In crisis after crisis, Western narrative control kicks into overdrive to shift blame, whitewash culprits, or make sure inconvenient lines of questioning are never pursued
Soon after US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s recent descent on Taiwan, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, called out Nicholas Burns, America’s ambassador to China, for “keeping an embarrassed silence” regarding the “insolent stunt.”
The silence was quite a change from how vocal Burns had been a mere month prior at the World Peace Forum in Beijing, where he demanded that China stop relaying “Russian propaganda” by “accusing NATO of starting” the conflict in Ukraine. He used the opportunity to accuse the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s spokesperson of “telling lies about American bioweapons labs, which do not exist in Ukraine.”
But that was then and this is now in the West’s ‘rules-based order’, where each occasion requires a new set of rules. Thus, it goes without saying that, for the time being, Burns will also keep an ‘embarrassed silence’ about another potentially tectonic event – the latest, even more damning statement regarding alleged US-run biolabs in Ukraine made by the Russian Defense Ministry on August 4. Lieutenant-General Igor Kirillov, the head of the Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection Troops of the Russian Armed Forces, said Moscow was assessing the possibility of US involvement in the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as investigating US-funded research of various other pathogens.
The reason for Burns’ silence is not difficult to guess – the serious allegations made in Kirillov’s presentation, if properly investigated and proven true, could serve as an indictment of what could be America’s use of Ukraine as a vast pathogen testing ground. And since the Western media mostly chose to ignore it, the ambassador was certainly not going to make a statement they would have to quote, drawing attention to the issue. And now that Twitter has suspended the Russian Foreign Ministry’s account for daring to quote key parts of Kirillov’s media presentation about the possible origins of Covid-19, Burns and company don’t have to say anything at all. If it’s memory-holed by the social media, then it’s as if it never happened.
That’s the modus operandi of the Western elites – it’s not the truth that matters, but successfully managing the narrative so that it doesn’t leave room for doubt in people’s minds. In other words, they think they can do whatever they want.
Perhaps we should remind ourselves of the post-Cold War Western formula announced during the heady days of the early 2000s, an era marked by another famous American political quote, Karl Rove’s “we’re an empire now and, when we act, we create our own reality.” As Tony Blair’s policy adviser, Robert Cooper, nonchalantly put it on the pages of The Guardian in April 2002: “The challenge to the postmodern world is to get used to the idea of double standards. Among ourselves, we operate on the basis of laws and open cooperative security. But when dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of states outside the postmodern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era – force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the 19th century world of every state for itself. Among ourselves, we keep the law but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle.”
Two decades later, despite the rise of both China and Russia and the world’s inexorable evolution to multipolarity, imperial habits die hard – usually until they hit a wall of reality, as is currently happening in Ukraine and is bound to happen in Taiwan. But back to Burns for a moment. He’s far from new in enforcing double standards in the ‘jungle’. Before his present work on poking the Dragon regarding Taiwan, and the Bear regarding just about everything, he distinguished himself as a partisan and apologist of NATO’s illegal aggression against Serbia back in the 1990s, which resulted in Kosovo’s unilateral secession.
Meanwhile, in 2009, when he was the US under-secretary of state for political affairs, Burns explained to the media that the recognition of Pristina’s independence was in fact an expression of the US’ “interest in good relations with Serbia.” Will he, in due time, express himself similarly vis-à-vis China and Taiwan? Outside the West, it’s all still a jungle to Burns and his ilk, and the ‘natives’ are to be dealt with accordingly. So, in Burns-talk, Pelosi’s Taiwan sojourn and pledge of continuing US support for the island is actually a sign of America’s interest in good relations with China.
Another notable Anglo-American figure visible across the Kosovo-China-Ukraine crisis landscape is the Englishman Geoffrey Nice, who gained international notoriety as a prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), whose sole purpose was to shift the blame for the Western-inspired bloody breakup of that multinational country solely onto the Serbs. In addition to his selective prosecution of former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic for ‘crimes against humanity’, Nice’s ICTY legacy also includes accusations of destroying evidence related to human organ trafficking in Kosovo.
Nice subsequently offered his legal services to former Kosovo President Hashim Thaci, one of the main figures in not just the trafficking but the alleged “forcible extraction” of human organs of still-living, mostly Serb prisoners, as outlined in a stunning Council of Europe 2011 report, ‘Inhuman treatment of people and illicit trafficking in human organs in Kosovo’. The report also cites anti-drug agencies of “at least five countries” as saying Thaci “exerted violent control over the trade in heroin and other narcotics.” Nice’s subsequent attempt to discredit the report was, however, brilliantly dissected and exposed by American journalist Diana Johnstone as the latest attempt by a representative of “self-righteous Western democracies” to reserve the privileges of a “culture of impunity” exclusively for themselves and their clients. Of course, the clients in the ‘jungle’ still have to pay for the imperial ‘double standards’ umbrella, so in the end, Nice reportedly accused Thaci of owing him “almost a half a million euros” for his work for the Kosovo government.
Zakharova just recently more fully described the house of horrors over which Thaci allegedly presided: “Kosovo is the territory of ‘black’ transplantation. People were dissected alive, taking out internal organs for sale to those people in the West… In the West they stood in line for organ transplant operations. And they began to receive these organs when Kosovo turned into a terrible black hole in which people disappeared, who were not just killed, but killed to sell their internal organs.”
To paraphrase Franklin D. Roosevelt’s immortal words justifying US support for Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, they may be sons of b****es, but they’re the West’s sons of b****es.
‘We need a new plague’ was the sentiment in the early 1980s in the corridors of America’s Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC), because the agency was facing closure. In his book The Real Anthony Fauci Robert F Kennedy Jr cites Dr Kary Mullis recalling the institutional desperation reflected in circulating memos which said: ‘We need to find something to scare the American people into giving us more money.’
The events which followed, and the panoply of artifices used to secure this end, became a template for amassing unbridled power over the population, the institutions, and even the White House.
Kennedy recounts that in the summer of 1981 the CDC reported that approximately 50 gay men in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York had presented with Kaposi’s sarcoma (a skin cancer associated with immune suppression) and other immune deficiency-related health problems including a rare form of pneumonia (PCP).
As cases starting appearing in other major cities in the same cohort, the hunt was on for the cause of this new disease, dubbed Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (Aids).
Responsibility for it fell under the US National Cancer Institute (NCI). In 1983 the French virologist Dr Luc Montagnier identified signals of a retrovirus in some Aids patients, which he believed could be responsible for causing the disease. Dr Robert Gallo of the NCI persuaded Montagnier to send him a sample of the virus in exchange for fast-tracking the publishing of Montagnier’s work in the journal Science.
Before doing so, Gallo cultured the sample, gave it a different name, patented an antibody kit he claimed capable of detecting it, and in April 1984 called a press conference to announce to the world that the probable cause of Aids had been found in the form of a ‘known human cancer virus’, claiming the discovery as his own. Once the announcement was made, no one could review Gallo’s work which was published subsequently.
A bitter row ensued between Montagnier and Gallo, which eventually led to an ‘accommodation’, whereby the researchers agreed to share the discovery, and the virus was given the name HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus).
The hypothesis that HIV caused Aids, however, had not been subject to the normal processes of independent replication, verification, dissent and rebuttal. A nascent hypothesis had been seized and hurriedly converted into accepted fact. ‘Science by announcement’ was a dangerous development which has had grave repercussions to the present day.
Robert Gallo’s overt ambition to be awarded a Nobel Prize made him a natural ally of Anthony Fauci. So once the HIV story of a worldwide lethal virus was launched, claiming the highly infectious nature of it, Fauci wrested jurisdiction for the disease away from NCI and into his moribund National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NAID), thus capturing the flood of congressional funds that would be made available to combat it.
Many eminent scientists had misgivings about the hypothesis. Foremost was Professor Peter Duesberg, a world-respected molecular biologist. Duesberg was a consummate scientist and an applied scholar. At thirty-three, having discovered the ‘oncogene’ which appeared to cause cancer, he subjected his own theory to more rigorous tests than his critics had, and became convinced his discovery had been a lab fluke. He therefore publicly abandoned his own hypothesis, at the height of his acclaim. Colleagues praised him for his ‘integrity, his genius, his kindness and his intelligence’.
Duesberg, Kary Mullis and their school of critics believed the first generation of Aids was a complex illness which had its cause in a variety of chemicals. The profusion of recreational drugs used by the homosexual community, particularly amyl nitrate (poppers) known to cause immune suppression, in combination with the constant use of antibiotics to treat infections, were strong factors in immunity collapse. But after Robert Gallo’s April 1984 press conference Fauci moved to quash all talk of toxic causation to attribute Aids uniquely to the deadly virus.
Following Gallo’s announcement, Duesberg studied every scientific publication on HIV and Aids, and in 1987 published his observations in the journal Cancer Research. He argued that retroviruses were not, by accepted definition, a life form, and HIV was not capable of causing either cancer or Aids. Referring to the supposed indeterminate incubation period of HIV he said: ‘There are no slow viruses causing Aids, only slow scientists.’ Duesberg was committed to clean functional proof at a time when electron microscopy and other technologies for detecting new viruses were making biology – particularly the study of viruses – increasingly murky. Fame and finance were driving the frenzy in viral research. With official and commercial encouragement, researchers were blaming newly discovered viruses for an assortment of ancient diseases. Duesberg argued that the apparent high incidence of HIV-Aids in Africa was a function of the now notorious PCR to produce false diagnoses of infection, and the broad definition of Aids, which captured everything in its net from malnutrition to endemic diseases.
