Insane West Declares Putin Insane
By Linh Dinh | Postcards From The End | April 4, 2022
Even before Russia invaded Ukraine, the New York Times strongly hinted Putin had lost it. Anton Troianovski on 2/18/22, “The 20-foot-long table that Mr. Putin has used to socially distance himself this month from European leaders flying in for crisis talks symbolizes, to some longtime observers, his detachment from the rest of the world. For almost two years, Mr. Putin has ensconced himself in a virus-free cocoon unlike that of any Western leader, with state television showing him holding most key meetings by teleconference alone in a room and keeping even his own ministers at a distance on the rare occasions that he summons them in person.” Though social distancing was an indication of health and good sense in the West, it was a sign of madness in Putin.
As Russian tanks crossed into Ukraine Douglas Murray concluded in The Sun that Putin was “insane and dangerous,” with the weak West enabling his deranged behavior.
On 2/27/22, Condoleezza Rice deemed Putin “erratic,” with “an ever-deepening, delusional rendering of history.”
Getting deep, Father Cyril Hovorun explained in Premier Christianity on 2/29/22, “It’s irrational: [Putin] destroys his own country for the sake of retaking Ukraine, which is looking increasingly unlikely […] He is driven by a sort of metaphysics. I would not call it religion, although there is a component of traditional Christianity in it. It’s really a sort of metaphysical outlook, which I believe to be dangerous […] Just like Dietrich Bonhoeffer talked of cheap grace, I would say Putin has adopted cheap spirituality […] It’s a mix of post-Soviet metaphysics, superstition and, I would call it, a dualistic worldview. There is a part of the world which is good, and he believes this is Russia, and then there is a part of the world which is bad, and he believes this is the West.”
On 3/1/22, Fox News summarized, “Russian leader is not crazy, he’s consistent. Since taking power 22 years ago, Putin has specialized in killing.”
There are many more declarations of Putin’s madness in the West. It is remarkable, this unhinged chorus, for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine can’t be more logical, or conducted more sanely.
Russia has to 1) put an end to Ukraine’s unending attacks on Russians in the Donbas 2) preempt an invasion of the Donbas, as evidenced by a huge buildup of Ukrainian troops in the region 3) prevent Ukraine’s entry into NATO, which would put nuclear warheads within six minutes of Moscow 4) investigate and neutralize around 30 illegal chemical labs, apparently aimed at Russia.
If anything, Putin should have acted sooner. In any case, he’s much saner than any Western leader. With Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau and Olaf Scholz, etc., the West is fronted by a gallery of buffoons, as led by the appallingly corrupt and idiotic Biden.
After 13 US soldiers were killed during the farcically chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, Biden cartoonishly intoned with much gravity, “We will not forgive, we will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay.” Thoughtful Putin never talks like that. It’s embarrassing, but cliches, slogans, slurs and lies now make up much of American English.
Biden then sent drones to massacre ten members of one Afghan family, a war crime barely noticed by Americans and already forgotten. To punish that starving country further, grifting, fogged up and fondling Joe then stole $3.5 billion of its frozen assets to compensate victims of 9/11, a tragedy Afghanistan had nothing to do with, and neither did Bin Laden, in case you haven’t figured it out.
The dumbing down of the West has been a decades-long process. Though we’re well into Idiocracy territory, there are still some brain cells left to concuss or wring dry, just for the fun of it. During World War II, English speaking soldiers read Henry James and Anthony Trollop, I kid you not. Paul Fussel, “Siegfried Sassoon favored James’s middle-period works because they were ‘so all beautifully remote’ from Hitlerism and its brutal behavior,’ and Trollope’s novels were widely read because, in addition to their distance from the current violence and stupidity, they were handily available in the World’s Classics pocket-sized editions, fit to be slipped into uniform pockets and gas-mask containers, like the equally popular unbellicose works of Dickens and Jane Austen. But Austen was valuable regardless of format.”
Even if Russians have gone through an intellectual decline, they can’t be as dumb as Americans, for Putin doesn’t address them as morons. From a speech on 2/24/22, here’s Putin explaining NATO’s aggression and insolence over three decades:
It is a fact that over the past 30 years we have been patiently trying to come to an agreement with the leading NATO countries regarding the principles of equal and indivisible security in Europe. In response to our proposals, we invariably faced either cynical deception and lies or attempts at pressure and blackmail, while the North Atlantic alliance continued to expand despite our protests and concerns. Its military machine is moving and, as I said, is approaching our very border.
Why is this happening? Where did this insolent manner of talking down from the height of their exceptionalism, infallibility and all-permissiveness come from? What is the explanation for this contemptuous and disdainful attitude to our interests and absolutely legitimate demands?
Instead of working a crowd with catch phrases, slogans and vacuous quips, Putin succinctly and patiently clarifies. After recounting America’s illegal attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria, Putin summarizes Uncle Sam’s modus operandi and its implication for Russia:
Overall, it appears that nearly everywhere, in many regions of the world where the United States brought its ‘law and order,’ this created bloody, non-healing wounds and the curse of international terrorism and extremism. I have only mentioned the most glaring but far from only examples of disregard for international law.
This array includes promises not to expand NATO eastwards even by an inch. To reiterate: they have deceived us, or, to put it simply, they have played us. Sure, one often hears that politics is a dirty business. It could be, but it shouldn’t be as dirty as it is now, not to such an extent. This type of con-artist behavior is contrary not only to the principles of international relations but also and above all to the generally accepted norms of morality and ethics. Where is justice and truth here? Just lies and hypocrisy all around.
[…]
Incidentally, US politicians, political scientists and journalists write and say that a veritable “empire of lies” has been created inside the United States in recent years. It is hard to disagree with this—it is really so. But one should not be modest about it: the United States is still a great country and a system-forming power. All its satellites not only humbly and obediently say yes to and parrot it at the slightest pretext but also imitate its behavior and enthusiastically accept the rules it is offering them. Therefore, one can say with good reason and confidence that the whole so-called Western bloc formed by the United States in its own image and likeness is, in its entirety, the very same “empire of lies.”
Deranged, the West declares the sanest leader alive a madman, and cheerleads a corrupt clown in Zelensky who pretended to play the piano with his dick on television, whose citizens are punished by being taped to utility poles with their pants pulled down, whose soldiers film each other shooting handcuffed Russian POWs in the legs and even groins, with one screaming victim stabbed in the neck then eye.
If the West still had an independent and varied media, news outlets would not ignore or gloss over such sensational war crimes, as the New York Post did on 3/28/22:
Senior presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych said the government is taking the videos very seriously.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian military commander Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi accused Russia of “staging” the videos and warned the public to only trust “official sources.”
“In order to discredit the Ukrainian defense forces, the enemy is filming and distributing staging videos with inhumane attitude of ‘Ukrainian military’ to ‘Russian prisoners,’” Zaluzhnyi said in a statement.
