From Washington to Jerusalem: A Chronicle of the Deliberate Destruction of a People Under the Guise of “Democracy” and “Security”.
The Gaza Strip today is not just a territory; it is an open wound on the body of humanity, a laboratory where the West, led by the United States and its puppet Israel, tests new forms of colonial violence. Under the pretext of “fighting terrorism” and “ensuring security,” a systematic destruction of an entire people is taking place—methodical, cynical, paid for by American taxpayers, and approved by the silent consent of European allies.
Trump’s plan for “managing” Gaza is not a solution but a refined form of neocolonial control. It is an attempt to replace open military occupation with a sophisticated system of neocolonial governance, where Palestinians are relegated to the role of perpetual wards, stripped of sovereignty, dignity, and a future.
The Architecture of Apartheid: How the US and Israel Jointly Engineered a Humanitarian Catastrophe
Annually, the United States provides Israel with $3.8 billion in military aid—money that transforms into bombs falling on homes in Gaza, into sniper bullets killing children at the border, into bulldozers uprooting ancient olive groves. This aid is not support for an ally; it is an investment in maintaining a colonial order. American weaponry is field-tested on Palestinians before being supplied to other dictatorial regimes.
The US Congress, that “great defender of democracy,” unanimously supports every Israeli military operation, every settlement expansion, every violation of international law. Democrats and Republicans compete over who can more zealously back Israeli militarism, as if Palestinian lives were merely bargaining chips in their dirty political game.
How many UN Security Council resolutions condemning the Israeli occupation have been vetoed by the United States? Over 45! Each time the international community attempts to condemn Israel’s war crimes, the US sides with the aggressor, demonstrating to the world that for them, international law is merely a tool to be ignored when it suits their geopolitical interests.
Trump’s “Peace to Prosperity” plan is a cynical parody of diplomacy. Creating alternative structures to compete with the UN is not a search for peace but an attempt to destroy the last remnants of multilateral diplomacy where small nations still have a voice. It is an endeavor to replace international law with the law of the jungle, where the strong are always right and the weak are doomed to suffer.
Technologies of Enslavement: Innovations in the Service of Neocolonialism
Israel is today a world leader in surveillance and control technologies, and Palestinians have become the guinea pigs in this laboratory of digital totalitarianism. Facial recognition systems, spy drones, cyber-attacks on infrastructure—all are first tested in Palestine, then exported as “battle-tested” technologies.
The permit system, electronic bracelets, biometric data—Palestinians live in a world where their every move is controlled, every trip requires a humiliating permit, every attempt at a normal life runs into a digital wall. This is not security—this is a scientific-technical apartheid, where technology serves not the advancement of humanity but its enslavement.
The blockade of Gaza is not merely a restriction on the movement of goods. It is a calculated strategy of economic strangulation, designed to make life in the Strip unbearable. The ban on importing construction materials, medical equipment, even baby formula—all are part of a plan to create a humanitarian catastrophe that will force Palestinians either to submit or to flee.
Israel controls Palestinian water, land, airspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum. The Palestinian economy is deliberately made unviable to create perpetual dependence on international aid, which can then be used as a lever for political pressure.
The Mythology of Exceptionalism: From “A Land Without a People” to “The Only Democracy in the Middle East”
Zionist colonization was built from the start on a lie—the lie of “a land without a people for a people without a land.” This initial falsehood spawned an entire ideology of denial: denial of the existence of the Palestinian people, their history, their connection to the land, their right to self-determination.
Today, this ideology has evolved into the rhetoric of a “Jewish state,” which by definition cannot be a state for all its citizens, and “the only democracy in the Middle East,” which rules over millions of people without any political rights. This hypocritical rhetoric finds fertile ground in the West, where Islamophobia and Orientalism render Palestinians as “the other,” whose suffering can be ignored.
Occupation is not only control over territory but also over history, memory, and identity. The destruction of Palestinian archives, the bombing of museums and libraries, the prohibition on teaching Palestinian history in schools—all are part of a strategy of cultural genocide aimed at erasing Palestinians not only from the map but from history itself.
Renaming cities and villages, replacing Arabic names with Hebrew ones, creating “archaeological parks” on the sites of destroyed Palestinian villages—this is an attempt to forge a new reality in which Palestinians are merely temporary guests on “Jewish land.”
International Complicity: The Silent Collusion of the “Free World”
European countries generously fund humanitarian programs in Palestine while simultaneously continuing profitable business with Israeli companies operating in settlements. They condemn “violence on both sides,” equating victim and executioner, the occupied and the occupier. Their “concern” is expressed in mild statements that Israel easily ignores.
The EU continues to grant Israel trade preferences despite the fact that Israeli goods produced in settlements clearly violate international law. This is not mere hypocrisy—it is complicity in crimes, cloaked in the rhetoric of “complexity” and “balancing interests.”
Some Arab regimes, tempted by American promises and intimidated by Israeli might, have betrayed the Palestinian cause. Normalization agreements with Israel, signed by the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan, are not a step toward peace but a capitulation to the colonial project. They have given Israel what it always wanted: recognition without the need to grant Palestinians their legitimate rights.
These regimes, many of which are themselves dictatorships, fear not Israel but their own peoples, for whom the Palestinian cause remains a symbol of justice and dignity. Their betrayal is temporary; popular memory and solidarity will outlive these shameful agreements.
Resistance as an Existential Imperative: Why Palestinians Do Not Surrender
Palestinians have endured the Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948, the occupation of 1967, intifadas, blockades, countless military operations—and they still stand. Their resistance is not merely a political position but an existential necessity. When attempts are made to erase you from the face of the earth, when your very existence is declared a “demographic threat,” the struggle for survival becomes a struggle for human dignity.
Every olive grove that Israeli settlers try to uproot, every family refusing to leave their home in East Jerusalem, every child walking to school under the muzzles of rifles—is an act of resistance. Palestinian steadfastness shatters the Israeli mythology of the “temporary nature of the occupation”; they remind the world that injustice, no matter how prolonged, remains injustice.
BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions)—a movement that Western governments are so afraid of they try to criminalize—is growing stronger. From university campuses in the US to trade unions in South Africa, from municipalities in Europe to church groups in Latin America, understanding is growing that the Palestinian cause is the cause of all who believe in justice.
The younger generation in the West, unburdened by Holocaust guilt and not bought off by Zionist propaganda, sees Israeli apartheid for what it is. Their solidarity is not just a fashionable trend but a moral imperative based on the universal values of equality and human rights.
Neocolonialism is Doomed, Even When It Seems Omnipotent
History is relentless: colonial projects, no matter how powerful they may seem, are doomed to fail. French Algeria, apartheid South Africa, the Portuguese colonies—they all collapsed because a people’s yearning for freedom cannot be suppressed forever. The American-Israeli colonial project in Palestine will be no exception.
The West, led by the US, is today on the wrong side of history, not on the side of justice. It supports occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing—and believes it can do so with impunity. But the moral erosion caused by this complicity in crimes is already undermining the foundations of Western moral authority.
Palestinians will survive because their cause is just, because the land remembers them, because injustice cannot last forever. And when the last wall of apartheid falls, when freedom finally comes to Palestine, history will deliver a harsh verdict not only upon the direct occupiers but also upon their Western patrons, who for seven decades have funded, armed, and justified one of the most brutal colonial projects of our time.
And that day will come—because no people will accept eternal servitude, and no empire, not even an empire of lies, can rule forever.
Muhammad Hamid ad-Din, a well-known Palestinian journalist
Half a century after the public learned that boys at a Belfast group home were sexually assaulted by senior staff, a key question remains unanswered: was British intelligence implicated in the abuse conspiracy, and did Kincora serve as a ‘honeypot’ to entrap and blackmail powerful figures?
A vast trove of declassified files on Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual, political, and intelligence escapades released by the US Department of Justice has once again thrust disgraced former Prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor into the spotlight. With British police reportedly reviewing Andrew’s past sexual activities and links to Epstein, questions are growing about whether Britain’s spy agencies were aware of Andrew’s alleged escapades with minors.
If the darkest rumors turn out to be true, it will not be the first time a British royal had been embroiled in a child rape conspiracy with spy agency involvement. Back in 1980, a scandal erupted when the Kincora Boys’ Home in occupied Ireland was exposed as a secret brothel run by powerful pedophiles. Chief among the alleged perpetrators was Lord Mountbatten — Andrew’s great-uncle.
From the very beginning, hints began to appear that MI5/MI6 knew of the child abuse taking place Kincora, and could have even been running the group home as part of a dastardly intelligence plot. With Britain’s domestic and foreign spies engaged in a savage dirty war in Ireland, and both services running operatives in Republican and Unionist paramilitaries, Kincora would have provided an ideal means of recruiting and compromising potential assets. Official investigations have strongly insinuated British intelligence chiefs had a close bond with many individuals who ran the Boys’ Home.
In May 2025, veteran BBC journalist Chris Moore published a forensic account of the case titled Kincora: Britain’s Shame. Featuring four and a half decades of firsthand research by the author, its groundbreaking contents have been met with general silence by British mainstream media.
In the book, Moore argues persuasively that the Boys’ Home was just one component of a more extensive child abuse network extending across British-occupied Ireland and beyond — in which London’s spying apparatus was not only aware, but likely complicit.
In 2023, Moore met personally with Kincora victim Arthur Smyth in Australia. Smyth’s stay at the Home was brief, but the horrors he endured there left him scarred forever.
“Having interviewed a number of Kincora survivors, I found Arthur’s story familiar. Sent to the Boys’ Home by a Belfast divorce court judge aged 11, he was continually preyed upon by the pedophiles who ran it, and intimidated into silence,” Moore told The Grayzone. “Arthur was also brutally abused repeatedly by a man he knew only as ‘Dickie’, who raped him while bending him over a desk.”
In August 1979, two years after Smyth escaped Kincora, he learned the true identity of ‘Dickie’ was none other than Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten, a member of the royal family and Queen Elizabeth II’s cousin. Mountbatten had just been murdered in an apparent IRA bombing attack on his fishing boat off the coast of Ireland. Though the British government appears to remain committed to concealing his crimes from the public, Mountbatten’s pedophilia was common knowledge among both British and US intelligence for decades.
As early as World War II, the FBI had identified Mountbatten as “a homosexual with a perversion for young boys.” A Bureau file detailing this was later identified by historian Andrew Lownie. After requesting other files the Bureau maintained on the royal, Lownie was informed by US authorities they had been destroyed.
Lownie says he was told by an FBI official that the files were only disposed of “after [he] asked for them” — indicating they were “clearly” shredded at the request of the British government.
Kincora conspiracy begins to unravel
Within months of Kincora’s opening in 1958, boys at the facility began coming forward to inform the adults around them that they were being routinely sexually abused. The Boys’ Home was repeatedly visited by police throughout the decades that followed in response to reports of rape and other mistreatment. Despite repeated investigations, time and time again, complaints were ultimately dismissed by the police.
Reports of sexual abuse spiked dramatically in 1971, when a prominent loyalist named William McGrath became the group home’s housefather, and was placed directly in charge of the boys’ day-to-to lives. Moore documented numerous harrowing accounts in which victims described being sadistically raped by McGrath to the point of internal bleeding, with the boys’ silence ensured by threats of violence.
Moore attributes police inaction to the “skillful manipulation” of Kincora’s director, Joe Mains, who successfully convinced officers that accusers were simply lying as revenge for perceived slights by the staff.
As an extremely well-networked figure in British-occupied Ireland, with deep links to prominent Unionist politicians and Protestant paramilitary groups, McGrath enjoyed virtual impunity. He also headed Tara, an armed Masonic loyalist faction covertly run by the British Army, which effectively functioned as an intelligence operation.
In conversations with colleagues, McGrath was known to boast about his work with British intelligence, and the regular trips to London which it entailed. A police source confirmed to Moore that MI6 had an interest in McGrath since the late 1950s, and that “everything McGrath did from this point on was known” to British intelligence. Small wonder campaigners firmly believe Kincora was exploited to compromise and control Unionists, who committed pedophilic offenses at the Home.