The second generation of Aids in the early 1990s is now widely recognised to have been caused by the poisonous drug Azidothymidine (AZT) pushed by Fauci on to ‘HIV positive cases’. AZT was developed in the 1960s as a leukaemia chemotherapy drug but abandoned when government researchers deemed it too toxic even for short-term use. Described by Joseph Sonnabend as ‘incompatible with life’, AZT randomly destroys bones, kidneys, livers, muscle tissue, the brain and the central nervous system.
After Peter Duesberg’s compelling 1987 article, which challenged point by point the basis of the HIV-Aids hypothesis, the scientific world waited for answers to Duesberg’s probing questions, but Gallo never attempted a reply. Instead Fauci moved ruthlessly to annihilate Duesberg’s voice. His stature and the respect he commanded were an existential threat to Fauci’s plans for control and grandeur through the theory of a dangerous virus.
Marshalled by Fauci, the self-interested scientific press banished Duesberg. John Maddox, editor of the journal Nature, invited Duesberg’s colleagues to slander him without fear of response, writing an editorial stating that the virologist, by his heresy, had forfeited the standard scientific practice of ‘right of reply’.
Scientific conferences disinvited Duesberg. His graduate students were warned by their university that working with him would render them irrelevant, and the fawning mass media followed the instructions handed down from on high. As the reporter Celia Farber wrote, ‘Duesberg’s problem transcended science: It was career protection to partake in his bullying and degradation. The Fauci serf scientists were driven by fear that if they did not publicly denounce Duesberg in sufficiently disgusted tones they themselves would be punished.’
In 1994 a senior geneticist, Dr Stephen O’Brien, was dispatched by the very same editor of Nature, John Maddox, to try to persuade Duesberg to change his position, in exchange for ‘reinstatement’. O’Brien rang Duesberg on the pretext of needing to speak to him urgently and the two met at the opera in San Francisco. O’Brien pulled from his pocket a paper entitled ‘HIV Causes Aids: Koch’s Postulates Fulfilled’ with his own name and that of Duesberg printed at the bottom, and begged Duesberg to sign it. To his undying credit, Duesberg refused.
Duesberg’s remarkable lack of bitterness towards his persecutors is the sign of a man at peace with his soul. It is likely that Fauci’s rancour, and the depths to which he sank to humiliate and denigrate Duesberg, sprang from a hatred of his ability and integrity, qualities Fauci could not bear to contemplate.
Germany has seen a “dramatic drop” in birthrate during the first 4 months of 2022, according to transitionnews.de, leading to rising suspicions over COVID vaccine safety.
“Compared to the previous year, the number of births has fallen by 12 percent – that’s about 25,000 fewer births in the first four months of 2022,” reports Sternfried Müller of transitionnews.de.
The above chart shows the number of births for the January-April period each year since 2018. During the Corona years of 2020 and 2021, Germany saw a rise in the number of births, climbing to 250,000 births. But in 2022, the number of births mysteriously plummeted a whopping 12%!
Something unusual must have triggered the phenomenon. Going back 9 months prior to the January-April 2022 period takes us to the April to July 2021 period, which coincides to COVID vaccination of younger adults in earnest. Remarkably, Germany’s media have been silent on the latest published statistics, issued by the German Federal Statistical Office (Destatis).
The next transitionnews.de chart shows the monthly number of births and just how dismally 2022 lags so far compared to the previous years:
A number of reasons have been proposed to explain the dramatic decline, among them fewer marriages. But that remains highly doubtful.
There are increasing suspicions that it is vaccine linked, as some studies already suggest: see here and here.
For the time being German authorities obstinately continue to remain in denial mode when it comes the the adverse effects of the COVID vaccines. Currently the Ministry of Health is gearing up to roll out another mass wave of vaccinations and restrictions in the run-up to the fall flu season.
A former Washington State University football coach is seeking $25 million from the university for wrongful termination after he was fired last year for refusing to get vaccinated against COVID-19, The Seattle Times reported Tuesday.
A tort claim was filed April 27 on behalf of Nick Rolovich with the state’s risk management office. Filing a claim is a prerequisite to filing a lawsuit against a state agency.
There’s a 60-day waiting period between when a claim is filed and when the claimant can file a lawsuit. As of Wednesday, a spokesperson for Attorney General Bob Ferguson said no suit had been filed, according to The Washington Post.
After denying Rolovich’s request for a religious exemption from Gov. Jay Inslee’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for state employees, the university in October 2021 fired Rolovich.
At the time of his firing, Rolovich was subject to a five-year contract with three seasons remaining and was paid $3.2 million per year — the highest public salary in the state. He had coached 11 games with the Cougars over two seasons.
Rolovich’s attorney, Brian Fahling, said at the time his client would take legal action for religious discrimination. He filed a 34-page letter with the university appealing the university’s decision to fire Rolovich, but the appeal was denied.
Rolovich, a Catholic, is not the first person to file a claim for wrongful termination or religious discrimination over an employer’s failure to grant a religious exemption to a COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
Liberty Counsel on July 29 settled the nation’s first class action lawsuit on behalf of healthcare workers who were unlawfully discriminated against and denied religious exemptions to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate by their employer, Chicago-based NorthShore University HealthSystem.
The $10,337,500 settlement, filed in the federal Northern District Court of Illinois, compensates NorthShore employees who were “punished for their religious beliefs against taking an injection associated with aborted fetal cells.”
As part of the settlement agreement, NorthShore also will change its unlawful “no religious accommodations” policy to make it consistent with the law and must provide religious accommodations in every position across its numerous facilities.
In addition, employees who were terminated because they refused to receive a COVID-19 vaccine on religious grounds will be eligible for rehire if they apply within 90 days of the final settlement approved by the court, and they will retain their previous seniority level.
The amount of individual payments from the settlement fund will depend on how many valid and timely claim forms are submitted during the claims process.
If the settlement is approved by the court and nearly all of the affected employees file valid and timely claims, it is estimated employees who were terminated or resigned because of their religious refusal of a COVID-19 vaccine will receive approximately $25,000 each.
Also under the settlement, employees who were forced to get the shot against their religious beliefs to keep their jobs will receive approximately $3,000 each.
The 13 healthcare workers who are lead plaintiffs in the lawsuit will receive an additional approximate payment of $20,000 each for their role in bringing this lawsuit and representing the class of NorthShore healthcare workers.
Lawsuits over denied exemptions or insufficient accommodations to COVID-19 vaccine requirements began last September after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted full approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech Comirnaty vaccine, allowing more employers to enact vaccine mandates.
Workers as of May 19, 2022, had filed at least 66 lawsuits since September 2021 against private employers for refusing to grant exemptions to COVID-19 vaccine requirements, according to Bloomberg Law.
Judges rejected workers’ requests for immediate court orders blocking enforcement of mandates in 22 cases.
In one case involving United Airlines Inc., the airline changed its policy allowing accommodations rather than contest the lawsuit.
According to Bloomberg Law, 59% of lawsuits filed over COVID-19 vaccine mandates are related to an employer’s response to faith-based requests for accommodation.
About 22% of lawsuits involve contesting a company’s handling of both religious and disability requests and 5% involve health-related accommodations.
Megan Redshaw is a staff attorney for Children’s Health Defense and a reporter for The Defender.
I joined the Tavistock Clinic in North London as a clinical nurse therapist in 2003. Back then, Tavistock was prestigious—known all over the world for its professional seminars and specialized psychological treatments for mental-health patients. Before I ever worked there, I would attend lectures and training workshops to hear from renowned psychoanalysts, who were considered some of the best in the field.
A lot can change in a decade.
Last week, the National Health Service ordered that the gender youth clinic at Tavistock to shut its doors by next spring. And I am part of the reason why.
The story of what happened at Tavistock is the story of how a small group of whistleblowers—doctors, nurses, parents and patients, together with the help of journalists and reporters—were able to relentlessly expose activist-driven medicine that they knew was irresponsible. It’s also an object lesson for others who are deeply concerned about a one-size-fit-all approach to transgender healthcare and wonder what they should do about it.
I was delighted when I started working at Tavistock back in the early 2000s. My role as senior clinical lecturer was to devise and deliver training courses for mental-health staff. Shortly after I joined, I took on another part-time role working with children and adolescents in what was called the Gender Identity Development Service.
There were, as I recall, seven of us on the team back then. We would have clinical meetings each week in which we would discuss our referrals and caseloads. Back then we had fewer than 100 referrals per year in the entire country and they were mostly biological boys.
Sometime during my first few weeks we were discussing a newly referred patient, a 16-year-old boy with a complex history, who felt he had been born in the wrong body. My colleague took on the case. Four months later, the boy’s name came up again in the meeting, and my colleague announced that she was recommending him for puberty blockers (gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonists), which are used to suppress the further development of secondary-sex characteristics like breast tissue in females or facial hair in males. Puberty blockers are almost always followed by cross-sex hormones (testosterone or estrogen).
Usually, when new patients arrived at the service, they would come in for an hour or so once a month for the first few months. So I was surprised to hear that my coworker was recommending drugs when, in my view, no meaningful understanding of his internal world could have been reached. I knew from my experience in working with adolescents that any diagnostic assessment arrived at after such a short time span would have been superficial.
It’s worth pointing out that Tavistock specialized in therapy—talking through problems with patients—and that we did not generally prescribe drugs. For that reason, I had expected the same approach when it came to treating children and teens with gender dysphoria. But it seemed that, even back then, certain staff didn’t hesitate to recommend puberty blockers—even for vulnerable kids contending with anxiety, autism, internalized homophobia or other challenges.
