It often happens that events we view as isolated occurrences are connected as integral parts of a much larger picture, often as part of a wide-ranging plan, and frequently with important social, economic, and/or political implications which become evident only when seen in total. The several topics of this essay add a necessary context to all major social, commercial, and geo-political events of recent decades, which may help us in connecting dots. For this, it is extremely important to realise and understand that in these matters there are no accidents, that ‘crises’ (other than things like volcanic eruptions) do not just happen, and that the final result of any crisis, however it may appear, was the result intended.
As one example, this many decades ago, we noticed that in our city in Canada one brand of American convenience store seemed to have a habit of opening new stores within a stone’s throw of the existing ‘mom and pop’ variety stores (as they were then called), these shiny and attractive new shops inevitably resulting in the closure of our traditional community stores with the resulting loss of livelihood of the owner-families. It was a surprise to learn later that this practice existed in all cities in Canada and it eventually became clear that each such apparently minor event reflected the gradual execution of an astonishingly predatory plan to not only become established in another country but to progressively eliminate all existing competition in doing so. The dawning of this realisation came too late for authorities to take preventive action, resulting in the destruction of what had been an important part of Canada’s community cultural landscape.
In a different category, and more recently, we learned that during a period of ten or more years ending around 2015, GlaxoSmithKline engaged in an enormous tax and marketing fraud in China[1][2], involving billions of RMB in massive and systemic bribery and falsified accounts, the discovery punctuated by the company’s China CEO Mark Reilly fleeing the country on the first plane to England “on a previously-planned business trip”, and intending to remain there “to help with the investigation from that end”.[3] Lacking additional information, we tend to view this revelation as a domestic issue involving the typical group of ‘a few bad apples’. But with a bit of investigation we discover that GSK carried on a series of virtually identical criminal adventures simultaneously in the US and other countries as well, having been fined billions of dollars in the US alone for repeated occurrences. This additional knowledge substantially amends our perception of the picture. When, with a bit of additional investigation, we discover that all the major pharma companies have repeatedly engaged in a wide range of criminal activities resulting in fines totaling tens of billions of dollars in the US alone, our appreciation of GSK’s activities in China, and of the entire landscape of big pharma, are much altered and more accurate. We now know something we didn’t know before, and we now understand we are not dealing with a few bad apples in an isolated if unfortunate event, but with an industry corrupt to its core, worldwide. [4][5]
Similarly, we learned that Apple, the darling of the US stock market and of iphone fans everywhere, was being hounded by the Chinese commercial authorities, this time over warranty periods, Chinese law categorising Apple’s ipad as a computer requiring a two-year warranty with Apple insisting the ipad was a phone and refusing to comply. Following stringent insistence and a huge public outcry, Apple was eventually forced to conform.[6][7] Reading this as an isolated occurrence, we might judge this as a technical domestic argument of little consequence but, with a bit of investigation, we discover that Apple’s warranties had been under fire for years throughout Europe (and other countries) for precisely the same reasons and with precisely the same outcome – Apple stubbornly flouting the consumer laws of dozens of countries.[8][9] With this additional information, our perception of Apple’s behavior in China assumes a different flavor. We no longer see a simple dispute between a retailer and a socialist government with perhaps sticky laws, but a multinational corporation suffused with sufficient arrogance to not only challenge but attempt to dictate consumer laws and warranty policies to all sovereign nations where it does business. To say nothing of some bold tax dodges.[10] Further investigation reveals that, of all computer and mobile phone companies, only Apple appears to take this position. We now have a more accurate picture of the international IT landscape and Apple’s position within it, our sympathy for Apple’s difficulties in China certainly moderating if not transforming into outright hostility.
In each case, our understanding has been substantially amended because we can see the whole picture and we now know something we did not know before. It is true for a great many occurrences in the world, of many different kinds, that these are not single disconnected events but are related in a set pattern and to a set purpose. Simply put, if one house burns down on a street, that’s unfortunate; if two houses burn down on that street, that’s a coincidence; if five houses burn down on that same street, that’s a plan.
Thus, for many of the world’s events, most especially those containing strong social, economic and/or geo-political effects, it behooves us to bypass the mass media who force-feed us with only carefully-selected sound bytes, and to engage ourselves in a bit of independent research to discover whether these apparently disconnected events are in fact related in a larger context. It is necessary to bypass the media because the absence of connection between these apparently disparate (but related) events is not accidental; the media coverage by design and intent renders it impossible for the general public to connect the dots.
The Official Narrative
In attempting to understand social, economic and geo-political events, there is a second matter demanding our attention, that of the initial mass media coverage, because this often betrays secrets of an event that might otherwise be unknown.
Consider: if there is an explosion in a shopping mall somewhere, at first neither we nor the relevant authorities know anything. It might have been caused a gas line leak, perhaps from faulty maintenance, or stored chemicals, or perhaps a disgruntled citizen set off a bomb. At first, we don’t even know what, much less having a clear idea of who or how, or why, and it takes time to ferret out these details and form a sensible working theory of that event. If it appears that persons were responsible, the authorities require additional time to determine why and who, then begin their search.
But, if we are paying attention, it often happens that immediately upon the occurrence of such an event, the mass media present us with a full-blown story lacking only small details, a more or less complete description of what, how, who and why, a story that could not possibly be known at that stage. Not only is the media description immediate, but it is universal and unanimous, with all apparently unrelated media presenting the same story line, often verbatim, with no disagreement on any significant elements, these uniform storylines sometimes flooding the news for days, weeks, and even months.
Such a unanimous flood can occur only with all participants reading from the same script, prepared beforehand and readied for simultaneous release. In the above case, there are only two possibilities:[1]The story, if true, could be known only by the perpetrators or, [2]the story is a fabricated falsehood, taking the microphone to pre-empt independent rational thought by the public and force the discussion into desired channels, resulting in the elimination of critical public analysis and preventing the truth from escaping confinement.
At one time, not so long ago, this was impossible. But today, with the intense concentration of media ownership across all continents, (and with the increasingly strong censorship of the social media) we have only five or six people, all colleagues, controlling perhaps 90% of all media content and with a powerful financial influence on the remainder.
As one ready example, we could review the unfortunate flight of Korean Airlines 007 in 1983, a Boeing 747 which was shot down by Russian aircraft when it ventured about 500 kilometers off-course and perilously close to some Russian military installations. The media response was immediate and universal that “the Russians” killed hundreds of innocent passengers, and a great deal else. I don’t want to dwell on this here but, if you would like some personal entertainment, you might enjoy doing some thorough research on this event. One of the more entertaining issues was that the water was shallow where the aircraft eventually went down, and the Russians searched thoroughly but located only a few bodies of the crew. No hundreds of innocent passengers. One other discovery was hundreds of pairs of new sneakers and a great deal of new clothing still folded in its original packaging. But no bodies. The official response was that when the aircraft was hit by the missiles, the decompression “sucked all the passengers out of their clothes”, then presumably folding and packaging their clothing. Mother Nature is nothing if not neat and tidy.
The events of 9-11 were certainly one of these, with the entire final version of the “official story” appearing the next day in all the Western media, all verbatim including the who, how and why. SARS and ZIKA fit this pattern in every respect, and COVID-19 also fit very well as do the seven biological pathogens unleashed on China during the past two years alone. With the 2019 swine flu, the entire Western media knew instantly that Chinese “criminal gangs” and “pork speculators” were for unknown reasons infecting all of China’s pigs, although no evidence ever surfaced to support any part of their story. If we review the media coverage for many notable events in our recent history, the pattern is the same. We are then facing the only sensible conclusion that those events were executed as part of a plan with the unanimous media coverage arranged well in advance – and with the knowing participation of the media owners.
Normally, subsequent contradictory theories arise over time as we learn details and assemble the pieces in what might be a more logical and sensible combination but, in these cases, all contradictions are first ignored by the mass media, then condemned as “conspiracy theories”, those presenting them unanimously mocked and derided. The more attention these contradictory theories generate, and the more that serious flaws are exposed in the official story, the louder the derision and more vicious the condemnation, again unanimous and universal. Moreover, as these theories gain traction, the underlying facts are increasingly ignored in exchange for attacking their proponents. If we don’t like the message, we kill the messenger. There is no shortage of examples of historians, authors, various experts, being hounded to bankruptcy, infamy, and even death, merely for publishing (or even attempting to publish) inconvenient truths. This process is now so well-established that whenever we see accusations of ‘conspiracy theories’ we can be certain that a government or a corporation has something to hide.