The horrifying abuse at Kincora finally surfaced in January 1980 when the Irish Times published an explosive report that triggered a police investigation, which was led by a veteran detective named George Caskey. According to Moore, it took Caskey just three days to decide that Kincora’s leadership were likely guilty.
Within weeks, Caskey’s team had identified dozens of victims of McGrath and others at Kincora, who each gave detailed statements about the abuse they suffered there. Based on their testimony, Mains, McGrath and fellow high-ranking staffer Raymond Semple were suspended from the group home, and arrested a month later. Curiously, Mains and Semple readily admitted their offenses to police, but McGrath aggressively protested his innocence. Resisting interrogation with such skill that investigating officers believed he had rehearsed for their questioning in advance, he made a number of bizarre, cryptic comments.
For one, McGrath declared he was the victim of political intrigue and the accusations against him were bogusly cooked up by the pro-British Ulster Volunteer Force paramilitary faction, among other people “out to destroy me.” He refused to elaborate on who they were, or why he believed he was being maliciously targeted in this manner. McGrath furthermore promised “other stories” and a “rebuttal to these allegations” would “come out in court,” but again declined to expand any further.
In December 1981, Mains, McGrath, Semple and three other individuals found to have abused young boys at two other state-run group homes in occupied Ireland finally stood trial. McGrath was the only defendant to plead not guilty. Present in court at the time, Moore recalls widespread anticipation McGrath’s testimony would “open a Pandora’s Box, laying bare the truth about Kincora and exposing an uncomfortable – some might say unholy – alliance between the British government and unionism, and perhaps even details of a secret MI5 operation.”
However, at the last minute, McGrath’s lawyer made a shock announcement – his client had changed his plea to guilty. McGrath’s volte face elicited a ripple of exasperated sighs across the courtroom, where over 30 Kincora victims had gathered, preparing to testify. Though all six men were convicted of sexual abuse of boys across three Belfast children’s homes, their relatively light sentences drew outrage. In the end, Mains was jailed for six years, while Semple received five years and McGrath, just four.
MI5 proposes creating ‘false files’ to sabotage investigations
For Moore, McGrath’s change of heart raises obvious suspicions that someone persuaded him to keep his mouth shut about “what had been said to him and by whom.” The police investigation established the six men knew each other and shared information about abused children in state-run boys’ homes, but did not explore the possibility they were part of a wider pedophile ring. The most significant official probe into Kincora since, the Northern Ireland Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry (HIA), initially raised hopes such information might emerge when it was launched in 2013.
That probe, which centered around allegations by British intelligence whistleblowers Colin Wallace and Fred Holroyd that the UK security state was complicit in systematic child rape at Kincora, appeared to leave MI5 extremely uneasy about the potential for British spies’ darkest secrets coming to light in occupied Ireland.
The HIA, however, appears to have been set up to fail. With no ability to compel MI5 or MI6 to produce records, the commission was forced to accept only whatever heavily redacted files the agencies voluntarily provided.
The decision to limit the scope of the HIA’s oversight came despite appeals by prominent figures including victims of sex abuse at Kincora, parliament’s home affairs committee, and former military officials, who claimed British intelligence was complicit in abuses at Kincora, and demanded the Inquiry be granted the ability to subpoena sensitive documents and witnesses.
As anonymous security and intelligence operatives spoke via videolink in the HIA hearings, Inquiry chair Judge Anthony Hart appeared to take their testimony at face value.
The Inquiry’s handling is all the more shocking given the contents of a June 1982 document provided by MI5 to the HIA showing how the agency’s higherups planned to counteract the inquiry itself.
Anxious to distance themselves from the horrors of Kincora, the British spy agency discussed creating “false files” to counteract “lines of enquiry which it was anticipated” that Caskey might pursue. In other words, MI5 was actively seeking to deceive police investigators through forgery.
But the HIA later declared it was “satisfied” that “the suggestion was not pursued,” concluding that the “false files” were not produced for the purposes of misdirecting the inquiry.
Kincora coverup continues
In 2020, it was revealed that extensive police records on investigations into Kincora from 1980 to 1983 had conveniently been destroyed roughly around the time the Inquiry was established.
The files which survived show the HIA received a number of tips suggesting MI5/6 were indeed entangled in pedophilic abuse at Kincora, only to consistently understate their significance.
For example, MI5 told HIA it had no records of William McGrath working for the agency. Conversely, documents produced by the intelligence service indicate how in April 1972, McGrath, who was “commanding officer of the Tara Brigade,” had not only been plausibly “accused of assaulting small boys,” but “could not account for any cash that had been handed to him over a period of a year.”
The HIA accepted MI5’s risible explanation that this information was not passed on to local police because it was unclear McGrath’s attacks on the boys were pedophilic in nature, rather than simply physical. “We ought not to assume that ‘assault’ would have been interpreted at the time by… [MI5] as being of a sexual type,” an internal document presented to the Inquiry declared.
Responding to a separate MI5 document from November 1973 noting McGrath was implicated in “assaulting small boys,” the HIA noted British intelligence was legally obligated to report such an “arrestable offence” to the police, and that by not doing so, it could be argued “the MI5 officers who had this information were in breach of that duty.” But the Inquiry concluded that “to take that view would be unjustified for several reasons,” primarily that “an unidentified member of Tara” was the source of this “unsubstantiated allegation.”
Similar mental gymnastics were employed to downplay the contents of an October 1989 MI6 file detailing “various allegations surrounding the Kincora Boys’ Home,” which revealed the spy agency “certainly ran at least one agent who was aware of sexual malpractice at the home and who may have mentioned this” to his handler. Judge Hart stultifyingly concluded, “it is quite possible the [MI6] officer misinterpreted what was discussed at the meeting.”
The HIA also insisted MI5 was unaware McGrath worked at Kincora until 1977. But that claim was effectively contradicted by the Inquiry itself, which unveiled MI5 documents from January 1976 clearly stating, “McGrath was reported in March 1975 to be warden of Kincora Boys’ Hostel.” A police memo from November 1973 dispatched to MI5’s director similarly noted McGrath was a “social worker” at Kincora.
Whitewash inquiry implicates MI6 chief in Kincora
As part of its probe, the HIA ordered “searches of documents and records” held by MI5, MI6, GCHQ, and the Metropolitan Police on allegations of child sex abuse by public figures and servants. In response, MI5 released files listing 10 powerful individuals, including diplomats, government ministers, and lawmakers, who Britain’s domestic spying agency had evidence to suggest may have been involved in pedophilic abuse.
Chief among them was veteran spy and dark arts specialist Maurice Oldfield, who oversaw MI6 operations in occupied Ireland throughout the 1970s, first as its deputy then chief. Shortly before his April 1981 death, Oldfield was outed as gay, which precluded him from serving with the agency under contemporary recruitment rules. Resultantly, “MI5 conducted a lengthy investigation to determine whether” Oldfield’s sexual proclivities “posed a risk to national security by making him vulnerable to blackmail or other pressure.”
Over the course of “many interviews,” he “provided information about homosexual encounters with male domestic staff, referred to as ‘houseboys’, whilst serving in the Middle East in the 1940s and hotel stewards in Asia in the 1950s.” Media reporting prior to Oldfield’s death suggested he was “a compulsive” user of “rent boys and young down-and-outs,” which was well-known to his security detail. However, the HIA repeatedly exonerated Oldfield of any wrongdoing, despite receiving bombshell evidence implicating him in the horrendous pedophilic acts perpetrated at Kincora.
Unbelievably, its report concluded “there is insufficient information in the records to deduce whether the term ‘houseboys’” was “used simply to describe domestic staff or to denote youth, leaving ambiguity over the ages of the other parties.” This is despite an anonymous MI6 officer telling the Inquiry the agency possessed four separate “ring binders” documenting Oldfield’s “relationship” with Kincora, his “friendship” with its chief Joe Mains, and potential personal connection to “alleged crimes at the boys’ home.”
Heavily redacted files published by the HIA also indicate MI5 was “aware of allegations” that occupied Ireland’s police knew Oldfield was intimately embroiled in the scandal. An internal agency telegram noted well-grounded suspicions the MI6 chief “was involved in the Kincora boys home affair in the course of occasional visits to Northern Ireland (associated with his job) between 1974 and 1979.” Still, the Inquiry dismissed this as proof of MI5/6 involvement in the child abuse conspiracy, on the grounds these excerpts referred purely to “allegations.”
The Kincora coverup continues today. In April 2021, the BBC announced “a new season of landmark documentaries… set to shine a new light on remarkable stories from Northern Ireland’s recent history.” Among the scheduled films was Lost Boys, which told the hideous tale of how numerous children inexplicably vanished in Belfast during the Troubles. It concluded the cases were all linked to pedophilic abuses at Kincora. Interviewees included several former police officers, who believed their inquiries into the disappearances had been systematically sabotaged by British intelligence.
On the eve of transmission, Lost Boys was pulled from broadcast. BBC managers were reportedly “shocked by its content, particularly evidence of MI5’s involvement in covering up the Kincora saga.” Moore, who consulted on the film, told The Grayzone there are strong insinuations British intelligence took a keen interest in the documentary’s producers, AlleyCats. “The home of one staffer involved in editing Lost Boys was burgled,” he says. “Another Alleycats member suspected a break-in, but could not be entirely certain.”
Having investigated Kincora since it first came to public attention, Moore concludes “MI5 and its cohorts in the police believe they can do what they want with little or no regard for the truth, the law or democracy,” noting British intelligence “somehow persuaded the government to bury Kincora files until 2065 and 2085.” The veteran muckraker also recently learned his private communications with journalists investigating other cases of criminal activity by MI5/6-sponsored loyalist paramilitaries – including murder – have been heavily surveilled.
“The British state has illegally spied on people trying to expose the truth in Northern Ireland for many years, in what they call a ‘defensive operation’. Senior local police chiefs have admitted surveillance tactics were deployed against 320 journalists and 500 lawyers over a decade, including me,” Moore concluded. “My telephone was monitored due to probing government-funded loyalist killers. Like many police officers who’ve looked into these matters, I’m all too aware of how authorities frustrate criminal investigations.”
As argued in last week’s article, economic coercion is never an end in itself, it is the prelude. When sanctions fail, when financial pressure cannot bend reality to the satisfaction of Washington’s Israel-first demands, the next instrument is always the same: war. The US has fallen into this trap repeatedly, ignoring the lesson every time, especially when Israel’s interest sits at the core.
Promoted as counterterrorism and the export of democracy, US interventions in Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Yemen, and beyond were nothing but proxy wars waged to secure Israel’s regional military supremacy, cement its occupation of Palestine, and preserve and expand a system of Jewish apartheid. The result was predictable and perverse: mushrooming terrorism, new dictators, pulverized states, endless wars, and a region locked into engineered chaos and permanent instability.
These were not failures of execution but successes of design. It was the precise prescription of the Israel-first ideologues in Washington. Wars that were marketed by an Israeli-managed media and paid for in American life and money. Israel-first Zionists, in coordination with Israeli operatives, manufactured the “Weapons of Mass Deception,” transforming the US military into Israel’s hired muscle, leaving US soldiers marooned in Israel-made-swamps for more than twenty years, and still counting.
The Israeli leader who testified to Congress in 2002, claiming that a US invasion of Iraq will have “enormous positive reverberation,” is hard at work. Benjamin Netanyahu’s prediction was partially correct; it was “enormous (negative) reverberation.” His intentional deception came at a massive cost to US taxpayers, $3.9 trillion, and the lives of American soldiers. Notwithstanding, Israel succeeded in destroying its supposed enemy, and got what it wanted without losing the life of one single Israeli soldier, or one cent.
