The rate of successful conception — a pregnancy leading to live birth nine months later — for women who received the COVID-19 vaccine was “substantially lower” than for unvaccinated women, according to a new peer-reviewed study.
Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), called the study’s conclusions alarming. He said:
“This preliminary analysis shows that much more information is needed to understand both short- and long-term implications of the different types of COVID shots on fertility and pregnancy parameters. This information should have been obtained prior to any public use of the COVID vaccine.”
The results showed that by June 2021, approximately six months after COVID-19vaccines became available to the public, successful conceptions per 1,000 women were considerably lower for vaccinated women than for those not vaccinated.
The researchers observed an increase in the rate of successful conceptions for unvaccinated women beginning in June 2021, which “was maintained over the subsequent 6-month period.”
In 2022, the rate of successful conceptions “stabilized” among both vaccinated and unvaccinated women but remained “about 1.5 times higher” for the latter group.
‘Troubling’ results indicate long-term impact on reproductive health
The preliminary analysis, by five researchers from the Czech Republic, Denmark and Sweden, was published last week in the International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine.
The study examined data obtained from the Czech Republic, one of the few countries where nationwide birth data for women who were vaccinated or unvaccinated for COVID-19 are available, the authors said.
The researchers analyzed data on 1.3 million women, ages 18-39, between January 2021 and December 2023.
The authors said their reasons for undertaking the study included existing research showing that COVID-19 vaccines have adverse effects on “menstrual characteristics,” and the lack of data on the effect of COVID-19 vaccines on birth rates.
Pediatrician Dr. Michelle Perro said the study’s findings are “deeply concerning” and “provide insight regarding adverse effects on fertility that warrants immediate and unbiased scientific investigation.”
“Releasing a new technology, especially one administered to our most vulnerable populations without comprehensive, long-term safety data, once again, has been shown to be disastrous towards the health of future generations,” Perro said.
Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., senior research scientist at CHD, said it was “troubling” that the rates of successful conceptions among vaccinated and unvaccinated women have not converged after 2021, indicating the vaccines’ potentially long-term impact on women’s reproductive health.
“If the exposure had short-term influence, the two groups would converge over time, and they don’t,” Jablonowski said.
Among the vaccinated women examined in the study, 96% received either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines, with 11 times more women receiving Pfizer’s vaccine compared to Moderna’s.
Multiple studies link COVID vaccines and reproductive problems
The researchers noted the relationship between vaccination and fertility is not necessarily causal, and some women may have based their decision to get vaccinated on whether they planned to become pregnant — a possible example of “self-selection bias.”
However, the researchers pointed out that, during the pandemic, the overall fertility rate in the Czech Republic declined. During that time, Czech public health authorities recommended that pregnant women get vaccinated — a recommendation the researchers said many women likely followed.
These factors reduce the likelihood that self-selection bias accounts for the difference in successful conception rates among vaccinated and unvaccinated women.
Other recent studies have also found an association between COVID-19 vaccines and reproductive problems.
A peer-reviewed study published in BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth in April found that among pregnant women who tested positive for COVID-19, those who received a COVID-19 vaccine were significantly more likely to miscarry compared to unvaccinated women.
A peer-reviewed study published in March in the journal Vaccines found that COVID-19 vaccines decreased the number of primordial follicles — “the foundation of fertility” — in female rats by up to 60%.
Contaminated COVID vaccine batches may have lowered conception rates
According to the Czech researchers, highly contaminated early batches of COVID-19 vaccines may be related to decreased rates of successful conception — a theory which they said deserves further investigation.
The researchers cited several studies — including a peer-reviewed analysis by Jablonowski and Hooker published last year in the journal Science, Public Health Policy and the Law — that found early batches of COVID-19 vaccines led to a disproportionately higher number of adverse events.
According to the Jablonowski-Hooker analysis, batches of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine distributed in the U.S. were associated with significantly different rates of serious adverse events.
Α 2023 Danish study found a significant percentage of the batches of the Pfizer-BioNTech BNT162b2 COVID-19 vaccine distributed in the European Union likely consisted of placebos — and the non-placebo batches demonstrated higher-than-normal severe adverse events in recipients.
In a paper published in the journal Medicine last year, the authors of the Danish study expanded their analysis to Sweden, finding the existence of the same batch-dependent issues in that country.
In another study published last year, researchers from the Czech Republic replicated the Danish study’s methodology. They found that COVID-19 vaccine batches in that country also had differing rates of adverse events, with more issues seen in early vaccine releases for all vaccines.
Perro said the study’s findings “highlight the necessity for extreme caution in public health interventions, particularly for women of childbearing age and children when they involve reproductive health.” She supports calls for the “immediate cessation and withdrawal of mRNA technology.”
Hooker said, “Any decrease in fertility and increase in miscarriages and stillbirths lies at the heart of the fact that this vaccine technology should have never been rolled out to the public in the first place.”
Former Air Force Staff Sergeant and Bioenvironmental Engineering Craftsman Kristen Meghan shares her explosive story as a geoengineering whistleblower. Over a decade ago, while tracking chemical inventories on a military base, she discovered toxic substances she now believes were tied to covert weather modification programs. Her testimony raises urgent questions about what’s really happening in our skies.
On September 11 2001, FOUR World Trade center buildings in New York were suddenly destroyed. We are told that no one could imagine that terrorists could knock down the two World Trade Center towers, even though Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu predicted this in his 1995 book. He warned the U.S. Congress this may happened unless the United States joined a war to expand Israel by destroying what he called terror states. Even before the smoke cleared on 9-11, the plotters blamed Osama bin Laden to block investigations into their weak official story.
Note: YouTube demonetized this video claiming “violence throughout”, even though there is no graphic violence, just some collapsing buildings often shown on television.
Unlike Russia’s quarrel with Kyiv or China’s claim to Taiwan, Washington’s war with Iran is not rooted in a national dispute with the US It is a project subcontracted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his lobby group, American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Donald Trump—a president addicted to flattery and drama—puffed by grandiose, proved the ideal Israeli subcontractor.
Netanyahu has refined this manipulation of US politics for decades. In 2002 he assured Congress that once the United States toppled Saddam Hussein, “I guarantee you” young Iranians would overthrow their clerics. The Iraqi “regime change” came, chaos followed, and no Iranian uprising materialised. Twenty-three years later Netanyahu succeeded, again, in dragging the US in his fantasy to reshape “the face of the Middle East.” A demonic feat: as America fights Israel’s wars, the region descends into chaos—reinforcing Israel’s security doctrine of fostering failed states incapable of challenging its regional supremacy.