I had also noticed that senior clinicians in the service would regularly meet with Mermaids, a transgender patient-advocacy group. At the time, various patient-advocacy groups were springing up alongside mental-health services so that patients would have a voice in the examination room. At first, I viewed all of this as an overdue development. But as time progressed, it seemed clear that groups like Mermaids were exerting influence over doctors and clinicians in the service—sometimes dictating the expectations of care for our patients.
One small anecdote: I was once instructed by a superior to rewrite a letter I’d written to a male patient’s referring doctor—making sure to use the patient’s chosen, female name and new pronouns. I understood the sensitivities around this subject, but I pointed out that using a female name and female pronouns might be confusing to the clinical team, since we had been talking about a male child with gender dysphoria..
I was informed that failure to use the right name and pronouns might result in problems or even litigation for me and the gender clinic at Tavistock.
The external influence of the advocacy groups increased. Instead of being a clinical, research-focused service where we were learning and developing ideas, it felt like it was a fait accompli that we had to go along with what Mermaids and patients wanted—even if we, the mental-health-care professionals, had legitimate questions about the appropriateness of the treatments that patients and patient advocates were demanding.
For example, a weird paradox arose at a conference on transgender health care hosted by Tavistock around 2005: the opening speaker declared that we were no longer supposed to think of gender dysphoria as a mental illness. But we were a mental-health team working at a mental-health facility. What were we supposed to be doing if not treating patients with psychological conditions?
Remember, this was all before the internet took hold of an entire generation of teenagers. There were no online groups dedicated to gender affirmation and coaching kids on what to say to their providers to secure cross-sex hormones. We mostly saw younger boys who believed themselves to be girls from an early age and a few teenagers who felt like they were trapped in the wrong bodies. So, although I felt aware of the gathering force of thinking around the area of gender dysphoria and transgender identity, it was hard to foresee the slow-motion avalanche that would hit over the next two decades.
Yet even what I saw in those years worried me deeply and working on the Gender Identity Development Service started to affect my personal well-being. I would come home with a headache on the days that I worked in the unit, and my heart would beat quickly when I went in the next morning. It felt like every time I raised a concern about us rushing prematurely to prescribe drugs that would have permanent effects on our patients, I’d be met with an eye roll and the unstated “Oh, here she goes again,” or “Can’t she just fit in?”
There were a few colleagues who shared my views. One colleague, Dr. Az Hakeem, would also speak up at team meetings. But for the most part I felt alone, and I felt very anxious about some of the children who had been referred for body-altering medications. I began to feel as though I might be part of something unethical. I tried to take on only children who were legally too young to commence the blockers, which would allow me more time to do long-term therapeutic work while avoiding the dilemma of the fact I worked in a so-called “gateway service” to medicalization.
I spoke a lot to my husband, Marcus, who is a psychoanalyst and who was by now a senior member of staff in the Adult Department of Tavistock. He suggested I go to the clinical director at theTavistock, which I did. She listened and took my concerns seriously. I later learned that she reached out to Dr. David Taylor, the Medical Director of the Trust, who was asked to launch an investigation into the work of the gender clinic. That was issued in 2006.
I do not remember being shown the report then, and don’t recall any in depth discussion about the contents of it or how the recommendations would be implemented. The only change that I remember was that a senior staff member from the more general Adolescent Department began overseeing our work. That oversight petered out when this staff member retired.
It was only in 2019 that I saw the full report when Hannah Barnes, a BBC journalist, obtained it via a Freedom of Information request. It confirmed all the disturbing things I had reported: Our data was poor; it wasn’t being stored properly; and there were not sufficient follow-ups with patients once they left the service—meaning we didn’t know how our patients were faring unless they voluntarily wrote to us.
As we have now learned from more recent whistleblowers, the recommendations in the report were buried, and when any criticism or difficult questions arose in the press, the Tavistock management would repeat the same mantra about how they were “a world-class service.” It’s important to acknowledge that there might have been some staff still struggling to deliver thoughtful, measured care, but the noise around our standards was growing louder.
I had tried hard to help the Gender Identity Development Service from the inside, but it felt like I was swimming against a stronger and stronger tide. I didn’t want to be part of something that felt wrong, and I knew that each time I spoke up I was being cast in a darker shadow of suspicion by my colleagues.
So in 2007, I quit.
After I left the gender clinic, I continued to work in other departments at Tavistock. I continued my clinical lecturing and practiced psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Life was satisfying and busy, and I tried to put the experience out of my mind.
But it became increasingly impossible to ignore.
In the past decade, there has been an explosion in referral numbers to the gender clinic at the Tavistock—over 3,000 in 2019—and the service came under mounting pressure to get through the long waiting lists. This resulted in even more children getting fast-tracked and put on blockers if they expressed a wish for them.
The profile of the patients changed significantly, too. Many were adolescent girls who had never exhibited signs of gender dysphoria. Often, their feelings of wanting to be a boy developed along with their breasts, or when they got their period. They were horrified by their bodies, and they wanted control over the changes taking place in them.
Between then and now, there were more whistleblowers, like Dr. David Bell, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst at Tavistock, who issued yet another report on the service in 2018 that raised a lot of the same concerns that I had raised back in 2005. Sonia Appleby, whose job title was Safeguarding Children Lead, spoke out in November 2019, claiming that she was being blocked from doing her job by management. By then, the political pressure, the institutional capture, and the influence of social media had become much more intense, and about 40 people were working on the youth gender care team. Shortly after Dave’s report came out, my husband Marcus resigned from the Tavistock Board.
His resignation gained national publicity, and Marcus was invited to present at a 2019 House of Lords meeting, which I attended with him. A representative of the Tavistock Trust who was also at the meeting read a statement claiming that no one was being rushed through treatment, that Tavistock was a best-in-class facility. This was my second Damascene moment. I raised my hand to speak. “Look, that is not correct,” I said. “I worked there. And I saw that children were being pushed to transition very quickly.”
After that meeting, a group of us met, and we learned that a mother of a girl with autism and gender dysphoria was seeking support as a claimant in a judicial review of Tavistock’s practice of giving puberty blockers to minors. (Adults who transition are also prescribed blockers prior to starting on cross-sex hormones.) She had contacted a lawyer and he arranged a meeting with several of us who had attended the House of Lords meeting. The mother was worried about her daughter’s referral to the Gender Identity Development Service, as she did not feel that her daughter would be able to fully understand the ramifications of the treatment and give informed consent to it. She needed to remain anonymous and, therefore, needed a co-claimant who could afford to go public. Dave was still at Tavistock and was being threatened by the administration there. My husband had his hands full with his own patients. I did not relish the idea of sticking my neck out, but I knew I had to get back into the ring. By now, the whistleblowers’ reports felt grave. I signed onto the suit.
Almost no one in the U.K. wanted to get involved, so I set about finding expert witnesses in the United States, Australia and Scandinavia. Gradually, we put together statements and evidence to support our claim that children could not give fully informed consent to an experimental treatment with lifelong, as yet unknown consequences. I found, among many others, Kiera Bell through a journalist, and I was immediately taken by her story.
Keira is a young woman who went on puberty blockers at 16, testosterone at 17, and then had a double mastectomy—only to realize, at 21, that she wasn’t, in fact, a man trapped in a woman’s body. She argued that, as a minor, she hadn’t been able to consent in any meaningful way to the treatment. Eventually, she became a co-claimant in the case against Tavistock.
In December 2020, we won. The court ruled that minors under 16 could not give informed consent to having their puberty blocked. The ruling came as a great relief. I thought, Finally, people will have to pay attention and examine the evidence base for treatment of childhood gender dysphoria.
It’s hard to deal with the feeling of being hated. I’m aware how contentious this area is, and while I was only ever trying to do my best for our young patients, there was a loud group of people who would only hear my concerns as transphobia or bigotry or that I was a proponent of conversion therapy. The win felt like such a victory—not just legally, but culturally. It felt like an honest conversation was finally beginning to happen.
But then, in September 2021, we lost on appeal. It was awful—deflating.
The only thing that softened the blow was the fact that the government commissioned yet another report into Tavistock. And the results were devastating. It vindicated everything we had been saying for years.
But this time, the NHS decided they were going to do something about it. On July 28, the NHS announced that Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service would be closed and that, from now on, regional clinics would handle cases of transgender kids. I was blown away. I still can hardly believe it. The aim is that the new services should be more holistic, taking into consideration the whole child, and adopt better clinical standards according to the new report’s findings.
I didn’t seek any of this. It has been a pretty stressful few years. When I get a letter from patients or parents from around the world, and they tell me, “Well done, thank you for speaking up, you didn’t give up,” I sometimes get a lump in my throat. It’s been hard to be suspected of being prejudiced when all I wanted was safer clinical practice, more scrutiny and evidence collecting, and improved data storage.
Because what I am is a nurse. And my job as a nurse is to treat all my patients with respect and an open mind. I try to think about who they are as people, and to relate to their experience and empathize with them. I also believe we need to keep an open and curious clinical mind when something is occurring in society that seems novel or not yet fully understood. It should never be that doctors and nurses are unable to question diagnoses and prescriptions.
If my actions all those years ago have made a contribution, then I am proud. I made the right decision to raise my hand to ask another unwanted question.
Sue and Marcus Evans run a private psychotherapy practice in London. They are the authors of “Gender Dysphoria: A Therapeutic Model for Working with Children, Adolescents and Young Adults,” which you can buy here.
Richard Smith, editor of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) until 2004 posted an interesting opinion piece in the BMJ last year.
I have posted it below for you to read.
Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?
