media, and the intelligence community, and Wall Street — an unprecedentedly powerful consortium of tech monopolies willing and able to exert greater control over a population that has rarely, if ever, been so divided, drained, deprived and anemic.
All of these authoritarian powers will, ironically, be invoked and justified in the name of stopping authoritarianism — not from those who wield power but from the movement that was just removed from power. Those who spent four years shrieking to great profit about the dangers of lurking “fascism” will — without realizing the irony — now use this merger of state and corporate power to consolidate their own authority, control the contours of permissible debate, and silence those who challenge them even further. Those most vocally screaming about growing authoritarianism in the U.S. over the last four years were very right in their core warning, but very wrong about the real source of that danger.
JPost Fabricates Alleged Hezbollah Involvement in ISIL Captagon Ship Seized in Italy, Arab & Lebanese Media Outlets Endorse Slander
Al-Manar | December 26, 2020
The Zionist newspaper, Jpost, fabricated a report which alleged that Hezbollah was behind the captagon ship seized in Italy last July, knowing that the Italian authorities confirmed that drugs were made to fund the takfiri group.
JPost’s fabricated report was not confirmed by the Italian authorities which did not even comment on the rumors, according to Al-Manar correspondent in Italy.
The correspondent stressed that even the Italian media outlets disregarded JPost’s fabricated report , except a modest agency called Agenzia Nova which republished it so that the anti-Hezbollah media outlets in Lebanon and the Arab countries can endorse it.
Indeed, the anti-Hezbollah propaganda in Lebanon and the Arab countries waged a war of accusations against Hezbollah, knowing that the fabricated report has not been conformed by any Italian official.
With Biden’s New Threats, the Russia Discourse is More Reckless and Dangerous Than Ever
The U.S. media demands inflammatory claims be accepted with no evidence, while hacking behavior routinely engaged in by the U.S. is depicted as aberrational.
By Glenn Greenwald | December 23, 2020
To justify Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss to Donald Trump, leading Democrats and their key media allies for years competed with one another to depict what they called “Russia’s interference in our elections” in the most apocalyptic terms possible. They fanatically rejected the view of the Russian Federation repeatedly expressed by President Obama — that it is a weak regional power with an economy smaller than Italy’s capable of only threatening its neighbors but not the U.S. — and instead cast Moscow as a grave, even existential, threat to U.S. democracy, with its actions tantamount to the worst security breaches in U.S. history.
This post-2016 mania culminated with prominent liberal politicians and journalists (as well as John McCain) declaring Russia’s activities surrounding the 2016 [election] to be an “act of war” which, many of them insisted, was comparable to Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 attack — the two most traumatic attacks in modern U.S. history which both spawned years of savage and destructive war, among other things.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) repeatedly demanded that Russia’s 2016 “interference” be treated as “an act of war.” Hillary Clinton described Russian hacking as “a cyber 9/11.” And Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) on MSNBC in early February, 2018, pronounced Russia “a hostile foreign power” whose 2016 meddling was the “equivalent” of Pearl Harbor, “very much on par” with the “seriousness” of the 1941 attack in Hawaii that helped prompt four years of U.S. involvement in a world war.
With the Democrats, under Joe Biden, [presumably] just weeks away from assuming control of the White House and the U.S. military and foreign policy that goes along with it, the discourse from them and their media allies about Russia is becoming even more unhinged and dangerous. Moscow’s alleged responsibility for the recently revealed, multi-pronged hack of U.S. Government agencies and various corporate servers is asserted — despite not a shred of evidence, literally, having yet been presented — as not merely proven fact, but as so obviously true that it is off-limits from doubt or questioning.
Any questioning of this claim will be instantly vilified by the Democrats’ extremely militaristic media spokespeople as virtual treason. “Now the president is not just silent on Russia and the hack. He is deliberately running defense for the Kremlin by contradicting his own Secretary of State on Russian responsibility,” pronounced CNN’s national security reporter Jim Sciutto, who last week depicted Trump’s attempted troop withdrawal from Syria and Germany as “ceding territory” and furnishing “gifts” to Putin. More alarmingly, both the rhetoric to describe the hack and the retaliation being threatened are rapidly spiraling out of control.
Democrats (along with some Republicans long obsessed with The Russian Threat, such as Mitt Romney) are casting the latest alleged hack by Moscow in the most melodramatic terms possible, ensuring that Biden will enter the White House with tensions sky-high with Russia and facing heavy pressure to retaliate aggressively. Biden’s top national security advisers and now Biden himself have, with no evidence shown to the public, repeatedly threatened aggressive retaliation against the country with the world’s second-largest nuclear stockpile.