As time passes, the public become inundated with what we term “the official narrative”, most tending to believe a story repeated daily for weeks from dozens of apparently independent and reputable sources, to the point where the matter is no longer news and dissenting opinions are lost in the haze. It then becomes almost impossible for hidden truths to emerge and, even if they do emerge, it is too late to significantly alter the public conviction or to obtain the required critical mass of dissention for a re-examination of the facts. It is said that if we hear a lie five times, especially from five different sources, we will believe it as true and will later be astonishingly reluctant to alter our opinion even in the face of irrefutable evidence to the contrary. This is one of the fundamental tenets of all propaganda.
In so many past instances, generally involving malfeasance, the US government or some branch of it quickly took the initiative to promulgate an “official story” that it wanted the public to accept, always with widespread media and scientific or other support. It isn’t usually difficult to distinguish between these crafted tales and other situations where the truth of an event innocently emerges as facts are sequentially discovered. One sure sign that we are being told a story is when “the official narrative” appears much too soon – before any actual facts emerge that would support the hypothesis, a ploy necessary to pre-empt independent conclusions and prevent more realistic or more factual versions from gaining traction.
Directed Channels of Discourse
There is one other item that serves to actively prevent our connecting the dots and forming correct conclusions about events, this being an intense and coordinated media focus to direct public discourse into desirable channels and away from the key issues. As a simple example, some years ago there were intense debates about the future of the Euro, with growing public opinion that the group currency was a failed experiment and European nations should revert to their original national currencies. But the mass media spawned a flood of debate centered on a wide range of options more or less titled “What is the best way to save the Euro?”, forcing public debate into a context where continuation of the Euro was assumed as immutable and all discussion focused on methods of preservation. Of course, the real question was “Should the Euro be saved?”, but those raising this question were ignored, mocked, derided, and painted as traitors to Europe.
If we pay attention to the mass media on the occurrence of many events, it is easy to see that we are often being propagandised and programmed to see the world through the same pair of eyes – the pair our masters want us to look through. It is a most effective tool of public manipulation, with most of us unaware this thought control is taking place. As Noam Chomsky noted in discussing propaganda[11], “The smart way . . . is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.” In simple terms, if you can focus the public on asking the wrong questions, you needn’t worry about the answers.
A Brief Case Study in Connecting Dots
In 2001, an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease ravaged the British farming industry. Exports from the UK of live animals, meat and dairy products were banned by other nations, and the government ordered a mass slaughter of millions of animals. The losses to British farmers were nearly incalculable, with a great many farmers going bankrupt or otherwise put out of business, and some farmers committing suicide in anguish over their losses. Within six months, almost 4 million animals had been slaughtered and their carcasses burned. Oddly, in the face of this enormous disaster, the government refused to hold a public inquiry into the outbreak, announcing instead three small separate investigations, the results of which would not be made public. A similar event occurred again a few years later. It was later admitted that the pathogen for this disease had gone “missing” from Porton Down and Pirbright, the UK’s two primary L-4 bio-weapons labs, the government then claiming “animal rights activists” had entered these military-guarded labs, stolen huge amounts of pathogen and released it. No information as to why they might do such a thing. The outcome of the UK foot and mouth disease outbreaks was to eliminate small farmers and turn over the UK’s beef supply to a few billionaire owners of Big Agra.
I won’t provide more detail here, but I have written a brief article covering this, the details of which will shock you.[12] As one example, for months prior to the outbreak the UK government was scouring the country for all loose volumes of timber admittedly to be used to burn the carcasses of the millions of cattle soon to become infected and slaughtered.
But so far, even to a suspicious mind, no clear evidence of malfeasance and no conspiracy. But we have other layers of dots here. It seems that immediately prior to this disastrous outbreak of a deadly biological pathogen, there was a ‘simulation’ dealing with precisely this eventuality, exactly the same as that held prior to the outbreak of COVID-19 and including most of the same players, most notably Pirbright who were the admitted source of the bovine pathogen and also who had developed and held patents on five coronavirus varieties, I believe the same five that infected the US and then the world.
And yet another layer of dots. Dr. Mae-Wan Ho wrote a report in the Institute of Science in Society, dated September 24, 2001, entitled “Foot & Mouth Outbreak, GM Vaccine and Bio-warfare”. It was after her report that investigations by the Evening Chronicle discovered papers leaked from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency that confirmed the simulation which had been secret to that point. Readers may recall this is the same Dr. Ho who called for a full investigation into the possible genetic engineering and dissemination of the SARS virus, the evidence eventually conclusive that SARS emerged from a lab.
Let’s turn to the swine flu outbreak in China in 2019 where the nation’s pork was raised by hundreds of thousands of small farmers much as the beef in the UK. With 50% of the livestock slaughtered, American firms had an open door to take control of China’s pork supply. In this case the effort failed because the Chinese government, not being a party to the pathogen, immediately provided financing and other assistance for the small farmers to rebuild their herds.
However, if we research the outbreaks of animal pathogens around the world – swine flu, bird flu, the evidence seems to indicate that the expansion of Big Agra follows closely on their heels. This is an apparently natural occurrence, given that small competitors have been eliminated while market demand remains constant – unless this occurs more than once or twice. When these outbreaks inexplicably appear repeatedly on all continents with Big Agra in the background, we have dots to connect. I do not possess details of every outbreak of an animal pathogen in all countries for the past ten or twenty years, but I have a powerful suspicion that if we correlate these with the growth in market share of the world’s few Big Agra companies, we would receive a surprise.
Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com.
American troops arrived in Korea in 1945 and never left. South Korea eventually prospered and became a major economic and military power, but American Generals plan to occupy Korea forever. They exaggerate the North Korean threat, ignoring that South Korea has twice its population, 53 times its economic power measured by GDP, and a modern military that is roughly five times stronger than the decrepit North Korean Army. American occupation troops should have left four decades ago, but President Jimmy Carter’s effort to withdraw was thwarted by Generals. The US military remains to deter peace and block unification in order to retain South Korea as a vassal state.
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“South Korea to shrink armed forces by a fifth in next 8 years”; Ashley Rowland; Stars and Stripes; March 18, 2014; https://www.stripes.com/news/pacific/…
“Military Considerations for OPCON Transfer on the Korean Peninsula”; Jina Kim; Council on Foreign Relations; March 20, 2020; https://www.cfr.org/blog/military-con…
The figure of 60,000 Americans in the Camp Humphreys community includes those at nearby Osan Airbase, the thousands of retirees and their families living nearby who shop at these bases, and American troops at these bases for temporary duty and training exercises.
The UK Labour Party’s “antisemitism crisis” has claimed another victim, as shadow education secretary Rebecca Long-Bailey is fired for sharing an article containing a so-called “antisemitic conspiracy theory.”
“This afternoon Keir Starmer asked Rebecca Long-Bailey to step down from the shadow cabinet,” a spokesman for the Labour leader said, claiming that an article she shared earlier on Thursday contained an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
The statement went on to say that Starmer, who took over the party plagued with accusations of antisemitism, has been “clear that restoring trust with the Jewish community is a number one priority,” adding, “antisemitism takes many different forms and it is important that we all are vigilant against it.”
Long-Bailey shared an Independent interview with Maxine Peake on Twitter. In it, the actress says: “The tactics used by the police in America, kneeling on George Floyd’s neck, that was learnt from seminars with Israeli secret services.” It was later updated to include a denial by the Israeli police that this is the case, and a reference to an Amnesty International report about US law enforcement travel to Israel for training was removed.
Long-Bailey shared an Independent interview with Maxine Peake on Twitter. In it, the actress says: “The tactics used by the police in America, kneeling on George Floyd’s neck, that was learnt from seminars with Israeli secret services.” It was later updated to include a denial by the Israeli police that this is the case, and a reference to an Amnesty International report about US law enforcement travel to Israel for training was removed.