In the New York Post, much more space is given to Zelensky’s pronouncements, such as this on 4/3/22, “We are the citizens of Ukraine. We have more than a hundred nationalities. This is about destruction and extermination of all these nationalities. We don’t want to be subdued to the policy of the Russian Federation. This is the reason we are being destroyed and exterminated. And this is happening in the Europe of the 21st century. So this is the torture of the whole nation.”
If Russia is exterminating “all these nationalities,” then it’s a Holocaust, isn’t it, but we can’t use that word, for it’s reserved for Jews. Zelensky, though, sure knows how to evoke that mythical genocide to confirm, once again, that Putin is a Hitler.
Even if Russian troops did massacre civilians in Bucha, it’s obviously not Putin’s intention, for if he wanted to exterminate Ukrainians, then Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa and Lviv, etc., would have been razed already. Instead, there’s still electricity, water and Wifi in all those cities. To allow civilians to escape the war, Putin never destroyed Ukraine’s rail system. Instead, it’s Zelensky’s troops who hold them hostage as human shields. What the US and UK did to Germans and Japanese at the end of WWII was far, far worse, but even that didn’t qualify as extermination, and how many massacres of civilians did the US commit in Vietnam?
Uniformity of opinions has become the law of the land in the Jewjerked empire of lies, so Jewish Zelensky is preposterously declared a new Churchill, and his propaganda, no matter how crude, is embraced. In one video, a sunglasses wearing Ukrainian beauty with perfect skin and makeup coolly walks from a supposed battle, amid wrecked tanks, with smoke and flames in the background. Nonchalantly, she flashes a victory sign. An assault rifle is slung over her shoulder, and, get this, she sports a Palestinian keffiyeh!
This cool leftist fashion statement deflects from the fact the Ukraine fiasco is a Jewish Fascist operation. Jews orchestrated this war, and now that it’s started, want it to last, if not spread. Jews hate Slavs as much as they hate Arabs, so a smoldering Syria in Europe is overflowing champagne to them. Again, you always know what the Jewish agenda is by what the Jewjacked media is pushing.
Ukrainian Police Said They Conducted “Clearing Op” in Bucha a Day Before Dead Body Videos Emerged
Narrative fail
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | April 4, 2022
Ukrainian police posted on Facebook that they had conducted a “clearing op” in Bucha the day before videos emerged showing dead bodies scattered around the settlement, as the war of words over the alleged “war crime” continues.
NATO powers and pro-Ukraine commentators have seized upon the alleged atrocity in a bid to escalate the war, with MSNBC hosts and guests even asserting that it justifies directly attacking Russia and putting American boots on the ground in Ukraine.
MSNBC host Ali Velshi demanded “direct military involvement,” something that would almost inevitably kick off World War III, in response to the alleged incident.
Former Army Major John Spencer also appeared on the same show to demand American “boots on the ground” in Ukraine.
Moscow has vehemently denied involvement, claiming Ukraine shelled the city after Russian troops had already withdrawn.
The only evidence offered so far pointing to Russian responsibility is the claims of Ukrainian authorities, with are being breathlessly amplified by the mainstream media without an ounce of skepticism.
Margaret Brennan of CBS admitted that Ukrainian President Zelensky’s team had “handed” her the videos and they were broadcast, as journalist Michael Tracey wrote, with “zero independent corroboration.”
The notion that Ukrainian authorities, who have been caught staging innumerable incidents already in a bid to lobby for more NATO military involvement, would lie about this is seemingly not even a consideration.
A timeline provided from reporting by the New York Times suggests that pro-Ukrainian Azov neo-nazi militants entered Bucha after Russian troops left and after the Mayor of Bucha had announced the town’s liberation with no mention of any atrocities.
One member of Azov was reportedly heard asking if he could shoot individuals who weren’t wearing blue armbands.
Another report asserts that Ukrainian national police posted on Facebook how they had conducted a “clearing operation” in Bucha before the alleged atrocities occurred accompanied by a video of their men walking around the town.
“Today, on 2 April, in the liberated city of Bucha, Kiev region, special units of the Ukrainian National Police began clearing the area of saboteurs and accomplices of Russian troops,” the Facebook post said.
As ever, with propaganda on both sides, it is virtually impossible to know what happened in Bucha, but to claim it’s an open and shut case of “war crimes” as the western media proclaims without any independent evidence is clearly ludicrous.
Accusations of Bucha massacre by Russian forces are fake news: Moscow
Samizdat | April 3, 2022
The Russian military has firmly denied accusations of mass killings of civilians in Bucha, a Ukrainian town northwest of Kiev. The claims have been raised by Ukraine itself, some Western media outlets and human rights groups, after Moscow had withdrawn its troops from the outskirts of Ukraine’s capital.
“All photographs and video materials published by the Kiev regime, allegedly showing some kind of “crimes” by Russian military personnel in the town of Bucha, Kiev region, are yet another provocation,” the Russian Ministry of Defense said Sunday.
Russian troops had been pulled out from the area on March 30, the military said, pointing out that “the so-called ‘evidence of crimes’ in Bucha appeared only on the fourth day” after the withdrawal, when Ukrainian intelligence and “representatives of Ukrainian television arrived in the town.”
“Moreover, on March 31 the mayor of Bucha, Anatoly Fedoruk, confirmed in his video address that there was no Russian military in the town, but did not even mention any local residents laying shot in the streets with their hands tied,” the Russian military also pointed out.
“It’s particularity concerning that all the bodies of people whose images were published by the Kiev regime, after at least four days, have not stiffened, do not have characteristic cadaveric spots, and have fresh blood in their wounds,” the military noted, adding that all these inconsistencies show that the whole Bucha affair “has been staged by the Kiev regime for Western media, as was the case with the [fake news from the] Mariupol maternity clinic.”
Graphic footage from Bucha shows multiple bodies in civilian clothing lying in the middle of a street. Some of the dead apparently had their hands tied, while others were white armbands, commonly used by Russian forces and civilians in areas under Russian control.
Kiev has blamed the Bucha killings on Moscow, with Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba claiming it was a “deliberate massacre” by Russian troops.
“The Bucha massacre was deliberate. Russians aim to eliminate as many Ukrainians as they can. We must stop them and kick them out. I demand new, devastating G7 sanctions NOW,” Kuleba wrote on Twitter.
Top Western politicians have backed Kiev’s assessment of Bucha, with some explicitly pinning the blame for the killings on Moscow as well. “Russian authorities will have to answer for these crimes,” French President Emmanuel Macron said.
A similar stance was voiced by the UK, with Foreign Secretary Liz Truss stating that such “indiscriminate attacks” on civilians should be probed as war crimes. “We will not allow Russia to cover up their involvement in these atrocities through cynical disinformation,” she said.
Moscow launched a large-scale offensive against its neighbor in late February, following Ukraine’s failure to implement the terms of the Minsk agreements signed in 2014, and Russia’s eventual recognition of the Donbass republics in Donetsk and Lugansk. The German- and French-brokered protocols had been designed to regularize the status of those regions within the Ukrainian state.