As the dust settles around the ceasefire between Iran and Israel, it becomes increasingly clear that Israel’s war on Tehran was not to stop the emergence of a competing nuclear power in the region. The deeper objective is to sow chaos, (regime change) and divisiveness in order to preserve its exclusive dominance in a forever fragmented Middle East. For Israel, the chaos is not a by-product of policy—it is the policy. Anarchy is not a failure of strategy; it is the strategy. It is the Israeli business model.
A destabilised Middle East is a calculated Zionist objective outlined in the Yinon Plan, published in Hebrew in 1982. It serves to deflect global scrutiny from Israeli war crimes, like today’s genocide in Gaza, the occupation of the West Bank, the expansion of Jewish-only colonies, and the systemic entrenchment of Israeli Jewish apartheid.
According to the plan, Mid-East instability reinforces the Israeli narrative of existential threat—one eagerly embraced by compliant US policymakers. A narrative used to justify the siphoning of billions in American taxpayer dollars and bankrolling a bellicose Israeli policy of preemption, militarisation and endless wars.
When neighbouring failed states are consumed by division, civil war, economic collapse, or sectarian violence, global headlines shift away from Israeli atrocities and toward regional instability. This enables Israel to act with impunity as the Palestinian suffering becomes background noise—an “unfortunate” consequence of a “tough” neighborhood rather than a direct result of a malevolent state policy.
Therefore, fueling perpetual chaos in countries like Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, and now Iran serves a long-term strategic objective: to prevent the rise of any unified front capable of challenging Israel’s regional hegemony. A broken Middle East is not only easier to dominate—it is easier for the world to dismiss and ignore.
In Gaza, for instance, the world shrugs off genocide as just another episode in a region long written off as irredeemably chaotic. It watches with silence as the Trump administration has normalised starvation and genocide. The distribution centers of the US funded, so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation have become killing zones; Israeli troops open fire daily on thousands of desperate people queuing before dawn, leaving hundreds of dead Palestinians. Every day, hungry people are murdered and many return home carrying over their shoulders a dead relative instead of a sack of flour. The scene, the starvation, the genocide, is lost in another Israeli war of chaos.
Now, Netanyahu may buy time to carry on with his genocide, and savor another “achievement” in having America, once again, fight Israel’s wars. But the euphoria will prove Pyrrhic.
All this unfolded against a growing American public resistance to foreign wars. Outside the Beltway, the mood is shifting. A majority of Americans oppose US involvement in yet another made-for-Israel war. The gulf between public sentiment and the AIPAC controlled elite decision-making officials continues to widen, further eroding trust in institutions already weakened by inequality and partisanship.
The latest US attack on Iran is likely to push Tehran’s leaders to further a global realignment to challenge the existing world order. An emerging alliance—anchored in Iran and backed by Russia and China—could start to take shape, with the potential of remaking the geopolitical landscape for decades to come. While the full extent of the US and Israeli raids on Iran remains unclear, one fact is certain: neither Washington nor Tel Aviv can undo Iran’s nuclear know-how.
Meanwhile, the international community remained conspicuously silent. Instead of condemning Israel’s violations of international law prohibiting attacks on nuclear facilities, it continued to recycle the mantra that “Iran must never obtain a bomb.” This rhetorical deflection ignores the critical fact that, unlike Israel, Iran’s civilian nuclear program has been under full International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) supervision since its inception during the Shah’s era.
The failure to speak out not only undermines the IAEA’s credibility but also diminishes Iran’s incentive to remain within its framework, increasing the likelihood that Tehran will abandon its commitments to international oversight altogether. While Iran’s next move is hard to predict, it’s entirely possible that Tehran could tell the US that after the destruction of its nuclear facilities, there is nothing left to negotiate over.
In this light, Trump may be remembered not as Israel’s “saviour,” but as the catalyst who drove Iran to pursue a nuclear program—outside the reach of global inspection regimes.
When that reckoning arrives historians will trace the arc—from Netanyahu’s phone calls to stoke Trump’s gullible ego to AIPAC’s cash to elected officials—showing how the strongest nation on earth allowed its military might and foreign policy to serve a foreign country. They will tally the lives lost and goodwill squandered and wonder how different the story might have been had the United States acted to serve its own interest, instead of being a tool for the Israeli politics of perpetual chaos.
Forget the fog of war. Even in war, and sometimes especially in war, some things are exceedingly clear. Regarding the so-called ‘Hamas-Israel War’, for instance, it is obvious that in reality it is not a war at all but a genocide, namely the Gaza Genocide, carried out by Israel against the Palestinians whose unbroken resistance will be the stuff of legends, and of history too.
Likewise, in the case of Israel’s current assault on Iran – really, of course, a combined US-Israeli attack from the get-go – there is no room for doubt that it is criminal and a “blatant act of aggression,” as multiple experts in international law agree. That’s because in essence, Israel is not acting with a UN mandate – which it would not have received – or in self-defense.
The legal basis for this compelling assessment is not complex and there is no room for good-faith debate: Israel’s attack violates Article 2 (4) of the foundational UN Charter, which is recognized universally as jus cogens, that is, a binding norm: no pick and choose.
So far, so simple. If anyone tries to make this look complicated by flagrantly misapplying and abusing the notion of a ‘preemptive strike’, you are dealing with Israeli or Israel-Lobby disinformation and propaganda. That too is anything but surprising.
Yet what is more puzzling than the above is the response of the governments, and often the mainstream media of the West, to this clearly criminal Israeli attack. After years of invoking international law to go after Russia, it turns out that the same leaders and talking heads will tie themselves into 5-D pretzels to let Israel get away with whatever Israel feels like doing on any given day.
This is not really news either, of course: Western ‘elites’, with Washington always in the lead, have behaved no better when serving as accomplices in Israel’s Gaza Genocide. But there is something peculiar and noteworthy about how exactly some important Western politicians and their media and ‘think tank’ experts spin the attack on Iran.
Take, for instance, Germany. Its chancellor Friedrich Merz has gone out of his way to loudly endorse the assault on Iran. He has even exposed himself to ridicule and some – if far too little – criticism by employing revoltingly indecent language. Calling Israel’s actions “dirty work” (it sounds even worse in the original German: “Drecksarbeit”) that must be done and for which we all should be grateful, Merz has revealed his double racism: As a German and a historian, I can only say that a German leader praising Jews for doing “our” dirty work is, to put it very mildly, extremely boorish. Defining the criminal killing of Iranians as that “dirty work” adds a very nasty “colonial” flavor reminiscent of say, Kaiser Wilhelm II gloating over massacring Chinese during the so-called Boxer Rebellion.