Amnesty International has said that Israeli forces train US law enforcement and partake in police exchange programs. In the wake of Floyd’s murder a number of articles circulated, reporting that Minnesota cops received Israeli training in Chicago in 2012. Israeli soldiers have been photographed leaning on Palestinians’ chests and necks, although Israel Police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld denies this is a tactic they use. It of course isn’t proven that the police officer who killed Floyd was taught how to lean on people’s necks by Israeli police.
Long-Bailey tweeted an explanation for her retweet, saying she shared the article because of Peake’s “significant achievements and because the thrust of her argument is to stay in the Labour Party. It wasn’t intended to be an endorsement of all aspects of the article.”
She later added that she agreed on the wording of her explanation with the Labour Party Leader’s Office, but was “subsequently instructed to take both this agreed clarification and my original retweet down.” She said she couldn’t do this without issuing a press statement of clarification and asked to discuss it with Starmer but “sadly he had already made his decision.”
The Jewish Board of Deputies among a number of other groups which called out Long-Bailey’s tweet. Before she was fired, it released a statement slamming the politician’s “pathetic” response to criticism of her tweet and questioning her “suitability” for her role.
Welcome back to New World Next Week — the video series from Corbett Report and Media Monarchy that covers some of the most important developments in open source intelligence news. This week:
This month, when protesters took to the streets of America to rage against ‘police brutality’ and ‘white supremacy’ following the death of George Floyd, millions of the participants unwittingly landed on the radar of location tracking companies. What happened to that information next may surprise some people.
Mapping technology is possibly the most revolutionary invention to come along since the Model T, yet you’ll never see or hear the invisible innovation sputtering down the street.
The groundbreaking technology, also known as ‘geofencing,’ makes it possible to track millions of people with pinpoint accuracy every minute of every day. For retailers, this massive amount of harvested data through smartphones is an invaluable source of information on consumer behavior, and there are a number of companies that now cater to that niche.
Foursquare, for example, is one of the heavyweights in the location technology industry. It works with some 150,000 app developers and many Fortune 100 companies. The problem with this new tracking technology, however, is that we are in the Wild West stage of its development; there are no formal rules governing its use. In fact, regulating what companies do with our personal information is so worrisome that Jeff Glueck, the CEO of Foursquare, floated the idea in a New York Times opinion piece that those working in the location data business “take a Hippocratic oath for data science…and hope that living by such an oath would curb abuses.”
It sounds like a grand idea, but nobody should hold their breath in expectation of it happening, especially now that the technology is being used in the political realm in the most consequential election year to come along in decades.
The political implications
As streets across the United States erupted this month with Black Lives Matter/Antifa protests following the death of George Floyd, tracking technology was given a golden opportunity for some raw beta testing.
Given the volatile nature of the protests, some may have thought that Silicon Valley was tracking protesters for the purpose of connecting them to criminal activities, like looting, physical assault and vandalism. After all, if smartphones can trace individuals legally shopping in Saks Fifth Avenue, for example, it should be equally capable of tracing looters inside of the same outlet.
Or perhaps the technology was used as a way of determining how many of the protesters had shown up at the events from other cities and states. After all, we saw such savvy techniques put to use at the peak of the Covid pandemic when college students crowded the beaches of Fort Lauderdale for the annual spring break revelry.
Tectonix GEO tweeted out a digitized map that showed the “secondary locations” of beachgoers after they departed Florida. It may have been very instructive had the same technology been applied after the Black Lives Matter protests dispersed to better understand the movement’s origins. But that is not what the tracking technology was used for.
Instead, the technology was used to sign up those individuals who protested the death of George Floyd to the Democratic Party. The Black Lives Matter/Antifa protests gave Democrat political strategists the ability to trace the participants of those events by their cellphone numbers and target them with messages about registering to vote, for example, or supporting other political activities.
The Collective, for example, a political group that works to elect African-Americans, began a campaign earlier this year to enlist Democratic voters while the main topic in the United States was impeaching the 45th POTUS not racism. In fact, Michael Bloomberg, the former Democratic presidential wannabe, donated $2million to the advocacy group in early March for the specific purpose of getting more blacks registered to vote. Some might call that curious timing.
“We never had the funding and the resources to really engage in these types of techniques before,” Quentin James, founder and president of the Collective, admitted to the Wall Street Journal this month.
This new political technology puts the protests and accompanying riots – coming as they did hot on the heels of Russiagate, impeachment and an economic shutdown due to a pandemic, all in a major election year – into a disturbing new light. Indeed, more cynical and conspiratorially minded observers might be tempted to believe that the nationwide protests were spurred on not for the purpose of protesting ‘police brutality’ or ‘white supremacy’, but rather to serve as a pretense for what was first and foremost a sophisticated vote-harvesting operation.
“Reaching those individuals is especially critical, groups say, since in-person voter registration drives were halted by the coronavirus,” reported the Wall Street Journal in an article that focused on Democrat voter harvesting during the protests. “Plus, with Americans staying home for the past few months to prevent the virus’s spread, organizations have little other recent data about people’s movements.”
It could also be added that the Democrat’s ability to spark public enthusiasm for their long list of colorless nominees, like Joe Biden, have been less than spectacular. Despite reports that Biden is leading Trump in the polls, the numbers were never reflected by an electrified electorate lining up for blocks to hear him speak. That can only be described as strange. In fact, as the Democratic frontrunner continues to shelter at home, giving the occasional bumbling television interview, Trump just managed to attract thousands of attendees to his first large-scale rally in months – and despite the purported threat of coronavirus lingering in the air.
Again, more cynical minds might be tempted to argue that since Democratic turnouts at both the ballot box and political rallies have been less than stellar, what better way of energizing the base and camouflaging voter indifference than through street protests that railed against the phantom threat of ‘systemic racism,’ which also serves the dual purpose of reaching out to thousands of new voters?
Whatever the case may be, this sort of ‘enrage and engage’ type of political strategy, where strategists are potentially able to scoop up millions of new supporters through their smartphone applications, is practically on par with opening up the southern border to illegal migrants who then vote left in the elections. It’s a grievous act that works against the best interests of the nation.
The most dangerous aspect of such scenarios is that the destructive nature of street protests and riots could be viewed by more ruthless individuals, of which there is no shortage in the world of politics, as a positive development as far as winning elections goes. A bit like a snake chewing on its tail out of hunger, a metaphor that aptly sums up the Democratic Party today.
In late January, John Bolton became the latest – and unlikeliest – official to enjoy a moment of Resistance glory. A New York Times report about Bolton’s forthcoming memoir fueled round-the-clock expectations that the former national security adviser would substantiate the core allegation at the heart of President Trump’s then-ongoing Senate impeachment trial – that the president tried to coerce Ukraine into opening an investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden in a quid pro quo for military aid. Compelling his testimony was cast as a matter of national urgency. Bolton was never given the chance as Senate Republicans voted to block witnesses and acquit Trump on both impeachment counts.
In the publicity blitz for his new memoir, “The Room Where It Happened,” Bolton has tried to keep the initial narrative alive. Speaking to ABC News, he claimed that Trump, at a meeting in August 2019, said he “wanted a probe of Joe Biden in exchange for delivering the security assistance.” That conversation, Bolton added, “was the crispest indication of the linkage. … The specificity of the linkage, I think, was unmistakable.”
His memoir, however, fails to substantiate that allegation.
In fact, Bolton offers new evidence that undermines it.
What he told Martha Raddatz is not what he writes in his book. Instead of a sharp demand of a quid pro quo, Bolton writes, Trump “said he wasn’t in favor of sending [Ukraine] anything until all the Russia-investigation materials related to [Hillary] Clinton and Biden had been turned over.”
Bolton does not explain what he means by “materials” – and no interviewer has asked him to so far. RealClearInvestigations’ request to Bolton for comment, sent through a representative, was not immediately answered.