Health research is based on trust. Health professionals and journal editors reading the results of a clinical trial assume that the trial happened and that the results were honestly reported. But about 20% of the time, said Ben Mol, professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Monash Health, they would be wrong. As I’ve been concerned about research fraud for 40 years, I wasn’t that surprised as many would be by this figure, but it led me to think that the time may have come to stop assuming that research actually happened and is honestly reported, and assume that the research is fraudulent until there is some evidence to support it having happened and been honestly reported. The Cochrane Collaboration, which purveys “trusted information,” has now taken a step in that direction.
As he described in a webinar last week, Ian Roberts, professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, began to have doubts about the honest reporting of trials after a colleague asked if he knew that his systematic review showing the mannitol halved death from head injury was based on trials that had never happened. He didn’t, but he set about investigating the trials and confirmed that they hadn’t ever happened. They all had a lead author who purported to come from an institution that didn’t exist and who killed himself a few years later. The trials were all published in prestigious neurosurgery journals and had multiple co-authors. None of the co-authors had contributed patients to the trials, and some didn’t know that they were co-authors until after the trials were published. When Roberts contacted one of the journals the editor responded that “I wouldn’t trust the data.” Why, Roberts wondered, did he publish the trial? None of the trials have been retracted.
Later Roberts, who headed one of the Cochrane groups, did a systematic review of colloids versus crystalloids only to discover again that many of the trials that were included in the review could not be trusted. He is now sceptical about all systematic reviews, particularly those that are mostly reviews of multiple small trials. He compared the original idea of systematic reviews as searching for diamonds, knowledge that was available if brought together in systematic reviews; now he thinks of systematic reviewing as searching through rubbish. He proposed that small, single centre trials should be discarded, not combined in systematic reviews.
Mol, like Roberts, has conducted systematic reviews only to realise that most of the trials included either were zombie trials that were fatally flawed or were untrustworthy. What, he asked, is the scale of the problem? Although retractions are increasing, only about 0.04% of biomedical studies have been retracted, suggesting the problem is small. But the anaesthetist John Carlisle analysed 526 trials submitted to Anaesthesia and found that 73 (14%) had false data, and 43 (8%) he categorised as zombie. When he was able to examine individual patient data in 153 studies, 67 (44%) had untrustworthy data and 40 (26%) were zombie trials. Many of the trials came from the same countries (Egypt, China, India, Iran, Japan, South Korea, and Turkey), and when John Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford University, examined individual patient data from trials submitted from those countries to Anaesthesia during a year he found that many were false: 100% (7/7) in Egypt; 75% (3/ 4) in Iran; 54% (7/13) in India; 46% (22/48) in China; 40% (2/5) in Turkey; 25% (5/20) in South Korea; and 18% (2/11) in Japan. Most of the trials were zombies. Ioannidis concluded that there are hundreds of thousands of zombie trials published from those countries alone.
Others have found similar results, and Mol’s best guess is that about 20% of trials are false. Very few of these papers are retracted.
We have long known that peer review is ineffective at detecting fraud, especially if the reviewers start, as most have until now, by assuming that the research is honestly reported. I remember being part of a panel in the 1990s investigating one of Britain’s most outrageous cases of fraud, when the statistical reviewer of the study told us that he had found multiple problems with the study and only hoped that it was better done than it was reported. We asked if he had ever considered that the study might be fraudulent, and he told us that he hadn’t.
We have now reached a point where those doing systematic reviews must start by assuming that a study is fraudulent until they can have some evidence to the contrary. Some supporting evidence comes from the trial having been registered and having ethics committee approval. Andrew Grey, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Auckland, and others have developed a checklist with around 40 items that can be used as a screening tool for fraud (you can view the checklist here). The REAPPRAISED checklist (Research governance, Ethics, Authorship, Plagiarism, Research conduct, Analyses and methods, Image manipulation, Statistics, Errors, Data manipulation and reporting) covers issues like “ethical oversight and funding, research productivity and investigator workload, validity of randomisation, plausibility of results and duplicate data reporting.” The checklist has been used to detect studies that have subsequently been retracted but hasn’t been through the full evaluation that you would expect for a clinical screening tool. (But I must congratulate the authors on a clever acronym: some say that dreaming up the acronym for a study is the most difficult part of the whole process.)
Roberts and others wrote about the problem of the many untrustworthy and zombie trials in The BMJ six years ago with the provocative title: “The knowledge system underpinning healthcare is not fit for purpose and must change.” They wanted the Cochrane Collaboration and anybody conducting systematic reviews to take very seriously the problem of fraud. It was perhaps coincidence, but a few weeks before the webinar the Cochrane Collaboration produced guidelines on reviewing studies where there has been a retraction, an expression of concern, or the reviewers are worried about the trustworthiness of the data.
Retractions are the easiest to deal with, but they are, as Mol said, only a tiny fraction of untrustworthy or zombie studies. An editorial in the Cochrane Library accompanying the new guidelines recognises that there is no agreement on what constitutes an untrustworthy study, screening tools are not reliable, and “Misclassification could also lead to reputational damage to authors, legal consequences, and ethical issues associated with participants having taken part in research, only for it to be discounted.” The Collaboration is being cautious but does stand to lose credibility—and income—if the world ceases to trust Cochrane Reviews because they are thought to be based on untrustworthy trials.
Research fraud is often viewed as a problem of “bad apples,” but Barbara K Redman, who spoke at the webinar insists that it is not a problem of bad apples but bad barrels if not, she said, of rotten forests or orchards. In her book Research Misconduct Policy in Biomedicine: Beyond the Bad-Apple Approach she argues that research misconduct is a systems problem—the system provides incentives to publish fraudulent research and does not have adequate regulatory processes. Researchers progress by publishing research, and because the publication system is built on trust and peer review is not designed to detect fraud it is easy to publish fraudulent research. The business model of journals and publishers depends on publishing, preferably lots of studies as cheaply as possible. They have little incentive to check for fraud and a positive disincentive to experience reputational damage—and possibly legal risk—from retracting studies. Funders, universities, and other research institutions similarly have incentives to fund and publish studies and disincentives to make a fuss about fraudulent research they may have funded or had undertaken in their institution—perhaps by one of their star researchers. Regulators often lack the legal standing and the resources to respond to what is clearly extensive fraud, recognising that proving a study to be fraudulent (as opposed to suspecting it of being fraudulent) is a skilled, complex, and time consuming process. Another problem is that research is increasingly international with participants from many institutions in many countries: who then takes on the unenviable task of investigating fraud? Science really needs global governance.
Everybody gains from the publication game, concluded Roberts, apart from the patients who suffer from being given treatments based on fraudulent data.
Stephen Lock, my predecessor as editor of The BMJ, became worried about research fraud in the 1980s, but people thought his concerns eccentric. Research authorities insisted that fraud was rare, didn’t matter because science was self-correcting, and that no patients had suffered because of scientific fraud. All those reasons for not taking research fraud seriously have proved to be false, and, 40 years on from Lock’s concerns, we are realising that the problem is huge, the system encourages fraud, and we have no adequate way to respond. It may be time to move from assuming that research has been honestly conducted and reported to assuming it to be untrustworthy until there is some evidence to the contrary.
In this in-depth interview series with Kirsten Murfitt of NZLSOS, we highlight the key points and outline the crucial yet-to-be-answered questions from Kirsten’s excellent Open Letter to Parliament, which she penned on 22 July 2022. This is Part 1.
Please share this interview. Please also utilise the steps involved at the end of the interview in order to put pressure on the government to answer our important questions:
The 3 main questions are:
1.) Why doesn’t the Government require mandatory reporting of deaths and serious adverse reactions, following the administration of a vaccine which has only provisional approval?
2.) Why does the Government refuse to investigate the safety and contents of the vaccine, given both the emerging overseas data and the court-ordered release of Pfizer’s documents?
3.) Why did the Government market the vaccine as “Safe and Effective”, when it knew that neither of those statements was true?
On this day, August 10, 1961, the United States began chemical warfare in Vietnam War, having sprayed 77 million liters of defoliants over South Vietnam by the end of 1971. Of that amount, 44 million liters contained dioxin, which causes various diseases and genetic mutations in humans and other living beings exposed to it.
Some three million Vietnamese were affected by direct contact with dioxin in that decade.
14% of the territory of South Vietnam was exposed to this toxin, causing severe consequences for the land and nature. Five thousand square kilometers of mangrove forests were almost completely destroyed; about 10,000 square kilometers of jungle and more than a thousand square kilometers of lowland forests were affected. American troops destroyed 70% of the coconut plantations and 60% of the Gewea plantations; they also changed the ecological balance of Vietnam.
The affected areas lost 18 out of 150 bird species; nearly all amphibians and insects disappeared; the number of fish in rivers decreased, and their composition changed. The microbiological composition of soils was disturbed. Changes in the fauna resulted in the replacement of black rats, which are safe for humans, with other species that were plague carriers. Alterations in the mosquito species composition led to the introduction of malaria-carrying ones. Dioxin: A Permanently Exploding Bomb The large-scale US use of chemical warfare in Vietnam lasted until late 1971. But this war was not over for Vietnam itself, said Professor Andrei Kuznetsov, director general of the Russian Division of the Joint Russo-Vietnamese Research and Technology Tropical Center, in an interview with Sputnik.
“This is because dioxins, once inside the human body, begin to work like an HIV infection. If a person is completely healthy, they do not affect him. As soon as the human immune system weakens and any disease begins, dioxins immediately get integrated into the disease chains and start working in their own way. No one knows just how. They can cause cancer, damage to the liver, skin, respiratory system, and much more. Dioxin pathology is very diverse. And the most tragic thing is that it is inherited through mother’s milk. More than a million and a half Vietnamese in the three postwar generations have suffered from it. For an extremely long time, for many generations, dioxins will continue to be passed on from women to their children. Moreover, there is no minimum permissible dose for dioxins,” says Andrei Kuznetsov.