Israel-first loyalists in Washington weren’t done, yet. Iran was always on Netanyahu’s list for America’s saber. Today, the parading US armada near or around Iran, follows the same trajectory of the Israel-first strategy to drag America into another Iraq-style war. As with Iraq, Netanyahu’s objective is not to prevent weapons of mass destruction—but along with Israel-first Zionists in the US to deploy “Weapons of Mass Deception” to drive the US into a new foreign war against Iran.
For this scheme to advance, however, American opposition to foreign wars would have to be neutralised, particularly on the right, where scepticism toward yet another foreign adventure had been gaining traction. According to Candace Owens, Charlie Kirk received a threatening text just 48 hours before his murder. Kirk had actively lobbied Trump against getting entangled into yet another overseas war.
The American Israel-firsters’ strategy is parasitic genius. It latches onto American power, drains it to destroy rivals, fracture neighboring states, and sow permanent chaos. The weaker the region becomes, the fatter the parasite grows, while the U.S. continues to bleed.
What America paid in Iraq may one day be remembered as a mere down payment compared to the devastation an Iran war would inflict on the region, the global order, and cost at home.
Here, American leaders would do well to revisit the sages of the founding father. In his Farewell Address, George Washington—as if he was contemporaneously addressing the ills of Israel-first and AIPAC—warned against “unnatural connections” with foreign powers, cautioning that excessive attachment could cloud judgment, corrupt independence, and subordinate the republic’s interests to those of another state. He urged against foreign entanglements and warned explicitly of outside influence that would “mislead public opinion” or “influence the public councils.”
Alas, foreign influence now shapes U.S. policy and what Americans hear and read in the media. Jewish billionaires, and lobby organizations such as AIPAC discipline political influencers, US lawmakers through funding threats and primary challenges. Political careers rise or fall on donor loyalty. Criticizing Israel is labeled anti-sematic, and dissent is criminalized as disloyalty. Journalists like Candece Own and Tucker Carlson, or even Megyn Kelly who rightly question the irrational Israeli influence, are labeled as haters and anti-Jews. In the Israel-first managed media, moral clarity is treated as treason.
America is possibly the only country in the world that borrows close to $5 billion every year, not counting special military appropriations, to give it away to a foreign state. Along with that, in the last two years, the US gave Israel more than $25 billion (annual aid + additional military aid). These are funds that could have been used to avoid healthcare cuts, or repair aging infrastructures across the United States.
The above is a living example of the “unnatural connection with any foreign Power…” George Washington warned against. Today, that forewarning reads like a prophecy.
In 2025, interest payments on the national debt alone consumed 1/5 of all federal revenue, $970 billion, or 13.8 per cent of the total US budget. Yet both parties continue to borrow more, not to rebuild the American economy, but to fund Israel and to wage wars against Israel’s enemies.
These are not abstract numbers. They are resources diverted from making America healthier, and productive investment like financial aid for college education where the money would circulate back into the economy by raising the incomes, productivity, and tax contributions of future US workers. Tariffs will not retire the debt. Trade barriers shield corporations, not consumers. Sanctions and wars weaken the economy, strain the dollar, and leave ordinary Americans footing the bill through higher taxes and inflated prices at the checkout counter for years to come.
Empires fall when they overspend, overextend, and allow corruption to auction their sovereignty to foreign powers, corporations, and oligarchs. Palestine has exposed the fatal flaw at the heart of this corruption. A government that claims to uphold international law punishes judges who apply it.
A state that lectures on human rights criminalizes those who document the crimes. A nation that boasts its humanitarian virtue enables the starvation of 2.3 million people; a state that allows rich foreign loyalists to dominate its political structure loses its sovereignty.
America’s moral redemption lies in heeding George Washington’s farewell speech, relearning the lessons of history, restoring American moral values, and reclaiming a foreign policy anchored in US interest, not outsourced to Israel-first American Zionists who are ready to drag America into a new Made-for-Israel War.
The Epstein files are still rocking Western and European elite. While much is being made by Western press about Russian women victims, one should also take a look at Ukraine: the files include documents belonging to women from many countries, but Ukraine is mentioned a lot. This imbalance in coverage is itself telling.
In a previous piece, I examined how the Epstein files point to experimental research of an ethically extreme nature, tied to Jeffrey Epstein’s long-documented obsessions with eugenics, genetics, and human engineering. One may recall the allegations about the “baby ranch” in New Mexico. Some of the (underreported) released emailsinclude references to “mouse testing” in a Ukraine lab and even to plans for a “designer baby” or a human clone within five years (files EFTA01003966 and EFTA02625486). The implications are disturbing enough.
Ukraine’s connections to Epstein’s world, however, do not end with potentially clandestine laboratories and futuristic plans about human cloning. The human trafficking dimension is equally strong. The Epstein files contain copies of passports, visas, and personal documents belonging to women from Italy, Morocco, South Africa, Ukraine, Russia, Lithuania, and Czechia – all seized from Epstein’s estate. Ukraine stands out repeatedly. The correspondence highlights at least two Kyiv-based modeling agencies, Linea 12 Models and L-Models, singled out by Epstein himself as “the best.”
The Linea 12 Models agency, repeatedly cited in the Epstein files, also appears in correspondence linked to Jean-Luc Brunel (file EFTA00753670), the French model agent and convicted sexual abuser long associated with Epstein. In 2022 Brunel was found dead in his cell (in Paris) just like Epstein was in 2019.
Bridal agencies and even the Hyatt Regency Kyiv are also mentioned in this context. In the exchanges, Epstein is provided with the contact of Yulia Kyselova, described as someone who “has about 400 girls for modeling and bridal agencies in Kyiv.”
In 2012 the billionaire’s longtime assistant Lesley Groff coordinated room bookings via Thomas Pritzker, owner of Hyatt, allegedly for individuals connected to the modeling industry. Another curious conversation concerns the purchase of an old house at 24 Borys Romanetsky Street in Lviv, Ukraine, supposedly to be repurposed as a “Pilates studio.”
Ukraine has consistently ranked among Europe’s most corrupt countries, a context that matters. It is also a major source and transit hub for human trafficking: an IOM-commissioned report estimates over 120,000 Ukrainians have been trafficked since 1991, making Ukraine one of the largest sources of trafficked labor in Europe – with earlier figures pointing to hundreds of thousands of women trafficked abroad for sexual exploitation. US State Department reports repeatedly cite allegations of official complicity, including orphanage staff accused of involvement or negligence (2015–2016) and police and judicial officials covering up brothels for bribes (2020–2021). More recent assessments note investigations but few convictions, indicating persistent impunity.
Add to this Ukraine’s role as a CIA hub, documented even by the New York Times. One may recall that US intelligence agencies, in their clandestine endeavors, have historically intersected with organized crime in various theaters, including human trafficking. We now know that Jeffrey Epstein himself was CIA-connected. In such an ecosystem, it is no wonder Ukraine would attract Epstein’s interests, whether in illicit modeling pipelines, trafficking networks, or even illegal human cloning.
The political connections should not be missing from this picture. The files reveal Davos “networking” and “private dealings” with Ukrainian elite figures. In an email dated June 10, 2019, a redacted sender casually states, “I will be with Zelensky this Thursday.” In the same period, Epstein discussed Ukraine with former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, remarking that “Zelensky [is] seeking help” (file FTA00517525). Former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko is also mentioned in the wider correspondence. These are not trivial name-drops; they situate Epstein within elite political circles at a decisive moment in Ukraine’s post-Maidan trajectory.
This should surprise no one. Back in March 2014, amid the chaos of the Maidan upheaval, Epstein wrote to Swiss banking executive Ariane de Rothschild that the US-supported coup in Ukraine would provide “many opportunities”, a point I discussed elsewhere. Opportunities for whom, exactly? Later correspondence sheds light.
In May 2019, Epstein advised a redacted interlocutor, presumably a Ukrainian woman, to start following Ukrainian politics, including Zelensky, parliament, and corruption, implying this would contribute to her future “success”. She answers: “Now it will be so interesting to watch the politics in Ukraine: all politics as a comedy”, to which Epstein says: “Yes, it is funny, but sophisticated corruption. Huge amounts of money will be made. Huge. I’d like to see you as a female oligarch.”
To sum it up, Ukraine was an important hub in the Epstein network, financially, politically, and as a source of human “assets” (women and girls potentially recruitable and exploitable). And there is no reason to assume it has ceased to be, considering that Epstein did not operate alone and his ring was not the only one. There is an ongoing narrative war; but the question is whether Western journalists are willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads, or whether geopolitical loyalties will continue to dictate what is seen, and what remains conveniently unseen in the New Cold War.
Uriel Araujo, Anthropology PhD, is a social scientist specializing in ethnic and religious conflicts, with extensive research on geopolitical dynamics and cultural interactions.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has for decades advocated net-zero governmental policies to reduce anthropogenic CO2 (aCO2) emissions.
This advocacy is rooted in the non-physical assumption that aCO2 molecules are special, as they remain in the atmosphere for decades to centuries.
In reality, a new study references the Equivalence Principle in emphasizing nature’s sinks indiscriminately and equivalently absorb both aCO2 and natural CO2 in about 4 years (Müller, 2025). There is no physical reality for IPCC claims of “specialized” absorption time for aCO2 vs. natural CO2 molecules.
The IPCC assumes exactly 50% of aCO2 emissions remain in the atmosphere for decades to millennia. It is consequently assumed net-zero policies that propose to halve aCO2 emissions will lead to the stabilization of atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Because “anthropogenic CO2 has the same [4-year] residence time of natural CO2,” this assumption is physically invalid.
Net-zero policies will literally have no detectable effect on atmospheric CO2 concentrations. In sum, “the IPCC’s assumptions and fundamentals are wrong.”
Israeli occupation forces have bulldozed sections of the Gaza War Cemetery in Gaza City’s al-Tuffah neighborhood, damaging graves of British, Australian, and other allied soldiers from the First and Second World Wars, according to an investigation by The Guardian.
Satellite imagery shows systematic earthworks in the cemetery’s southern corner, including removed gravestones, churned soil, and a large earth berm indicating the use of heavy machinery. The damage was not visible in images from March last year but appeared clearly in satellite photos taken in August and December.
Essam Jaradah, the cemetery’s former caretaker, told The Guardian that Israeli bulldozers first cleared land around the cemetery walls before later entering the graveyard itself, flattening nearly one dunum of land that included graves of Australian soldiers.
“The bulldozing covered the area from the bench where foreign visitors used to sit up to the memorial monument,” Jaradah said, adding that the operations took place after Israeli occupation forces withdrew from the area in late April or early May.
Israeli army cites combat operations
Responding to questions from The Guardian, the Israeli military command said the area was an “active combat zone” at the time and claimed its actions were taken for defensive reasons.
“At the relevant time, the area in question was an active combat zone,” a military spokesperson said, alleging the presence of underground “terrorist infrastructure” within and around the cemetery.
The Royal British Legion said it was “saddened” by reports that allied war graves had been damaged, stressing that such sites “deserve to be treated with the utmost respect”.
Former CDC Director Robert Redfield’s recent, startling admissions about the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines raise a critical question: how different might the COVID era have been if the public had been told early on that these shots were never designed to stop transmission and were not appropriate for children?
Tales of the American Empire produced several tales about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. They detail evidence that American President Franklin Roosevelt knew a Japanese carrier force was sailing east to attack Hawaii in late 1941, and he allowed it to happen by not alerting commanders in Hawaii. Few Americans know about this shocking fact because their government controls informational sources. Tales of the American Empire has a playlist of ten videos about this event that is linked in the description. I have stumbled upon even more proof of this crime.
“A Century of U.S. Naval Intelligence”; Captain Wyman H. Packard, USN (Retired); Office of Naval Intelligence and the Naval Historical Center; Department of the Navy; 1996; Pearl Harbor starts on Page 19; https://ncisahistory.org/wp-content/u…
On August 25th 2025, this journalist documented how the 1975 Helsinki Accords transformed “human rights” into a highly destructive weapon in the West’s imperial arsenal. At the forefront of this shift were organisations such as Amnesty International, and Helsinki Watch – the forerunner of Human Rights Watch. Supposedly independent reports published by these organisations became devastatingly effective tools for justifying sanctions, destabilisation campaigns, coups, and outright military intervention against purported overseas “rights” abusers. A palpable example of HRW’s utility in this regard is provided by Yugoslavia’s disintegration.