While Merz has been clumsy enough to couch his obnoxious ideas in equally obnoxious language, he has by no means been alone. All too many prestigious German publications, such as the staid Frankfurter Zeitung or the also important Merkur newspaper, have hurried to either simply agree with Merz or at least to excuse and relativize his vile statement. In addition, rather overworked all-purpose ‘experts’, such as the reliably conformist and rarara-russophobic Christian Mölling, have used their perma-perk in Germany’s streamlined talk shows to cynically diminish international law and help dress up Israel’s newest crime as so necessary that it trumps all law anyhow.
Mölling was self-unaware enough to openly argue that some countries (read: Israel) can’t afford the “luxury” of accepting “normative limits” and that international law, anyhow, might be “protecting the wrong ones” (read: Iran). It’s breathtakingly brazen and intellectually primitive, and also historically speaking, very German in the worst sense: If we or our friends (read: Israel) feel constrained by international law, then that’s a problem not for us or our friends but for international law.
And now, let’s take a step back and think for a moment like a German who was not a conformist intellectual mediocrity: Enlightenment giant Immanuel Kant. For those with ears to hear and brains to process, Kant has taught us that reason and ethics demand that the justifications for our actions ought to be generalizable in good conscience. In short, when we act, we should be able to show that we are acting according to a fair and reasonable rule.
Let’s generalize into such a rule, then, what German leader Friedrich Merz has just said and what all too many German mainstream representatives agree with: A country (here: Israel) that feels sufficiently afraid (as judged by that country) of another country (here: Iran) has a right (that trumps international law) to attack that other country without provocation and even during ongoing negotiations.
Interesting. Consider that German elites have been fanning war hysteria relentlessly. Not a day seems to go by without some German general, spy, or politician warning their fellow Germans that Russia is at least likely, really almost certain, to attack within the next five years or so. Evidence: zero.
Indeed? So, if we are all supposed to be so afraid of Russia in Germany, does that now mean that according to Merzian logic we may as well one day launch a preemptive strike on Moscow? After all, we could then say we felt threatened and our military and the intelligence services were telling us that the Russians were coming. And moreover, we’d probably claim that we, the Germans, were proudly doing the ‘Drecksarbeit’ for all of NATO (minus, most likely, the US). And isn’t doing the ‘Drecksarbeit’ now officially a good thing in Germany, again?
Absurd, you say? Yes, absolutely. Exactly as absurd as Israel’s pretexts for attacking Iran. And yet those have been officially endorsed by a German chancellor, including self-revealing dirty language. Let’s hope that Moscow does not take seriously what Merz says. Because if Moscow did take it seriously, then by Merzian logic, it should feel very threatened indeed by Berlin – and again by Merzian logic, who knows where that might lead.
Tarik Cyril Amar is a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory.
Daniele Ganser is a historian with a focus on contemporary history since 1945 and international politics. His main research focuses on peace studies, geostrategy, covert warfare, resource conflicts, and economic policy. Dr. Ganser discusses Operation Gladio, the stay-behind mission of NATO’s secret army to fight on after a possible Soviet invasion. The secret army and hidden weaponry outside of public scrutiny enabled violent terror against Europe to ensure the correct political forces would have the power.
Deaths during the first “peak” of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted from medical and government interventions, not a circulating respiratory virus, Canadian researchers concluded in a paper posted Monday on Preprints.org.
Those interventions resulted in the deaths of primarily elderly and poor people, researchers with the Canadian nonprofit Correlation: Research in the Public Interest said.
Joseph Hickey, Ph.D., Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., and Christian Linard, Ph.D., authors of groundbreaking all-cause mortality research since early in the pandemic, analyzed all-cause mortality data in several locations in the northern hemisphere during the “first” and “summer” pandemic peaks in March-May and June-September 2020.
In their 356-page paper, they analyzed data from much of Europe and key sites in the U.S. at different geographical scales — by states and counties in the U.S., and “national units of territorial statistics” in Europe, which are roughly similar to U.S. counties.
They compared the actual all-cause mortality rates in these places to the predicted all-cause mortality for a contagious pandemic virus as measured by standard epidemiological models. They found that even accounting for flaws in those models, the results were very different than what would have been expected.
They said their findings show “strong evidence” that the patterns of excess mortality can’t be explained by a “novel and virulent virus (SARS-CoV-2) that spreads by person-to-person contact,” as most analysts of early excess mortality spikes have assumed.
They wrote:
“This means that the paradigm that a spreading viral respiratory disease caused the excess mortality during Covid is false. The said paradigm is disproved by empirical observations of high-resolution geotemporal variations of age and frailty adjusted excess mortality … on two continents in the Northern Hemisphere.
“Instead, the excess mortality appears to be entirely iatrogenic and induced by the imposed so-called pandemic response.”
Adjacent jurisdictions should have had similar excess death rates — but they didn’t
Almost immediately after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020, there were large peaks of excess mortality in some jurisdictions and not in others — even when the jurisdictions were adjacent to each other, had high population densities and significant numbers of people moving between them daily.
The researchers found “a high degree of geographic heterogeneity” in excess mortality during the first peak in early 2020, contrary to the standard epidemiological models’ prediction that similar adjacent places would have similar outcomes.
For example, they analyzed Germany’s western border with the Netherlands, France and Belgium. The regions have very similar population density, population profiles and a high degree of traffic moving between them, leading to the assumption that those regions would have similar excess mortality outcomes.
Yet, Germany had almost no excess mortality in the western border regions, while France, Belgium and the Netherlands had high excess mortality.
“The fact that there’s that big difference in mortality on either side of the border suggests that there’s something that is a matter of a policy or a measure that’s responsible for that big difference,” lead author Hickey told The Defender. “The virus would not stop at the border, because people are traveling across. And it’s very contagious, supposedly.”
The researchers also compared cities with similar population profiles, healthcare systems and large airports within countries — such as New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco in the U.S. and Milan and Rome in Italy — and found stark differences in excess mortality.
Standard large-scale spatial epidemiological models that account for people traveling to airport hubs around the world and spreading the virus would have predicted a more even spread of the virus in these different locations, Hickey said. That would be true even when accounting for the travel restrictions enacted almost immediately at the start of the pandemic.
However, the mortality data showed that some locations, like New York, had high spikes in excess mortality and others, like San Francisco, did not.
Timing of excess mortality peaks didn’t match expectations
The researchers also found that within countries, the peaks in excess mortality were very different — higher in some places and lower in others — but the peaks occurred at the same time. These findings also contradict the expectations for standard mortality models for COVID-19.
For example, their analysis of several jurisdictions in Italy found a wide variation in the rate of excess death — a 7-fold difference between northwest Italy and central Italy — even though the peaks in excess mortality occurred at the same time throughout the country. This trend was similar for all European countries that had a high excess mortality peak.