Russia has now demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join the US-led NATO military alliance. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked and has denied claims it was planning to retake the two rebel regions by force.
NY Times Latest to Mislead Public on New Ivermectin Study
The NEJM study chose a much lower dose, 400mcg per day for only three days, less than half the total dose that has been shown to be effective
By Madhava Setty, M.D. | The Defender | March 31, 2022
The New York Times on Wednesday sent an email blast to subscribers with the subject line: “Breaking News: Ivermectin failed as a Covid treatment, a large clinical trial found.”
The Times was referring to a study I wrote about, that same day, for The Defender.
My article called out the Wall Street Journal for its March 18 reporting on the same study — before the study was even published — for its failure to provide an accurate, critical assessment of the study.
The study in question — “Effect of Early Treatment with Ivermectin among Patients with Covid-19” — was officially published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).
In it the authors concluded:
“Treatment with ivermectin did not result in a lower incidence of medical admission to a hospital due to progression of Covid-19 or of prolonged emergency department observation among outpatients with an early diagnosis of Covid-19”
The Times did not critique the study itself, but quoted the opinion of Dr. David Boulware, an infectious-disease expert at the University of Minnesota:
“There’s really no sign of any benefit. Now that people can dive into the details and the data, hopefully that will steer the majority of doctors away from ivermectin towards other therapies.”
Yes. Let us dive into the details and the data and see where it “steers” us, shall we?
A closer look at the details
The NEJM study took place in Brazil between March 23 and Aug. 6, 2021.
The study examined 1,358 people who expressed symptoms of COVID-19 at an outpatient care facility (within seven days of symptom onset), had a positive rapid test for the disease and had at least one of these risk factors for severe disease:
- Age over 50
- Hypertension requiring medical therapy
- Diabetes mellitus
- Cardiovascular disease
- Lung disease
- Smoking
- Obesity
- Organ transplantation
- Chronic kidney disease (stage IV) or receipt of dialysis
- Immunosuppressive therapy (receipt of ≥10 mg of prednisone or equivalent daily)
- Diagnosis of cancer within the previous 6 months
- Receipt of chemotherapy for cancer.
Young and healthy individuals were not part of this study.
Both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals were included in the study. The percentage of vaccinated participants in each group was not specified. Note that by choosing not to identify vaccination status as a confounding variable the authors are implying that vaccines are playing no role in preventing hospitalization.
The 1,358 subjects were divided into two equally sized groups that were relatively well-matched and randomized to receive either a three-day dose of placebo or a three-day course of ivermectin at 400 mcg/kg.
The primary outcome was hospitalization due to COVID-19 within 28 days after randomization or an emergency department visit due to clinical worsening of COVID-19 (defined as the participant remaining under observation for >6 hours) within 28 days after randomization.
How researchers were able to conclude ‘no benefit’ despite signs to the contrary
The study’s authors wrote:
“100 patients (14.7%) in the ivermectin group had a primary-outcome event (composite of hospitalization due to the progression of COVID-19 or an emergency department visit of >6 hours that was due to clinical worsening of COVID-19), as compared with 111 (16.3%) in the placebo group (relative risk, 0.90; 95% Bayesian credible interval, 0.70 to 1.16).”
In other words, a greater percentage of placebo recipients required hospitalization or observation in an emergency department than those who received Ivermectin.
The authors of the study broke it down by subgroups here:
As is demonstrated in nearly every subgroup, the Ivermectin recipients fared better than those who received the placebo.
However, these data were not statistically significant given the size of the study.
This is how the authors were able to conclude there was no benefit to ivermectin use in preventing hospitalization in high-risk patients in their study.
Patients were under-dosed, some didn’t follow instructions
As it stands, the study The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal declared as proof of the uselessness of ivermectin in treating COVID-19 is actually quite promising — contrary to what their headlines told readers.
The dosing protocol advised by the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) includes a five-day course of ivermectin at 600 micrograms per kilogram of body weight for people with risk factors such as those possessed by participants in the study.
Instead, the investigators behind the NEJM study chose a much lower dose, 400mcg per day for only three days. This represents less than half of the total dose that has been shown to be effective in practice.
Furthermore, despite acknowledging that studies have shown some indication that the bioavailability of ivermectin increases when taken with food, especially a fatty meal, participants in the trial were instructed to take the medicine on an empty stomach.
In other words, the patients were significantly under-dosed — and yet a positive effect of the drug was emerging, though not statistically significant given the size of the study.
Also of note, the investigators chose to include emergency room visits with hospitalizations for COVID. Clearly, six hours of observation in an ER is a significantly different outcome than a hospitalization that may last a night or much longer.
When excluding the ER visits from the primary outcome and examining only hospitalizations, the ivermectin cohort had even less risk of an outcome, i.e. the relative risk was 0.84 vs 0.9 when ER visits and hospitalization were grouped together.
Perhaps the most glaring deficiency of the study is the low number of placebo recipients who actually followed the study’s protocol:
Only 288 of 679 participants randomized to receiving the placebo reported 100% adherence to the study protocol. Nearly 400 didn’t.
Why not? We asked Dr. Meryl Nass, an internist and member of the Children’s Health Defense scientific advisory committee.
Nass told The Defender :
“Presumably they knew the difference between ivermectin and placebo, and the placebo subjects went out and bought ivermectin or something else … but whatever they did, they didn’t bother with the pills they were given.
“So, it was not actually a double-blinded trial. Yet the 391 people who didn’t take the placebo but did something else were included in two of the three calculations of ivermectin efficacy anyway.”
So, was this the definitive answer proclaimed by mainstream sources? Nass thinks otherwise:
“I would say that instead, it was a failed trial due to the 391 placebo recipients who admitted they did not follow protocol versus the 55 in the ivermectin arm.”
More questions than answers
Rather than pounding the final nail in the coffin around ivermectin’s utility in treating COVID, the NEJM study raises more questions.
- What would the effect have been if a higher dose shown to be effective were administered?
- What would be the benefit of this medicine in patients with no risk factors?
- How statistically significant would the results have been if more participants were enrolled?
- Why weren’t more participants enrolled as the study progressed given the emerging benefit of the drug and the absence of adverse events?
- Why did the investigators define a primary outcome with such different real-world implications (ER visits vs hospitalizations)?
- With less than 50% of the placebo arm adhering to the study protocol, why were their outcomes included in the analysis?
- What effect did vaccination status have on outcome? If this is the primary means endorsed to prevent hospitalization, why wasn’t vaccination status mentioned as a confounder?
- Did the investigators choose to limit the study as it became clear that an Ivermectin benefit would be too big to ignore?
Given these obvious issues with the study, it is becoming even more clear where the real story is: Neither The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times are willing to pursue startling details around how corporate interests are corrupting scientific opinion as reported here.
Instead, these iconic journals chose to report on a scientific study on or prior to the day of publication using misleading headlines backed up by flimsy investigations conducted by journalists with no capacity to dissect the analysis or data.