In December 2017, HRW published a self-laudatory essay boasting how its publication of “real-time field reporting of war crimes” during the Bosnian civil war’s early stages in 1992, and the organisation’s independent lobbying for a legal mechanism “to punish military and political leaders responsible for atrocities” committed in the conflict, contributed to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia’s establishment. Documents held by Columbia University“reveal the fundamental role of HRW” in the ICTY’s May 1993 founding.
These files moreover detail HRW’s “cooperation in various criminal investigations” against former Yugoslav officials by the ICTY, “through mutual exchange of information.” The organisation is keen to promote its intimate, historic ties with the Tribunal, and how the ICTY’s work spurred the International Criminal Court’s creation. Yet, absent from these hagiographic accounts is any reference to HRW’s pivotal contribution to manufacturing public and political consent for Yugoslavia’s breakup, which produced the very atrocities the organisation helped document and prosecute.
In November 1990, HRW founding memberJeri Laber authored a tendentiously-titled op-ed for The New York Times, “Why Keep Yugoslavia One Country?”. Inspired by a recent trip to Kosovo, Laber described how her team’s experience on-the-ground in the Serbian province had led HRW to harbour “serious doubts about whether the US government should continue to bolster the national unity of Yugoslavia.” Instead, she proposed actively facilitating the country’s destruction, and laid out a precise roadmap by which Washington could achieve this goal.
Namely, by offering financial aid exclusively to Yugoslavia’s constituent republics, “to help them in a peaceful evolution to democracy,” while sidelining “weak” federal authorities from any and all “economic support”. She forcefully concluded, “there is no moral law that commits us to honor the national unity of Yugoslavia.” Coincidentally, mere days earlier, US lawmakers began voting on the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act, which codified Laber’s prescriptions as formal government policy.
Under the legislation’s auspices, Washington would provide no “direct assistance” to Yugoslavia’s federal government whatsoever. Moreover, financial aid would be withheld from the country’s constituent republics unless they all convened elections under US State Department supervision within six months. In a stroke, Belgrade’s central authority was neutralised, and the seeds of bitter, bloody wars of independence throughout the multiethnic, multifaith federation were sown. Shockingly, Human Rights Watch was well-aware this was an “inevitable” consequence of terminating Yugoslav “national unity”.
‘Multinational Experiment’
In January 1991, HRW published an investigation, Human Rights in a Dissolving Yugoslavia. Laber was lead author, and its findings relied heavily on her visit to Kosovo the previous year. The report claimed the Serbian province was home to “one of the most severe situations of human rights abuse in Europe today,” due to the Yugoslav army’s mass-deployment. Kosovo resultantly teemed with soldiers and roadblocks. Numerous anonymous local Albanians told HRW lurid tales of atrocities, supposedly committed by the military and security forces against civilians.
The report briefly acknowledged Serbs, and Kosovo’s other ethnic and religious minorities, had previously “suffered abuse” from elements of the province’s Albanian population, and local governments “composed predominantly of ethnic Albanians.” It also noted prior HRW missions to Kosovo concluded the Yugoslav military’s mission was “to protect the Serb minority.” However, the report asserted there was now “no justification” for the army’s presence, and its true purpose was to “subjugate ethnic Albanian identity” locally on the Serbian government’s behalf.
That non-Albanians “suffered abuse” in Kosovo before the Yugoslav army’s arrival is quite an understatement. As The New York Times reported in November 1982, Albanian ultranationalists had in recent years embarked on a savage “war of terror” to create a Kosovo “cleansed of all Slavs.” That year alone, 20,000 terrified Serbs fled the province. In 1987, the outletrecorded how this barbarous crusade had intensified to such a degree, Yugoslav officials and citizens across the federation feared the outbreak of civil war.
“There is no doubt Kosovo is a problem of the whole country, a powder keg on which we all sit,” Slovenian Communist chief Milan Kucan, who three years later led his republic’s independence from Yugoslavia, was quoted as saying. “Officials in Belgrade” of every ethnic and religious extraction viewed the “challenge” of Kosovo Albanian secessionists as “imperiling the foundations” of the country’s “multinational experiment”. They cautioned of the “Lebanonizing” of their state, comparing the situation to the “Troubles” inBritish-occupied Ireland:
“As Slavs flee the protracted violence, Kosovo is becoming what ethnic Albanian nationalists have been demanding for years… an ‘ethnically pure’ Albanian region… Last summer, [Kosovo] authorities… documented 40 ethnic Albanian attacks on Slavs in two months… Slavic Orthodox churches have been attacked, and flags have been torn down. Wells have been poisoned and crops burned. Slavic boys have been knifed, and some young ethnic Albanians have been told by their elders to rape Serbian girls.”
Earlier that year, Belgrade’s nine-strong Presidency, led by Sinan Hasani– himself a Kosovo Albanian – formally condemned the actions of ultranationalists in the province as “counter-revolutionary”. In the parlance of socialist Yugoslavia, this was the gravest qualification that could be bestowed by the country’s leadership. Hasani remained part of the Presidency in February 1989, when its members unanimously declared a state of emergency in Kosovo, leading to the military’s deployment.
HRW singularly failed to probe this complex, essential context in its report. There was also no recognition whatsoever the situation in Kosovo for non-Albanians remained fraught at this time, to the extent Serbs escaping brewing ethnic tensions elsewhere in Yugoslavia were explicitly warnednot to seek refuge in the province by authorities. These omissions are all the more unpardonable given HRW’s distorted view of events in Kosovo was central to the report’s conclusion – the US should sanction the Yugoslav federal government for human rights violations.
This finding was reached despite HRW conceding it was widely believed punitive action against Belgrade would “inevitably” lead to the federation’s disintegration, with “human rights virtually guaranteed to suffer” as a result. The organisation however did “not endorse this position”, believing it of far greater urgency Washington “express its disapproval” over purported abuses in Kosovo via destructive sanctions. Meanwhile, HRW unbelievably stressed it took “no position on whether Yugoslavia should or should not stay together as a country.”
‘Communal Violence’
Fast forward to December 2002, and Jeri Laber testified as an “expert” witness during Slobodan Milosevic’s ICTY prosecution. Under cross-examination by the indicted former Serbian and Yugoslav President, she exhibited an absolutely staggering ignorance of socialist Yugoslavia’s culture, history, legal and political systems, and much more besides. For example, Laber was unaware Tito, the federation’s founder and longtime leader, was – famously – a Croat. Her pronounced lack of local comprehension proved particularly problematic when Milosevic dissected an August 1991 HRW report, on the Croatian civil war.
The probe made a number of bold claims regarding that conflict, describing “the resurrection of Croatian nationalism” producing the deadly standoff “as a reaction to 45 years of Communist repression and Serbian hegemony,” leaving Croats “bitter” over how Zagreb was, in Yugoslavia, “a vassal” of Belgrade. HRW strongly suggested – without evidence – Milosevic was personally responsible for fomenting local tensions and violence. Western sponsorship of Nazi-veneratingCroat leaders, who openly advocatedtotal erasure of their republic’s Serb population, was unmentioned.
Milosevic asked Laber how HRW could’ve possibly concluded Croatia’s membership of socialist Yugoslavia amounted to almost half a century of “Serbian hegemony”, given a Serb occupied the office of Prime Minister just once throughout the federation’s history, for a four-year-long period. He further questioned her cognisance of Belgrade’s three federal premiers 1982 – 1992 all being Croats, that Croats led and dominated Yugoslavia’s defence apparatusduring the Croatian conflict itself, and how “all ethnicities were represented proportionally” in the country’s government and military by law.
Laber confessed to not knowing a single one of these inconvenient truths, fatally undermining the claims of every HRW report published on Yugoslavia under her watch – which inspired the ICTY’s formation, and prosecutions. Flailing on the witness stand, she resorted to arguing the countless flagrantly bogus assertions in HRW’s assorted Yugoslav investigations weren’t intended to be taken as her organisation’s own independent findings, or in any way rooted in reality, but merely reflected what some people locally had voiced to HRW researchers:
“We were not saying that was factually the case, we were trying to explain the attitudes we heard, what people told us when we were there… There was no intent or implication… this is what we thought. We were just saying Croats talked about many years of Serb hegemony. That was the way they seemed to see it, not the way we were saying it was… We were trying… to explain a very complicated situation to people who were not living in [Yugoslavia]… in our own simplest way.”
Such crucial, self-nullifying caveats were of course not included in any of HRW’s reports on Yugoslavia’s collapse and the numerous internecine conflicts that resulted, which the organisation actively encouraged and facilitated. That Laber’s witless pronouncements informed and justified US policy, despite her ignorance of the most basic facts about Yugoslavia, is a disquieting testament to the woeful quality of ‘expertise’ routinely exploited in pursuit of Washington’s imperial goals. What the federation’s breakup would produce was entirely predictable, and indeed contemporaneously predicted by scholar Robert Hayden.
In a December 1990New York Times op-ed, Hayden – an actual expert on Yugoslavia – harshly condemned Laber’s strident call for the US to shatter the federation in the newspaper the previous month as “remarkable for its lack of comprehension.” He rightly warned, “those who would break up the country are strong nationalists, not likely to treat minorities within their own borders well,” while recording how the federal military’s interventions helped “forestall armed conflict” in Croatia that August, which could’ve easily spread across the country.
Comparing Belgrade’s present situation to the US civil war’s leadup, Hayden charged it was “truly bizarre… ‘human rights’ activists so cavalierly advocate policies that are likely to turn Yugoslavia into the Lebanon of Europe.” With eerily precise foresight, he warned if Belgrade’s federal authority collapsed, “the republics are almost certain to fight one another because of the large minority populations that are scattered through the country.” His dire premonitions today reverberate as a prophet’s curse wretchedly validated:
“At best, we could expect strict repression, perhaps massive expulsions, the sundering of mixed towns and families, followed by permanent hostility and… communal violence as to make present human rights abuses in Kosovo seem absolutely civilized… The nations of Yugoslavia, despite their hostilities, are tightly bound to one another. These bonds cannot be broken, at least not without atrocities. ‘Human rights’ advocates should thus consider policies that will lead these nations to put down their arms, rather than policies that will induce fratricide.”
The vaccinated versus unvaccinated study does not exist.
Not “hasn’t been done well.” Not “needs more funding.” Does not exist. No large-scale, long-term study has ever compared total health outcomes of vaccinated children against those who received no vaccines at all. The most basic question a parent might ask—what happens to children who get the full schedule versus children who get none of it?—has never been answered.
The tampon-cervical cancer study does not exist.
Women insert products containing lead, arsenic, cadmium, dioxins, and PFAS directly against cervical tissue, for days each month, for decades. The vaginal epithelium absorbs substances more efficiently than swallowing them—pharmaceutical companies exploit this property deliberately. No study has examined whether this chemical exposure causes the cancer that develops in that tissue.
The long-term antidepressant outcome study does not exist.
Millions take SSRIs for decades. No study has followed patients long enough to determine whether these drugs improve life outcomes compared to people who experienced similar depression but did not take them.
These are not gaps in the research. These are the research.
The streetlight effect takes its name from an old joke. A drunk searches for his keys under a streetlight. A policeman asks where he dropped them. “In the bushes,” the drunk says. “Then why are you looking here?” “Because this is where the light is.”
The joke works because the behaviour is absurd. No one would search where they know the answer isn’t, simply because that’s where they can see.
Except institutions do exactly this. Every day. As policy.
The streetlight effect, as it operates in captured institutions, is not cognitive error. It is not researchers making innocent mistakes. It is the deliberate positioning of the light to ensure certain questions are never asked and certain answers are never found.