That means that instead of the virus spreading out from major urban centers with large airports to rural areas over time, as epidemiological models would predict, urban and rural centers experienced their peaks simultaneously.
Hickey said there are flaws in typical models, which don’t account for a lot of diversity in populations. However, if the models were adjusted to account for all of the regional and population differences found in the real world, the outcome would be more heterogeneity from one place to another. Instead, there was a high degree of synchronicity in the all-cause mortality peaks.
Higher mortality associated with higher poverty rates
The researchers also found major disparities between wealthy places and adjacent poor places, through their analysis of “inter-county disparity.” They examined socioeconomic vulnerability metrics, which include things like per capita income.
One of the greatest disparities was between Manhattan and the Bronx, which border each other. Places with higher poverty and greater numbers of non-white residents, like the Bronx, had much higher mortality than neighboring Manhattan. They found similar disparities in different boroughs of London.
“Exceptionally large F-peaks [first-peak period excess mortality] occurred in areas with large publicly-funded hospitals serving poor or socioeconomically frail communities, in regions where poor neighbourhoods are situated in proximity to wealthy neighbourhoods, such as the case of The Bronx in New York City, and the two of boroughs of Brent and Westminster in London, UK,” they wrote.
Traditional epidemiological models of viral spread predict that people who live in more crowded living conditions when a contagious virus is spreading have higher rates of excess death. However, the excess death data showed a high level of variability. In some places, people in crowded living conditions had high excess mortality and in others, they had low excess mortality.
The researchers also analyzed death by institutional location, comparing hospitals, nursing homes and homes. They found that in places with high excess mortality, a disproportionate number of deaths happened in hospitals. And in places with low excess mortality, a higher share of deaths than normal were happening at home.
Given that the prevailing viral spread paradigm failed to account for the distribution of excess mortality generally, they argue that the higher number of deaths in hospitals in places with higher excess mortality supports the hypothesis that medical interventions were driving the numbers higher.
For example, Hickey said, in the “frenzy of the first months of COVID,” measures like mechanical ventilation were being applied in untested ways. They were used frequently, and sometimes two people were put on the same ventilator. “Anesthesia machines,” which carry greater risks than regular mechanical ventilators, were used.
Hickey said they also argue that the biological stress of pandemic policies that locked people down, isolated them, imposed testing and other measures imposed major stress on large populations.
That stress reduced immune system efficacy and made people more susceptible to developing pneumonia, which then went untreated. This was a major driver of excess mortality in the first peak period.
Just hours after Israel launched its strikes on Iran in the early hours of Friday, June 13, US President Donald J. Trump declared that it was “not too late” for Tehran to return to the negotiating table over its nuclear program. The level of delusion displayed by the joint aggressors here is simply staggering. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu justified the bombs being rained on Iranian cities as a means to bring “freedom.”
The US-Israeli axis sees no contradiction in reducing a sovereign nation to rubble while draping its aggression in humanitarian rhetoric. The strike came even as Washington and Tehran were engaged in protracted negotiations over the thorny nuclear issue. This is not diplomacy; this is coercion cloaked in diplomatic theater. Worse, it will go down as a day of infamy in international relations: a moment when negotiation was used not to resolve conflict, but to disguise premeditated violence.
Regime change blowback
What did Israel and the United States hope to achieve through this betrayal? Regime change? The total submission of a sovereign nation to a militarized settler state forged in 1948? Are we now expected to believe that post-regime change, Tehran will suddenly embrace Tel Aviv – as some delusional pro-Israel ideologues like to fantasize?
Incredibly, Israel now casts itself as the victim. Russia’s deputy UN envoy Dmitry Polyansky brusquely described Israel’s claims that it was only acting in “self-defense” as “very perverted logic.” But such perversion runs deep in the policies and pathologies of the Israeli state.
As key Iranian infrastructure is bombed to ruins, and as Netanyahu urges Iranians to overthrow what he calls “an evil and oppressive regime,” many Iranians are calling, ironically and defiantly, for their government to acquire nuclear weapons as the only credible deterrent against the endless cycle of sanctions, sabotage, targeted killings, and military strikes unleashed by the US-Israeli axis. Under such circumstances, can Tehran be blamed for cultivating and arming proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas in an effort to contain Israel? Just look at what Israel did to its neighbours before these groups existed.
What makes Netanyahu believe that any post-Ayatollah government would be more pliant? If anything, it might be more resolute in seeking the ultimate deterrence. After all, Iran has been the target of unrelenting foreign aggression since the 1953 CIA-MI6 coup against nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh.
And let us not forget that during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, the Islamic Republic was bombarded with chemical weapons, supplied or sanctioned by Western powers. Washington had no qualms back then, when Saddam was “our man.” That was, until Israel orchestrated a back-channel arms pipeline that would become the infamous Iran-Contra affair.
A matter of honor
Can any self-respecting nation endure the constant humiliation meted out by its adversaries? That model of submission may succeed in parts of the Arab world, or in post-colonial client states across the Global South, but the Persians are apparently made of sterner stuff. Only time will tell. A civilization that traces its lineage to Cyrus and Avicenna has a moral and historical obligation to protect itself from existential threats. And if doing so requires the ultimate form of deterrence, then so be it – even if that means defying a so-called “international community” that has allowed Israel to quietly amass nuclear weapons and lay waste to its neighbors with impunity for nearly 80 years.
Israel, for its part, has warned the world time and again of the consequences of ignoring its self-declared prerogatives. As Netanyahu declared last year: “If Israel falls, the whole world falls.”
What exactly did he mean by that? Perhaps he was alluding to the Samson Option – a Sword of Damocles that Israel has long wielded over the world’s head. It has been described as a nuclear-armed ultimatum: protect Israel at all costs, or face global ruin.
The ‘Samson Option’
The Samson Option refers to Israel’s alleged military doctrine of massive nuclear retaliation in the face of an existential threat. Named after the biblical figure who brought down a Philistine temple, killing himself along with his enemies, the doctrine reflects a last-resort strategy. If Israel faces annihilation, it will reportedly unleash its full nuclear arsenal, possibly as many as 400 warheads, against its adversaries, regardless of collateral damage or global fallout.
But is the Samson Option truly limited to nuclear counterstrikes?
Former Israeli Defense Minister Naftali Bennett once warned that if Israel were ever pushed to the brink, critical global systems, including life-sustaining medical devices like pacemakers, could cease to function. That may sound far-fetched, until you consider that Israel’s cybersecurity and cyber-strategic sectors have become a strategic pillar of its economy. Navigation apps like Waze, maritime tracking systems, and aerospace logistics pipelines are embedded with “secure” Israeli codes.