Here’s a bigger question: Are they incompetent, or complicit, too?
© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
The Guardian Rewrites the Facts
By Will Jones | The Daily Sceptic | March 31, 2022
The Guardian has been running a series to mark the second anniversary of the first U.K. lockdown called “Rewriting COVID-19”, billed as examining the “narratives and received wisdom of the first two years of the pandemic”. It aims to ask “experts what we’ve got wrong and how to move forward”.
“Rewriting COVID-19” seems an apt title, with one contribution, from anthropologist Devi Sridhar, criticised for literally rewriting the history of the pandemic by claiming she only advocated Zero Covid before the vaccines arrived, when she is on record promoting it subsequently.
Despite the Guardian saying the series is about asking “experts”, it begins with a scurrilous piece by science journalist Debora MacKenzie, proclaiming, “False narratives about Covid left us with millions of deaths.” Criticising lockdown scepticism as “libertarian” (boo, hiss!), MacKenzie argues: “Infectious disease is always profoundly collective, whether or not leaders find that ideologically congenial… The many people whose age or medical condition makes them more likely to die if [infected], or who have suppressed immunity – perhaps only because they need an arthritis drug – cannot take ‘personal responsibility’ for avoiding Covid if they must return to the office, surrounded by maskless people exercising their ‘individual freedom’ to exhale asymptomatic Omicron.” According to Ms. MacKenzie, then, we must all change the way we live forever in case we inadvertently infect others with our asymptomatic bugs. But don’t worry, if we all wear masks then no one will get infected!
One expert who has contributed is Dr. William Hanage, Professor of the Evolution and Epidemiology of Infectious Disease at Harvard University. It’s not a great start, however, when he cites a figure of 160,000 U.K. pandemic deaths, even though the number of excess deaths during the pandemic is more like 133,000 (a figure which includes collateral deaths). He also claims herd immunity has “stubbornly failed to arrive and expel the virus from the population”, despite that being, as he should know, a caricature of what scientists say about herd immunity.
It’s what he says next, however, that puts his dogmatism really on show.
It should be astonishing given these facts, but some stubborn voices have continued to argue that in the autumn of 2020 we should have rushed to remove restrictions on all except those most at risk – who would be somehow saved by untested, implausible means gathered together under the heading of ‘targeted protection’. At that point no vaccines were widely available, and the effective therapies we now have against Covid were pie in the sky. Shockingly, there are now attempts to rehabilitate these ideas in parts of the media. Reaching back to relitigate such already-discredited approaches is nonsense. And worse, it makes reasonable discussions about pandemic management that much harder. Distraction has always been the goal of such revisionism.
It’s a bit rich to criticise focused protection as untested and implausible when the lockdown measures he is promoting are themselves untested – and now that they have been implemented have shown no overall benefit or effectiveness.
Although he implies he wants “reasonable discussions about pandemic management”, he shows no sign himself of pursuing that, as he writes off any scepticism of Covid restrictions as beyond reasonable debate. He implies that relaxing restrictions before vaccines were available was not a “reasonable” position to take as it was “guaranteed to lead to more preventable transmission, more serious illness, more hospitalisations and more deaths”. This is despite it being shown repeatedly that Covid waves rise and fall whether or not restrictions are in place, with Sweden demonstrating this in spring 2020 and Florida – which from autumn 2020 adopted the focused protection approach Professor Hanage rails against – having no worse a winter than those places which locked down hard. Why is a Harvard professor of epidemiology dismissing out of hand the ‘reasonableness’ of the evidence from Florida in the winter of 2020-21?
Professor Hanage states that Omicron BA.2 is mild enough to be “readily handled by the great majority of vaccinated folks” – implying it isn’t readily handled by the great majority of unvaccinated people, which is clearly misleading.
Having found a scientist willing to write meanly and intemperately about those who disagree with him, the series falls back on its science journalists. (To be fair, it also includes a contribution from Professor Danny Altmann of Imperial College London, saying the vaccines are not much cop and seem to cause original antigenic sin – which is surprisingly off-narrative.)
Science journalist Laura Spinney attempts a heroic defence of Zero Covid – though seems to undermine her own argument by conceding that you “need a plan B in case the context changes”. This might seem fatal for the argument, as of course the context always changes (you can’t live in a hermit kingdom forever), but Spinney instead blames the ultimate failure of Zero Covid on “other countries” which “let the virus rip”. If only everyone had done Zero Covid, it would have just gone away.
Reciting the Zero Covid article of faith, “The virus deprives us of liberty; the efforts preserve it,” she insists these “efforts” don’t necessarily mean lockdown, but merely “mass testing plus isolation of the infected, ventilation, masking, distancing” – failing to recognise that such measures, even without stay-at-home orders and business closures, are economically and socially crippling, rendering normal life and many activities unviable or prohibitively unpleasant.
It’s no surprise to find Spinney is no fan of cost-benefit analyses when it comes to pandemics, claiming it is “pointless… to cost elimination, or any other containment strategy”. “How do you measure what it has saved you,” she asks, in a misplaced rhetorical question. “In speculative fiction terms, what’s the counterfactual?” I’d suggest, countries which didn’t do these things, and earlier pandemics where we didn’t panic and overreact, which show clear benefits to keeping calm and carrying on.
At one point she claims that “non-pharmaceutical interventions” “stop transmission completely” – has she been following any of the data or studies these past two years? – and lines up countries which are “abandoning” such restrictions as responsible for the rise of hypothetical “more severe” new variants. Whatever the problem, it’s always the fault of the countries which didn’t impose more severe Zero Covid measures.
Not so much rewriting Covid, then, as rewriting the facts. So much for them being sacred.
NYT Painted Matt Gaetz as a Child Sex Trafficker. One Year Later, He Has Not Been Charged.
By Glenn Greenwald | March 31, 2022
On March 30 of last year, The New York Times published an article that was treated as a bombshell by the political class. Citing exclusively anonymous sources — “three people briefed on the matter” — the Paper of Record announced that Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) “is being investigated by the Justice Department over whether he had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old and paid for her to travel with him.”
The headline chosen by Times editors was as inflammatory and provocative as possible: “Matt Gaetz Is Said to Face Justice Dept. Inquiry Over Sex With an Underage Girl.” The paper, high up in the article, emphasized what grave crimes these were: “The Justice Department regularly prosecutes such cases, and offenders often receive severe sentences.” The article was extremely light on any actual evidence regarding Gaetz, instead devoting paragraph after paragraph to guilt-by-association tactics regarding “a political ally of his, a local official in Florida named Joel Greenberg, who was indicted last summer on an array of charges, including sex trafficking of a child and financially supporting people in exchange for sex, at least one of whom was an underage girl.”
Only in the seventh paragraph — well below the headline casting him as a pedophile and sex trafficker — did the Times bother to note: “No charges have been brought against Mr. Gaetz, and the extent of his criminal exposure is unclear.” Exactly one year after publication of that reputation-destroying article, this remains true: while the DOJ may one day formally accuse him, Gaetz has not been charged with, let alone convicted of, a single crime which The New York Times stapled onto his forehead.