This is not censorship. Censorship is visible, resistible, galvanizing. The streetlight effect is invisible. The scientist who never receives funding for the destabilizing question does not experience suppression—they experience a career that simply moved in other directions. The question dies without ever being asked. The ignorance is architecturally produced.
Peter Duke (The Duke Report™️) calls this epistemic warfare—the deliberate construction of ignorance as a strategic weapon. The battlefield is what you’re allowed to know.
The drunk in the joke is stupid. The people positioning the lampposts are not.
The Machine
The streetlight effect does not operate alone. It is one component in a larger machine that creates stable falsehood.
Consider a pole balanced perfectly vertical. This represents truth in equilibrium. It requires no energy to maintain—gravity holds it in place. Now tilt the pole twenty degrees from vertical. Enormous energy must flow into the base to prevent collapse. Struts, supports, constant adjustment. A partial deviation from truth demands perpetual maintenance.
But invert the pole completely—one hundred eighty degrees—and it balances again. Not because it has escaped gravity, but because the inversion is complete enough to create its own coherent structure. A partial lie must argue with reality. A complete inversion replaces reality. The internal logic becomes consistent, even though every element points in the wrong direction.
This is how medical orthodoxy maintains itself. The cholesterol hypothesis, the viral theory of disease, the vaccine safety consensus—these are not partial deviations requiring constant defense. They are complete inversions that have found their own equilibrium. Once trillions of dollars of infrastructure are built around the inverted pole—careers, institutions, industries, identities—the structure stands for generations.
The streetlight effect is what keeps the inversion stable. It ensures the studies that would expose the inversion never get funded. The questions that would topple the pole never get asked. The light shines where the answers aren’t, and the darkness protects what cannot survive scrutiny.
The Components
The founding lie. Every inversion begins with a deliberate decision to construct a reality opposite to truth. Someone knows the truth and chooses to build the inversion. The tobacco executives who wrote “doubt is our product” in 1953. Ancel Keys selecting six countries from twenty-two. Simon Flexner declaring viral causation without demonstrating any virus. The founding lie need not be elaborate—it needs only to be simple enough to anchor a heuristic and complete enough to form a coherent alternative.
Epistemic capture. The systematic colonization of institutions that produce and validate knowledge. Journals, regulatory bodies, funding agencies, medical schools. When captured, the inversion gains legitimacy. It becomes “the science” rather than a lie being told. Two-thirds of medical school department chairs have financial ties to pharmaceutical companies. Two-thirds of researchers carry conflicts of interest. The top two-thirds of universities own pharmaceutical stock. Most clinical trials are conducted by for-profit Contract Research Organizations. Up to 40% of medical journal articles are ghostwritten by the industry. The $27 billion spent annually on drug promotion exceeds the entire NIH budget. Capture this system and you capture the epistemology of the entire society. The inversion no longer needs to persuade—it certifies.
The herd-mind limitation. Collective cognition cannot perform slow thinking. It holds only simple heuristics—two-variable formulas compressing reality into actionable shortcuts. “Cholesterol causes heart disease; statins prevent it.” “Viruses cause illness; vaccines prevent it.” “HPV causes cancer; Gardasil prevents it.” Two variables, one relationship. This is not stupidity—individuals can think slowly and hold multiple variables. But the collective runs on pattern-matching shortcuts. Whoever installs the two anchor points controls the collective understanding. The streetlight effect ensures no competing formula can form, because the evidence that would generate it remains in darkness.
The complicity of comfort. The inversion succeeds not only because institutions enforce it but because populations prefer it. A comfortable lie demands nothing. An uncomfortable truth demands everything—action, disruption, reversal of past choices, separation from the herd. The parent who accepts that vaccines are safe can believe they protected their child. The parent who questions must face what they may have done, and must find the courage to refuse the next injection while doctor, family, and social circle apply pressure. The comfortable lie offers belonging. The uncomfortable truth offers exile. Given the choice, most people choose comfort. They are not stupid. They are human. The inversion exploits this.
Convergent opportunism. Once the inversion is seeded, other actors discover the structure serves them. They join maintenance without coordination. Pharmaceutical companies profit from the products the inversion protects. Doctors maintain income and status by following captured protocols. Regulators secure future employment by approving what industry wants approved. Journals collect advertising revenue and reprint fees. Academic careers are built on the approved research agenda. Politicians receive donations. Media companies receive advertising. No one needs to be in a room together. Their interests converge on the same structure like iron filings around a magnet. The original architects can retire or die. The founding lie no longer requires their maintenance. The ecosystem maintains itself.
The streetlight effect. Research, funding, and career advancement concentrate in the illuminated zone. Questions that would destabilize the inversion lie in darkness—not forbidden, merely unrewarded. Scientists go where the light is. The ignorance is architecturally produced.
The components interlock. Epistemic capture makes the heuristic installation possible—the two anchor points are certified as “settled science.” The herd-mind limitation makes capture effective—the collective cannot audit the institutions it trusts. The complicity of comfort ensures the collective does not want to audit them—the truth is too costly. Convergent opportunism maintains the streetlight—each actor has incentive to keep the illuminated zone stable. The streetlight produces the ignorance that protects the founding lie from scrutiny. No central control required. Each component creates conditions for the others.
How the Light Gets Positioned
Funding control. Fund what you want studied. Don’t fund what you don’t want studied. A study that doesn’t exist cannot produce inconvenient findings.
Definitional control. Define questions narrowly enough that desired answers become inevitable. Define vaccine safety as “does not cause the specific harm we’re testing for in the short window we’re testing,” and you can find vaccines safe while ignoring every harm you didn’t test for. Define “isolation” as detecting genetic sequences rather than extracting particles, and you can claim viruses are isolated without ever demonstrating they exist.
Methodological control. Use active comparators instead of inert placebos. The HPV vaccine trials used aluminum adjuvant as the “placebo”—a toxic substance guaranteeing the control group would experience adverse events. Exclude participants likely to have adverse reactions. End trials before long-term effects appear. Choose surrogate endpoints instead of outcomes that matter.
Publication control. Fund journals, sit on editorial boards, peer review each other’s papers. Authors with conflicts of interest are twenty times less likely to publish negative findings. The Lancet generates up to two million euros from reprints when a positive drug study is published. The same investment funds—BlackRock, Vanguard—that own major pharmaceutical stakes also own the journals that evaluate their products. Publish what supports the narrative. A finding that isn’t published doesn’t enter “the scientific consensus.”
Career control. Reward researchers who produce useful findings. Punish those who produce threatening ones. Kilmer McCully discovered homocysteine—his laboratory was moved to the basement, his funding evaporated, no institution would hire him for two years. The survivors learned what questions not to ask. Upton Sinclair identified the mechanism: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Mortgages create beliefs.
Narrative control. Establish “scientific consensus” through the mechanisms above, then use it as a weapon. Anyone who questions it is “anti-science.” The lamppost is defended by making it socially impossible to point out it’s in the wrong place.
Once you begin, you cannot stop. The streetlight effect is not a one-time decision but continuous operation. Every year, researchers must be funded for approved questions and not funded for forbidden ones. Every year, journals must publish approved findings and reject threatening ones. The moment you stop, someone asks the forbidden question, funds the forbidden study, publishes the forbidden finding. This is why captured institutions respond to challenges with ferocity. A question that might move the lamppost threatens the entire inverted structure—because for the people who positioned the lamp, it does.
Why
Money is the mechanism. Power is the motive. Extraction is the outcome.
Control what questions get asked and you control what answers are possible. The chain is short: control what is studied → control what is known → control what is believed → control what is done.
The streetlight effect is infrastructure for extraction. You cannot build a system that extracts wealth through manufactured illness if people can see what is causing the illness. The lamppost must be positioned away from the cause before the extraction pipeline can operate. Shine the light on claimed viruses, genes, bad luck. Leave toxins, chemicals, iatrogenic injury in darkness. Attribute illness to nature rather than industry. The treatment becomes drugs rather than removal of harm. The patient becomes a customer. The extraction runs indefinitely.
The streetlight effect is not a bug in the system of knowledge production. It is the system.
The HPV Case
In 2006, journalists Torsten Engelbrecht and Claus Köhnlein contacted the German Cancer Research Centre—the DKFZ, one of the world’s leading cancer institutions—with four requests:
A study proving HPV exists through proper isolation.
A study proving HPV causes cervical cancer.
A study proving non-viral factors can be excluded as primary causes.
A study proving HPV vaccines are safe and effective.
The DKFZ provided literature for requests one, two, and four—though what they called “isolation” for request one was not isolation in any meaningful scientific sense. It was detection of genetic material declared viral without demonstrating that any virus existed. No particle was extracted from human tissue, purified, and shown to cause disease. The methodology assumes what it claims to prove.
For request three, they provided nothing.
This is the streetlight effect in its pure form. The question “could something other than the claimed virus cause this cancer?” was never investigated. Not because it was asked and answered. Because it was never asked. The light was positioned on virology from the start. Toxicology remained in darkness.
The statistics expose the positioning. Up to 80% of women test positive for HPV markers at some point. Less than 1% develop cervical cancer. In Germany, 0.017% of women develop cervical cancer annually. The marker is nearly universal. The disease is rare. If the marker caused the disease, the pattern would be different.
The establishment response is not to investigate what actually causes the cancer. The response is to add qualifiers—HPV is “necessary but not sufficient,” cofactors are required. The cofactors are vague enough to explain any distribution of cases: “immune status,” “genetic susceptibility,” “lifestyle factors.” The theory cannot be falsified because it absorbs any evidence. This is the hallmark of a stable inversion—internal coherence maintained by excluding the data that would destroy it.
Meanwhile, the chemical hypothesis sits in darkness, unstudied.
In 2024, researchers published the first study measuring metal concentrations in tampons. They found lead in every sample tested—at concentrations ten times higher than maximum levels allowed in drinking water. Arsenic in 95% of samples. Cadmium in 100%. Dioxins from chlorine bleaching. PFAS in products marketed as “organic” and “natural.”
The average woman who menstruates uses approximately 11,000 tampons over her reproductive lifetime. Each remains in contact with vaginal mucosa for hours. The vaginal epithelium is not a barrier; it is a gateway—pharmaceutical companies use vaginal administration precisely because it delivers substances to the body more efficiently than swallowing them.
Fifty years of cumulative exposure to documented carcinogens, delivered directly to the tissue where the cancer develops. The research examining this exposure as a cause of cervical cancer does not exist.
The mutation patterns found in HPV-negative cervical cancers—TP53, KRAS, PTEN, ARID1A—are consistent with chemical-induced DNA damage. The cancers that don’t fit the viral story fit the chemical story. No one is funded to look.
The HPV vaccine trials used aluminum adjuvant as the “placebo”—a toxic substance that guaranteed the control group would experience adverse events, making the vaccine appear safe by comparison. The trials never established whether the vaccine prevents cancer; they used surrogate endpoints and ended before cancer could develop. The protection claimed wears off before women reach the age when cervical cancer typically occurs.
The entire apparatus—causation claim, screening program, vaccine—is built on a lamppost positioned to illuminate virology and leave toxicology in darkness. The studies that would challenge this positioning do not exist. The questions that would threaten vaccine revenue do not get asked.
The founding lie. The captured institutions. The simple formula. The comfortable belief. The convergent interests. The positioned light. All the components, interlocking. The machine runs.
The Polio Precedent
The HPV case is contemporary. The pattern is not new.
In 1907, Simon Flexner of the Rockefeller Institute claimed to have isolated a poliovirus. His method: inject diseased human spinal cord tissue into monkey brains. When monkeys became ill, inject their tissue into other monkeys. Declare that whatever caused the illness must be a virus.
Flexner admitted in his 1909 paper that he “failed utterly to discover bacteria” and could not demonstrate any pathogen under the microscope. His conclusion: the agent “belongs to the class of the minute and filterable viruses that have not thus far been demonstrated with certainty.”