Now imagine a hidden fail-safe buried in legacy software across the globe, programmed to unleash cascading failures across nuclear plants, air traffic control systems, financial markets, and emergency infrastructure when the Samson Option is unleashed? Think of the recent Stuxnet and Lebanese pager affairs as harbingers. One keystroke, one kill-switch, and the lights go out everywhere!
As a researcher in systemic global risks, I find it increasingly naive to assume that the Samson Option is limited to a conventional nuclear doctrine.
The real Samson Option may be about collapsing the global system itself – a scorched-earth deterrent against isolation or defeat.
A case for a nuclear Iran
Kenneth Waltz, one of the most influential realist thinkers in international relations, argued in a controversial 2012 Foreign Affairs article titled “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb” that a nuclear-armed Iran might actually stabilize the Middle East, rather than destabilize it.
Waltz’s theory is rooted in neorealism (or structural realism), which sees the international system as anarchic, and posits that states act primarily to ensure their own survival. From this perspective, nuclear weapons are the ultimate deterrent, and their spread, under specific conditions, can actually lead to greater stability. Consider North Korea: since developing nuclear weapons and delivery systems, its behavior has arguably become more calculated and status-quo-oriented. It also encouraged Trump to extend an olive branch to Kim Jong-un.
Israel remains the sole nuclear power in the Middle East, a monopoly fostering strategic imbalance and absolute impunity. The emergence of a rival nuclear-armed state, even with minimal second-strike capability, would force belligerent sides to act with greater caution. Conflicts would likely be reduced to face-saving precision strikes, as seen with nuclear-armed India and Pakistan. Despite hosting radical militant groups, Pakistan has behaved as a rational actor within the nuclear matrix.
Similarly, a nuclear Iran could reduce its reliance on asymmetric proxy strategies – such as its support for Hamas or Hezbollah – because its security would primarily rest on deterrence.
Some critics however warn that if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabia may rapidly follow suit. A moot point, except that Riyadh bankrolled Islamabad’s nuclear weapons program under America’s watch during the 1980s Soviet-Afghan War which featured beloved “anti-Soviet warriors” like Osama bin Laden!
There are also persistent reports which suggest that some Pakistani nuclear assets may already be stationed in Saudi Arabia, under the command of senior Pakistani officers. In the event of a regional nuclear escalation, Riyadh can simply request transfer at will.
Historical precedents also do not support alarmist non-proliferation fears. When North Korea acquired nuclear weapons, neither South Korea nor Japan followed suit. Deterrence, once established, tends to cool ambitions, especially when the cost of escalation becomes too high.
What if Iran is destroyed?
So, what happens if Israel prevails in the current high-stakes military standoff, and a “friendly” government is installed in Tehran? This could come about in any number of ways, as Israel alone will not be able to bomb Iran into submission. From a game theory perspective, a series of false flag events can be pinned on “Iranian sleeper cells.” Furthermore, Netanyahu keeps insisting that Iran is plotting to assassinate Trump – a charge unsubstantiated by any US intelligence findings. If a “presidential transition” occurs overnight, Vice President J.D. Vance may commit US forces directly to Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Iran.
But let’s game out another scenario: If the current conflict escalates and the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is destroyed – whether by design or by accident – Iran will almost certainly be blamed for the loss of Islam’s third holiest site. Such an event would enrage the Sunni Muslim world, redirecting its fury toward Shia Iran, and potentially paving the way for Israel to construct its long-anticipated Third Temple. Notably, in the early 1980s, Israeli extremists plotted to blow up the Dome of the Rock and the adjacent Al-Aqsa Mosque to effect this very outcome.
Should such scenarios unfold, it could mark the disintegration of the Middle East as we know it. Netanyahu has previously hinted that after Iran, nuclear-armed “militant Islamic regimes” like Pakistan could be next in Israel’s crosshairs. This warning is not without its irony. For decades, Pakistan’s deep state has maintained covert ties with Israel – dating back to Mossad-ISI collaboration in arming the Mujahideen during the 1980s Soviet-Afghan war. Israel has long been aware of Pakistan’s “pan-Islamic” nuclear ambitions but likely opted for strategic silence until all the Middle Eastern chips were in place.
What the wider Muslim world fails to grasp is this: alliances with unprincipled powers are always transactional. When the geopolitical bill comes due, it may cost far more than anyone is willing to pay.
The Zionist dream
Since its founding in 1948, several Israeli leaders have consistently expressed a vision of “Greater Israel” stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates – encompassing parts of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and the Gulf. Iran however remained the perennial spoiler to this geopolitical dream.
In fact, it was none other than Supreme Allied Commander Europe (NATO), General Wesley Clark, who famously revealed that Iran was the last in a list of seven Middle Eastern countries slated for regime change after 9/11. The current conflict is not about Iranian nukes per se; it is about Israel’s territorial ambitions and the fulfilment of ancient apocalyptic messianic fantasies.
Zionist ideologues like Avi Lipkin had even floated the idea of “purifying Mecca, Medina, and Mt. Sinai” – rhetoric that signals theological as much as territorial ambitions. Once Israel secures strategic depth in the Middle East, it may soon challenge major powers beyond the region. But first, Iran must be subdued!
Dr. Mathew Maavak researches systems science, global risks, geopolitics, strategic foresight, governance and Artificial Intelligence.
The voluminous book Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic, by the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, was published in late 2024. He wrote a history of the lobby and traced its beginnings to 19th-century England; more specifically, to Anthony Ashley-Cooper (1801 – 1885), 7th Earl of Shaftesbury. The other side of the Atlantic alluded to in the title is, of course, the USA, and the history continues to the present.
Over the centuries, both the British crown and the US government have had tendencies both in favor of and against the lobby. The latter sought to place an Arab monarch as a preferred ally and to keep the Middle East at peace, without the immense disturbances caused by Zionists. During the Cold War, these internal tensions were quite dramatic, since making the “Free World” an unconditional supporter of Israel meant to push the Arabs, with all their oil, to the side of the Soviets.
Since the book is comprehensive, I have chosen a few points to highlight that are specifically from the history of the lobby.
The origins
Since the idea that the Jews should return to the Holy Land is easily found among Puritans (Pappé shows that even President John Adams believed in this), the choice of the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury is due to the fact that he had worked, within the British Empire, for the creation of “a British and Jewish state in the middle of the Ottoman Empire, Palestine” (p. 4). In the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire was strong and steady. In a way, then, the Zionist lobby began as a British lobby against the integrity of the Ottoman Empire.
In 1838, under the pressure of Shaftesbury and already with such a purpose, the first British consulate was opened in Ottoman Palestine. For Shafstesbury, “the days of the Ottoman Empire were numbered, and the scramble for its spoils had already begun” (p. 6). Both the earl and the first consul had previously been involved in religious projects, which aimed to interpret the Bible and convert the Jews.