Congressman Jason Crow (D-CO) — one of the pro-war Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee who earlier this year joined with Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) to block Trump’s plan to withdraw troops from Afghanistan — announced: “this could be our modern day, cyber equivalent of Pearl Harbor,” adding: “Our nation is under assault.” The second-ranking Senate Democrat, Dick Durbin (D-IL), pronounced: “This is virtually a declaration of war by Russia.”
Meanwhile, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), who has for years been casting Russia as a grave threat to the U.S. while Democrats mocked him as a relic of the Cold War (before they copied and then surpassed him), described the latest hack as “the equivalent of Russian bombers flying undetected over the entire country.” The GOP’s 2012 presidential nominee also blasted Trump for his failure to be “aggressively speaking out and protesting and taking punitive action,” though — like virtually every prominent figure demanding tough “retaliation” — Romney failed to specify what he had in mind that would be sufficient retaliation for “the equivalent of Russian bombers flying undetected over the entire country.”
For those keeping track at home: that’s two separate “Pearl Harbors” in less than four years from Moscow (or, if you prefer, one Pearl Harbor and one 9/11). If Democrats actually believe that, it stands to reason that they will be eager to embrace a policy of belligerence and aggression toward Russia. Many of them are demanding this outright, mocking Trump for failing to attack Russia — despite no evidence that they were responsible — while their well-trained liberal flock is suggesting that the non-response constitutes some form of “high treason.”
Indeed, the Biden team has been signalling that they intend to quickly fulfill demands for aggressive retaliation. The New York Times reported on Tuesday that Biden “accused President Trump [] of ‘irrational downplaying’” of the hack while “warning Russia that he would not allow the intrusion to ‘go unanswered’ after he takes office.” Biden emphasized that once the intelligence assessment is complete, “we will respond, and probably respond in kind.”
Threats and retaliation between the U.S. and Russia are always dangerous, but particularly so now. One of the key nuclear arms agreements between the two nuclear-armed nations, the New START treaty, will expire in February unless Putin and Biden can successfully negotiate a renewal: sixteen days after Biden is [tentatively] scheduled to take office. “That will force Mr. Biden to strike a deal to prevent one threat — a nuclear arms race — while simultaneously threatening retaliation on another,” observed the Times.
This escalating rhetoric from Washington about Russia, and the resulting climate of heightened tensions, are dangerous in the extreme. They are also based in numerous myths, deceits and falsehoods:
First, absolutely no evidence of any kind has been presented to suggest, let alone prove, that Russia is responsible for these hacks. It goes without saying that it is perfectly plausible that Russia could have done this: it’s the sort of thing that every large power from China and Iran to the U.S. and Russia have the capability to do and wield against virtually every other country including one another.
But if we learned nothing else over the last several decades, we should know that accepting claims that emanate from the U.S. intelligence community about adversaries without a shred of evidence is madness of the highest order. We just had a glaring reminder of the importance of this rule: just weeks before the election, countless mainstream media outlets laundered and endorsed the utterly false claim that the documents from Hunter Biden’s laptop were “Russian disinformation,” only for officials to acknowledge once the harm was done that there was no evidence — zero — of Russian involvement.
Yet that is exactly what the overwhelming bulk of media outlets are doing again: asserting that Russia is behind these hacks despite having no evidence of its truth. The New York Times’ Michael Barbaro, host of the paper’s popular The Daily podcast, asked his colleague, national security reporter David Sanger, what evidence exists to assert that Russia did this. As Barbaro put it, even Sanger is “allowing that early conclusions could all be wrong, but that it’s doubtful.” Indeed, Sanger acknowledged to Barbaro that they have no proof, asserting instead that the basis on which he is relying is that Russia possesses the sophistication to carry out such a hack (as do several other nation-states), along with claiming that the hack has what he calls the “markings” of Russian hackers.
But this tactic was exactly the same one used by former intelligence officials, echoed by these same media outlets, to circulate the false pre-election claim that the documents from Hunter Biden’s laptop were “Russian disinformation”: namely, they pronounced in lockstep, the material from Hunter’s laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information.” This was also exactly the same tactic used by the U.S. intelligence community in 2001 to falsely blame Iraq for the anthrax attacks, claiming that their chemical analysis revealed a substance that was “a trademark of the Iraqi biological weapons program.”
These media outlets will, if pressed, acknowledge their lack of proof that Russia did this. Despite this admitted lack of proof, media outlets are repeatedly stating Russian responsibility as proven fact.