No Word on Burisma
Regardless, those were not at the heart of Trump’s impeachment. Trump was not impeached for trying to coerce Ukraine into handing over “Russia-investigation materials” to the U.S., but for allegedly trying to force Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to open a wholly separate investigation of the Bidens and Burisma, the gas company where Hunter was given a lucrative board seat while his father was running U.S. policy in Ukraine.
Yet Burisma is not even mentioned in Bolton’s book – and Hunter only in passing. This includes an acknowledgement that Bolton does not even remember if the younger Biden was actually discussed. At a May 8 meeting where Trump and his legal adviser Rudy Giuliani discuss the latter’s “desire to meet with President-Elect Zelensky,” Bolton cannot recall if the purpose is “to discuss [Ukraine’s] investigation of either Hillary Clinton’s efforts to influence the 2016 campaign or something having to do with Hunter Biden and the 2020 election, or maybe both.”
Son gets job on energy company board after father backs violent coup
Bolton says his recollections are not precise because the Ukraine-related theories floating around the Trump administration “always seemed intermingled and confused, one reason I did not pay them much heed. Even after they became public, I could barely separate the strands of the multiple conspiracy theories at work.”
Bolton’s words are also ambiguous. The fact that Trump allegedly “said he wasn’t in favor of sending [Ukraine] anything” is not an explicit linkage to military aid. And as for the “Russian-investigation materials,” Bolton does not specify what Trump was referring to. It seems likely Trump may have been referencing his reported theory that the Democratic National Committee server was somehow hacked with Ukrainian involvement.
Trump may also have been seeking information on the Ukrainians who openly admitted to interfering in the 2016 campaign with the aim of thwarting his candidacy, most notably by leaking allegations of illegal payments to Paul Manafort. It is highly plausible that these were Trump’s priorities. In his July 25 phone call with Zelensky, which sparked the whistleblower complaint behind Ukrainegate, Trump’s top issue – and the object of the “favor” he requested – was not the Bidens, but securing Zelensky’s assistance with the Justice Department’s ongoing review of how the Russia investigation began in 2016.
Whatever the case, for Bolton to write that Trump drew a link between these issues and the security aid – and not a link to a demand that Ukraine open an investigation of the Bidens and Burisma – contradicts the impeachment case that many expected him to validate.
Bolton, perhaps inadvertently, also lends credence to the Trump administration’s public defense of its freeze on security assistance to Ukraine, which Democrats cast as the linchpin of a politically motivated quid pro quo. In his July 25 call with Zelensky and subsequent public statements, Trump has said that he wanted NATO allies to spend more on Ukrainian military funding. Bolton recounts that on Aug. 30 – just days after an article in Politico made the aid freeze public, including to the Ukrainian government – Trump repeated his complaints about the U.S. burden, and proposed that NATO provide Ukraine with the security assistance instead of Washington:
Trump said, “I don’t give a shit about NATO. I am ready to say, ‘If you don’t pay, we won’t defend them.’ I want the three hundred million dollars [he meant two hundred fifty million dollars, one piece of the assistance earmarked for Ukraine] to be paid through NATO.” … He then said to Pence, “Call [NATO Secretary General Jens] Stoltenberg and have him have NATO pay. Say ‘The President is for you, but the money should come from NATO,’” which still didn’t make any sense.
If Trump is freezing the military aid for the sole purpose of coercing a Ukrainian investigation, it would be incongruous for him to propose an outcome that delivers the money without the investigation he is supposedly trying to compel.
As a part of their impeachment case, Democrats argued that Trump released the aid to Ukraine only after getting caught through publicity surrounding the whistleblower complaint. Yet Bolton writes that after Ukraine conducted a successful prisoner swap with Russia on Sept. 7, “Trump had seemingly indicated” that the swap “might be enough to get him to release the security assistance.” The money was released four days later, on Sept. 11.
Says He Wanted Nothing to do With Ukraine
Bolton confirms national security aide Fiona Hill’s testimony that he told her he did not want to be “part of whatever drug deal Sondland and [White House Chief of Staff Mick] Mulvaney are cooking up.” But he offers context that makes that line far less explosive than it was initially received. Bolton was not referring to leveraging any military aid, but to Sondland’s attempt to push for a hasty meeting between Trump and Zelensky at the White House, where the “Giuliani issues” could be discussed before Ukraine’s parliamentary elections in July.
Bolton says he nixed the idea of a meeting because Trump had recently told him that “he didn’t want to have anything to do with Ukrainians of any stripe,” due to Ukrainian meddling against him in the 2016 campaign. Sondland, in Bolton’s view, was “freelancing.” According to Bolton, Trump had also “resolved the visit issue just before leaving for the United Kingdom in June,” by saying he would meet with Zelensky “not until the fall, the right outcome in my view.”
It is easy to forget why Bolton was initially cast as a savior figure in January by those hoping to remove Trump by impeachment. When news of his memoir emerged, 10 days after the Senate trial began, Democrats had failed to prove their case. Not a single witness in the House impeachment hearings had provided direct evidence of a quid pro quo. The only witness who even spoke to Trump about the Ukraine aid was the then-European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland. He reiterated multiple times that “nobody told me directly that the aid was tied to anything,” and that such a linkage was only his “presumption” and “personal, you know, guess.”
Sondland’s testimony was even more damaging to the impeachment case because, according to the impeachment narrative, he was the Trump official who purportedly relayed the alleged quid pro quo to the Ukrainian side. But Sondland revealed that he had only told Zelensky aide Andriy Yermak, in “a very, very brief pull-aside conversation,” that “I didn’t know exactly why” the aid has been frozen, but that a demand to open investigations “could be a reason.”
For his part, Yermak has said he does not even remember discussing the frozen aid with Sondland. That highlighted another problem with the Democrats’ quid pro quo allegation: Not a single Ukrainian official substantiates it. In addition to Yermak, President Zelensky and Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko also said that they saw no tie between the frozen military funding and pressure to open investigations. Even Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, a staunch impeachment advocate, corroborates them: When they met in early September, Murphy recalled, Zelensky “did not make any connection between the aid that had been cut off and the requests that he was getting from Giuliani.”
The Ukrainians’ claims make sense in light of the fact that they only learned of the aid freeze, along with the rest of the world, with the Politico article published August 28. That would have meant that the supposed quid pro quo demand was made to them only after the issue became a matter of public controversy. That scenario was always implausible on its face. And now Bolton’s memoir has failed to change the picture. Bolton seems to grasp this fact. “I think the House Democrats built a cliff, they threw themselves off of it,” he told Raddatz of ABC News. “And halfway down, they looked up and saw me, and said, ‘Hey, why don’t you come along?”
In 2001, an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease ravaged the British farming industry. Exports from the UK of live animals, meat and dairy products were banned by other nations, as was the movement of animals from the infected area, and the government ordered a mass slaughter of millions of animals. The losses to British farmers were nearly incalculable, with a great many farmers going bankrupt or otherwise put out of business, and some farmers committing suicide in anguish over their losses. Within six months, almost 4 million animals had been slaughtered and their carcasses burned. Oddly, in the face of this enormous disaster, the government refused to hold a public inquiry into the outbreak, announcing instead three small separate investigations, the results of which would not be made public.
The UK government initially blamed the disease outbreak on “animal activists“, but not everyone believed the official story. At the time, the Sunday Express reported that the outbreak had been attributed to some vials containing foot and mouth virus, which had gone mysteriously missing from the laboratories at Porton Down, which location is a top-secret government bioweapons research facility housing such agents as TB, anthrax, smallpox, Ebola and the foot-and-mouth viruses. The report stated that “Authorities tried to play down the report by suggesting that “animal rights activists” had stolen and released the samples from the maximum-security government laboratory, though the same authorities failed to explain how animal rights activists would believe they were promoting animal rights by releasing a biological agent that would result in the destruction of millions of animals, or how they were able to penetrate the multiple layers of defenses in the heavily-secured laboratory.
