The Highwire with Del Bigtree | June 13, 2024
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | June 13, 2024
Unlike COVID, the bird flu has one distinctly different feature that is threatening American food security. As nearly 100 million birds and counting have been culled, will governments use this tragic opportunity to push net zero goals?
MEMO | June 14, 2024
More than 2,000 academics have signed a letter demanding the resignation of Germany’s Education Minister over her attempt to sanction scholars who supported pro-Palestinian students’ right to protest, Anadolu Agency reports.
Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger has come under growing criticism after media reports revealed that her Ministry initiated a legal review last month to examine the open letter released by these scholars, and the possibility of dropping funding for their studies.
“Academics in Germany are experiencing an unprecedented attack on their fundamental rights, on the 75th anniversary of the Basic Law,” the scholars said in a statement on Friday, and underlined that recent actions taken by the Ministry make Stark-Watzinger’s position as Minister untenable.
“The withdrawal of funding ad personam on the basis of political statements made by researchers is contrary to the Basic Law: teaching and research are free. The internal order to examine such political sanctions is a sign of constitutional ignorance and political abuse of power,” the scholars said.
“It illustrates an increasing rift between decision-makers in the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and those who support the academic system through their research and teaching. Through its intimidating effect alone, the Minister’s actions risk permanently damaging the hard-won right of academic freedom against political and state interference,” they added.
On 8 May, more than 300 academics from Berlin universities expressed their support for pro-Palestine protest camps on the campus of the Free University of Berlin, and defended the students’ right to demonstrate.
“Regardless of whether we agree with the specific demands of the protest camp, we stand up for our students, and defend their right to peaceful protest, which also includes the occupation of university grounds,” they said.
The academics accused the university’s management of subjecting the demonstrators to “police violence”.
Media reports have revealed that, a few days after this open letter, Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger’s office initiated a legal review to examine the possibility of sanctions under civil service law and criminal law against these academics, including the option to revoke funding for their studies.
BY DENNIS KUCINICH | JUNE 13, 2024
Our government is planning a big draft, conscripting millions of young Americans for an even bigger war!
I call to your attention a Democratic amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which was slipped into the almost trillion-dollar Pentagon war spending bill, by voice vote, in the House Armed Services committee.
The Democratic Amendment to H.R. 8070, the National Defense Authorization (NDAA) reads:
Section 531. Selective Service System: Automatic Registration. SEC. 3. (a)(1) “Except as otherwise provided in this title, every male citizen of the United States, and every other male person residing in the United States, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six, shall be automatically registered under this Act by the Director of the Selective Service System.”
This amendment is in the NDAA legislation and there is no pending amendment to strip it from the bill. So, when the NDAA passes, as early as this week, Congress will have taken steps to make automatic conscription the law of the land.
Why an automatic draft? Members of Congress and the President have an obligation to explain to the American people to which foreign land will their sons, and perhaps their daughters, be sent to die?
The U.S. has been in a continuous “State of Emergency” since September 11, 2001, which provides a president with over 100 powers he would not ordinarily have. Notwithstanding that the automatic draft provision will go into effect in a year, a presidential order invoking emergency powers and/or an Act of Congress, could readily move millions from their civilian lives to the front lines of a war.
WHAT WE KNOW:
We know that America is fomenting wars around the world
We know that the military industrial complex controls our government
We know that we are on the precipice of a global war, provoking aggression rather than resolution with Russia, China and in the Middle East.
The only winners in these wars are the war profiteers.
They’re now going to take our children to fight in unnecessary, destabilizing, dangerous, debt-creating wars.
Just today President Biden committed the U.S. to an additional decade of support for Ukraine’s war with Russia.
There is no other conceivable reason to require more than 16 million American males to be automatically registered for the draft, other than to prepare for a large-scale war.
The Selective Service System is the vehicle by which individuals are inducted into the armed forces. This NDAA Automatic Registration amendment facilitates an efficient, large-scale draft.
The new law will automatically register all males between the ages of 18 and 26. Selective Service will notify in writing every young American male that they have been registered and will prescribe regulations which can require the registrant to provide “date of birth, address, social security account number, phone number and email address….”