Today, Vietnam faces the ever-present threat that children will be born with a wide variety of defects. To this day, several villages there are closed to the public, where children are born into families with various deformities. There are several specialized boarding schools where children with genetic defects live. Scientists from different countries have been studying the effects of dioxin on soil for a long time, but only in temperate and northern climates. No one has studied its impact in the tropics. There have been no studies on what happens when dioxin molecules enter the soil under tropical conditions, continued Professor Kuznetsov.
“The Joint Russo-Vietnamese Research and Tropical Technology Center is the first and only one to address this issue. It was commonly believed that dioxin molecules were insoluble. Supposedly, humus binds them and they remain in the top layer of the soil. One could bulldoze or even shovel it and burn it. But it turns out that things are different in the tropics. Dioxin molecules bind with various acids in the soil, forming new dioxin-containing molecules that become water-soluble and water-permeable. They mix with rainfall streams, sink into the soil, get transported by subsurface water, and subsequently enter wells, lakes, rivers, and seas hundreds of kilometers away from where they were sprayed. This situation persists in Vietnam to this day. There are several ‘hot spots’; places where, during the aggression, the Americans stored barrels with chemical agents. When they left Vietnam, they shot these barrels with large-caliber machine guns and left them there. For example, this happened in Da Nang, which was one of the largest US military bases. And the same happened at the US military base in Bien Hoa. These two former bases are still the largest and scariest hotbeds of contamination,” said Andrei Kuznetsov.
The expert also noted that the Americans recently have conducted a demonstrative action in Da Nang – and have now begun it in Bien Hoa – to decontaminate the soil to a depth of two meters in those places where barrels with warfare agents were stored. But they don`t check the level of dioxin contamination even within the radius of 200-300 meters from the storage sites. Meanwhile, subsurface water transports pesticides far beyond those limits.
The Mission of Joint Tropical Center The Joint Russo-Vietnamese Research and Technology Tropical Center has been studying the consequences of the US chemical war in Vietnam since its founding. In fact, it was established precisely for this work, noted Professor Kuznetsov.
“We were tasked with determining whether contact with dioxin leads to genetic changes in humans and has a detrimental effect on soil, flora, and fauna. Our conclusion – yes, it does. The results of our work were published and reported to the leadership of Vietnam’s Ministry of National Defense and Ministry of Health, together with our scientific and practical recommendations on combating various dioxin-related effects. At the same time, we noted that the most effective, global way to prevent dioxins from damaging people is to take maximum care of their health. That is, Vietnam needs to invest much more in health care than countries that have not been exposed to this toxic chemical. We cannot yet say when the effects of US chemical warfare will cease in Vietnam. After all, Vietnam is the first and only country to have been exposed to such massive amounts of poisonous substances,” Kuznetsov concluded.
Germany’s Hauke publishing house has published an open letter from 413 physicians, addressed to Thuringia’s Prime Minister, harshly criticizing the government’s Corona policy and call for the immediate suspension of Covid vaccinations due to “serious side effects and consequential damage”.
The signatories are all from one single German state, Thuringia, and were brought together by the fear of “the so-called facility-based mandatory vaccination” which they claim “has long been scientifically untenable, and thereby continue to bring suffering to those affected and their patients.”
The 413 physicians blast the government for ignoring the “growing number of studies critical of the measures or studies on side effects of the so-called vaccinations” and how “the so-called vaccinations continue to be touted as the only ‘panacea’ against the SARS-Cov2 virus.”
The group of physicians and health professionals also remind the government that they are “endangering the health of people” and doing so “to an unprecedented degree”. They expressed grave concerns over the safety of the COVID vaccines, stating that their harmful effects have now gone far beyond “suspicion” in terms of risk, and: “Colleagues from our group could tell you here about the growing number of patients with vaccine-related serious side effects and consequential damage.”
The group of 413 are calling for an investigation on the vaccine’s safety and blast the authorities for remaining silent, even that they have been abundantly warned, writing: “This does nothing to build confidence in your government’s policies.”
They add: “The answers of the state government to the many small inquiries of the member of the state parliament Dr. Ute Bergner on the subject of Corona show a shocking picture of ignorance, many data are not available to the state government again and again. ”
The signatories also share the opinion that “parts of science, politics, leading media, pharmaceutical industry have failed.”
The following is an adapted excerpt from Whitney Webb’s upcoming book, One Nation Under Blackmail, which examines the network behind Jeffrey Epstein and traces it back to the merging of American organized crime and intelligence beginning in the early 1940s. In this excerpt, Whitney examines the Wexner Foundation’s origins and the ties of Leslie Wexner’s philanthropy and Jeffrey Epstein to Harvard as well as the now infamous Young Global Leaders program of the World Economic Forum. Whitney’s book can be pre-ordered here, here or here.
The Origins of the Wexner Foundation
It is hard to know exactly when the Wexner Foundation was originally created. The official website for the foundation states clearly in one section that the Wexner Foundation was first set up in 1983 alongside the Wexner Heritage Foundation. However, the 2001 obituary of Wexner’s mother, Bella, states that she and her son created the foundation together in 1973. Regardless of the exact year, Wexner’s mother, Bella, became the secretary of the foundation (just as she had with his company The Limited), which Wexner wanted people to refer to as a “joint philanthropy.”
The foundation’s website states that the original purpose of the Wexner Foundation was to assist “emerging professional Jewish leaders in North America and mid-career public officials in Israel.” Per the website, Wexner’s main philanthropic endeavors were created after Wexner “reached the conclusion that what the Jewish people needed most at that moment was stronger leadership.” As a result, Wexner sought to focus his foundation’s attention chiefly on the “development of leaders.” As a consequence of this, Wexner’s programs have molded the minds and opinions of prominent North American, as well as Israeli, Jewish leaders who went on to work at the top levels of finance, government and, even, intelligence.
One of the Wexner Foundation’s original advisors, and perhaps one of the most important, was Robert Hiller, who had previously been executive vice president of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds. Robert I. Hiller was described in an article in The Baltimore Sun as a “nonprofit leader who helped develop community fundraising strategies and was active in the Soviet Jewry movement.”
As well as being known as a community development leader, Hiller was also an executive with Community Chest of Metropolitan Detroit in 1948. In that position, Hiller helped bring together corporations such as General Motors to create “social service groups under an umbrella organization, a precursor to collective fundraising efforts today.” In 1950, Hiller became the associate director of the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland and six years later he also joined the United Jewish Federation of Pittsburgh. He would spend another nine years in that position before his move to Baltimore.
In his autobiography, Hiller wrote about his extensive dealings with various Israeli heads-of-state, saying: “I had pictures of every Israeli Prime Minister from David Ben Gurion to Menachem Begin. I would have many more with Begin because he was the current Prime Minister. My favorite picture, however, (it was to be hung) was taken in Washington, D.C. at a gala party where Marianne and I were with the then Ambassador, Yitzhak Rabin, and his wife, Leah.”
Hiller was extremely proactive when it came to seeding suitable, high ranking candidates for appropriate positions in Jewish community organizations, a task that the Wexner Foundation would later reproduce on a grand scale via its various Fellowship programs and subsequently apply to the worlds of business and government. One example of this matchmaking was the appointment of Larry Moses as assistant to Rabbi Maurice Corson. Corson is credited as having co-founded the Wexner Foundation with Leslie Wexner in 1983, per the foundation’s website, and he served as its first president. After Corson left that post, Moses stepped in to serve as the foundation’s president.
Hiller wrote in his autobiography that he had “personally enticed” Moses to become Rabbi Corson’s assistant and this later resulted in Larry Moses becoming the executive vice president of the Wexner Foundation. When Hiller was 33 years-old, he was presented with an opportunity to become a member of the Big 16, which was classed as an informal grouping of the 16 largest communities in North America headed by prominent Jewish executive members. One of the people who Hiller connected with the Wexner Foundation was originally meant to lead the Big 16 Federation, Fern Katelman. Katelman declined this prestigious leadership role in order to join Larry Moses, where he became his assistant at the Wexner Foundation.
Hiller, when revisiting his life, would state: “One of the most stimulating relationships I had was with the Wexner (Leslie) Foundation of Columbus, Ohio, and New York City. Rabbi Maurice Corson was the foundation president. My relationship with him started in Baltimore where he had been a new rabbi for one of the city’s largest Conservative synagogues. He came from Philadelphia with an interesting background and credentials.”
Hiller goes on to write: “He [Corson], however, seemed bored and uneasy with the routine of being a synagogue rabbi. When he and the congregation decided to part company, I assisted in getting him an executive position with the United Israel Appeal of Canada. He did so well that he was recruited to return to the U.S.A. in an executive position with International B’nai B’rith. Leslie Wexner met him through his work with B’nai B’rith, and when Les began to put together a formal foundation, he engaged Rabbi Corson as the chief executive.” B’nai B’rith is a “Jewish fraternal organization” that was founded in the 19th century and is modeled as a secret society, leading some to compare the group to the freemasons.
Hiller went on to assist Corson in the initial stages of setting up the Wexner Foundation while they put together “a distinguished advisory group” with the group meeting in Columbus, Ohio, and New York City. Hiller describes assisting Corson in creating the foundation, which Hiller called: “an unusual foundation with its own agenda and programming.” After several years of service to the Wexner Foundation, Hiller retired from his consultancy role and was replaced by Philip Bernstein, the former executive of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds (CJF).