No ragtag collection of anybody from anywhere would ever have access to such a facility, much less know how to deal with it. Neither terrorists nor animal-rights activists are renowned Ph.Ds with high-level security clearances and access to the top-secret and impossibly-secured facilities that contain these pathogens. And even if they did obtain access, the chances of any of them knowing what to search for, what to take, and what to do with it – and exiting alive – are somewhat less than zero. Given all of this, what do we make of the UK government’s claims that “activists” entered such a P-4 facility, stole many vials of foot and mouth virus, then apparently walked out of the facility unchallenged and proceeded to inoculate cattle and other farm animals by the hundreds of thousands? The accomplishment of such a feat might require more animal activists than exist in England, possibly by orders of magnitude.
As well, one media report in 2001 stated that “An eminent scientist with thirty years experience of infectious diseases challenged [UK Prime Minister] Blair in a prominent Sunday newspaper to “come clean and tell the truth about the foot-and-mouth epidemic“. The scientist testified that the virus which devastated Britain’s livestock “was not active in any other part of the world and could only have come from a UK laboratory.” And indeed the UK government bio-warfare labs at both Pirbright and Porton Down have been confirmed by the UK Minister of Health as containing more than 5,000 different strains of this particular virus, and in the end it did indeed appear the virus had originated in the UK government’s bio-warfare labs at Porton Down.
Then, the Sunday Express reported that a routine audit of Porton Down’s bio-warfare labs revealed that a container of several vials of foot-and-mouth virus had gone missing two months before the first outbreak of the disease, stating that “There are very persistent rumors over missing phials from Porton Down linked to animal rights activists”. The government of course desperately denied such a possibility, stating that “… only the Institute of Animal Health Laboratory and the Merial Biological Laboratory at Pirbright are licensed to hold FMD virus”, and that tales of the virus being stolen from Porton Down were inaccurate and impossible. But then, a senior military source at Porton Down stated publicly that vials “appear to have gone missing from one of the labs [at Porton Down] following a routine audit last year.”
The government then admitted that such a thing did happen after all and, right on cue, the government blamed the usual “animal rights activists” for the theft and release of the deadly pathogen, the media dutifully reporting that “Ministry officials were informed immediately and an investigation was launched initially by Special Branch and then by MI5, who are interested in the activities of animal rights protesters.” Unfortunately, those animal activists and protestors were somehow never found.
This scenario was repeated in 2007 with another outbreak in the UK, the source of which was determined to have been another UK government bio-weapons lab, this time at Pirbright. At the time, the Guardian published an article stating that, according to the authorities, “A leaky drain allowed the disease to escape”. The Guardian reported that, according to government sources, there had been a “probable” new leak of foot and mouth disease virus from the Merial Animal Health facility at Pirbright, the virus believed to have escaped through a leaking valve, “allowing an unintended probable release of live FMD virus into the drainage system“. The government claimed in a written statement to have received Merial’s assurances that “the live virus had not been released to the environment”, though in fact it had been. A spokesman for Merial apparently told the Guardian that he was “surprised by the fuss”. Both the government Health Service and Merial shared the source of this outbreak, the “broken drainage system” which served both sets of laboratories, though apparently “investigators were strangely unable to determine which lab was actually responsible for the leakage and outbreak”.
What do we make of the claim that perhaps thousands of liters of foot and mouth virus escaped through “a leaky drain” at Pirbright? I have had some experience with things that leak from drains or similar, and in all cases the leaks simply pool on the ground, filling the depressions while waiting to evaporate. But then this is England and maybe things are different there, which would account for the leaked pathogens winding their way through English hill and dale, visiting and somehow infecting millions of animals, for hundreds of kilometers in all directions from the biolab. In my world, viruses are not renowned for their motive ability to travel a countryside, nor for the necessary tracking radar to hunt down thousands of animal herds, nor for the aggressive disposition that would lead them to attack and infect every animal they found. That would almost require an intelligence – and a vehicle.
In June of 2008, soon after the second major outbreak of foot and mouth disease, the UK media ran a series of articles stating that “Security at British laboratories working with some of the world’s deadliest pathogens (that included anthrax, hemorrhagic fever and smallpox viruses), was undermined by a lack of investment and poor maintenance“. The media articles were in response to a report produced by some government MPs which claimed that the labs were “so dilapidated” and “run down” it was “not acceptable” that scientists were asked to work there. These facilities, the MPs claimed, had “outlived their usefulness”, and were in such ruinous condition they were “quite likely to experience” yet another leakage of deadly pathogens such as those of the foot and mouth virus that necessitated the slaughter of millions of animals. The committee of MPs especially singled out the labs at Pirbright and the secretive bio-warfare lab installations at Porton Down which, the media reported, were “Britain’s frontline defense against infectious diseases”.
It needs to be noted here that neither Pirbright nor Porton Down, but especially Porton Down, are a ‘frontline defense’ against anything and are in fact bio-weapons labs with a well-deserved evil reputation and a long and malicious history. This may have been the CIA’s version of a joke, but when anthrax spores were mailed to some US government and media representatives in 2001, CIA officials publicly speculated that Porton Down may have been their origin. In the end, the origin was determined to be (quite possibly courtesy of the same CIA) the US military’s bio-weapons labs at Fort Detrick, so perhaps a small false flag. Porton Down and the CIA have been close friends for many decades.It was to Porton Down that the CIA outsourced many of its “terminal interrogations”, i.e. questioning people until they died from the questioning methods. It was here that CIA biochemist Frank Olson witnessed firsthand the results of his ‘biochemistry’, began to suffer unbearable pangs of conscience, then suddenly met his death in most unusual circumstances, the result of an apparent suicide – as they almost always are. It was eventually revealed that Olson had been ordered killed by CIA Director Allen Dulles, that his death was neither an accident nor a suicide, but a deliberate murder to prevent the man from disclosing to the media the secret crimes of the CIA and Porton Down. Then-US President Johnson apologised to the family and paid $750,000 in compensation. So let’s not pretend Porton Down provides defense against infectious diseases.
According to an “independent” report, the buildings housing the lab facilities that contained the foot and mouth viruses were apparently “visibly substandard”, were suffering from a “creeping degradation of standards”, and were “poorly managed and regulated”. As Dr. Iain Anderson, who led a similar inquiry into the larger similar outbreak in 2001, was quoted as saying, “This virus should never have got out. [No argument there] Everything was wrong around Pirbright; the regulatory system was poor, the risk management was poor“. He further stated, “… the facilities … fall well short of internationally recognised standards, and the governance and funding arrangements are muddled and ineffective”. As well, his report described the laboratories as “shabby and dilapidated”, thus leading to the deadly virus “probably leaking from faulty pipes”. One British MP was quoted as saying, “When you think about how important biosecurity is, [… this] is staggering”. No kidding. I would have to agree.
At the time of the release of these so-called independent reports, the media were uniformly frightening us with claims that “Many scientists believe” that “climate change and terrorism” would now “bring many new diseases” and cause many pathogens such as anthrax to be “deliberately released in public places”, though it wasn’t immediately clear how climate change might deliberately release anthrax in a public park. The only scientists who believe that are the same people planning the next release. Those reports were not meant as either an apology or explanation for past disease outbreaks, but to create fear because a fearful public is malleable and will easily surrender civil rights to a fascist government in exchange for protection – most often from that same government. It was also a political statement to justify to the public the planned expense of a new, and quite massive, bio-warfare pathogen facility in the UK, one that would of course be “necessary to combat whatever our enemies throw at us”. Or to produce whatever we might want to throw at ourselves.
Aside from the implausibility inherent in the official narratives of these disease outbreaks, there are three other curious items I would bring to your attention.
The UK Government appeared to have prepared precisely for the epidemic of 2001. From an article by Dr. Mae-Wan Hoin an Institute of Science in Society Report dated September 24, 2001, entitled “Foot & Mouth Outbreak, GM Vaccine and Bio-warfare”:
“Investigations by the ‘Evening Chronicle‘ uncovered that the United States, Canada and Mexico began preparing for ‘a simulated outbreak of foot and mouth disease’ last October. According to papers leaked from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, the exercise – which took place between November 6 and 9 – was ‘for the purpose of emergency planning.’ The papers reportedly state: ‘This exercise is the first of its kind and provides all three countries with a unique opportunity to apply their emergency response plans in the event of a real disease outbreak.’ At the same time, the UK Government was reported to be preparing its own ‘contingency plans’ for a foot and mouth outbreak. The Evening Chronicle reported that officials from the Agriculture Ministry began telephoning timber merchants as early as December asking if they could supply wood for pyres, should foot and mouth strike.”