He could not demonstrate any virus. He concluded one must exist anyway—because he found no other explanation. He did not look for other explanations. He did not investigate toxins. He assumed viral causation and built an empire on the assumption.
The Rockefeller Institute was not a neutral scientific body. It was an instrument of Rockefeller interests—specifically, the interest in redirecting American medicine toward patentable drugs. In 1911, the Institute succeeded in having poliomyelitis entered into US Public Health Law as “a contagious, infectious disease caused by an air-borne virus.” No proof of contagion existed. No proof of any virus existed. Children with the disease kept in general hospital wards did not infect other patients. The law said it was contagious anyway.
By classifying poliomyelitis as viral, the Rockefeller Institute cut off investigation of alternatives. The lamppost was positioned. Toxicology was in darkness.
Then came DDT.
After World War II, DDT was released for civilian use, declared safe for humans. Cities sprayed beaches and swimming pools. Housewives sprayed kitchens and children’s mattresses. Farmers sprayed crops and dairy cows. From 1945 through 1952, US DDT production increased tenfold.
Polio cases increased in parallel. From 25,000 in 1943 to over 280,000 in 1952.
Dr. Morton Biskind testified to Congress in 1950, documenting over 200 cases where severe symptoms—including paralysis—disappeared when DDT exposure was eliminated. Dr. Ralph Scobey noted that polio symptoms matched known toxic poisoning patterns and that hospital polio wards never saw transmission between patients.
The Rockefeller-controlled National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis rejected this evidence. They funded vaccine research instead.
Beginning in 1951, as DDT use declined amid public concern and livestock deaths, polio cases fell by two-thirds—well before the Salk vaccine was widely administered. The decline tracked DDT reduction, not vaccine introduction.
The vaccine was credited anyway. The streetlight effect operated for decades, protecting the viral hypothesis from toxicological evidence.
Beyond Medicine
The streetlight effect operates wherever institutions benefit from not knowing.
LeBron James has played professional basketball for over twenty years. During that time, footage has accumulated showing him grabbing referees, screaming profanities in officials’ faces, flopping theatrically, committing uncalled fouls—each action a violation that would result in ejection or fines for other players. The footage is not hidden. It happens on national television, in real time, in front of millions of viewers.
ESPN does not report on it.
The same ESPN that posts about a player wearing an armband—content so trivial it borders on self-parody—does not mention a player grabbing a referee. No memo is required. ESPN holds broadcast rights to the NBA worth billions. They are not journalists covering the league; they are partners with the league. A reporter who runs that story damages their access. An editor who approves it damages their network’s relationship. Everyone understands what’s expected. The silence self-organizes.
The league benefits. The network benefits. The player benefits. The advertisers benefit. No coordination required. Each actor maintains their piece of the structure, and the pieces interlock without a blueprint.
The Lakers have led the NBA in free throw differential for four consecutive seasons. No other team has appeared in the top three more than once during that span. Their cumulative differential over those four years is +1,200. No other team has reached even +500. The numbers are public. The pattern is measurable. The coverage does not mention it.
The evidence is on screen. The media controls where the light of attention shines. Highlights are illuminated. Uncalled fouls happen in peripheral vision. Preferential treatment registers as background noise. People aren’t failing to see. They’re searching where they’ve been trained to search.
The Cholesterol Case
In 1852, Austrian pathologist Karl von Rokitansky proposed that atherosclerotic plaques were remnants of blood clots. He had performed thousands of autopsies and noticed that plaques looked exactly like clots in various stages of organization. The thrombogenic hypothesis—heart disease caused by clotting, not cholesterol accumulation—had compelling evidence from the start.
A century later, Ancel Keys positioned the lamppost elsewhere.
In 1953, Keys published a graph showing correlation between fat consumption and heart disease deaths in six countries. The points lay almost perfectly on a line. Data was available from twenty-two countries. Keys chose six. When Yerushalmy and Hilleboe analyzed all twenty-two countries in 1957, the correlation vanished.
The lamppost was positioned anyway.
The sugar industry recognized the threat. In the 1960s, researchers were linking sugar consumption to heart disease. The Sugar Research Foundation paid Harvard researchers the equivalent of $50,000 to write a review attacking anti-sugar studies while promoting the fat hypothesis. The researchers assured executives they were “well aware of your particular interest.”
The debate about sugar died. The war on fat intensified. The processed food industry could now replace expensive animal fats with cheap vegetable oils and sugar while marketing their products as “heart-healthy.”
Kilmer McCully discovered that homocysteine, not cholesterol, was destroying arteries. Children with genetic disorders causing high homocysteine developed severe atherosclerosis and died of heart attacks—despite normal cholesterol. McCully published his findings. Despite Harvard credentials and compelling evidence, he lost his position. His laboratory was moved to the basement. His funding evaporated. For two years, no institution would hire him.
The Framingham Heart Study, the longest-running cardiovascular study in history, produced a finding buried deep in its thirty-year report: “For each 1 mg/dl drop in cholesterol, there was an 11% increase in coronary and total mortality.” People whose cholesterol decreased were more likely to die. The study’s director later admitted: “In Framingham, the more saturated fat one ate, the more cholesterol one ate, the more calories one ate, the lower the person’s serum cholesterol.”
This contradicted everything the study was cited to support. The finding was not publicized.
Statins generate over $20 billion annually. The University of British Columbia’s Therapeutics Initiative concluded: “Statins have not been shown to provide an overall health benefit in primary prevention trials.” People without existing heart disease who take statins are no less likely to die.
The lamppost remains on cholesterol. The questions about clotting, sugar, homocysteine, stress, and metabolic dysfunction remain in darkness. Rokitansky’s thrombogenic hypothesis—supported by 170 years of autopsy evidence—sits unstudied while billions flow into cholesterol research. The studies that would move the light do not get funded. The researchers who ask the wrong questions do not get hired.
Seventy years. Billions of prescriptions. The founding lie. The captured institutions. The simple formula. The comfortable belief. The convergent interests. The positioned light. The same architecture.
Seeing the Lamp
The streetlight effect leaves signatures.
The absent study. A question any reasonable person would want answered, never investigated. The vaccinated-versus-unvaccinated comparison. The tampon-cancer link. The long-term antidepressant outcomes. When obvious questions remain unasked, ask who benefits from not knowing.
The aggressive defence. When someone asks the forbidden question, the response is not engagement but destruction—career attacks, accusations of conspiracy thinking, demands for retraction. Institutions confident in their evidence respond with evidence. Institutions defending a positioned lamppost respond with force.
The unfalsifiable theory. When a theory absorbs any contradictory evidence—when exceptions are explained away with cofactors, when it cannot specify conditions under which it would be proven wrong—you are looking at narrative maintenance, not science. You are looking at a stable inversion.
The funding trail. Who paid for the studies that exist? Who would have paid for the studies that don’t exist? The asymmetry reveals where the lamppost stands.
The career pattern. Who prospers in the field? Who disappears? When researchers who produce industry-friendly findings rise while researchers who produce threatening findings lose funding, laboratory space, positions—the incentive structure is visible.
The simple formula. When complex reality is compressed into two variables and one relationship—cholesterol causes heart disease, viruses cause illness, vaccines prevent disease—ask who installed the formula and who profits from it.
The comfort test. Does the official position demand anything of you, or does it offer easy absolution? The comfortable lie asks nothing. The uncomfortable truth asks everything.
The system depends on trust. Trust in institutions. Trust in expertise. Trust that the questions being asked are the right questions and the absence of other questions is innocent.
The streetlight effect ends when enough people start asking different questions. Why isn’t there a study on that? Who decided not to fund it? What would we find if someone looked in the dark?
The drunk searching under the streetlight is a figure of comedy. The institutions searching only where their funders want them to look are not funny.
They are why children receive vaccines never tested against unvaccinated controls.
They are why women develop cancers from products no one investigated.
They are why treatments that might work are never studied while treatments that profit the right people are studied endlessly.
The lamppost was positioned. It can be repositioned. But first you have to see it—and see the machine it is part of.
The next time you hear “no studies show,” ask the next question.
Who made sure those studies don’t exist?
That’s where the keys are.
References
HPV and Cervical Cancer
Engelbrecht, Torsten and Köhnlein, Claus. Virus Mania: How the Medical Industry Continually Invents Epidemics, Making Billion-Dollar Profits at Our Expense. Trafford Publishing, 2007.
Holland, Mary, Mack Rosenberg, Kim, and Iorio, Eileen. The HPV Vaccine on Trial: Seeking Justice for a Generation Betrayed. Skyhorse Publishing, 2018.
German Cancer Research Centre (DKFZ). Email correspondence with Engelbrecht and Köhnlein, October-December 2006.
Shearston, J.A. et al. “Tampons as a source of exposure to metal(loid)s.” Environment International, 190, 108849, 2024.
Marroquin, J. et al. “Chemicals in menstrual products: A systematic review.” BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, 131(5), 655-664, 2024.
Lee, Kwang-Beom et al. “Untold story of human cervical cancers: HPV-negative cervical cancer.” BMC Cancer, 2022.
Polio and DDT
Flexner, Simon and Lewis, Paul A. “The Transmission of Acute Poliomyelitis to Monkeys.” Journal of the American Medical Association, 1909.
Flexner, Simon and Lewis, Paul A. “The Nature of the Virus of Epidemic Poliomyelitis.” Journal of the American Medical Association, December 1909.
Biskind, Morton S. “Statement on Clinical Intoxication from DDT and Other New Insecticides.” Journal of Insurance Medicine, 1951.
Biskind, Morton S. Testimony before the House Select Committee to Investigate the Use of Chemicals in Food Products, 1950.
Scobey, Ralph R. Statement to the House Select Committee to Investigate the Use of Chemicals in Food Products, 1952.
Cholesterol and Heart Disease
Rokitansky, Karl von. A Manual of Pathological Anatomy. 1852.
Yerushalmy, J. and Hilleboe, H.E. “Fat in the Diet and Mortality from Heart Disease: A Methodologic Note.” New York State Journal of Medicine, 1957.
Kearns, C.E. et al. “Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents.” JAMA Internal Medicine, 2016.
McCully, Kilmer S. The Heart Revolution. HarperPerennial, 1999.
Rockefeller Medicine
Brown, E. Richard. Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America. University of California Press, 1979.
Flexner, Abraham. Medical Education in the United States and Canada (The Flexner Report). Carnegie Foundation, 1910.
Pharmaceutical Industry Influence
Gøtzsche, Peter C. Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare. Radcliffe Publishing, 2013.
Angell, Marcia. The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It. Random House, 2004.
Light, Donald W. “Institutional Corruption of Pharmaceuticals and the Myth of Safe and Effective Drugs.” Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 2013.
Virology
Bailey, Mark. A Farewell to Virology. 2022.
Epistemic Capture and the Streetlight Effect
Duke, Peter. Work on epistemic warfare and the architecture of manufactured ignorance.
Rogers, Toby. Testimony before the U.S. Senate on epistemic capture, 2025.
Unbekoming. “The Mechanics of Stable Falsehood.” Lies are Unbekoming, December 2025.
Unbekoming. “Epistemic Capture.” Lies are Unbekoming, September 2025.
Unbekoming. “The HPV Lie: Pap Smears, Gardasil, and a Cancer Caused by Something Else.” Lies are Unbekoming, January 2026.
Unbekoming. “Toxicology vs Virology: The Rockefeller Institute and the Criminal Polio Fraud.” Lies are Unbekoming, March 2025.
Unbekoming. “A Farewell to Virology (Expert Edition).” Lies are Unbekoming, January 2025.
Unbekoming. “The War on Knowing.” Lies are Unbekoming.
Unbekoming. “Extraction: The Middle Class as Colony.” Lies are Unbekoming, November 2025.
Unbekoming. “LeBron’s Immunity.” Lies are Unbekoming, December 2025.
Unbekoming. “The Wrong Enemy: Blood Clots. Not Cholesterol.” Lies are Unbekoming, September 2025.