Now, it makes sense to examine Rabbi Maurice S. Corson himself. Corson was a prominent Jewish educator who, as previously mentioned, already had associations with various Jewish welfare organizations prior to serving as co-founder and then president of the Wexner Foundation. Corson had been ordained as a rabbi in 1960 through the Jewish Theological Seminary, after previously studying at the University of Cincinnati where he graduated in 1955. By 1964, Corson had become the president of the Religious Education Society in Seattle, and he remained in that position until 1966.
Over the following decade, he began working for the Zionist Organization America in Atlantic City and, shortly thereafter, became the Senior Rabbi at the Chizuk Amuna Congregation, a position he held from 1976 until 1979. Around this time, Hiller helped Corson get an executive position with the United Israel Appeal of Canada, where he went on to work for only a year before joining B’nai B’rith.
Once recruited into serving a leadership role within the influential “secret society,” Corson worked as director of development for B’nai B’rith International, based in New York City, between 1980 until 1985. During this very period, the board of overseers of B’nai B’rith included Edmond Safra, a notorious banker with close ties to Robert Maxwell and later Jeffrey Epstein; Edgar Bronfman, scion of the family behind Seagrams whose fortunes have long been tied to organized crime and Max Fisher, a Detroit businessman who re-launched the Jewish Agency, worked as a “private” diplomat on Israel matters and later served as a mentor to Leslie Wexner.
As noted previously, while Corson was at B’nai B’rith, he first met Leslie Wexner, who persuaded him to co-found the Wexner Foundation (per the version of events on the foundation’s website). Although he had been recruited by Wexner and subsequently left the B’nai B’rith organization, Corson became a member of the executive committee of B’nai B’rith Hillel Commission in Washington in 1987.
Another key figure who is important to mention is the co-founder of the Wexner Heritage Foundation, Rabbi Herbert A. Friedman. Depending on which part of the Wexner Foundation site you visit, that Foundation is listed as having been founded in either 1983 or 1985. However, Friedman is clearly listed as the co-founder of the foundation and as having served as its president for a decade.
The Wexner Heritage Foundation, per its website, was created “to strengthen volunteer leaders in the North American Jewish Community.” It spawned the Wexner Heritage program, which “provides young North American Jewish volunteer leaders with a two-year intensive Jewish learning program, deepening their understanding of Jewish history, values, and texts and enriching their leadership skills.”
Friedman was a US Army chaplain during World War II and also served as an “adviser on Jewish affairs to General Lucius D. Clay, the commander of American occupation forces in Germany.” He was later personally recruited by David Ben-Gurion, who went on to serve as Israel’s first Prime Minister, to join the paramilitary group, the Haganah. The Haganah was the pre-cursor to the Israeli military and was armed in large part by organized crime-linked networks. Per the New York Times, “as a member of the Haganah, Rabbi Friedman participated in the Aliyah Bet, the illegal transport of European Jews to Palestine.”
From 1954 to 1971, Friedman was the chief executive of the United Jewish Appeal (UJA) and, in that role “raised more than $3 billion to support the fledgling state of Israel.” During this period, UJA was intimately involved in the relaunching of the Jewish Agency by Wexner’s mentor Max Fisher in 1970. Fisher was also intimately involved with the related United Israel Appeal. Throughout the 1980s, Wexner was “one of the largest individual contributors to the United Jewish Appeal in America” and, after creating the Wexner Heritage Foundation with Friedman, Wexner became UJA’s vice chairman.
While Wexner was serving in these capacities, he was also engaged in closed door meetings with the highest levels of Israeli leadership, not just about “philanthropy,” but also about his business interests. One specific meeting saw him meet with top Israeli government officials about “Chinese and Israeli interests” working with his company, The Limited, to establish factories in the occupied Golan Heights.
Notably, the Wexner Foundation has direct and controversial ties to at least one former Israeli head of state, Ehud Barak, who was intimately involved with Jeffrey Epstein and an alleged participant in his sex trafficking operation. As reported by Israel Today in 2019:
“[Barak’s ties to the Wexner Foundation] became an issue only after right-wing journalist Erel Segal called last October to investigate the $2.3 million ‘research’ grant Barak received from the Wexner Foundation, which has in turn for years been the beneficiary of Epstein’s financial contributions. According to Segal, the grant under question was given to Barak in 2004-2006, when he held no public position. Barak insists he has no authority to disclose details about this grant. Only the Wexner Foundation can, if they so choose (they choose silence).”
Developing Leaders
Set up simultaneously alongside the Wexner Foundation, Wexner’s Heritage Program (WHP) planned to connect American Jews with the ever expanding nation-state of Israel. The program was created so as to “expand the vision of Jewish volunteer leaders, deepen their Jewish knowledge and confidence and inspire them to exercise transformative leadership in the Jewish community.” The foundation defines the program as: “essentially a Jewish learning and leadership development program for volunteer leaders in North America.”
There have been, to date, around 2000 “leaders” who have taken part in the program. The WHP is a vehicle for standardizing a certain perspective on the history of Israel, as well as Judaic texts. The two year program is made up of 36 evening seminars, which occur bi-monthly for four-hour periods, as well as three short-term and out-of-town summer institutes hosted in either the US or Israel. Each of these summer institutes are between 5 and 7 days long and take place throughout the program.
As with other well-founded leadership programs, such as the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leader program, the Wexner Heritage Program targets a very specific age group, aiming at professionals who are generally between the ages of 30 and 45 years-old. Some of the most important criteria required of program participants include showing a demonstrated commitment to Judaism, the Jewish community and/or Israel and a track record of leadership in Jewish communal life.
The Wexner Foundation website claims that:
“The 2,300 Alumni of the Wexner Heritage Program are top lay leaders at the local, national and international level. In the 35 cities where we have convened WHP cohorts, virtually every Jewish communal organization continues to be supported by our alumni. They become presidents or chairs of synagogues, Federations, JCC’s, Hillels, day schools, camps and more; they often are founders or chairs of allocations or annual campaigns. They serve on the boards of JFNA, 70 Faces Media, the Foundation for Jewish Camp, International Hillel, AIPAC and J Street; The Shalom Hartman Institute, Pardes, Hadar and every US rabbinical seminary; the Jewish Education Project, Prisma, the JDC and so many more.”
It is worth noting that, of those aforementioned groups, the Wexner Foundation (and especially the Wexner Heritage program) enjoys particularly close ties to AIPAC. For instance, Elliot Brandt, AIPAC’s national managing director, is an alumnus of the Wexner Heritage Program and, in a 2018 speech at that year’s AIPAC policy conference, Brandt noted that “most of the [AIPAC] National Board consists of Wexner Heritage Alumni, not to mention its regional chairs and some of its most committed donors as well.”
Elliot Brandt and Alan Dershowitz at the 2017 AIPAC policy conference, Source: Screenshot
Wexner’s close ties to AIPAC take on a different tone when one considers, not only his close association with the Israeli intelligence-connected Jeffrey Epstein, but also the fact that AIPAC itself has long-standing and controversial ties to Israeli intelligence. For instance, AIPAC was at the center of an Israeli espionage scandal in the US in the mid-1980s as well as again in 2004, when a high-ranking Pentagon analyst was caught passing highly classified information over to Israel’s government via top officials at AIPAC.
Despite extensive evidence, particularly in the latter case, AIPAC itself avoided charges. As journalist Grant Smith noted at the time, “the Department of Justice’s chief prosecutor on the [AIPAC] espionage case, Paul McNulty, was suddenly and inexplicably promoted within the DOJ after he backed off on criminally indicting AIPAC as a corporation.” The charges against the specific AIPAC officials involved were also dropped.
In the years after the Wexner Heritage Program was launched, other similar efforts followed. In 1987, the Wexner Foundation announced it would begin channeling “$3-$4 million in grants to the first year of a program dedicated to the enhancement and improvement of professional leadership in the North American Jewish community.”
Per the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Wexner said an Advisory Group drawn from among leading Jewish academicians and communal professionals recommended that attention be focused on three critical groups: rabbis, communal professionals and educators.” These efforts would result in the formal creation of the Wexner Graduate Fellowship in 1988. Chairmanship of the Wexner Fellowship Committee was given to Professor Henry Rosovsky.
Henry and Harvard
Henry Rosovsky was an economist at Harvard University. Like Wexner, and like many other of the Wexner Foundation’s associates, Rosovsky was born to Russian Jewish parents. He grew up speaking Russian, German, and French and, in 1940, Rosovsky emigrated to the United States of America with his parents.
During World War II, he served in Counterintelligence Corps of the US Army. He became a naturalized US citizen 9 years later. That same year, he received his B.A. degree from the College of William and Mary public research university in Williamsburg, Virginia, followed by his PhD from Harvard in 1959.
Rosovsky taught overseas as a visiting professor in Japan at Hito Subashi and Tokyo Universities, and subsequently taught Japanese studies, economics and history at the University of California at Berkeley until 1965. He also taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, again as a visiting professor, as well as working as a consultant with the United States government, the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank, and UNESCO.
Rosovsky settled down into his eventual career at Harvard in 1965 and brought with him the intention of making Jewish life at Harvard flourish. By 1978, Rosovsky had helped to establish the Center for Jewish Studies, which was led by Harry Wolfson, the first chairman of a Judaic studies center at any American college. Rosovsky was the first Jew to serve on the board of the Harvard Corporation. Rosovsky’s wife, Nitza Rosovsky, also had a presence at Harvard, and in 1986, during Harvard’s 350th anniversary celebrations, she wrote a piece entitled “The Jewish Experience at Harvard and Radcliffe,” which traces the Jewish history at the university dating back to the 1720s.