There are members of Congress who advocate that young women also be included in any draft, which could bring to 32 million the number of Americans of draft-eligible age.
The U.S. currently has over 1,300,000 men and women, career soldiers, as well as volunteers, serving in the all-volunteer armed forces.
According to the new automatic draft law, undocumented immigrants, between the ages of 18 and 26, numbering at least 1.5 million, could also be conscripted, if it were to apply to women as well as men.
A government conscription edict covering the undocumented could ironically do damage to the so-called “replacement theory,” where draft-eligible undocumented immigrants could decide to retreat to the other side of the border. Military service may appeal to others as a path toward citizenship, since immigrants serving during “period of hostility,” can seek immediate naturalization.
The last time a draft was instituted in the United States was during the Vietnam War, when 1.9 million Americans were conscripted.
A total of 8.7 million Americans served during the course of that war, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, including married men, who were subject to the draft by Presidential order.
Of 58,220 U.S. service fatalities in the Vietnam War, 17,671 were draftees.
President Biden’s recent D-Day speech, quoted in Politico, contained this noteworthy warning for young Americans: “The price of unchecked tyranny is the blood of the young and the brave.”
Years ago I had a conversation with then-Vice President Biden, who mused, painfully, about his own sons’ lives potentially being at risk in combat. His deep love for his sons is reflective of all Americans’ love for their children. Those parents and grandparents with a first-person understanding of the human cost of wars in Vietnam and Iraq may have a powerful aversion to exposing their children and grandchildren to deadly conflict, unless there is a direct threat to the territory of the United States.
Ukraine understands the price paid for war, having lost hundreds of thousands of its courageous sons and daughters in the ongoing war with Russia.
As Ukraine turns to conscription, there is push back coming from those who are subject to service but who understand they could well be facing a death sentence.
In Israel, the growing ultra-orthodox worshippers have been exempt from military service since the founding of Israel, but the government is being pressed to expand its military ranks creating a political squeeze on the Netanyahu ruling coalition.
Conscription is under discussion in Germany and Italy, while at least nine other European Union countries already use the practice to replenish their armed forces.
Resistance does occur during a draft. I well remember anti-Vietnam war rallies with the cry “Hell, no, we won’t go!” But for a heart murmur and a high draft number, I would have joined my brother Frank Kucinich, Jr. on the battlefield in Southeast Asia.
During the Vietnam war, an estimated 60% of all draft-eligible young men found a means to avoid getting conscripted, (including future a President by the name of Bill Clinton). Some, fearful for their lives, fled to Canada or Sweden.
The Vietnam War ripped apart the country. The protests over the war, fueled by compulsory service and rising casualty numbers of US troops, led President Lyndon Johnson to decide, on March 31, 1968, not to run for reelection. The draft was ended in 1973 and was reinstated by President Carter on January 23, 1980.
We must have a national debate over America’s forever wars which have led to the automatic draft. Just what, exactly, are America’s interests? Our nation’s leaders’ diplomatic skills seem limited to putting a gun on the table and saying “Let’s talk.”
Why does our government choose war over diplomacy?
As directly-elected representatives of the people, Congress, a co-equal branch of government, has a responsibility under Article One, Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution to decide to formally take this nation to a state of war.
Yet this congress, and others, have been content to appropriate money for war and then let the President take the responsibility, something the Founding Fathers sought to avoid in devising a system of checks and balances.
Congress must take up the question of war, long before the country institutes an automatic draft. An automatic draft is a preparation for war, dramatically altering the lives of young Americans. They deserve an answer. We all deserve an answer. America’s future is literally on the line.
Postscript: For my part, as a former member of Congress who is seeking re-election to the House of Representatives in November – – upon my return to Congress, I will bring forth legislation which will abolish automatic registration for the draft. I believe it is honorable, a sacred obligation, to serve in defense of one’s country. But our leaders have a deeper obligation, a solemn duty to explain why. They have not done so.
RT | June 13, 2024
A Ukrainian NGO has compiled a database of influential American citizens, who it claims hold positions that ‘mirror’ those of Moscow. One of the blacklisted individuals is billionaire Elon Musk, who has called for the organization to be designated as a terrorist group.