Since March 2020 there has been an almost continuous refrain that the UK was not prepared for the COVID-19 pandemic – across the mainstream media, at the UK Covid Inquiry and most recently by Dominic Cummings in a Spectatorinterview. So much so that it seems to have become an accepted ‘truth’ regardless of the actual facts. Nevertheless there are facts, even in the postmodern dystopian world we now live in.
Firstly, we did have a detailed UK Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy published in 2011 and it was explicit in saying that it could be adapted to respond to other respiratory virus pandemics, and gave as an example the first Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome virus (SARS). Secondly, there was further national guidance in 2013 and 2017 to update the strategy. Thirdly, this national guidance helped all four nations and each local health board or authority to develop their own pandemic plans which were regularly reviewed and updated. Fourthly, we had many systematic reviews of the evidence for non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to minimise transmission, one published only a few months before the COVID-19 pandemic started. And finally, the UK scored second in a global assessment of countries’ pandemic preparedness in 2019.
So, the ‘unprepared’ mantra was not the whole truth and arguably we were comparatively well prepared. However, in the event all this preparation did prove to be useless – but only because we decided to abandon it all in March 2020. We binned our pandemic plans and ignored the careful reviews of the evidence and the experience gained responding to previous pandemics. No doubt the UK strategy will be updated, but whatever is produced could be just as easily discarded next time. So what can be done?
Perhaps what we need is something more accessible, something that reflects the ethical and democratic foundations of our country, and, given how important this is for the whole of society, something that is shared widely – well beyond public health departments, the office of the Chief Medical Officer (CMO), the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) and the NHS. Core principles on how we should respond to a pandemic that are shared, understood and agreed with the public, perhaps through their representatives in Parliament, might give us some scientific, ethical and governance guardrails. They might help to improve and protect accountability and also stand a better chance of surviving beyond a few weeks when the next pandemic hits.
If so, what might such principles contain? Here we offer some suggestions with commentary on how they were applied, or not, during the Covid-19 pandemic, grouped under four headings – epidemiological, medical, ethical, and democratic. Many of these principles don’t appear in the UK Strategy, or those of the four nations or local pandemic plans … and for very understandable reasons. Prior to 2020 they were taken for granted, they were so obvious that they did not need stating, they were the principles and codes that the public health specialty and the medical profession had followed for decades if not centuries, they were the way we conducted ourselves in our liberal democratic society. The Covid-19 pandemic response changed all that – we now clearly need to restate our commitment to core, indeed fundamental, principles.
Epidemiological principles
The first task in epidemiology is to assess the scale and severity of a new disease or health problem, examine how it varies by time, place and person (age, sex, occupation etc.), and compare it with other diseases. This helps to ensure that any response is proportionate and identifies those at greater and lower risk, as well generating hypotheses about potential causes.
In the context of a respiratory viral pandemic, data on case and infection fatality ratios are paramount. These were available early in the COVID-19 pandemic and before the first UK lockdown. Instead of these data being reported accurately, compared to previous pandemic data and carefully explained to the population (for example here), public messaging was alarmist and seemed designed to instil fear not reassure, and made little reference to those at lower risk (see Laura Dodsworth’s 2021 book A State of Fear). In a future pandemic the public should expect such data, the media should demand them, the CMO should have a responsibility to identify and collate them, and government responses should be calibrated based upon them.
Then to ensure accurate monitoring of the developing pandemic within the country and valid comparison to earlier pandemics the standard definitions for confirmed cases, hospitalisations and deaths should be employed. This did not happen in the COVID-19 pandemic with new definitions adopted, definitions that for all three exaggerated the statistics. This was compounded by inappropriate widespread testing using a PCR test insufficiently specific and using inappropriate cycle thresholds.
There was a further concern that arose during the pandemic response on the epidemiological front: the use and impact of modelling studies. Whilst such studies can be helpful they cannot be interpreted without understanding their underlying inputs, assumptions and methods. They are ‘what if’ studies – for example, what if we assume that the number of cases will grow exponentially without any seasonal effect, what if we assume no existing immunity in the population from other coronaviruses, etc. The Imperial College modelling study published in March 2020 seems to have had a significant impact on the push for the first lockdown, but it had not been peer-reviewed and seems to have been insufficiently debated and challenged; of course, it is now widely considered to have been flawed. Modelling studies are not reality, they are not facts, they are not evidence, they are better viewed as ‘what if’ scenarios and their assumptions and results should be rigorously challenged. Their presentation to politicians without critical analysis and careful interpretation amounts to professional negligence.
Medical principles
Science and medicine only develop through open debate and a willingness to consider alternative views, even if they are contrary to the current orthodoxy. This did not happen during the COVID-19 pandemic, as the oft repeated term ‘The Science’ demonstrates. There is no such thing: there is rarely a consensus and science is never settled, we only ever have the current disputed theories which remain until better ones come along. Any pandemic response should be open to challenge and wide debate so that we are not limited to the knowledge and experience of only a few prominent scientific and medical government advisors. The thoughtful and detailed letters addressed to the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) from often in excess of 100 doctors and scientists on the merits or otherwise of Covid vaccination of children were a case in point, and were ignored or summarily dismissed. Public health messages to the population certainly need to be clear and if possible consistent to maximise understanding, but this does not preclude an open and vigorous debate within the medical and scientific community, something that is essential if we are to develop an optimal response.
In 1979 Archie Cochrane, widely regarded as the father of evidence-based medicine, made his famous comment that: “It is surely a great criticism of our profession that we have not organised a critical summary, by speciality or subspeciality, adapted periodically, of all relevant randomised controlled trials.” The international Cochrane Collaboration, named after him and designed to address this criticism, produced a series of systematic reviews on the effectiveness of physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses such as school and business closures, social distancing measures and restrictions on large gatherings. Despite the limited evidence for effectiveness and the relatively poor quality of the evidence from these reviews and similar conclusions from a WHO review published in September 2019, almost all these measures were applied to the whole population from March 2020, including a ‘lockdown’ of healthy people.
We copied the response of a totalitarian state despite a lack of evidence and despite the fact that these same systematic reviews drew attention to the widespread harms that would be caused by implementing these measures across the whole population. These harms are beginning to be appreciated across multiple areas – in terms of mortality and physical health particularly of older people, the social development of young children, the mental health and education of young people, businesses across the country as well as jobs, the economy and the benefits system.
An evidence-based approach also required a thorough review of the evidence on the benefits and harms for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 in individuals. The limited data on the effectiveness of the novel gene technology ‘vaccines’ (and see Clare Craig’s 2025 book Spiked – A Shot in the Dark) and on their side-effects, with no data at all on long term harms, pointed clearly towards their use only in those at higher risk with full disclosure on what was known and what was not. In the event, of course, they were recommended and pushed on most of the population including those at insignificant risk. Furthermore, ‘safe and effective’ was far from a full disclosure of the evidence on benefits and risks.
By contrast, the use of re-purposed drugs such as ivermectin with known anti-viral and anti-inflammatory effects, extensive evidence on effectiveness and a well-documented safety profile, was actively discouraged.
In all these areas, doctors should be acting as advocates for their patients, informing them as best they can and helping them to make decisions on their treatment and care, as required by the General Medical Council’s guidance ‘Good Medical Practice.’ However, as already discussed, the informing was cursory and partial, and the contact often non-existent or via leaflet or video-call.
If they are to regain public trust the medical profession and public health authorities must do better next time, and patients and the public must demand better information and better discussion and engagement with medical staff to help them make decisions.
Ethical principles – informed consent for individuals
The Greek philosopher and physician Hippocrates developed his Oath around 400 BC. It urged doctors to act with beneficence – that is, to help their patients and prevent harm – and non-maleficence – that is to do no harm themselves or primum non nocere. The term appropriateness brings these two concepts together – an appropriate treatment is one that has been chosen because its benefits outweigh its harms in the particular patient.
As outlined above, evidence-based medicine involves the careful assessment of the evidence, ideally from randomised controlled trials, to quantify these benefits and harms. Whilst the patient advocacy role of doctors involves them in informing and supporting their patients to make informed decisions on their treatment and care.
Although this process sounds simple and straightforward, it is not. It seems to be taken more seriously in surgical practice, after notable legal cases, but less so in medical practice with the prescribing of drugs and vaccines. Certainly in the pandemic consenting practices for vaccination were cursory, to the point of being non-existent – public information heralding the ‘safe and effective’ vaccines was at best partial, and coercion was widespread via national advertising that deliberately sought to shame and manipulate, via vaccine mandates, and via bans from venues without proof of vaccination (or negative Covid antigen tests).
Large relative risk reductions of 70% for the Astra Zeneca ‘vaccine’ and 95% for the Pfizer ‘vaccine’ were trumpeted, but not the smaller, less convincing absolute risk reductions of around 1-2%. And there was no attempt to directly compare benefits and risks and harms, the key information a patient needs to give fully informed consent.
The wholesale abandonment of standard codes of practice for informed consent during the pandemic was truly shocking. To regain public trust the medical profession needs to take this key responsibility more seriously and particularly improve practice in relation to long term medications and vaccinations.
Democratic principles
The UK Strategy of 2011 did emphasise the importance of accurate and timely information to the public, and stressed that uncertainty and any alarmist reporting in the media could create additional pressures on health services. Despite this, the early epidemiological data on the scale and severity of the COVID-19 pandemic, a comparison with previous pandemics and clear identification of those at higher and lower risk were not shared with the public and carefully explained. The data that were given were far vaguer and the messages seemed designed to raise anxiety rather than contain it and modulate it to appropriate levels. Government advisors seem to have entirely lost sight of these crucial epidemiological data that are so essential to enable the government to calibrate its response and ensure it was proportionate. Data reflecting reality seem to have been overshadowed by modelling data reflecting potential future scenarios – fiction rather than fact influenced key decisions.
Whatever national response is being contemplated to a pandemic, there needs to be a clear separation of the medical and scientific evidence on the benefits and risks of specific interventions on the one hand, and the political value judgements and decisions on the other. Governmental advisors must present options and their benefits, risks, harms and likely costs to ministers, and in a democracy it is for ministers to decide as they are accountable to the electorate. This relationship is akin to the doctor-patient relationship – the doctor informs the patient and supports him or her to make his or her own decision but does not lead or coerce. This line may have been blurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, government advisors seemed reluctant to identify, and where possible quantify, the risks, harms and costs that might flow from the options they put to ministers despite some, like lockdowns, being unprecedented in their severity and scope.
In turn ministers and politicians more generally have a responsibility to ensure that their advisors present them with the epidemiological data and the data on the benefits, risks and costs of recommended options. Ministers also have a responsibility to ensure that differences of opinion on how best to respond within the medical and scientific community are fully aired and discussed. This is crucial to arrive at an optimal response and to avoid groupthink. Only if ministers do these things can they take decisions on behalf of their population and give fully informed consent.
Crucially ministers have a particular responsibility to protect the basic freedoms we enjoy in a democratic society – freedom of speech, association and movement and individual bodily autonomy when it comes to medical treatments. Any infringement of such basic freedoms demands a clear, unambiguous and overwhelming justification, must be subject to challenge in Cabinet and Parliament, and must be the least restrictive as is possible to achieve the aim – in extent, impact and time. This is such a fundamental issue that we perhaps need to develop a framework to guide and constrain actions: defining the types of evidence and high thresholds that are required; limiting powers in terms of their impact, duration and the number of people affected; and outlining checks and balances, with perhaps an automatic independent review afterwards. We have such a clear and rigorous framework for compulsory detention under the Mental Health Acts when one individual is affected: we need at least as rigorous a framework when the freedom of millions is at stake.
There has also been considerable criticism of how the usual democratic governance systems were subverted and avoided during the pandemic, including the use of emergency legislation by the executive without appropriate challenge within Parliament. These governance systems are essential to enable questioning and challenge by MPs and select committees with the aim of improving decision making, and to ensure a clear justification for measures taken and transparency to facilitate accountability. This did not happen during the COVID-19 pandemic as clearly outlined in The Accountability Deficit by Kingsley, Skinner and Kingsley (2023).