Henry Rosovsky posing with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Source: Harvard Hillel
Rosovsky developed a close relationship with some key faculty members at Harvard, including future US Treasury Secretary and Harvard president Larry Summers. In 2017, Summers stated in a video tribute to Rosovsky the following: “Thirty-five years ago, I sat in your office as a young recruit to the Harvard faculty, and I was trembling with the majesty of it all,” he said. “Over time I became less intimidated and came to value your wisdom and your experience.”
Rosovsky became involved with the Wexner Foundation in 1987, when the Wexner Foundation announced the aforementioned initiative to recruit, support, and retain “the highest quality professional leadership” in the American Jewish community through grant-making to individuals and institutions. Those individual grants were awarded as Wexner Foundation fellowships and the Foundation appointed Rosovsky to serve as the chairman of the Wexner Fellowship Committee.
Rosovsky was prominent and well-connected by the time Wexner approached him, with his connections including Israeli politicians and heads of state like Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Rabin. By this point, Rosovsky was also being publicly honored for his many achievements. In 1987, after Wexner had launched several of his philanthropic endeavors, the American Academy of Achievement – a non-profit educational organization that recognizes some of the highest achieving individuals in the country – had awarded Rosovsky its “Golden Plate Award.”
One of Rosovsky’s most important links that were likely of interest to Wexner was his strong connection with Harvard Hillel. What is today referred to as the “Harvard-Radcliffe Hillel,” the Harvard Hillel is commonly described as a service organization that provides Jewish educational, cultural, religious, and social opportunities for students and faculty. Rosovsky had been a key player in paving the way for Hillel’s relocation from a simple home at the outskirts of campus to a location at the heart of Harvard life. Wexner’s subsequent involvement with Harvard Hillel would also mark Epstein’s own entry into what would become his controversial, and intimate, relationship with the prestigious university.
According to a 2003 article in the Harvard Crimson on Epstein’s donations to the University, Rosovsky was not only one of Epstein’s closest associates at Harvard, but was also Epstein’s “oldest friend of the bunch,” having been introduced to Rosovsky by Wexner around 1991. That is notably the same year that Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell began their sexual blackmail/sex trafficking operation.
1991 was also the year that the New York Times reported that four donors, among them Leslie Wexner and Jeffrey Epstein, had pledged to raise $2 million for the construction of the new student center of Harvard-Radcliffe Hillel. In that article, the Times lists Epstein as the “president of Wexner Investment Company.” The building was completed in 1994 and named Rosovsky Hall in Henry Rosovsky’s honor. Rosovsky Hall is a 19,500-square-foot building, which cost $3 million to complete and includes a garden courtyard, a student lounge, a dining hall, a library, offices, and multi-purpose rooms for worship and meetings.
After Epstein’s 2019 arrest, Hillel executive director Rabbi Jonah Steinberg claimed that Epstein had merely “facilitated” a gift that was actually donated by the Wexners and did not involve Epstein’s personal money. However, a now-absent plaque on the building, cited by the Harvard Crimson in 2003, named both Epstein and Wexner as donors responsible for funding the center’s construction.
Steinberg did note that Epstein did donate $50,000 to Hillel in 1991, the same year that the gift for the construction of Rosovsky Hall was also made. The following year, records from Harvard’s Office of Alumni Affairs and Development reveal that Epstein was courted as a potential donor by the University, with Harvard’s “most senior leaders” first officially meeting with Epstein to “seek his support.” It is unclear exactly what resulted from this meeting, as Epstein’s first official donation to Harvard was recorded in 1998, raising the possibility that support could have been given in other ways that did not necessarily involve direct donations to the University.
Indeed, when Harvard moved to reject donations from Epstein following his 2008 conviction, Epstein continued to donate indirectly to the University by directly sponsoring several professors as well as a student social club at Harvard. Epstein may have contributed in this fashion during this earlier period, especially given that he had already donated to Harvard’s Hillel by the time of the 1992 meeting.
Jeffrey Epstein speaks with Larry Summers at a 2004 dinner he hosted for Harvard’s biggest names. Also pictured is Alan Dershowitz, among others. Source: Sott
It is worth noting that Epstein’s first “official” donation to Harvard in 1998 was the same year he was using his private plane, now best known to the public as the “Lolita Express,” to transport then-Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence “Larry” Summers. Summer’s then-boss, Treasury Secretary Richard Rubin, had previously facilitated Epstein’s first official visit to the Clinton White House in early 1993. Summers would become president of Harvard University shortly after the conclusion of the Clinton administration, in July 2001. During Summer’s tenure, Epstein’s access to Harvard’s campus and many of its most notable professors increased exponentially. While president of Harvard, Summers continued to fly on Epstein’s plane.
Developing Young Global Leaders
Though Epstein’s ties to Harvard have been scrutinized, Wexner also dramatically expanded his donations to Harvard during much of the same period. However, the role this may have played in facilitating Epstein’s own connections to the university have been largely glossed over by mainstream media reports on the matter.
Even before Wexner and Epstein donated to Harvard’s Hillel in 1991, Wexner’s philanthropic “development of leaders” had become entangled with Harvard University. In 1989, the year after the Wexner Graduate Fellowship was launched, the Wexner Israel Fellowship program was created to specifically “support up to 10 outstanding Israeli public officials earning their Mid-Career Master of Public Administration (MC/MPA) at Harvard Kennedy School.”
Per the Wexner Foundation’s website: “The goal of the Fellowship is to provide Israel’s next generation of public leaders with advanced leadership and public management training. More than 280 Israeli public officials have participated in the Israel Fellowship, including leaders who have gone on to become Directors General of government ministries, Generals and Commanders in the Israeli military, and top advisers to Prime Ministers.” As part of the program, participants “meet with senior U.S. government officials.” Wexner Israel Fellows also “commit to returning to Israel and remaining in the public sector for at least three years after completing the program.”
Similar claims can be found among Israeli media. For example, Israel 21c stated the following about the program in 2002:
“Several Wexner graduates have gone on to become Director-Generals of government ministries. Others have reached the highest echelons of the military, the health service, and the educational establishment. But ultimately, for Israel, the value of the program is not the titles of its participants, but in the quality of leadership exercised by these individuals at every level.”
That same article also notes that Wexner’s interest in having this program be hosted at Harvard’s Kennedy school “is the quality of the international exposure it permits. It attracts the highest caliber of public sector leadership from around the world and Israeli participants find themselves sitting next to ex-presidents and future prime ministers from every continent. It also creates a rare opportunity for high quality public relations, as future world leaders are exposed to some of the finest and most dedicated individuals Israel has to offer.”
Among the 10 alumni of the first class of Wexner Israel Fellows is Shay Avital, a prominent leadership figure in the Israeli military and who had first served under Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother, Yonatan Netanyahu. Other alumni include Avinoam Armoni, former special adviser to Teddy Kollek, as well as Israeli prime ministers; Moshe Lador, former Israeli state prosecutor; Arik Raz, former governor of Israel’s Misgav region; Uzi Vogelman, current justice on Israel’s Supreme Court; Eduardo Titelman Goren, a Chilean economist who has played a major role in managing Chile’s copper mining industry (the world’s largest); and Yossi Tamir, Director General of the JDC-Israel, “the leading global Jewish humanitarian organization.”
Another interesting alumnus from this first class was Amos Slyper, who was Deputy Director-General of the State Comptroller’s Office in Israel, making him responsible for the auditing of Israeli government ministries and offices. During Slyper’s tenure, the legal adviser to that office was Nurit Israeli, an alumnus of the second class of Wexner Israel Fellows.
As can be seen from just the first class of fellows, the Wexner Israel Fellow programs and its active alumni community have given Wexner considerable clout with prominent Israelis in major positions in government and industry. Years after this program was launched, it has since expanded to include the Wexner Senior Leaders program, which “leverages the training and scholarship of the Harvard Kennedy School to strengthen Israel’s public service leadership and spur innovative, collaborative projects across government departments and agencies.” It specifically seeks applicants from “senior level positions within Israel’s public service sector, including the civil service, local government, government agencies, and security forces.”
Thus, even before the 1991 donation by Wexner and Epstein, Wexner was actively bringing prominent Israelis, many with careers in Israel’s national security apparatus or in the public sector, to study at Harvard’s Kennedy school. In the years that followed, Wexner would become one of the guiding forces behind this particular school and would have even greater influence over the “development of leaders” at the institution.
Shortly before Larry Summers became Harvard’s president, Leslie Wexner, via the Wexner Foundation, funded the creation of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership (CPL). The CPL is described as “a premier training ground for emerging public leaders in the United States.”
The long-time director of CPL, who was likely chosen with direct input from Wexner, is David Gergen, an adviser to former presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton. Gergen has also had a parallel career in journalism and, in the late 1980s, “he was chief editor of U.S. News & World Report, working with publisher Mort Zuckerman.” Zuckerman was a close associate of Epstein and bought the New York Daily News after the death of its previous owner, Robert Maxwell. Gergen is also a long-time member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, where Epstein also had memberships.
Wexner’s contributions to Harvard’s CPL reached $19.6 million by 2006 and totaled more than $42 million by 2012. Notably, during this period, Jeffrey Epstein – one of Wexner’s closest associates until they parted ways between 2007 and 2008 – was also making major connections and gaining unprecedented access to the school.
In 2006, when the Wexner’s announced an additional donation of $6.8 million to the CPL, Gergen was quoted by the Harvard Crimson as saying:
“It has been a great personal privilege to work with Les and Abigail Wexner over the past half-dozen years, at the University and beyond. They are both leaders in their own right – people of vision, imagination, and keen dedication to advancing the quality of public life. They have been wonderful partners.”