UK farms appeared to have been targeted in advance, each marked with yellow tapes, for a visitation from unannounced and unidentified “government animal inspectors”, those farms being unfortunate enough to earn an “inspection” apparently coinciding with those suffering an outbreak of foot and mouth disease, with all livestock being destroyed.
According to one report that appeared credible, and there were others, a local resident named Martin Grant, who lived in Hatherleigh, Devon, described events he observed while cycling through the countryside in the Spring and Summer of 2001. Grant claims to have seen yellow tapes tied to fences, hedges, and trees on the roadside at the entrances to farms in the area. He, and others, later noted that these same locations were those “inspected” by staff claiming to be government agricultural workers. Though Grant was not conducting a scientific survey, he later stated that these locations appeared to coincide not only with the so-called inspections but also with the specific appearances of foot and mouth disease. He said it all occurred “generally just about the same time … this seemed to coincide that anyone that got a tape got foot-and-mouth. As if somebody had deliberately done something.” He was asked if his impression was that the yellow tapes were, “In other words, to ear-mark the farm for possible infection?” His response was to say, “Yes. That was the impression that I got… yes.” He added further that at the time, fragments of the yellow tapes were still hanging on many of the fences.
Another report was from a family named Bratton who lived in the area in question. Mrs. Bratton reported that she “encountered two men in white overalls outside the cattle shed” while walking to the buildings on her farm. She had no idea who they were or why they were on her property and, upon inquiring, was told they were UK Ministry of Agriculture officials “who had every right to inspect agricultural premises”, and ordered her to go inside her house because she was not permitted to witness their “inspections”. Mrs. Bratton said she called the local police several times, was assured they would investigate and contact her. She claimed she received no response, and was later informed the police had no record of her prior calls. Shortly thereafter, all her farm’s livestock was discovered to be infected and were subsequently destroyed. I have not seen much of the documentation, but there were many apparently many similar reports of animal inspections from farms suffering the same fate.
Perhaps the most curious of all was the well-documented activity by staff from the office of the UK Minister of Agriculture inquiring about the supply of lumber (for burning infected livestock) and the requisitioning of it, prior to any apparent need. There were at least several published accounts of various government officials or their representatives inquiring about “combustible materials”, as well as stockpiling them, and of the issuing of contracts to trucking companies and machinery operators for ground excavation and for the hauling of dead livestock, several months prior to the disease outbreak in February of 2001.
One headline stated, “Timber merchants around Britain say that in early February they were approached by the ministry for wood supplies to burn animals with foot-and-mouth. Timber merchants say they were approached by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food in early February, before the outbreak was confirmed, to supply wood for the pyres which are used to burn the diseased animals that have been killed.” UK Agriculture minister Nick Brown insisted this was part of a “regular contingency planning exercise”, and added, “There are a number of urban legends doing the rounds that the ministry knew about this disease before. That is not true.”
Mr. Brown was pointedly questioned about the contacts made by his office with suppliers – many months prior to the disease outbreak – “to establish the availability of timber, suitable for use in pyres for burning dead livestock.” The Minister’s reply was to say that “Information on all the timber stockists contacted by the Ministry over the last year is not held centrally and could be provided only at a disproportionate cost.” If that isn’t clear, the Minister effectively stated that his staff created no accessible records of their approaches to lumber dealers, purchases made and contracts signed, that any records that did exist were widely dispersed and couldn’t be collated. That might be true if 50,000 lumber dealers were approached by several thousand different staff members in a wholly uncoordinated fashion but, if the number of dealers were only in the tens, which is likely, the Minister’s statements beg some questions.
There is one final matter I would bring to your attention, one on which I have no commentary. There were many rumors, some articles, and several letters to the Editor at the time, dealing with what was called a “planned rationalisation” of UK animal farms, ‘rationalisation’ in this sense referring to the elimination of small farmers and the concentration of livestock production in the hands of Big Agra. This would have included, according to these people, increased and prohibitively costly new regulations which small operators would find onerous or impossible to implement, preparing the way for small agra to be “eventually absorbed by the multi-national food processing corporations“. Writers claimed this was one of the ambitions of then Prime Minister Blair. I do not know if this was the intent, but it certainly was the result. According to my information, many thousands of small farmers have disappeared from the UK, driven out by unrecoverable losses, poor compensation and new regulations. And Big Agra has apparently indeed proliferated in the aftermath.
I do not know the totality of truths for these outbreaks of foot and mouth disease, nor specifically how the virus was removed from the secure P-4 facilities and spread around the entire country. It certainly was not the result of either accidents or activists, and had to be done deliberately. I think we can be forgiven for suspicions that the deep state that controls so many Western governments is the most vicious criminal enterprise in the world today.
Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com.
Just when you thought the leaders of NATO could not push the limits of insanity any further, something like NATO 2030 is announced.
After helping blow up the Middle East and North Africa, dividing the Balkans into zones of war and tension, turning Ukraine upside down using armadas of neo Nazis, and encircling Russia with a ballistic missile shield, the leaders of this Cold War relic have decided that the best way to deal with instability of the world is… more NATO.
In a June 8th online event co-sponsored by the Atlantic Council, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced the launch of a planning project to reform NATO called NATO 2030. Stoltenberg told his audience that in order to deal with Russia and China’s strategic partnership which is transforming the global balance of power, “we must resist the temptation of national solutions and we must live up to our values: freedom, democracy and the rule of law. To do this, we must stay strong militarily, be more united politically and take a broader approach globally.”
In the mind of Stoltenberg, this means expanding NATO’s membership into the Pacific with a high priority on the absorption of Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea into NATO’s dysfunctional family. It also means extending NATO’s jurisdiction beyond a military alliance to include a wider political and environmental dimension (the war on climate change is apparently just as serious as the war on terrorism and should thus be incorporated into NATO’s operating system).
Analyzing China’s intentions through the most Hobbesian dark age lens on the market, Stoltenberg stated “they are investing heavily in modern military capabilities, including missiles that can reach all NATO allied countries. They are coming closer to us in cyberspace. We see them in the Arctic, in Africa… and they are working more and more together with Russia.”
In spite of NATO’s Cold War thinking, Russia and China have continuously presented olive branches to the west over the years- offering to cooperate on such matters as counter-terrorism, space exploration, asteroid defense, and global infrastructure projects in the Arctic and broader Belt and Road Initiative. In all instances, these offers have been met with a nearly unanimous cold shoulder by the western military industrial complex ruling NATO and the Atlantic alliance.
The Engine of War Heats Up
As Stoltenberg spoke these words, the 49th Baltic Operations running from June 1-16th were underway as the largest NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea featuring “30 ships and submarines, and 30 aircraft, conducting air defence, anti-submarine warfare, maritime interdiction and mine countermeasure operations.” In response Moscow reinforced its armored forces facing Europe.
Meanwhile in China’s backyard, three aircraft carriers all arrived in the Pacific (the USS Theodore Roosevelt, USS Ronald Reagan and USS Nimitz) with a senate Armed Services Committee approval of $6 billion in funds for the Pacific Defense Initiative which Defense News stated will “send a strong signal to the Chinese Communist Party that America is deeply committed to defending our interests in the Indo-Pacific”. The committee also approved a U.S. Airforce operating location in the Indo-Pacific for F-35A jets in order to “prioritize the protection of the air bases that might be under attack from current or emerging cruise missiles and advanced hypersonic missiles, specifically from China.”
Another inflammatory precursor for confrontation came from a House Republican Study Committee report co-authored by Secretary of State Pompeo calling for sanctioning China’s leadership, listing Russia as a state sponsor of terror and authorizing the use of military force against anyone on a Foreign Terrorist Organization list. When one holds in mind that large sections of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard happen to be on this list, it is not hard to see how quickly nations doing business with Iran can be considered “state sponsors of terror”, justifying a use of military force from America.