The NGO, Texty.org.ua, produced a lengthy report last week, which detailed a supposed “ecosystem” of citizens and organizations in the US, whose narratives “echo key messages of Russian propaganda” regarding the Ukraine conflict.
On Wednesday, Republican members of the House Appropriations Committee added a provision to the markup of the State Department’s 2025 budget that bans Texty from receiving US funding.
“It’s a good first step. They should be added to the list of sanctioned terrorist organizations,” Musk said on X (formerly Twitter) in reaction to the news.
The prohibition was championed by Representative Jim Banks, who was also targeted by the Ukrainian NGO. He told fellow Republicans that “federal bureaucrats should not support or partner with foreign groups that attempt to intimidate and silence US citizens and lawmakers.”
His message alluded to a link between the department and Anatoly Bondarenko, a co-founder of Texty. He is also an instructor for the ‘TechCamp’ program, which provides training to foreign journalists, NGOs, and activists, according to the Conservative Thinker.
The group has said its report was a piece of “data journalism,” and described itself as the victim of “an attack on freedom of speech and a display of chauvinism against the citizens of Ukraine.”
“Our critics believe that we do not have the right to investigate the streams of false information they produce about our country and us, simply because they are US citizens and we are not,” it claimed.
The original report described people on its list as “forces in the US impeding aid to Ukraine,” ranging “from Trumpists to Communists.” Highlighted in the report was the renowned anti-war group CODEPINK, organizations funded by billionaire Charles Koch, popular conservative speaker Jordan Peterson, and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Texty targeted Musk for supposedly allowing “Russian propaganda” on X, which he owns, and sharing with his followers a “highly skeptical view of the United States’ financial support for Ukraine.” Meanwhile, businessman Peter Thiel was accused of investing in Rumble, a free speech video sharing website. Unlike major platforms operated by US tech giants, it allows RT content.
The report acknowledged that both entrepreneurs had contributed to Kiev’s war effort against Russia via Musk’s Starlink satellite internet system and Thiel’s Palantir big-data analysis platform, but placed them on its blacklist nevertheless.
Palestine Chronicle | June 9, 2024
The Palestine Chronicle is saddened to learn that Abdallah Aljamal, one of its contributors in the Gaza Strip, has been killed in the latest Israeli massacre in the Nuseirat refugee camp.
Particularly tragic is that Aljamal’s last contribution to the Palestine Chronicle covered a previous massacre, which killed over 40 Palestinian civilians in an UNRWA school in the refugee camp.
Israeli media is linking Aljamal’s family to the Israeli captives, claiming that Abdallah’s father, Dr. Ahmed, and other members of the family, were executed in the process of the bloody rescue mission.
Those claims have been refuted by respected commentators and journalists online, who pointed in the inconsistencies in the official Israeli narrative.
“The building where Abdallah lived was one of 7 homes reportedly raided by the IDF on June 8. Hostages were held in only 2 of these buildings, not yet clear which,” Gazan writer and analyst Muhammad Shehada wrote on X.
The tragic news of Aljamal’s family execution was conveyed through EuroMed Monitor, a Geneva-based rights organization.
“In a preliminary investigation into the field executions by the Israeli army at the Nusseirat refugee camp yesterday, @EuroMedHR stated that soldiers used a ladder to break through the residence of Dr. Ahmed Al-Jamal,” the statement said.
“Upon encountering 36-year-old Fatima Al-Jamal on the staircase, they immediately shot her dead. The troops then stormed the house and executed her husband, 36-year-old journalist Abdullah Al-Jamal, and his father, 74-year-old Dr. Ahmed Al-Jamal, in front of his grandchildren. Additionally, their 27-year-old daughter, Zainab, was shot and seriously injured,” it added.
The Israeli mission, which according to Axios and other news outlets, involved direct and indirect US and British support, resulted in the killing of 274 Palestinians and the wounding of hundreds more.
“Abdallah Aljamal’s reports have focused entirely on the humanitarian situation in Gaza, especially in the central part of the Strip, starting shortly after the war,” The Palestine Chronicle said in a statement.
“His contributions became frequent when Israel deliberately began killing journalists, making it nearly impossible for the Palestinian voice to break away from the Gaza siege,” it added.