From the start, the GOP Congressman vehemently denied these accusations. And he went further than mere denials: he claimed that these allegations arose as part of a blackmail and extortion scheme to extract $25 million from his family in exchange for not publicizing these accusations, which his father promptly reported to the FBI. While many scoffed at Gaetz’s story as fantastical and bizarre, that part of his story was vindicated last August when a Florida developer and convicted felon “was arrested on a charge that he tried to extort $25 million from the father of Rep. Matt Gaetz in exchange for a presidential pardon that would shut down a high-profile, criminal sex-trafficking investigation into the Republican congressman.” In November, that developer, Stephen Alford, pled guilty to trying to extort $25 million from Rep. Gaetz and his family.
In other words, the only component of this story that has thus far been confirmed — a full year after the NYT first trumpeted it — is the part of Gaetz’s denial where he insisted that all this arose from an extortion attempt. Yet none of that mattered, and it still does not matter. As I wrote in the aftermath of the Times story, designed to warn of the perils of assuming someone’s guilt without any due process: “That Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) is a pedophile, a sex trafficker, and an abuser of women who forces them to prostitute themselves and use drugs with him is a widespread assumption in many media and political circles.” CNN celebrated the fact that one of Gaetz’s arch political enemies — the liberal icon Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) — said that “as the mother of daughters, the charges certainly are sickening.”
In sum, Matt Gaetz has now spent a full year with millions of people believing he is guilty of pedophilia and sex trafficking even though he has never had the opportunity to confront witnesses, evaluate evidence or contest his guilt in a court of law because he has never been charged. Instead, he has been found guilty by media-led mob justice, all from unethical and possibly illegal leaks by “people briefed on the matter.” As a result, not only did Gaetz become radioactive due to crimes that have never been proven, but so too did anyone who argued that he is entitled to due process before being assumed guilty. For writing that April article and producing an accompanying video advocating the need for due process before assuming someone’s guilt, I spent two days trending on Twitter due to widespread accusations that, like Gaetz, I too must be a pedophile who was only defending him because I am guilty of the same crimes. That is the core evil of mob justice: it triggers the worst instincts in mob participants, who become drunk with righteous rage and bereft of reason.
In a separate article and video report in December of last year, I outlined the reasons prosecutors are ethically and often legally barred from leaking the pendency of criminal investigations as appears to have been done to Gaetz. It is precisely because it is common that a person who is the subject of a criminal investigation never ends up being charged with, let alone convicted of, any crimes due to a lack of evidence to support an indictment or guilty verdict. Leaks thus have the effect, and often the intent, of destroying someone’s reputation, convicting them of repellent crimes in the court of public opinion that will never be brought in a court of law, thus relieving the state of the requirement to prove the crime and depriving the accused the opportunity to exonerate themselves.
These vital journalistic and ethical principles clearly apply to Gaetz but not only to him. In 2019 and 2020 in Brazil, I worked with colleagues for eighteen months on a multi-article exposé which revealed widespread corruption and wrongdoing on the part of the most powerful Brazilian prosecutors and judges. The misconduct was varied and severe, but one of the key unethical tactics they used was strategic and selective leaks about investigations against their adversaries. They would frequently use friendly media outlets to plant stories that a particular politician, activist or business person who opposed them was being “investigated” for some grave crime involving bribes or money laundering.
As these dirty prosecutors and judges in Brazil intended, these leaks would destroy the reputation of their targets overnight. Their allied media outlets would trumpet these accusations as if they were proven fact. The public assumed that their targets were guilty. Many lost their jobs, while others had their political careers ended. Yet so often, no charges were ever brought based on these leaks. That is because there was little to no evidence that the targets of these leaks had actually committed any crimes. As we revealed in August, 2019 as part of that investigative series:
Brazil’s Chief prosecutor overseeing its sweeping anti-corruption probe, Deltan Dallagnol, lied to the public when he vehemently denied in a 2017 interview with BBC Brasil that his prosecutorial task force leaked secret information about investigations to achieve its ends.
In fact, in the months preceding his false claim, Dallagnol was a participant in secret chats exclusively obtained by The Intercept, in which prosecutors plotted to leak information to the media with the goal of manipulating suspects by making them believe that their indictment was imminent even when it was not, in order to intimidate them into signing confessions that implicated other targets of the investigation.
The abuse inherent in such leaks is self-evident. When large corporate media outlets publish or broadcast innuendo from prosecutors by framing it as “X is being investigated for Grave Crimes Y and Z,” the public naturally believes that where there is smoke, there must be fire. In the midst of our exposés, Sérgio Dávila, the editor-in-chief of Brazil’s largest newspaper, Folha of São Paulo, apologized for this practice in an article by its ombudsman:
In the evaluation of the [editor], the space given by the newspaper to the allegations leaked by the prosecutor is deserving of criticism. “If I had to revisit the case and do the coverage again, I know that’s not possible, maybe I’d rethink the space we’ve given, headlines after headlines… So, yes, I do that self-criticism.”
Dávila spoke … about a common procedure not only in Folha, but in all major newspapers: the headlines produced from [accusations made during investigations] along the lines of “so and so” said that [a politician] “did such a thing, according to an investigation by Operation Car Wash”.
Much of this content, however, ended up being reviewed or invalidated by the courts, without a new headline to make amends.
In other words, media outlets frequently blared in headlines any accusatory leaks made by prosecutors and investigators, ruining the reputations of countless people. But when no charges were brought, or courts dismissed the accusations for lack of evidence, the paper or news broadcast rarely returned to tell their readers and viewers that the accusation had not been proven. Therein lies the grave danger, the clear injustice, of accusing people of crimes through media leaks and forcing them to live with a cloud over their head with no fair process to defend themselves.
One could make a similar argument about the ongoing FBI criminal probe into Hunter Biden’s international business and tax activities. On Monday, we produced a new video report on what is clearly one of the most egregious disinformation campaigns in modern American political history: the union of the CIA, corporate media and Big Tech to spread the outright lie in the weeks before the election that the incriminating materials from the Hunter Biden archive were not real but instead were “Russian disinformation” — meaning fake documents forged by the Kremlin.
As we have repeatedly reported, the evidence that this was a lie, and that the archive was real, was overwhelming from the start. But six months ago, a reporter from Politico, Ben Schreckinger, published a book, “The Bidens,” that contained ample proof that the key materials on the laptop were authentic. The media outlets that spread that lie in the weeks before the election simply ignored that book.
Two weeks ago, the outlet they unironically regard as the Paper of Record — The New York Times — published an article on the FBI probe into Hunter Biden which, in their words, relied on emails “obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.” On Monday, The Washington Post published a lengthy article on the Bidens’ potentially corrupt business activities in China that also relied on materials from the laptop, which that paper also said it confirmed.