“Scope of Russian Hacking Becomes Clear: Multiple U.S. Agencies Were Hit,” one New York Times headline proclaimed, and the first line of that article, co-written by Sanger, stated definitively: “The scope of a hacking engineered by one of Russia’s premier intelligence agencies became clearer on Monday.” The Washington Post deluged the public with identically certain headlines.
Nobody in the government has been as definitive in asserting Russian responsibility as corporate media outlets. Even Trump’s hawkish Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, crafted his accusation against Moscow with caveats and uncertainty: “I think it’s the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity.”
If actual evidence ultimately emerges demonstrating Russian responsibility, it would not alter how dangerous it is that — less than twenty years after the Iraq WMD debacle and less than a couple of years after media endorsement of endless Russiagate falsehoods — the most influential media outlets continue to mindlessly peddle as Truth whatever the intelligence community feeds them, without the need to see any evidence that what they’re claiming is actually true. Even more alarmingly, large sectors of the public that venerate these outlets continue to believe that what they hear from them must be true, no matter how many times they betray that trust. The ease with which the CIA can disseminate whatever messaging it wants through friendly media outlets is stunning.
Second, the very idea that this hack could be compared to rogue and wildly aberrational events such as Pearl Harbor or the 9/11 attack is utterly laughable on its face. One has to be drowning in endless amounts of jingoistic self-delusion to believe that this hack — or, for that matter, the 2016 “election interference” — is a radical departure from international norms as opposed to a perfect reflection of them.
Just as was true of 2016 fake Facebook pages and Twitter bots, it is not an exaggeration to say that the U.S. Government engages in hacking attacks of this sort, and ones far more invasive, against virtually every country on the planet, including Russia, on a weekly basis. That does not mean that this kind of hacking is either justified or unjustified. It does mean, however, that depicting it as some particularly dastardly and incomparably immoral act that requires massive retaliation requires a degree of irrationality and gullibility that is bewildering to behold.
The NSA reporting enabled by Edward Snowden by itself proved that the NSA spies on virtually anyone it can. Indeed, after reviewing the archive back in 2013, I made the decision that I would not report on U.S. hacks of large adversary countries such as China and Russia because it was so commonplace for all of these countries to hack one another as aggressively and intrusively as they could that it was hardly newsworthy to report on this (the only exception was when there was a substantial reason to view such spying as independently newsworthy, such as Sweden’s partnering with NSA to spy on Russia in direct violation of the denials Swedish officials voiced to their public).
Other news outlets who had access to Snowden documents, particularly The New York Times, were not nearly as circumspect in exposing U.S. spying on large nation-state adversaries. As a result, there is ample proof published by those outlets (sometimes provoking Snowden’s strong objections) that the U.S. does exactly what Russia is alleged to have done here — and far worse.
“Even as the United States made a public case about the dangers of buying from [China’s] Huawei, classified documents show that the National Security Agency was creating its own back doors — directly into Huawei’s networks,” reported The New York Times’ David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth in 2013, adding that “the agency pried its way into the servers in Huawei’s sealed headquarters in Shenzhen, China’s industrial heart.”
In 2013, the Guardian revealed “an NSA attempt to eavesdrop on the Russian leader, Dmitry Medvedev, as his phone calls passed through satellite links to Moscow,” and added: “foreign politicians and officials who took part in two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009 had their computers monitored and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their British government hosts.” Meanwhile, “Sweden has been a key partner for the United States in spying on Russia and its leadership, Swedish television said on Thursday,” noted Reuters, citing what one NSA document described as “a unique collection on high-priority Russian targets, such as leadership, internal politics.”
Other reports revealed that the U.S. had hacked into the Brazilian telecommunications system to collect data on the whole population, and was spying on Brazil’s key leaders (including then-President Dilma Rousseff) as well as its most important companies such as its oil giant Petrobras and its Ministry of Mines and Energy. The Washington Post reported: “The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable.” And on and on.
[One amazing though under-appreciated episode related to all this: the same New York Times reporter who revealed the details about massive NSA hacking of Chinese government and industry, Nicole Perlroth, subsequently urged (in tweets she has now deleted) that Snowden not be pardoned on the ground that, according to her, he revealed legitimate NSA spying on U.S. adversaries. In reality, it was actually she, Perlorth, not Snowden, who chose to expose NSA spying on China, provoking Snowden’s angry objections when she did so based on his view this was a violation of the framework he created for what should and should not be revealed; in other words, not only did Perlroth urge the criminal prosecution of a source on which she herself relied, an absolutely astonishing thing for any reporter to do, but so much worse, she did so by falsely accusing that source of doing something that she, Perlroth, had done herself: namely, reveal extensive U.S. hacking of China].