In 2014, Gergen participated in the Wexner Foundation’s 30th anniversary gala, hosting a session where he interviewed former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres at length.
Before Epstein’s second arrest, the Wexner-dominated CPL saw Epstein associates like Glenn Dubin and Leon Black creep into its top leadership bodies. For example, Dubin had become a member of CPL’s advisory council, which Leslie and Abigail Wexner co-chaired. Both Wexner and Dubin were pressured to remove themselves from that council after Epstein’s second arrest and subsequent death and departed in February 2020. At the time, the Harvard Crimson noted that the chief of staff to then-Harvard president Lawrence Bacow, Patricia Bellinger, had been added to the board of directors of Wexner’s L Brands (the current corporate name of The Limited).
Also at the time, Dubin had been named in court documents as one of the men Virginia Giuffre was forced to have sex with when she was under Epstein’s control, with another being Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz. In addition, as noted by the Crimson, a “former manager of the Dubin household Rinaldo Rizzo recount[ed] his encounter with a 15-year-old girl allegedly trafficked by Epstein who was brought to the Dubins’ house in 2005.” In 2010, Dubin had donated $5 million to the CPL to create his own fellowship aimed at “developing leaders,” called the Dubin Graduate Fellowships for Emerging Leaders.
In another example, Leon Black, of Apollo Global Management and whose “philanthropic” family foundation was also managed by Epstein for years, was on the CPL’s leadership council. Black, however, did not resign his post after the Epstein scandal became a national concern. However, after Wexner and Dubin had left their positions on the advisory council, Black’s connection to Epstein resulted in considerable media scrutiny as well as an “internal investigation” by Apollo.As of 2022, Black is no longer listed on the CPL’s website as a member of its leadership council.
In 2006, plans were made for the Wexner-funded CPL to team up with the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders (YGL) program. The World Economic Forum, which describes itself as the pre-eminent facilitator of “public-private partnerships” on a global scale, originally created what would become YGL in 1992 under the name the Global Leaders of Tomorrow. It was rebranded as the YGL program in 2004.
In recent years, the Forum and its YGL program have become infamous in some circles, specifically after a clip of the Forum’s chairman Klaus Schwab went viral. In that clip, Schwab states the following of the YGL program:
“I have to say then I mention names like Mrs Merkel, even Vladimir Putin and so on they all have been Young Global Leaders of The World Economic Forum. But what we are really proud of now with the young generation like Prime Minister Trudeau, President of Argentina and so on, is that we penetrate the cabinets… It is true in Argentina and it is true in France now…”
Notably, that clip comes from a 2017 discussion between Klaus Schwab and the CLP’s David Gergen that took place at the Harvard Kennedy school. In the introduction to that discussion, the close ties between the Harvard Kennedy school and the World Economic Forum are highlighted and it is also mentioned that YGL participants are also present and attending the Harvard Kennedy school for an executive session. Gergen, in addition to his many roles and appointments, is also formerly a board member of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, which Klaus Schwab co-founded with his wife in 1998, and is also an agenda contributor to the World Economic Forum.
The CPL began hosting an Executive Session for Young Global Leader participants in order to allow “the Young Global Leaders a much greater opportunity to form personal connections and bonds that will encourage opportunities for the leaders to working together, across multiple sectors, to solve international issues and problems in the future.”
These executive sessions were “designed and hosted by the Kennedy School of Government” and a significant amount of the funds raised were connected to the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). In 2007, Epstein’s defense lawyers claimed that Epstein had played a major role in developing the CGI, writing to federal prosecutors that “Mr. Epstein was part of the original group that conceived the Clinton Global Initiative, which is described as a project ‘bringing together a community of global leaders to devise and implement innovative solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges’.”
At the time, the executive director of the CPL, working under David Gergen, was Betsy Meyers, a former senior adviser to president Clinton, specifically on women’s issues. Meyers also played a “critical role in Clinton’s re-election effort in 1996.” The corruption surrounding Clinton’s re-election campaign that year and Epstein’s own connections to that corruption are a key focus of my upcoming book.
Klaus Schwab’s now infamous “penetrate the cabinets” quote may offer insight as to Leslie Wexner’s own interest over the decades in “developing leaders” in American Jewish communities, in Israel and beyond. With nearly 40 years focused specifically on training men and women of influence in American Jewish society – as well as in Israel’s government and private sector – ideas and policies that benefit Wexner both personally and professionally have been instilled into generations of leaders and influencers, who then go on to influence many others. In the specific case of the Wexner Israel fellows, Wexner has been able to “penetrate” key posts in Israel’s government, and even its national security/intelligence apparatus, with people he has funded and who have participated in courses that were shaped by, and reflect, Wexner’s views.
Over the past two decades, Wexner’s foray into becoming one of the main donors of the Harvard Kennedy school allows for much the same to occur, but this time for leaders who operate and influence those far outside of the boundaries of the global Jewish community.
Wexner’s exact reasons for establishing and maintaining this legitimate yet massive influence operation, which paralleled Epstein’s own blackmail-based influence operation, have never been made explicit.
Yet, in speculating as to why he would want to mold the powerful and soon-to-be powerful, it is worth considering Wexner’s lesser known connections, including to organized crime and to Jeffrey Epstein.
Whitney Webb has been a professional writer, researcher and journalist since 2016. She has written for several websites and, from 2017 to 2020, was a staff writer and senior investigative reporter for Mint Press News. She currently writes for The Last American Vagabond.
The White House on Monday called on Russia to “return full control” of the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant near Energodar to the Kiev authorities. Meanwhile, the Russian Defense Ministry accused Ukrainian forces of “nuclear terrorism” for bombarding the Russian-held facility twice since Friday.
“Fighting near a nuclear plant is dangerous,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters aboard Air Force One on Monday, flying with President Joe Biden to Kentucky to tour areas damaged by flooding.
“We continue to call on Russia to cease all military operations at or near Ukrainian nuclear facilities and return full control to Ukraine,” Jean-Pierre added. “We are also aware of the reports of mistreatment of the staff and we applaud the Ukrainian authorities and operators for their commitment to nuclear safety and security under trying circumstances.”
On Monday, the government in Kiev called for a demilitarized zone to be established around Europe’s largest power plant. The Zaporozhye facility has been in Russian hands since February, with its Ukrainian staff continuing to operate and supply Ukraine with electricity.
Russia has accused Ukraine of “nuclear terrorism” over the repeated attacks on the facility. Ukraine’s 44th Artillery Brigade fired at the plant on Sunday from the village of Marganets, on the opposite side of the large Kakhovka water reservoir, General Igor Konashenkov said in a briefing on Monday. It was the second time Ukrainian shelling has caused a fire and a partial power outage at the plant since Friday, he added. Ukrainian troops targeted the Zaporozhye plant with several suicide drones in late July.
Kiev has claimed that Russian troops were using the facility as a staging area – but also that the Russians were shelling themselves. Moscow has rejected both of those accusations. The Kremlin has called on “countries which have an absolute influence on the Ukrainian leadership” to command Kiev to end the shelling.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has condemned the “suicidal” attacks on the plant, expressing hope that international inspectors will be able to access the facility soon.
Professor Tim Noakes was born in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1949. As a youngster, he had a keen interest in sport and attended Diocesan College in Cape Town. Following this, he studied at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and obtained an MBChB degree in 1974, an MD in 1981 and a DSc (Med) in Exercise Science in 2002.
Prof. Noakes has published more than 750 scientific books and articles. He has been cited more than 19 000 times in scientific literature, has an H-index of 71 and has been rated an A1 scientist by the National Research Foundation of South Africa for a second 5-year term. He has won numerous awards over the years and made himself available on many editorial boards.
In 2012, Tim founded ‘The Noakes Foundation’, a Non-Profit Corporation founded for public benefit which aims to advance medical science’s understanding of the benefits of a low-carb high-fat (LCHF) diet by providing evidence-based information on optimum nutrition that is free from commercial agenda. The foundation has also started the Eat Better South Africans campaign, which allows South Africans in even the poorest communities to adopt a high-fat, low-carb, extremely healthy diet for just three dollars per day.
More recently, the foundation has developed ‘The Nutrition Network’, which is a certification and training program for doctors who want to prescribe a high-fat, low-carb diet to their patients. The platform has been designed exclusively for medical practitioners across all disciplines, covering the latest and most up-to-date science and research in the field of Low Carb Nutrition (https://nutrition-network.org/)
Prof. Noakes has a passion for running and is still active, running half marathons when he can. He is a devoted husband, father and grandfather and now, in his retirement, is enjoying spending more time with his family.
Please consider supporting Low Carb Down Under via Patreon. A small monthly contribution will assist in the costs of filming and editing these presentations and will allow us to keep producing high quality content free from advertising. For further information visit; https://www.patreon.com/lowcarbdownunder
By Alan Mosley | The Libertarian Institute | April 22, 2026
Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s book, The Technological Republic, is a clarion call for Silicon Valley to abandon its consumer trinkets and rush headlong into the arms of the military-industrial complex. According to Karp, America’s future depends on wielding hard power through technology—arming soldiers, AI-weaponry, and mass surveillance systems—rather than on the “soft” influence demonstrated by free markets and liberty-first principles. The book claims that “the survival of the American experiment depends on the technological revitalization of the military-industrial complex” and urges the country’s engineering talent to focus on national defense. Karp and his co-author, Nicholas Zamiska, argue that tech bros should “grow up” and start killing America’s enemies before they kill us. … continue
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