Yet not a single media outlet that spread the pre-election “Russian disinformation” lie has acknowledged any of this, let alone retracted their pre-election lies. That is because, as we document in our new video report, these outlets no longer see their function as journalistic but instead as partisan and propagandistic: they are absolutely willing and even eager to lie if it helps the Democratic Party stay in power. They know that their almost exclusively liberal readers and viewers want them to lie to help Democrats, and so they feel no compunction about lying and no need to acknowledge it when they get caught red-handed doing so. Our new video report can be viewed on our Rumble page, or on the video player at the end of this article.
But note what our numerous reports on the Hunter Biden matter do not allege or imply. We do not state or suggest that he is, in fact, guilty of the crimes for which he is being investigated, precisely because he has not yet been charged with those crimes, which means that the government has not yet been forced to show its evidence of guilt and Hunter Biden has not yet had the opportunity to defend himself in a fair process. One can suspect his guilt based on the disclosed evidence, but to assume he is guilty prior to charges being filed and a trial being held would be just as wrong as assuming that about Matt Gaetz. The corporate media, vehemently defending Hunter Biden, has no problem recognizing this core principle when it comes to the president’s son, yet refuses to recognize its validity at all when it comes to Congressman Gaetz — whom they have all but branded a pedophile and sex trafficker of children — and other enemies of American liberalism.
There are multiple forms of corruption and wrongdoing in the world of politics and journalism. Obviously, if Gaetz in fact had sex with a 17-year-old girl, that would be a crime in some states. If he paid her to travel across state lines to do so, that would be a crime under federal law.
But thus far, he has not been charged with any such crimes. Maybe one day he will be. But as a result of these unethical leaks and the treatment of them by The New York Times, he has lived for a full year with millions of people believing that he committed a serious crime with which he has never been charged. Even if the day comes when he finally is charged and convicted, this will still be a form of grave corruption and profound injustice, one committed by the sinister leakers and the journalists who deliberately turned him into a pedophile and sex trafficker for ideological reasons, even knowing that the state has not yet concluded that it has sufficient evidence to prosecute him for it.
Rowlatt Facing Two Complaints Over Panorama
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | March 30, 2022
You will recall the Panorama edition last November, “Wild Weather- Our World Under Threat”. Presented by Justin Rowlatt, it attempted to show that the world’s weather was getting worse because of global warming:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00117h1/panorama-wild-weather-our-world-under-threat
The programme highlighted four weather disasters, yet failed to offer even the slightest evidence that they were either unusual or becoming worse.
One of the four concerned a drought in Madagascar, which Rowlatt described as “the world’s first climate change-induced famine.”
Shortly after the programme was aired, a scientific study proved that his claim was nonsense, and that equally severe droughts had occurred there in the past.
I filed a complaint about this, only to be fobbed off with the response that they had been told this by the World Meteorological Organisation,WMO. I have now escalated my complaint to the Executive Complaints Unit, ECU, pointing out that since this was a major segment of the programme, the failure to check the actual data, which is readily available, was extremely shoddy journalism. Regardless of their excuses, a full correction needed to be broadcast.
The Panorama edition also included this opening statement by Rowlatt:
“The world is getting warmer and our weather is getting ever more unpredictable and dangerous. The death toll is rising around the world”
This is another lie. According to the same WMO:
Deaths decreased almost threefold from 1970 to 2019. Death tolls fell from over 50 000 deaths in the 1970s to less than 20 000 in the 2010s. The 1970s and 1980s reported an average of 170 related deaths per day. In the 1990s, that average fell by one third to 90 related deaths per day, then continued to fall in the 2010s to 40 related deaths per day.
Another reader complained about this, and received this astonishing reply:
In other words, the BBC justify their claim because the cumulative number of deaths is rising!
Needless to say, he too has escalated to the ECU.
It is clear that Rowlatt is facing big problems here. He has already been rebuked by BBC News bosses about his lies regarding offshore wind costs last year. He is now facing two complaints over this flagship Panorama edition.
Regardless of the ECU decision, it is crystal clear that Rowlatt is far too emotionally attached to climate issues on a personal level to be able to report accurately and objectively.
He should be removed from the climate brief.
For pro-lockdown campaigners, all roads lead to the Kochs
By Martin Kulldoff and Jay Bhattacharya | Unherd | March 29, 2022
During the Covid-19 pandemic, tribal politics have pushed scientific discourse into the back seat. Scientists who provide their honest assessment of medical and public health data have often been subject to ad hominem attacks and slander.
When Left-leaning journalists defend the government’s pandemic strategies by falsely classifying opponents as Right-wing, it hurts the Left while boosting the Right. The latest example is an article in the New Republic with one of the most far-fetched personal attacks we have seen since March 2020 — a true accomplishment during a pandemic filled with logical somersaults.
The target is Urgency of Normal, a group of physicians and medical scientists arguing against the masking of toddlers and children. The group includes Dr Vinay Prasad, a physician, epidemiologist, and associate professor at the University of California in San Francisco. With colleagues at Harvard and the University of Colorado, he wrote the most thorough scientific review of the efficacy of masks against Covid. They concluded that “data to support masking kids was absolutely absent.”
The New Republic article is called ‘Why Is This Group of Doctors So Intent on Unmasking Kids?’ The straightforward answer is that the doctors concluded that there is no reliable scientific evidence that masks on children reduce disease spread alongside a strong presumption that they may harm some children. The New Republic dismisses this possibility, claiming that “the science is strong” that masks help to “quell the pandemic”, and that there is “‘little scientific disagreement”. The last point is self-evidently untrue given the participation by many eminent scientists in the Urgency of Normal itself.
The essay then goes full ad hominem, attempting to link Dr. Prasad to “libertarian” efforts by the Koch family to unmask children via a convoluted chain of supposed associations, each of which is weak and the combined effect of which is simply conspiracy (see below). It appears that the New Republic, once a fierce critic of Sen. Joe McCarthy, has now embraced McCarthy’s guilt-by-association techniques.
Dr. Prasad is an excellent epidemiologist, but to paraphrase the New Republic, it seems “that the days of listening to the epidemiologists are over”. They are not alone. The Daily Poster/Lever and Jacobin magazine have used similar ad hominem arguments to falsely “connect” lockdown opponents with the Koch network, falsely claiming that the two of us are “connected to Right-wing dark money”. Our closest and only financial “connection” to the Koch Network is to have worked for universities, Stanford and Harvard, which have received millions of dollars from Koch foundations, although unrelated to any of our own work.
In the summer of 2020, Jacobin magazine interviewed one of us about lockdowns and their devastating effects on children and the working class. Their reader’s reactions were illuminating. The public criticism from high-profile individuals was harsh, calling us Trumpian, among other things. But, we also received many private letters from Jacobin readers, thanking us for saying what they were thinking but did not dare to say in public.