What all of this makes demonstrably clear is that only the most deluded and uninformed person could believe that Russian hacking of U.S. agencies and corporations — if it happened — is anything other than totally normal and common behavior between these countries. Harvard Law Professor and former Bush DOJ official Jack Goldsmith, reviewing growing demands for retaliation, wrote in an excellent article last week entitled “Self-Delusion on the Russia Hack: The U.S. regularly hacks foreign governmental computer systems on a massive scale”:
The lack of self-awareness in these and similar reactions to the Russia breach is astounding. The U.S. government has no principled basis to complain about the Russia hack, much less retaliate for it with military means, since the U.S. government hacks foreign government networks on a huge scale every day. Indeed, a military response to the Russian hack would violate international law . . . .
As the revelations from leaks of information from Edward Snowden made plain, the United States regularly penetrates foreign governmental computer systems on a massive scale, often (as in the Russia hack) with the unwitting assistance of the private sector, for purposes of spying. It is almost certainly the world’s leader in this practice, probably by a lot. The Snowden documents suggested as much, as does the NSA’s probable budget. In 2016, after noting “problems with cyber intrusions from Russia,” Obama boasted that the United States has “more capacity than anybody … offensively” . . . .
Because of its own practices, the U.S. government has traditionally accepted the legitimacy of foreign governmental electronic spying in U.S. government networks. After the notorious Chinese hack of the Office of Personnel Management database, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said: “You have to kind of salute the Chinese for what they did. If we had the opportunity to do that, I don’t think we’d hesitate for a minute.” The same Russian agency that appears to have carried out the hack revealed this week also hacked into unclassified emails in the White House and Defense and State Departments in 2014-2015. The Obama administration deemed it traditional espionage and did not retaliate. “It was information collection, which is what nation states—including the United States—do,” said Obama administration cybersecurity coordinator Michael Daniel this week.
But over the last four years, Americans, particularly those who feed on liberal media outlets, have been drowned in so much mythology about the U.S. and Russia that they have no capacity to critically assess the claims being made, and — just as they were led to believe about “Russia’s 2016 interference in Our Sacred Elections” — are easily convinced that what Russia did is some shocking and extreme crime the likes of which are rarely seen in international relations. In reality, their own government is the undisputed world champion in perpetrating these acts, and has been for years if not decades.
Third, these demands for “retaliation” are so reckless because they are almost always unaccompanied by any specifics. Even if Moscow’s responsibility is demonstrated, what is the U.S. supposed to do in response? If your answer is that they should hack Russia back, rest assured the NSA and CIA are always trying to hack Russia as much as it possibly can, long before this event.
If the answer is more sanctions, that would be just performative and pointless, aside from wildly hypocritical. Any reprisals more severe than that would be beyond reckless, particularly with the need to renew nuclear arms control agreements looming. And if you are someone demanding retaliation, do you believe that Russia, China, Brazil and all the other countries invaded by NSA hackers have the same right of retaliation against the U.S., or does the U.S. occupy a special place with special entitlements that all other countries lack?
What we have here, yet again, is the classic operation of the intelligence community feeding serious accusations about a nuclear-armed power to an eagerly gullible corporate media, with the media mindlessly disseminating it without evidence, all toward ratcheting up tensions between these two nuclear-armed powers and fortifying a mythology of the U.S. as grand victim but never perpetrator.
If you ever find yourself wondering how massive military budgets and a posture of Endless War are seemingly invulnerable to challenge, this pathological behavior — from a now-enduring union of the intelligence community, corporate media outlets, and the Democratic Party — provides one key piece of the puzzle.
The Washington Post Can’t Stop Babbling About Russians ‘Hacking Our Minds’
By Caitlin Johnstone | December 19, 2020
The Washington Post has published another article warning its readers that the Russians are “hacking our minds”, this one authored by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria.
“Russia hasn’t just hacked our computer systems. It’s hacked our minds.” blares the ridiculous, propagandistic headline for an article about “the Russian model” of propaganda which “rests on the principle that people get convinced when they hear the same message many times from a variety of sources, no matter how biased.”
Which is funny, since this is not the first time WaPo itself has repeated this cartoonish narrative about Russian mind-hackers.
Just two months ago the Washington Post editorial board published an article titled “The US may be safe from foreign interference in this election. But what about perception hacking?“, which opens with the line “Russia and other adversaries may not need to hack the election if they can hack something else: our minds.”