In addition to the religious and geopolitical issues, there was the issue of migration. In the 19th century, Western Europe did not know what to do with the multitude of Eastern Jews fleeing pogroms in the Russian Empire. Therefore, in addition to the eschatological and geopolitical purposes, the creation of a Jewish state would serve as a dumping ground to solve Europe’s migration problem. Furthermore, the 19th century was witnessing the rise of scientific racism, so this concern was motivated by anti-Semitism.
The United States also had an early lobby in the 19th century promoted by Puritans. The most notable result is that these Puritans formed Cyrus Scofield, the author of the Scofield Bible. The faithful who study his edition of the Bible will find many explanatory notes in the Old Testament, and will learn that the Bible is a kind of real estate deed, in which the area of the ancient Kingdom of Israel is owned by the Jews per omnia saecula saeculorum, and that it is the duty of Christians to support the chosen people when they blow up the houses of the Gentiles who live there.
The poor Jews and the leftist phase
Normally, the history of Zionism begins with Herzl and the publication of Der Judenstaat in 1896. By then, much water had already flowed under the bridge among the Puritans. And when Herzl entered the scene, he failed to win over the Anglo-Jewish elites. They considered that the creation of a Jewish state would call into question their loyalty to England, and they saw this as a bad deal.
On the other hand, the poor Jews crowded into the outskirts of London saw Zionism as a chance to change their lives. At that time, socialism and communism were spreading among the urban poor in Europe. Zionism then abandoned the colonialist and capitalist vocabulary of Herzl (who wrote Der Judenstaat to convince a Jewish banker to invest in the new movement) and began to present itself as the socialism of the Jews. Thus, the Poale Zion movement, a labor movement, became a craze among poor Jews in England, and would grow greatly within the Labour Party in the 20th century. Since the English Left is of Puritan formation, combining Jewish socialism with Puritan Christian laborism was like combining fire with gasoline. Only in the second half of the 20th century did the greater visibility of Israel’s crimes bring Labour closer to the Palestinian cause. One of the most prominent figures in this movement was George Galloway, a Scotsman of Irish descent and, for that reason, a Catholic.
Furthermore, in both Europe and the Americas, the idea that Bolshevism was a Jewish conspiracy was widespread, so that every Jew was suspected of communism. It was a burden for a Jew to call himself a communist, so Zionism was the politically correct leftism.
The Israeli Lobby’s Takeover of the United States
One of the questions that most intrigues observers of the issue is: Is Israel an extension of American power in the Middle East, or is it a vampire state that uses American resources to maintain its own project? Pappé’s book points to the second answer, although it makes clear that the neocons (who consider Israel an outpost of their civilization) have their own agenda.
The lobby’s takeover of the United States should make political theorists reflect on the flaws of democracy. In the 1950s, there were the “three I”s of identity politics: Italians, Irish and Israel. The three communities originating from minority religions (Catholicism and Judaism) elected their representatives based on their Italian, Irish or Jewish identity. An exemplary case was that of parliamentarian Fiorello La Guardia, the son of an Italian father and a Hungarian Jew (which makes him Jewish according to halacha), fluent in Italian and Yiddish. Thus, by claiming two identities, he achieved electoral success by garnering the votes of the Italian and Jewish communities. American Jews were great enthusiasts of Israel; and, even if they had no intention of moving there, they demanded that their parliamentarians take measures favorable to the foreign state. Furthermore, the puritanical formation of the United States meant that there was widespread sympathy for the idea of sending the Jews “back” to the Holy Land.
Since the majority of Jews were left-wing, it was common sense that the Democrats had to be pro-Israel, since they depended on the Jewish vote. (Although Kennedy frustrated these expectations.) The party most capable of confronting the lobby would, in principle, be the Republicans.
Nevertheless, opposition to the lobby had been concentrated, since the partition of Palestine, among State Department bureaucrats. They were the ones who wanted to make alliances with Arab monarchies, keep the region stable and prevent the Arab world from getting closer to the Soviet Union. However, stopping the pampering of Israel was difficult in American democracy for two reasons: the aforementioned puritanical affection for Israel and the lobby’s role in campaign financing.
The game began to change within the bureaucracy when Nixon hired the diabolical Henry Kissinger as an advisor. Under his influence, the Arabists in the State Department were replaced by pro-Israel people. Furthermore, also during the Nixon administration, Hans Morgenthau’s political philosophy, according to which states should not care about morality in international relations, became the institutional stance of the United States.
Henry Kissinger and Hans Morgenthau were two German Zionist Jews who went to the United States as refugees. Morgenthau was also an advisor to Ben Gurion during the ethnic cleansing of 1948. The realist Morgenthau made a school of thought and was succeeded by the neo-realist Kenneth Waltz. Regarding the latter, Pappé comments: “His work still constitutes the ideological infrastructure of most studies in international relations research centres in America. From these centres graduated the American diplomats who were selected to conduct the peace process in the Middle East, guided to overlook issues such as justice or morality in the process and to take as few risks as possible. This suited Israel very well and disadvantaged the Palestinians considerably.” (p. 325).
By combining the major pro-Israel actors in the United States, Pappé speaks of an unholy trinity: “Christian Zionism, neoconservatism and the American Jewish lobby” (p. 362). The neocons are a school of thought that is notoriously composed of many ex-Trotskyist Jews, but it is worth noting that this is not exclusive (neither Fukuyama nor Huntington are Jewish).
As for the lobby, AIPAC which takes up many, many pages in the book. This is the most famous lobbying organization in the US and its most notorious activity is financing campaigns for politicians at the beginning of their careers. AIPAC was founded in the 1950s from pre-existing organizations and intended to be bipartisan. It takes money from US donors, sends it to Israel, and Israel decides how to spend it. (I will not go into the details of AIPAC here, but I recommend the documentary The Lobby produced by Al-Jazeera, which is a source for Pappé in the book.) Of the unholy trinity, the only thing left to look at is the Christian Zionists.
Radicalization and televangelists
In the 1980s, after a long hegemony of the socialist and labor left, a right-wing, religious and nationalist coalition came to power in Israel. American Jews, who were mostly leftists, began to distance themselves from the Israeli government. Since AIPAC works in the interests of the Israeli government, and not of the American Jewish electorate, AIPAC ceased to be bipartisan and became right-wing. Thus, instead of focusing on the Jewish population to mobilize American public opinion in favor of Israel, the lobby preferred to focus increasingly on fundamentalist Zionist Christians. This strategy was launched by Menachem Begin and his Likud party in 1977, and the idea was conceived by the young Benjamin Netanyahu, who had just returned from the United States.