Views on pandemic strategies do not map onto a simple Left/Right binary. In the United States, Dr Anthony Fauci’s lockdowns were implemented by both Republicans and Democrats, generating enormous collateral damage to education, cancer, cardiovascular disease, vaccination rates, mental health, and hunger, to name a few malign outcomes. More often than not, members of the working class were the hardest hit. In Europe, the social democrats in Sweden chose not to copy Fauci’s response to the pandemic. One contributing factor may have been that its prime minister came from the working class, having started his career as a welder.
Classifying those like Dr Prasad as “Right-wing” for taking different views on pandemic restrictions is only damaging to the Left. Instead of permitting the Right to claim full credit for opposing misguided Covid policies, the Left should rightly claim some of that credit — Dr Prasad is, after all, on the Left himself. Instead, publications like the New Republic seem intent, not merely on smearing scientists instead of learning from them, but on driving reasonable men and women to the Right.
The New Republic’s convoluted attempt to associate Dr Prasad with the Koch family, in full:
- Prasad ‘writes for the Brownstone Institute for Social and Economic Research.’ (The Brownstone Institute, with no Koch connections, has republished Dr. Prasad’s Substack articles without payments.)
- The Brownstone Institute’ advocates for a more libertarian approach to the pandemic’. (Brownstone is not a libertarian organisation. It advocates for a more scientific approach to the pandemic based on basic principles of public health. It has attracted writers from across the political spectrum.)
- The Brownstone founder ‘consults for the American Institute for Economic Research’ (AIER). (He is a former employee without current ties.)
- AIER ‘receives funding from the Charles Koch Foundation.’ (One grant only, which paid <1% of AIER expenses in 2018.) AIER ‘receives funding’ from the ‘Koch-funded public relations firm Emergent Order and Emergent Order which also aided the Great Barrington Declaration.’ (Neither is true.)
- ‘One Koch-backed group has been linked to school unmasking efforts.’ (A mother’s anti-mask letter was circulated by a women’s group with some Koch funding. In contrast, a Koch-backed group have funded the pro-lockdown Covid work of Prof. Neil Ferguson at Imperial College.)
Martin Kulldoff, Ph.D., is an epidemiologist, biostatistician, and a former professor of medicine at Harvard University. Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D., is an epidemiologist, health economist, and professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Both are senior scholars at the Brownstone Institute and founding fellows at the Academy for Science and Freedom.
Red Alert: What seeing the war in Syria taught me about US/Western government and media propaganda
By Janice Kortkamp | Ron Paul Institute | March 29, 2022
The Syrian war was the first fully observed conflict on social-media and the ability to connect directly with Syrians real time as they were experiencing the crisis was unprecedented. This created a unique opportunity to get unfiltered information directly from all sides of the conflict to gain insights and understanding. The results have helped shake off the control by conventional news media over foreign events reporting and analysis. While this has created some chaos, valuable lessons have been (or should have been) learned.
I began researching Syria and the war there in late 2012, and have made seven extended journeys traveling around during the war from 2016 through 2019, meeting with hundreds of Syrians from different backgrounds, walks of life, and opinions as a 100 percent non-affiliated, unpaid, and self/crowd-funded, independent citizen-journalist.
It became clear that what’s been happening in Syria was not a spontaneous, organic, popular uprising against a tyrant, but a proxy regime-change attempt war in the works since the mid 2000’s against the quite popular Assad. This effort was spearheaded by the US, UK, France, and Israel, using Sunni violent fundamentalists and extremists (unpopular with the majority of Syria’s Sunni population as well as minority groups) armed and funded by the West and regional allies of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar to start the violence and do the dirty work. The basic character of the rebel groups was apparent from the beginning: Syrian and non-Syrian fighters most Westerners would call terrorists and be screaming for their government to crush if the same heavily armed groups had taken over their cities, towns, and suburbs by massacring, beheading, torturing, kidnapping, and raping.
Syrians often remarked to me that before the war their country was “almost a paradise.” The middle class was the largest economic sector and growing. Religious harmony was the norm and Christians there were doing well. International investment was increasing as were the tourists. Women were equal or outnumbering men in the universities and present in leadership roles in nearly all aspects of society. Syria had made the “Top 5” list of the world’s most personally safe countries. President Assad had brought the Internet into the country and kept it open throughout the war and the people there knew all that was being said in the West about the crisis.
This doesn’t mean Syria was perfect and Assad beloved by all Syrians. There were and are many problems there which are directly attributed to the government with corruption always being number one on the list of grievances. These internal issues have been exacerbated by the war.
Now, after 11 years of war, 90 percent of Syrians are poor, many are starving; the economy is shattered. Between the fighting, US/Western sanctions, loss of production capability (though an impressive number of factories have been rebuilt), shortages of electricity and fuel, the black market and smuggling, dearth of employment opportunities, Covid-19, and the economic meltdown in Lebanon, the situation seems destined to remain desperate for the foreseeable future. The pressure by the US and most allies continues including increased sanctions, and three on-going illegal occupations: US has seized control over 1/3 of the country (the part with the richest oil fields); Turkey holds much of the north; and Israel is still occupying the Golan while making routine air strikes in Syria with no condemnation. There are numerous terrorist groups including ISIS cells and Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS, formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, the al Qaeda affiliate) to get rid of in the northeast and Idlib.
As for Russia’s role in Syria, I’ve watched it closely – including observing some Russian military operations personally in Deir Ezzor, Homs, and Palmyra. Russia and Iran are in Syria legally, asked to join in the fight against ISIS and al Nusra by the Syrian government.
From 2011 through 2015 the situation was dire. In 2012 the US resolution at the UN called for President Assad to step down and both Russia and China vetoed it. The US and UK responded with “fury” according to The Guardian, while Syrians were out in the streets cheering. When Russian troops came in September of 2015, the priority was to put a stop to ISIS operations in the northeast. Massive ISIS oil convoys were taking the stolen oil up to Turkey, bringing the terrorist army equally massive amounts of money to use for their rampages while, according to a leaked, verified audio tape of John Kerry speaking with the Syrian opposition, the US was “watching ISIS grow” hoping the pressure would get Assad to negotiate. Instead, an appeal was made to Putin and answered. Within a few months, the ISIS oil convoys had been reduced significantly, cutting that cash flow.
By the end of 2016 total chaos had been replaced with more established battle lines and though violence was still occurring everywhere, there was some order. Palmyra was liberated from ISIS in the spring of 2016, after which the Russians and Syrians put on an orchestra concert to rededicate the spectacular archaeological site to culture; Western governments and media were not enthusiastic. It fell again to ISIS and many of the most important buildings were destroyed by the terrorists. The battles for Palmyra would have been the perfect opportunity to actually use chemical weapons – to protect that prized site and with ISIS forces isolated in the desert, however the fighting raged with conventional weapons and casualties were very high. In December 2016, Aleppo was freed from the terrorist groups that had been holding the eastern half of the city for years by the Syrian Army and its allies – with the ones fighting the terrorists being treated as though they were worse than ISIS in western media. The terrorist groups backed by the US and allies included the likes of Nour al din al Zenki that grabbed the young boy, Abdullah Issa, out of hospital with the IV still in his arm and beheaded him in the back of a truck on video while laughing. Al Zenki had received advanced weapons and other support by the US.