In all of these four areas – epidemiological, medical, ethical and democratic – principles were violated during the COVID-19 pandemic with dire consequences for health, basic freedoms, quality of life, education, business and the economy, and for democracy and society itself. Before 2020 it would have seemed unnecessary to state such core principles. Now, having set a precedent when we abandoned them, it seems absolutely essential not only to restate them but to discuss them widely and if possible to reaffirm our commitment to uphold them before another pandemic hits.
Dr Alan Mordue is a retired consultant in public health medicine and Dr Greta Mushet is a retired consultant psychiatrist and psychotherapist.
Parenti was well known for his sharp criticism of U.S. foreign policy and U.S. imperialism throughout his life, waking up many to the reality of it and the lies used to justify it.
This is best underscored in one of his last published articles, “Ukraine and Regime Change”, which was published in the book “Flashpoint In Ukraine: How the U.S. Drive for Hegemony Risks World War III”, where he predicted to a tee what the result of the 2014 U.S. backed coup in Ukraine would be.
Correctly Calling Out U.S. Funding Of The Coup
Parenti correctly pointed out how the regime change operation against Ukraine’s elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, mirrored previous U.S. regime change operations, writing:
regime change is a form of action designed to make it impossible for the existing government to govern. We have seen this well-orchestrated chaos and endless disruption in various countries. Militantly organized groups are financed and equipped by outside western interests. NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) surface in substantial numbers and produce rebellious publications and events designed to unsettle the besieged government—in Ukraine’s case, a government that was democratically elected not long before. The NGOs handle billions of dollars worth of supplies used to mobilize and sustain the protests. Even though they are supposed to be independent (‘nongovernmental’) some NGOs get all their funds from the U.S. government. An Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, proudly exclaimed that the United States had poured some $5 billion into the struggle for regime change.
All of this has since been vindicated. As journalist Branko Marcetic reported , “Just two months before they (Maidan protests) broke out, the NED’s (National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA cutout) then president, pointing to Yanukovych’s European outreach, wrote that ‘the opportunities are considerable, and there are important ways Washington could help.’ In practice, this meant funding groups like New Citizen, which the Financial Times reported ‘played a big role in getting the protest up and running,’ led by a pro-EU opposition figure. Journalist Mark Ames discovered the organization had received hundreds of thousands of dollars from US democracy promotion initiatives.”
Correctly Calling Out Far-Right Infiltration And The Maidan Massacre False Flag
Michael Parenti then wrote that the protests were overtaken by far-right paramilitary groups, who fired snipers into crowds in the Maidan square, which was then falsely blamed on Viktor Yanukovych’s forces- all facts which have now been proven correct.
Parenti wrote, “In Ukraine, crypto-fascist groups like Svoboda, the Right Sector, and others secured ample funds to keep thousands of people fed and comfortable enough on the streets of Kiev for weeks at a time, complete with well-made marching flags, symbols, and signs in various languages (including English). Svoboda henchmen were being financed by someone. They wore insignia that bore a striking resemblance to the swastika. Svoboda’s top leaders openly denounced ‘Russian scum,’ and ‘Muscovite Jewish mafia.’ Disguised men in unmarked combat fatigues attacked unarmed police and security guards. They moved among the gathered crowd and at times, according to independent sources, delivered sniper shots into the crowd—which could then be readily blamed on the nearly asphyxiated government. Meanwhile the western media reported everything the way the White House wanted, for instance, unfailingly referring to the perpetrators as ‘protestors.’”
Indeed, as the aforementioned Branko Marcetic reported, “The driver of this violence was largely the Ukrainian far right, which, while a minority of the protesters, served as a kind of revolutionary vanguard. Looking outside Kyiv, a systematic analysis of more than 3,000 Maidan protests found that members of the far-right Svoboda party — whose leader once complained Ukraine was run by a ‘Muscovite-Jewish mafia’ and which includes a politician who admires Joseph Goebbels — were the most active agents in the protests. They were also more likely to take part in violent actions than any group but one: Right Sector, a collection of far-right activists that traces its lineage to genocidal Nazi collaborators.”
Even more impressively, Michael Parenti correctly noted that the “Maidan Massacre” was a false flag carried out by Right Sector, a fact which has now been proven by Ukrainian-Canadian academic Ivan Katchanovski.
After carefully studying the trial on the massacre and the verdict from it, Ivan Katchanovski noted, “51 out of 72 wounded Maidan protesters, with whose shooting on February 20 Berkut policemen (Yanukovych’s forces) are charged and whose testimonies were revealed, testified at the trial and the investigation that they had been shot by snipers from Maidan-controlled buildings or areas, had themselves witnessed snipers there, or had been told by other Maidan protesters about such snipers. 31 of these wounded protesters testified at the trial and/or the investigation that they had been shot from the Hotel Ukraina, the Bank Arkada, and Zhovtnevyi Palace, the buildings on Muzeinyi Lane and Horodetskyi Street, or other Maidan-controlled buildings or areas. At least 33 wounded protesters testified that they had either witnessed snipers there and/or were told about snipers in these Maidan-controlled locations, mostly in the Hotel Ukraina, by other protesters.”
He also uncovered that :
The findings of forensic medical examinations done by government experts for the prosecution were first made public during the Maidan massacre trial, and revealed that the absolute majority of protesters were shot from the side or back, and from top to bottom. Most videos and photos, however, show that the absolute majority of those killed and wounded had the Berkut police (Yanukovych’s police forces) in front of them and at ground level, whereas the Maidan-controlled buildings were generally behind them and on the left and right side.
Forensic medical examinations indicate that 40 out of the 48 killed protesters were shot from a high angle. At least 36 of them were killed at a time when the Berkut policemen were filmed on the ground.
48 out of 51 wounded protesters had steep entry wounds, consistent with the theory that they were shot by snipers in Maidan-controlled buildings, or on the roofs of these buildings.
He also noted that the bullet examinations from the massacre matched those of Right Sector and other pro-Maidan militants and not the Berkut police force, writing:
The forensic ballistic examinations presented at the trial found that 19 protesters were killed on February 20 by bullets which match the calibers not only of AKM Kalashnikov assault rifles, but also of hunting versions of Kalashnikovs, and other weapons, Videos showed protesters with hunting firearms in the Hotel Ukraina during the massacre
A forensic ballistic examination conducted by government experts with use of an automatic computer-based IBIS-TAIS system, found that the bullets extracted from killed protesters, trees, and the Hotel Ukraina rooms did not match police database for Kalashnikov assault rifles of members of the entire Kyiv Berkut regiment, including the special Berkut unit deployed
Predicting The Fallout From The Coup
While Parenti reporting on the events of the Maidan coup exactly right is impressive enough, what makes Parenti’s article especially impressive is the fact that he also predicted the aftermath of the coup to a tee.
Parenti wrote, “This manufactured uprising in Kiev is something we have seen in numerous other countries: from Venezuela to Thailand during this very same time frame. The scenario is much the same, and the goal of these western-financed attacks has been to make the world safe for the 1%, the global super rich. Ukraine citizens who think they are fighting for democracy will eventually discover that they are really serving the western plutocracy. They will be left with a new government filled with old intentions. Ukrainians will end up with nothing to show for their efforts except a still more depressed and more corrupt economy, an enormous IMF debt, a worsening of social services, and an empty ‘democracy,’ led by corrupt neo-Nazis and ultra-nationalists.” (Emphasis: Mine)
This is exactly what the result of the Maidan coup was.
Forbes magazine noted at the time that, after the coup, the U.S. installed Arseniy Yatsenyuk as the interim prime minister of Ukraine because, “Yanukovych resisted the International Monetary Fund’s demand to raise taxes and devalue the currency” while, “Yatsenyuk doesn’t mind”.
As Ukrainian political scientist Konstantin Bondarenko documented, the results of the IMF-imposed “reforms” included:
-“Ukraine’s GDP shrinking by approximately 17%”.
-The exchange rate going from “8 hryvnias (Ukrainian dollar) to 1 U.S dollar” in 2013 to “23 hryvnias to the dollar” in 2015
-Inflation rising from 24.9% in 2014 to 43.3% in 2015
-a “significant decline in industrial production during the first two years” after the coup, leading to Ukraine losing “its economic cluster that manufactured goods with high added value (machine engineering)”
-“mining and metallurgical complex, energy (coal production), chemicals, food production”, “sustained significant losses”.
-“an increase in unemployment and the emigration of citizens from Ukraine to neighboring countries—primarily to Poland and Russia.”
-“utility rates increasing by 123%, reaching up to 20% of family income” from the IMF introduced policies
Parenti was also spot on about the prevalence of “neo-Nazis and ultra-nationalists” in the post-Maidan Ukraine.
After the coup, the UK’s Channel 4 news reported that, “the far-right took top posts in Ukraine’s power vacuum” and Foreign Policy Magazinereported that, “The uncomfortable truth is that a sizeable portion of Kiev’s current government — and the protesters who brought it to power — are, indeed, fascists.”
U.S. Congressman Ro Khanna noted in 2018, “Ukraine’s 2015 memory laws went even further by glorifying Nazi collaborators and making it a criminal offense to deny their ‘heroism.’ However, unlike the Polish law, this move by the government in Kyiv has received little to no public response from the United States. The groups and individuals extolled by Ukraine include Nazi collaborators Stepan Bandera, Roman Shukhevych, and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), as well as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). These paramilitaries and individuals in some cases collaborated with the Nazis and bear responsibility for the murder of thousands of Jews, 70,000-100,000 Poles, and other ethnic minorities between 1941 and 1945.”
Khanna added, “It’s particularly troubling that much of the Nazi glorification in Ukraine is government-supported. Examples include the 2017 pro-UPA campaign conducted by the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory; the naming of streets after Bandera and Shukhevych by the Kyiv city council; and L’viv’s 2017 ‘ShukhevychFest’ which took place on the anniversary of the 1941 L’viv Pogroms in which 4000 Jews were killed.”
He added, “Last November, Radio Free Europe reported on the presence of torches and Nazi salutes at a 20,000-person march in honor of the 75th anniversary of the UPA. These torchlight marches are closely linked to organizations such as the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, an armed group that was prohibited from receiving U.S. weapons and training by the recently signed Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018. Rather than disband Azov, the government incorporated it into the Ukrainian National Guard overseen by the Ministry of the Interior. The group is widely known to be closely connected to Interior Minister Arsen Avakov.”
Furthermore, Parenti correctly predicted that the coup would lead to an American confrontation with Russia, writing:
The U.S. empire’s ultimate intent is to encircle and reduce Russia to a frightened and discombobulated satellite. But that is much easier said than done. At this time, as I write, Moscow reportedly no longer accepts telephone calls from the White House. Meanwhile protests against the NATO-supported Ukrainian regime are on the rise. Anti-Kiev activists are seizing administrative buildings and calling for a referendum on federalization. Ukraine’s acting President, Aleksandr Turchinov, put the Ukrainian army on full alert due to the “threat of a Russian invasion.” Turchinov admitted that the government in Kiev could not control the situation in eastern Ukraine. It did not even seem able to control the situation in Kiev itself.
Obama may have a few tricks and trumps left to play. But he is fishing in troubled waters and might invite more danger and tribulation than he—or we—can handle. As Putin put it: “The situation is serious” and we need “to find serious approaches to the solution.”
Michael Parenti’s prophetic article on Ukraine underscores how important much of his foreign policy analysis was and why it will be deeply missed by many.
By Vladimir Danilov – New Eastern Outlook – 11.10.2020
In the beginning of October, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order about imposing sanctions on countries that, in Washington’s opinion, “do not put forth sufficient efforts to combat human trafficking”. The list of countries put together by Washington specifically includes Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Cuba, and the DPRK. In addition, US representatives in the IMF and multilateral banks have been ordered to vote against certain projects in which funds will be provided to Russia, China, Cuba, the DPRK, Iran, Syria, and several other countries. … continue
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