During the Reagan era, televangelists emerged, and at the same time foreign policy was thought of in Manichaean religious terms (the Christian West was fighting the great Satan in Moscow, etc.). In this context, televangelists took the lead in Zionist propaganda, saying that being against Israel was being against God. Between 1981 and 1989, writes Pappé, “Netanyahu integrated the Christian fundamentalists into Israeli Hasbara (propaganda)” (p. 311). Perhaps the greatest proof of this integration is the fact that, in occupied Lebanon (1982 – 2000), Israel authorized the opening of a Zionist Christian TV channel that broadcasted televangelists. They were probably targeting the Maronites…
Lobby doomed
In addition to telling the story of the lobby, Pappé points out a puzzle: why, decades after the international recognition of the state of Israel, does the Zionist lobby tirelessly repeat that the State of Israel is legitimate? Both in the preface and in the conclusion, he raises his conjectures. He assumes that propaganda is, in principle, a problem of conscience: Zionist Jews know that Israel is illegitimate, and that is why they lie non-stop. But there is a more serious problem: Israel does what it wants, and no longer cares about public opinion. What is the point of spending so much money to suppress student speech on American campuses, if the opinion of those students is irrelevant? For Pappé, the lobby has taken on a life of its own, and power is intoxicating. Why would a lobbyist give up the influence he has over politicians of left-wing and right-wing parties on both sides of the Atlantic?
Nevertheless, the lobby is doomed to failure because Israel has already decided that it does not care about Western opinion. Thus, in its death throes, the lobby will become increasingly ferocious, seeking to hide reality and maintain power.
During the recent Covid-19 pandemic, Peter J. Hotez, professor of paediatrics and molecular virology at Baylor College of Medicine, wrote a Scientific Americanopinion piece that spoke of an emerging threat that he believed should concern us all:
Antiscience has emerged as a dominant and highly lethal force, and one that threatens global security, as much as do terrorism and nuclear proliferation. We must mount a counteroffensive and build new infrastructure to combat antiscience, just as we have for these other more widely recognized and established threats.
He paints a picture of a political right-wing engaging in a disinformation campaign, and of an interference with an otherwise scientifically sound programme – actions that he maintained would result in many dying unnecessarily:
Despite my best efforts to sound the alarm and call it out, the antiscience disinformation created mass havoc in the red states. During the summer of 2020, COVID-19 accelerated in states of the South as governors prematurely lifted restrictions to create a second and unnecessary wave of COVID-19 cases and deaths.
Given his strong views, and the bellicose manner in which he chose to express them, it is not surprising that Hotez recently teamed up with Professor Michael Mann to write of the triple threat of global warming, a “cadence of pandemic threats” and, most importantly:
… a well-organized, financed, politically motivated, and steadily globalizing campaign of disinformation and attacks against mainstream science that makes it extremely difficult to mount an effective global response to the climate and pandemic threats.
Of course, Hotez and Mann are not alone in promoting this narrative of a burgeoning threat to humanity. For example, in a recent PNAS article, Phillipp-Muller et al wrote:
From vaccination refusal to climate change denial, antiscience views are threatening humanity.
So confident are the authors in the reality of the phenomenon that they dedicate the whole paper to analysing causes and suggesting countermeasures:
Building on various emerging data and models that have explored the psychology of being antiscience, we specify four core bases of key principles driving antiscience attitudes. These principles are grounded in decades of research on attitudes, persuasion, social influence, social identity, and information processing. They apply across diverse domains of antiscience phenomena… Politics triggers or amplifies many principles across all four bases, making it a particularly potent force in antiscience attitudes.
But what exactly is antiscience? Is it well-organized? Does it primarily emanate from the right-wing? And is it an attitude that represents an existential threat to humanity on a par with nuclear war?
The authors of the PNAS paper seem to have no doubts regarding the basis for antiscience — it’s simply a case of pathological psychology:
Distinct clusters of basic mental processes can explain when and why people ignore, trivialize, deny, reject, or even hate scientific information—a variety of responses that might collectively be labeled as “being antiscience”.
Once one starts out with such a premise, it becomes remarkably easy to formulate ‘frameworks’ and ‘models’ to give the whole thing a scientific veneer. And since science is upheld as the epitome of the rational venture, any resistance to scientific findings can be readily dismissed as a retreat from reason.
Indeed, in their book, Science and the Retreat from Reason, John Gillot and Manjit Kumar present a thoughtful treatise explaining why, despite the obvious benefits of the scientific method and its resulting successes, society has nevertheless grown wary of the technocratic future that it offers. Yet nowhere within its 250 pages does the book use the term ‘antiscience’, or speak of it as a phenomenon resulting from politically inspired disinformation. Furthermore, perhaps because it was written back in 1995, it doesn’t see the retreat from reason as an existential threat requiring ‘new infrastructures’ to ‘mount a counteroffensive’. Instead, a lack of faith in science is seen as stemming from a post-war disillusionment. Basically, science had gained the reputation of being the handmaiden of a belligerent military, and it became very difficult to maintain high levels of trust in a sector of society that delivered the threat of atomic annihilation. Furthermore, developments such as genetically modified food and the various attempts to control and exploit the environment did little to endear those who buy in to the idea of a purity of nature. As such, it was the liberal left-wing that led the movement against science in its practical realities. The idea that antiscientific attitudes are the reserve of the right wing is a relatively modern invention.
Of course, none of this should be used as a reason to question the potency and integrity of the scientific method. However, I sincerely doubt that this is why anyone would come to ‘ignore, trivialize, deny, reject, or even hate scientific information’. It isn’t the scientific mind that some people distrust – it is the scientific community. It is the recognition that science is a social enterprise and, as such, is not immune to the problems that can emerge when humans interact and compete. Seen in this light, antiscience is not a pathology of thinking but the label invented by those who are comfortable with such issues in order to stigmatize those who are not.
It is easy to see where the comfortable position would come from. Scientists do know about phenomena such as groupthink. They are well aware that the structuring of academia is such that scientific enquiry is marshalled both by sources of funding and by influential figureheads (not to mention a growing tendency for prosocial censorship). And yet they can look around them and see a broadly uncorrupted society of individuals who are personally motivated only by the desire to understand how the world works and how best to further the interests of humanity. They are ideally placed to understand just how much effort has gone into validating a particular finding, and so must find it highly frustrating to see vociferous and vehement rejection emanating from those who enjoy no such advantage. When the challenge has a political foundation, their disquiet is bound to be all the more profound. They are the scientists and practitioners of the scientific method, so this challenge is, by definition, antiscientific to them. And if you have an ego like Michael Mann’s, combined as it is with a victim complex, you are going to imagine you are surrounded by an orc army.