By October of 2017 when I was in Palmyra, Deir Ezzor and al Mayadeen, most of that area was freshly liberated from ISIS by the combined Syrian, Russian, Iranian, Iraqi, and Hezbollah forces. ISIS was still all around but its backbone of cities down the Euphrates had been severed. In Homs, I observed the transportation of armed groups twice from the Al-Waer suburb, overseen by the Russians. In addition, Russian de-mining efforts have insured relative safety for civilians returning to their homes after areas have been liberated.
To summarize, in my experience the Russians have indeed been effective in the fight against ISIS and al Qaeda while displaying professionalism, precision, and minimizing civilian casualties. The US has been using ISIS as a pretext for its own completely illegal occupation of the entire northeast third of Syrian lands, and has often been helping or working directly on behalf of the al Qaeda affiliate and similar terrorist groups.
However, the US/Western media is still saying the same things they’ve said since 2012, if anything entrenching deeper in the assertions of the US and other western governments. All major articles and stories are still about “the tyrant Assad killing his own people”; and the great majority of the Syrian people who supported their leader and army were made invisible. That support ranged from total devotion to begrudging acceptance because the alternative, Syria falling to the terrorists promoted by the West, was unthinkable. Anyone offering evidence and opinion different from that of the accepted narratives isn’t just ignored – they’re treated as enemies and attacked by the media.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is still in the early stages and although I’ve been tracking the situation since 2014, I certainly don’t to know all of what’s happening or will happen. To sort fact from fiction from all sides will be a painstakingly long process yet there is great urgency to avoid as much devastation as possible. War is painful, the most painful thing. It truly does hollow out souls as it lays waste to lands and lives and I hate it all, but I’ve seen the wall go up already which prohibits looking at the other side, hearing what their grievances and concerns are. That wall protects the easy to memorize, constantly repeated, approved talking points: “pre-meditated”, “unprovoked”, “unjustified” and that wall is already considerably taller, deeper, and wider than it’s been about Syria. For me, this is when the red light starts flashing, the alarm begins sounding, and I’m on full alert for more gross oversimplifications, exaggerations, unproven allegations, and outright falsehoods.
Copyright © 2022 by Ron Paul Institute
The ‘Ukrainian Resistance’ and the Houthis – A contrast in media coverage
By Gavin O’Reilly | Ron Paul Institute | March 28, 2022
In the now month-long mainstream media coverage of the Russian military intervention in Ukraine, much attention has been paid to the actions of the ‘Ukrainian Resistance’.
In a manner not dissimilar to its coverage of the ‘Syrian rebels’ a decade ago, a romanticised image of ‘Ukrainian freedom fighters’ fighting bravely against a militarily superior Russian foe has been widespread amongst corporate outlets, alongside their fawning over Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in his calls for the implementation of a No Fly Zone – a move that would undoubtedly trigger nuclear war.
This Hollywood-style PR makeover of the Ukrainian military by the corporate media, including the notorious neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, also shares a strong similarity with the aforementioned ‘Syrian rebels’ in that it highlights the strong presence of CIA involvement in the background.
Indeed, the training of Ukrainian military personnel by the CIA to engage in guerrilla warfare against Russia was recently outlined in a Western corporate media report, indicating that a plan was in place to draw Moscow into an Iraq-war style military quagmire in Ukraine – the second largest country in Europe.
Such a tactic has historical usage against the Kremlin, when in 1979, then-US President Jimmy Carter would launch Operation Cyclone, a CIA programme which would see the arming, funding and training of Wahhabi insurgents known as the Mujahideen, who would go onto wage war on the USSR-aligned government of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan – with Kabul, previously Western-friendly, having come under Soviet influence following the 1978 Saur Revolution.
This romanticised image of ‘Ukrainian freedom fighters’ by the corporate media however, lies in stark contrast to their coverage of Ansar Allah, more commonly known as the Houthis, currently waging an armed resistance campaign against Western-allied Saudi Arabia’s seven year long war and blockade on neighbouring Yemen – leading to mass-starvation in what is already the most impoverished country on the Arabian Peninsula.
Indeed, this was evidenced as such on Friday, when the Yemeni armed forces launched air strikes against a key oil refinery in the Saudi city of Jeddah, to a noticeable absence of articles by the Western media celebrating the actions of the Yemeni resistance against the Western-backed might of Riyadh, unlike their coverage of Ukraine and Russia.
To understand this contrasting approach to both Yemen and Ukraine by the corporate media, one must look further into the wider geopolitical and historical context in the West’s relationship with both countries.
In 1979, the same year as the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, the Islamic Revolution in Iran saw the anti-Western and anti-Zionist Ayatollah Khomeini come to power in Iran following the overthrow of the US and UK-aligned Shah Pahlavi – who had himself come to power following 1953’s Operation Ajax, an MI6 and CIA-orchestrated regime change operation launched in response to then-Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh’s decision to nationalise Iran’s vast oil reserves.
In order to counter the influence of Khomeini’s newly-established anti-Imperialist state and to maintain hegemony in the Middle East, the United States adopted the strategy of using Saudi Arabia – separated from the Islamic Republic by the Persian Gulf – as a political and military bulwark against Iran.
This is where the media coverage of the Yemen conflict comes into play, with Tehran long being accused of backing the Houthis, whose seizure of the capital Sana’a in March 2015 led to Riyadh launching its current air campaign – involving US and British-supplied bombs – in a bid to restore its favoured Presidential candidate, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, to power.
Therefore, with the aims of Ansar Allah consequently being opposed to the aims of the US-NATO hegemony, this explains why no heroic descriptions such as ‘Yemeni resistance’ or ‘freedom fighters’ are ascribed to the Houthis by the Western media, in stark contrast to their coverage of the Armed Forces of Ukraine – supported by the West since the 2014 Euromaidan colour revolution and their subsequent war on the breakaway Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, a situation that has escalated to the point where nuclear war has now become a distinct possibility.
Copyright © 2022 by RonPaul Institute
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The Voters’ Self-Induced Matrix
By Jeb Smith | The Libertarian Institute | April 20, 2026
In Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions, Professor Todd Rose explains that to belong to a group, people “keep twisting [themselves] into pretzels, trying to conform to what we falsely believe everyone else expects of us.” Seeking acceptance from the group, we conform in language, behavior, beliefs, and practices. As a result, we lose our individuality and aggregate into herds. Within our group we create an alternate reality to fit whichever collective mindset we attach ourselves to, and interpret the world through those lenses—our innate desire to belong overrides reality.
Rose says these illusions “have become a defining feature of our modern society.” In other words, the collectivist mindset is a great conduit for spreading illusions; thus, it is the politician’s favored form of governance.
Rose points to studies in psychology and neuroscience showing we delude ourselves into believing what the majority does, even if it is not what we desire or know to be accurate. … continue
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