The paranoid screed unironically argued that Russia is using its super powerful propaganda engine to make people paranoid and doubtful of US electoral systems, which could actually have an adverse effect on the US election. As though telling people their mental and perceptual faculties are being hacked by a hostile foreign enemy with the goal of influencing the election would not make them paranoid and doubtful of US electoral systems.
Zakaria’s piece builds on this already established theme by parroting the still completely evidence-free claim that Russia was responsible for the far-reaching cyber intrusion into the IT company SolarWinds, whose cybersecurity we recently learned was left so unprotected that its update server’s password was literally “solarwinds123”.
“But what about the perhaps more insidious Russian efforts at disinformation, which have helped to reshape the information environment worldwide?” Zakaria asks. He then does a few mental gymnastics to tie Russia’s propaganda campaign to Donald Trump, because of course he does, and leaves the reader with the closing line, “The problem is not just that Russia has hacked America’s computer systems. It seems to have hacked our minds.”
WaPo keeps hammering this narrative about powerful Russian mind-hackers as though Russia is the only nation with an existing propaganda campaign on the world stage and not one of the weaker ones doing so. The US government itself openly uses propaganda on foreigners with programs like Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia and Voice of America, which actually serve the more important function of presenting the illusion that those are the only form of US government propaganda.
In reality the plutocratic class which owns the mass media works closely with the US government and sets up its institutions to only elevate voices which advance narratives that are favorable to the status quo those plutocrats have built their kingdoms upon. WaPo itself is owned by the richest man in the world who is also a CIA contractor and sits on a Pentagon advisory board. The unofficial propaganda operations of the oligarchic empire give it a massive edge in international narrative control that dwarfs both official US propaganda programs and anything the Russian government could ever come up with.
Among some very stiff competition, one of the dumbest recurring themes in western imperialist media is the idea that world affairs, entire electoral and governmental systems, and even our very minds, are being controlled by a nation with the same GDP as South Korea. Russia does not have an especially strong sway over the world stage, it just happens to be one of the few remaining power structures which have resisted absorption into the US-centralized empire and is being targeted with a propaganda campaign aimed at changing that.
Russia is not hacking your mind. If anyone is hacking your mind, it’s the vast globe-spanning power structure loosely centralized around the United States which has been aggressively propagandizing you into supporting the continuation of status quo politics since you were born.
The dawn of political insight comes when you realize that propaganda is not just something that is done by other nations to other people. It is done by your own rulers, in your own nation, and it is being done to you.
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Trump’s China tweet ‘destructive & deceitful’ as there isn’t ‘ANY QUESTION’ Russia behind latest hacking scare, Adam Schiff claims
RT | December 20, 2020
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) has joined Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in blaming Russia for a recent massive cyber attack. He also slammed President Donald Trump for the inconvenient suggestion China could have been the culprit.
“Based on what I’ve seen, I don’t think there’s any question that it was Russia,” Schiff, who is the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told MSNBC on Sunday, commenting on the hack.
The hacking operation in question targeted the SolarWinds Orion Platform, a network monitoring tool used by US government agencies and numerous corporations. There has been no evidence presented that Russia was behind the hack, but Pompeo alleged otherwise in a recent interview.
The president broke with his secretary of state on Saturday and called out “fake news media” for their anonymous reports pinning the hack on Russia. He also suggested China may have been behind the hack, tying it to his ongoing allegations of voter fraud in key swing states during November’s election.
Schiff, one of the president’s most vocal critics in the House and a supporter of evidence-free claims Russia colluded to influence the 2016 presidential election, called Trump’s tweets “uniformly destructive and deceitful and injurious” to the country’s “national security.”
In a previous tweet, Schiff called the president’s China accusation “another scandalous betrayal of our national security.”
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) also pushed back against the president on Sunday, accusing him of having a “blind spot” when it comes to Russia.
“What Russia has done is put in place a capacity to potentially cripple us in terms of our electricity, our water, our communications,” the senator told CNN’s Jake Tapper.
The Republican called for the cyber attack to be “met with a very strong response, not just rhetorical, important as that is, but also with a cyber response of like magnitude or greater.”
Similarly to 2016, the claim of a major Russian cyber attack on the US comes amid the expected transition of power at the White House – although President Trump continues his legal efforts disputing the election result over the alleged mass-scale voter fraud. When Trump assumed his post in January 2017, the stage had already been set for the worsening of relations with Moscow, which included dozens of Russian diplomats getting expelled by the Obama administration over the allegations of meddling in US affairs and over “hacking” of the election. As Trump’s term progressed, overshadowed by the failed ‘Russiagate’ investigation, initial hopes of a detente with Moscow have all but faded.
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