Aljamal’s relationship with the Palestine Chronicle was that of a freelance contributor. He was neither a staff writer nor a contractor. Aljamal has contributed his services to the Palestine Chronicle on a voluntary basis.
However, the value of his work was very important as one of the few journalists who kept the focus entirely on displaced Palestinian refugees, families of victims of the Israeli genocide, and other stories that were not being told by other journalists or media outlets.
Abdallah’s daily reports were originally written and published in Arabic. The Palestine Chronicle translated and republished a selected number of these reports throughout the war.
The Palestine Chronicle conveys its condolences to the people of Nuseirat and all the families of journalists murdered in Gaza throughout this genocidal war.
For more information about Abdallah Aljama’s translated and republished articles, click here.
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | June 7, 2024
The World Health Organization (WHO) is expanding its “health promoting schools” initiative worldwide, citing flagging vaccination rates and the need to provide medical services to underprivileged children and combat alleged misinformation.
The COVID-19 pandemic is behind the latest push to expand its “Making Every School a Health Promoting School” program, the WHO said, citing “the largest disruption of education systems in history” and “the health effects of mass school closures” and other pandemic-related disruptions.
The agency said the initiative aims to “serve over 2.3 billion school-age children” worldwide.
But critics say that behind the WHO’s noble-sounding plan to expand health-promoting schools — also known as school-based health centers (SBHCs) — is an attempt to gain “a foothold in our schools,” to bypass parental consent and expand vaccination, data collection and surveillance.
Laura Sextro, CEO and chief operating officer of The Unity Project, a California-based health freedom and parental rights nonprofit, told The Defender that SBHCs are “very, very agenda-driven organizations within the school system.”
Sextro said SBHCs “will cover everything from sex education [to] radical gender ideology. They’ll be talking about driving vaccines … That is something that frankly parents should have the autonomy” over.
Valerie Borek, associate director and lead policy analyst for Stand For Health Freedom, said SBHCs will promote “vaccines, especially COVID, HPV, and influenza.”
“School-based health centers have no place in public schools,” said Sheila Matthews, co-founder of AbleChild: Parents for Label and Drug Free Education. Matthews alleged the centers allow “Big Pharma access to our children, who are a captive audience.”
Nigel Utton, a board member of the World Freedom Alliance and coordinator of its Education Charter, said the WHO can’t be trusted to support the health of young people. “If it did, no child in the world would live in unsanitary conditions, or be subjected to trafficking, poor nutrition or emotional intimidation within school systems,” he said.
“Instead, the WHO wastes enormous resources on forcing vaccination programs — injecting children with dangerous chemicals including animal proteins, heavy metals and other unspecified ingredients,” Utton added.
Critics also question the involvement of private interests in SBHCs, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — and Bill and Melinda Gates themselves — in promoting SBHCs and funding the WHO’s reports on the subject.
School-based health centers give ‘Big Pharma access to our children’
SBHCs aren’t new — the concept dates back to the 1970s. The WHO, UNESCO and UNICEF have actively promoted such programs since 1995.
SBHCs are intended to offer “primary care, mental health care, and other health services in schools,” particularly in underserved communities. This includes services such as immunizations and “well-child care.”
A 2020 paper in Health Promotion Perspectives, whose lead author, Manuela Pulimeno, Ph.D., is UNESCO’s chair on health education and sustainable development, said health-promoting schools help “integrate health educational goals in a holistic perspective at school” and have shown positive outcomes.
“To achieve this goal, health-related contents may be embedded in the school curricula as core discipline,” the paper states.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has endorsed SBHCs, stating they “improve access to health care services for students by decreasing financial, geographic, age, and cultural barriers.”
In the U.S., the School-Based Health Alliance promotes SBHCs. According to the alliance, about 3,900 SBHCs operate nationally, up from around 1,900 in 2012. A September 2023 study in JAMA Network Open called for “additional SBHC expansion.”
In 2022, the Biden administration issued $75 million in grants to states to expand SBHCs, while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention incorporated SBHCs into its “Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child” model.
On a global level, “work is currently underway with early adopter countries such as Egypt, Kenya, North Macedonia and Paraguay to support governments in building a new generation of school health programmes,” the WHO said in a May 26 report.