With this level of explicit antagonism and duplicity, it is no wonder that China’s foreign ministry announced on June 10th that it would not participate in joint three-way arms talks between the USA and Russia. If America demonstrated a coherent intention to shift its foreign policy doctrine towards a genuine pro-cooperation perspective, then it is undoubtably the case that China would enthusiastically embrace such proposals. But until then, China is obviously unwilling to lose any part of its already small nuclear deterrent of 300 warheads (compared to Russia and the USA, who each own 6000).
The Resistance to the Warhawks
I have said it many times before, but there is currently not one but two opposing American military doctrines at war with each other and no assessment of American foreign policy is complete without a sensitivity to that fact.
On the one hand, there is the sociopathic doctrine which I outlined summarily above, but on the other hand, there exists a genuine intention to stop the “forever wars”, pull out of the Middle East, disengage with NATO and realign with a multipolar system of sovereign nation states.
This more positive America expressed itself in Trump’s June 7th counter-attack on former Secretary of Defense Gen. James Mattis who had fueled the American Maidan now unfolding by stating his belief that solutions can happen without the President. Trump had fired Mattis earlier over the Cold Warrior’s commitment to endless military enmeshment in Syria, Turkey, Afghanistan and Iraq. In this Oval Office interview, the President called out the Military industrial complex which Mattis represents saying “The military-industrial complex is unbelievably powerful… You have no idea. Some legit, and some non-legit.”
Another aspect of Trump’s resistance to the neo-cons running the Pentagon and CIA is reflected in the June 11 joint U.S.-Iraq statement after the Strategic Dialogues summit of American and Iraqi delegates which committed to a continued reduction of troops in Iraq stating:
“Over the coming months, the U.S. would continue reducing forces from Iraq and discuss with the government of Iraq the status of remaining forces as both countries turn their focus towards developing a bilateral security relationship based on strong mutual interests”.
This statement coincides with Trump’s May 2020 call to accelerate U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan which has seen a fall from 12000 troops in February to under 9,000 as of this writing.
Most enraging to the NATO-philes of London, Brussels and Washington was Trump’s surprising call to pull 9,500 American troops out of Germany hours before Stoltenberg gave his loony NATO 2030 speech with Johann Wadephul (Deputy head of the CDU) saying “these plans demonstrate once again that the Trump administration neglects a central element of leadership: the involvement of alliance partners in the decision-making process”. In his next breath, Wadephul made his anti-Eurasian delusion transparent saying “Europe gains from the Alliance being unified. Only Russia and China gain from strife.”
Just a few months earlier, the President showed his disdain for the NATO bureaucracy by unilaterally pulling 3,000 American military personnel out of the Trident Juncture exercise held annually every March.
In Defense of President Trump
In spite of all of his problems, Trump’s resistance to the dark age/neocon faction which has been running a virtually independent military-industrial-intelligence complex since FDR’s death in 1945 demonstrates a high degree of courage unseen in American presidents for many decades.
Most importantly, this flawed President represents a type of America which is genuinely compatible with the pro-nation state paradigm now being led by Russia and China.
Trump’s recent attempt to reform the G7 into a G11 (incorporating Russia, India, South Korea and Australia) is a nice step in that direction but his exclusion of China has made it an unworkable idea.
To solve this problem, American University in Moscow President Edward Lozansky stated in his recent Washington Times column that adding China to the list making it a G12 would be a saving grace to the idea and one of the best flanking maneuvers possible during this moment of crisis. Lozansky’s concept is so important that I wish to end with a larger citation from his article:
“Both Russia and China got the message a long time ago that they need to stay together to withstand the efforts to destroy them in sequence… The G-7 indeed is an obsolete group and it definitely needs a fresh blood. Therefore, a G-12 meeting in New York in late September during the annual meeting of the U.N. General Assembly would be a perfect place and timing since Mr. Trump had already announced that he is willing to hold a G-5 summit with the leaders of Russia, China, Britain and France — the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — to discuss nuclear security issues. China so far is reluctant to join these talks, arguing that its smaller nuclear force is defensive and poses no threat. However, for the discussion in the G-12 format Mr. Putin might be able to convince his pal Xi to accept Mr. Trump’s invitation. This would be a huge achievement for the world’s peace and at the same time allow Mr. Trump to score lots of political points not only from his electoral base but from undecided and even from his opponents who want to save their families from nuclear holocaust.”
Unless world citizens who genuinely wish to avoid the danger of a nuclear holocaust learn how to embrace the idea of a G-12, and let the NATO/Cold War paradigm rot in the obsolete trash bin of history where it rightfully belongs, then I think it is safe to say that the future will not be something to look forward to.
For the next installment, we will take a look at the British Imperial origins of NATO and the American deep state in order to help shed greater light on the nature of the “two Americas” which I noted above, have been at war with each other since 1776.
In this interview, Dr. Andrew Kaufman joins Spiro for a second time. The first time Dr. Kaufman joined Spiro, they talked about topics that apparently, nobody is allowed to talk about, if you dare question the official story that is.
In the first interview the two discussed the coronavirus, they covered testing and they covered the vaccine. The video was quickly approaching 100k views but YouTube removed the video after only a couple days. This video will likely be taken down as well, because it does not conform to the establishment’s narrative.
Not only did YouTube remove the previous video, Reuters, which is a massive international news publication that news sites from all over the world obtain their talking points from, published a fact checking report attempting to debunk Dr. Kaufman’s claims that the new COVID-19 DNA vaccine would genetically modify humans. In this must see report, Dr Kaufman responds to the Reuters ‘fact checking’ report.
There appears to be a coronavirus vaccine on the horizon—but it’s a GMO and the FDA would need to approve testing https://geneticliteracyproject.org/20…
A listener writes in to lament that The Corbett Report is spreading false facts about Bill Gates in Who Is Bill Gates? . . . at least, according to the fact checkers. But are they right? Don’t miss today’s important edition of the Fact Check series where James teaches a master class in how to examine a “fact check” and how to tell whether a claim is supported by the evidence or not.
Imagine believing that you know what is in the best interests of others, and worse, ones you have never even met, and worse still, believing you have a right to improve their situation in the manner and timeline you see fit. The belief that one has the right to save the world is termed ‘communal narcissism’. Therein lies the first problem with progressive imperialism.
The American left in the realm of foreign policy suffers from a type of prosocial communal narcissism, based in their own self-appraisal that their best intentions will be realized in the best outcomes for others, as the narcissist has themself defined it.
But the American left is significantly more dangerous and grotesque compared to standard justifications of imperialism, because it frames the discourse in such a way that it is blind to its own chauvinism, and believes itself to speak for the world.
What in other countries is viewed as quite ugly – believing oneself so enlightened and righteous that they can force others into their own image – has become a quintessential aspect of American culture post 1960’s.
We arrive then at our problem; the leftist approach has relied on soft-power tactics which require a lot more imagination, and yet also hubris, to justify. It is based overtly in telling other countries how to manage themselves as being both philosophically and categorically its proclaimed mandate.
It is the most overt form of imperialism, couched in the language of the left’s understanding of human rights and universalism. It rests gently on the ears and upon the conscience if left unexamined, but in actual fact it is far more malignant. Perhaps because they are so over-used, and perhaps here because they appear to be benign, because American society accepts these as just. But the specter of Dunning-Kruger will always rear its ugly head, and the expected outcomes will almost never materialize.
And in typical gas-lighting fashion, the failure of the subject nation to live up to the vision of the narcissist will be blamed upon the subject.
Most dangerously, soft-power tactics situate themselves outside of the founding principles of national self-determination and sovereignty that the UN was established upon in the post-war years, and yet exploits the various corrupt alphabet soup of organizations and agencies that operate under the UN’s umbrella.
Soft-power tactics were born out of a cultural shift within the U.S.., the development of media and later new media, as a form of propaganda and manufactured consent. The role of television media reporting on Vietnam left an American public taken aback by raw images of the terrorism and horror that is war.
Gone forever was the myth of purity of arms. And so a new myth, the myth of soft-power towards regime change, had to be built.