There are certainly plenty of science communicators on the internet who are only too willing and eager to defend the comfortable position and to cruelly mock the ‘antiscientist’. See, for example, some of the output from Professor David James Farina, aka Professor Dave. As is often the case, he specialises in debunking easy targets such as Flat Earthers and proponents of Intelligent Design, but along with that comes a regrettably condescending and arrogantly dismissive attitude towards anyone who isn’t fully on board with the idea that only credentialed scientists are qualified to criticise other scientists. But this isn’t a debate that is going to be settled by lampooning your local crackpot. The issues are far too nuanced for that.
For example, let us return to the Covid-19 pandemic and reflect upon its use as an example of an explosion of the antiscience movement. There was indeed no shortage of opinion expressed on subjects such as the safety and efficacy of vaccines, the importance of masks, lockdown strategies, mobile phone masts, etc. Some of the advice given wasn’t particularly well thought through and there was no shortage of downright conspiracy and pseudoscience in the air. But throughout it all, politicians were anxious to maintain the mantra that they were only following the science, no matter how many twists and turns that entailed. The reality, however, was that there was never any single science but a plurality of sciences offering different perspectives. As Dr Elisabeth Paul et al point out:
“Anti-science” accusations are common in medicine and public health, sometimes to discredit scientists who hold opposing views. However, there is no such thing as “one science”. Epistemology recognizes that any “science” is sociologically embedded, and therefore contextual and intersubjective.
The paper illustrates the point by tracing the history of claims made on behalf of the various vaccines employed, pointing out many inconsistencies and contradictions in the various narratives as the crisis unfolded. The paper finishes with some very wise words:
Rather than uncritically continuing to perpetuate the “follow the science” vs “anti-science” dichotomy, let us all look in the mirror and reflect what really constitutes science. If nothing else, this involves the curiosity of deliberating the multiple perspectives arising from the different lenses of inquiry. Being open-minded and critical does not immediately equate to being “anti-science”, as some medical and political thought leaders want us to believe.
The message given is that scientists are themselves very often to blame for the lack of trust they encounter within the public, and this is basically due to them adopting an overly dogmatic attitude:
To regain public trust in science, it is high time scientists acknowledge the limitations of their methods and of their results, and to provide decision-makers, populations and healthcare providers with appropriate tools to judge how to best apply particular research results to individuals and communities.
None of this is to accuse scientists of corruption or of engaging in a hoax. They are simply dealing with complexities that have to be honestly portrayed as such. As Dr Paul et al put it:
Here, understanding the dynamics of how knowledge is socially constructed and used is crucial. This is because health interventions, and what is determined to be science, can often be captured by combinations of favoured scientific practice, pathway-dependency, vested interests, politics, louder voices, or, regarding our immediate concern, by ideational hegemonies that prohibit wider dialogic knowledge production.
Very often, by being defensive about this, scientists become their own worst enemies. Too often, sceptics are accused of failing to understand the scientific method, but the reality is that they usually understand it all too well. They are just not that convinced that it is all that relevant when evaluating a scientist’s latest earnest statement.
There is a certain hubris to be detected within those who speak of existential threats from an organised antiscience movement, since it implies that there are those with dark motives who fear the spotlight of scientific truth being shone in their direction. No doubt there is much that is irrational in modern discourse and we would all do well to take whatever benefit there is to be had from listening to the scientific voice (that is why the Trump administration’s DOGE purge is so worrying). However, that is a long way from uncritically accepting all that has been said in the interests of ‘following the science’. I’m sure that those on both sides of the debate would argue that being legitimately open-minded and critical is not being ‘antiscience’. Unfortunately, however, we are still a long way from agreeing upon what constitutes legitimacy, and this is as true for the climate change debate as it is for any.
As a European who has lived in America, I used to believe the myth that the United States was the freest and most democratic nation on Earth. That’s what we were all told. But now that I’ve spent time in these political circles and spoken with major right-wing influencers, what I’ve seen and heard has completely shattered that illusion.
Let me tell you the story I’ve heard over and over again, from different voices, in different cities, at different events. Influencers, some of the biggest names on the right, get pulled aside at private gatherings. Someone leans in, starts a casual conversation, and then comes the pitch: “Have you ever thought about going into politics? We can get you into Congress.”
But there’s always a condition. They’re told to go to Jerusalem. Kiss the wall. Symbolically pledge loyalty. Only then does the funding and institutional support start flowing, usually from AIPAC and its donor network. I know how crazy that sounds, but it’s the same story every time.
And once you understand how things actually work, you start to see the pattern everywhere. Nearly every so-called “America First” politician in Congress takes AIPAC money. The few who refuse it—like Thomas Massie—get relentlessly targeted. AIPAC pours money into their opponents’ campaigns. Even Trump openly said they plan to get rid of him. And you still think this is the land of the free?
– How can you be the world’s greatest democracy when you’re not even ruling your own country?
– How can you be sovereign when another nation dictates your foreign policy, controls your lawmakers, and censors your speech through proxies like the ADL?
And let’s talk about the influencers who conveniently never mention any of this. Be they Jewish or Zionist, they’ll rant about Russian bots, Chinese spies, or any other manufactured threat. But not a word about AIPAC. Not a word about how U.S. foreign policy is openly shaped by another country’s interests.
Marco Rubio will get on stage and give passionate speeches about freedom and patriotism, but he won’t touch the topic of AIPAC. And he certainly won’t mention the ADL’s role in silencing anyone who does. Nor will influencers like Mike Benz, Mark Levin, and co.
You want to understand why the Epstein files are still sealed? Why does this Mossad-linked blackmail operation remain untouched? It’s not because the system is slow. It’s because the people in charge of releasing that information were placed there by the same network that wants it buried. They don’t serve your country. They serve another one.
Try doing an early life check on the loudest defenders of the status quo. You’ll start to understand who they serve and why they’ll never say what needs to be said.
So no, America is not the greatest democracy in the world. It’s the most powerful vassal state on Earth. And the truth is, until America frees itself from foreign control, no election, no movement, and no slogan will make it truly free.
Dr. Simon Goddek has a PhD in Biotechnology and is a Senior Researcher at SINTEF.
When the House of Commons was debating how much to increase the time limit for detention without trial the question of torture came up. Officially this was limited to the nice considerations of whether it was all right to send people to places where torture is used and whether Britain can use information collected by the use of torture in other countries. This discussion gave an impression of democratic Britain as the home of civilised behaviour where the very idea of torture is repugnant to our legislators – unlike, say, the US with its secret CIA jails… In reality, the British state has a long history of using and developing a whole range of torture techniques. … continue
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