While soft-power tactics may at first appear to be less harmful to the target, because ‘military’ is not used, the socio-economic outcome of such an approach is the very definition of collective punishment and civilian targets, targets which if zeroed in on by the military would qualify as war crimes and crimes against humanity by any reasonable measure.
Enter the Save the World Generation of 1968
The ‘save the world’ generation in America that emerged from the utopian leanings of 1968, in part also out of opposition to the Vietnam War, came to define the left-wing version of American foreign policy.
The popular opposition to the war in Vietnam signaled the need for a new era in American foreign policy development. Richard Falk – the preeminent American professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University – wrote for Foreign Policy Magazine in an article titled ‘What We Should Learn from Vietnam’ published in 1970 or ‘71:
“Where there is no formidable radical challenge on the domestic scene, as in India or Japan, the American preference is clearly for moderate democracy, indeed the kind of political orientation that the United States imposed upon Japan during the military occupation after World War II. However, where an Asian society is beset by struggle between a rightist incumbent regime and a leftist insurgent challenger, then American policy throws its support, sometimes strongly, to the counterrevolutionary side.
As a result, there has been virtually no disposition to question the American decision to support the repressive and reactionary Saigon regime provided that support could have led to victory in Vietnam at a reasonable cost.”
In establishing this as a problem, Falk proposes what he terms a ‘Fourth Position’, one which would end America’s pre-occupation with supporting counter-revolutionary forces in Asia.
We can extrapolate from Falk’s thesis an historical parallel: It was forward looking Gauls inspired by their Roman neighbors who established the infrastructure of roads which Roman legionaries would later march in on under Cesar.
Likewise, allow modernizing and technology oriented communist regimes to flourish in Asia as these would ultimately create the interface with which the U.S. could pursue its interests in the region.
In Falk’s work we find the kernel of contemporary U.S. foreign policy and the leftoid soft-power approach, and indeed almost predicts the Nixon-Mao meeting a year or two later.
By now, everyone is familiar with Nye and Ferguson’s ideas on soft-power. By the 1990’s, left-overs from the Cold War’s Radio Free Europe were transformed into more covert projects towards soft-power, outside of the more obvious Radio Liberty and the Atlantic Council’s array of projects. USAID and the NED combined with private philanthropy of the likes of George Soros to establish a ‘legal, peaceful’ mechanism by exploiting international law and the UN’s bodies, known now as the NGO industrial complex.
But what will confound and confuse future historians of the American empire is the mindset of the mainstream left which supports foreign interventionism.
So this is how we have to understand it. If the 70’s was the ‘We’ generation, the 80’s was the ‘Me’ generation – and in came a toxic combination of noble intentions for others taken from the 60’s and 70’s, alongside a particular mission-individualism that gives a person a sense that they are exceptional.
The result was the self-improvement craze of the 80’s and 90’s. And just as self-improvement for individuals becomes a collective norm that others must also be pressured to accept or face ridicule and shunning for being ‘backwards’, the contemporary psychology of human rights (soft power) imperialism is understood.
In short, it opposed American exceptionalism but promoted an exceptionalism of the enlightened community, almost always a liberal of the left, a model that everyone else must also follow.
Something appropriated from Marxism and Christianity, the left has substituted the idea that the nation should rule or that the nation has legitimacy, with the idea that the party with the right values and ideas should rule.
And here is where our final point rests. Alongside the communal narcissism of human rights imperialism which we see in the left’s preference for soft power, we also find this: a belief that just as they as individuals are evolving towards an ever greater enlightenment, so too is America.
This is probably the most complex and dynamic aspect of the problem of the American left’s psychology in foreign policy.
If nations shouldn’t rule others, perhaps they shouldn’t rule themselves, for in each nation are ‘others’ – minorities, historically oppressed identity groups, and so on. America shouldn’t rule them either, the belief goes, but the enlightened ideas which conveniently are determined by an enlightened yoga-practicing vegan community who happen to be American, should indeed rule.
They think this: Assad may not be a threat to his neighbors, but the fact that Syria is a nation and is ruled by a man who exemplifies numerous hetero cis-gendered patriarchal norms, probably means that the U.S. (not acting as a nation but rather a ‘vehicle of values’) should use soft-power to support any method to remove him.
Other countries are viewed as static, unmoving, non-dynamic ‘regimes’. From the outside looking in, and being a poor cultural anthropologist, all societies appear monolithic and in contemporary parlance, that means ‘totalitarian’. Commonly held beliefs and customs among a foreign people are transformed into top-down mandated values that are imposed upon an unwilling population.
America has deep problems, the liberal soft power imperialist reckons, but the fact that America can overcome and indeed is overcoming them, means that other countries can overcome them too, if they emulate America.
This is perhaps the only way to get on board with something that otherwise would be a flagrant contradiction: America, land of deep problems, ought to be emulated.
It also means imposing American narratives on the rest of the world. If America had a particular problem of racism, land theft, and never ending foreign wars, then suddenly America is nevertheless ‘alright’ since it is in some dynamic process of changing this. Other countries, being governed by static and monolithic caricatures, must have their whole societies uprooted and their governments overthrown in order to overcome the same problems.
America therefore is the ‘expert’ at solving these problems for other countries, not because it has solved them, but because it has developed a model for resistance.
Never mind these are often not problems other countries have. To the hammer of American soft power, all the world is a human rights nail.
Now we see that the U.S. can intervene everywhere in the world so long as it can paint that foreign land as having American problems. Yugoslavia, Syria, Libya – ethnic conflict, patriarchy, rape culture and a popular uprising (which CNN will color left) means a justified soft power intervention.
There is a saying, ‘All’s well that ends well’. By establishing a conflict thesis of American history, America – in the view of the left – can rectify its past wrongs by righting the same wrongs around the world.
Never mind that these past wrongs aren’t, by their own measure, solved in America. These left Americans see themselves not as Americans acting in America’s interests, but as enlightened people with a right to fix other country’s problems, whether or not those problems really exist and regardless of whether those lowly and unevolved people actually want it. After they are uplifted and re-educated, they will look back and thank us.
This in a nutshell is the mindset of the imperial progressive. This is the sort of thinking that has no place in an international community based on mutual respect and sovereignty.
Supporters of the American empire proclaim the U.S. military invincible unless stabbed in the back by politicians. They say the US military won the war in Vietnam, but claim victory was lost after politicians cut off aid to South Vietnam. This is fake history. The Vietnam war was lost by 1963 after the CIA failed to establish a new nation that became known as South Vietnam. The arrival of American troops prevented a defeat, but only caused more death and destruction until they left.
Soon after the Americans departed, the fragile, corrupt puppet regime of South Vietnam collapsed. After this retreat, supporters of the American empire began to spread lies that South Vietnam collapsed in 1975 only because Democrats in Congress cut military aid. This deception begins with the half-truth that the 1968 Tet Offensive was a major defeat for the Vietnamese. This was true on the tactical level but it was a strategic disaster for the US military.
“MACV The Joint Command in the Years of Withdrawal 1968-1973; Graham A. Cosmas; US Army Center for Military History: https://history.army.mil/html/books/0…
By Patrick Pillow | The Libertarian Institute | June 8, 2026
By the summer of 2000, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević appeared firmly entrenched in power.
A decade earlier, he had risen to prominence by harnessing Serbian nationalism as Yugoslavia began to fracture. Over time, he consolidated control over political institutions and much of the media while leading Serbia through wars, sanctions, and NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign. Yet beneath the surface, public frustration was growing. The economy was struggling, unemployment remained high, and many Serbians had grown weary of international isolation and authoritarian rule.
When Milošević changed election rules in July 2000 to allow the presidency to be decided by popular vote, he likely expected another victory. Instead, the move created an opportunity for a united opposition.
On September 24, voters went to the polls. Milošević faced Vojislav Koštunica, the candidate of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS). Election observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe later described the vote as fundamentally flawed, citing irregularities, restricted monitoring, and unequal media access. State television overwhelmingly favored Milošević while opposition voices received little coverage.
When results were announced, the opposition claimed Koštunica had won outright. The government election commission insisted that no candidate had received a majority and ordered a runoff election. The opposition rejected the decision and called for nationwide resistance. … continue
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