WHO’s global standards for SBHCs include censorship and surveillance
In their report, the WHO developed eight “global standards” for SBHCs (page 3), in which school health services represent just one such standard. Other standards include school and government policies, school governance and leadership, school and community partnerships, schools social-emotional and physical environments and curriculum.
These are accompanied by 13 “implementation areas,” (page 17) calling for reinforcement of “intersectoral government and multi-stakeholder coordination,” strengthening “school and community partnerships,” curriculum development, “teacher training and professional learning” and monitoring and evaluation.
Critics say these proposals allow schools to implement vaccine programs. For instance, SBHCs have been linked to higher human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination rates, according to a 2022 report.
Merck, the maker of the Gardasil HPV vaccine, is a funder of the School-Based Health Alliance, whose board includes several members with ties to Big Pharma and vaccine-promoting organizations.
The Gardasil HPV vaccine is often administered to teenagers as part of school vaccination programs. In October 2023, a 12-year-old boy in France died days after collapsing and injuring himself minutes after HPV vaccination at his school.
In the U.S., several state and city government websites include vaccinations among the list of services SBHCs provide.
“Increased vaccine uptake is a mark of success for school-based health programs,” Borek said. “They’re considered an optimal place to promote and administer vaccines. In fact, schools and vaccine policy go hand in hand historically — vaccines didn’t have a strong foothold until schools mandated them for admission.”
Utton pointed out that “schools have been used to coerce and manipulate children into taking vaccinations against the will of their parents. Teachers have been indoctrinated, and those who have questioned the manipulative agenda have been ostracized.”
Borek said the “psychological pressure” a child experiences when a school authority figure recommends any kind of medical care creates a “fertile ground for pushing policy.”
SBHCs ‘will certainly be a tool to collect data’
Included among the WHO’s global standards for SBHCs are interventions in school curriculums and proposals to “embed school health content” in training for educators.
The 2020 Health Promotion Perspectives paper said the WHO calls for the incorporation of “health literacy” in “the core curriculum as children enter school.”
Critics told The Defender that changes like these could lead to the inclusion of non-health-related topics in school curricula under the guise of health education.
Virginie de Araujo-Recchia, a French lawyer and member of ONEST, France’s National Organization of Ethics, Health and Transparency, told The Defender that SBHCs may be “favored by the political powers in an attempt to achieve a fusion between education, citizenship and environmental causes.”
The WHO’s global standards for SBHCs also target “misinformation.” According to UNESCO, SBHCs “can … teach young people develop the critical thinking skills they need to reject harmful health-related myths and misconceptions,” noting that “This is a key in responding to pandemics like Covid-19 and HIV.”
The global standards call on schools to develop “versatile physical spaces that can be adapted to changing restrictions, as in managing the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The WHO’s global standards also contain provisions for increased data collection and surveillance in schools, with the 13th “implementation area” calling on schools to “Design, develop and share practices for collecting, storing and analysing data.”
This is linked to calls to provide “capacity-building in evaluation (e.g. data collection and analysis)” and investments “in feasible … interoperable systems for collecting and storing data from monitoring at all levels of the education and/or health system.”
According to Stand for Health Freedom, SBHCs are “completely unregulated” in the U.S.
For instance, it is unclear how HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) andthe Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act will be applied to SBHCs and students’ health information.
SBHCs “will certainly be a tool to collect data on anything from vaccine status to sexual preference,” Sextro said.
Children can become ‘health trainers of their parents’
The WHO claims SBHCs involve “all stakeholders, and particularly students, parents and caregivers.” The agency’s global standards call for “opportunities for parents … to participate meaningfully in the governance, design, implementation and evaluation” of SBHCs and their inclusion on “design teams” and governance boards.
But the WHO appears to contradict itself, excluding parents from the “system of global standards for health-promoting schools” and noting that the “target readership” of its SBHC-related documents is “mainly people in government.”
According to Nemours KidsHealth, the centers “only provide care to children with parents’ written permission.” However, the organization notes that this “permission” usually consists of “the option to sign a permission form at the beginning of each school year.”
A consent form for an Atlanta SBHC shared with The Defender says nothing about parents being notified before, during or after treatment. Last year, a Connecticut school board was sued for rejecting a government-funded school-based mental health clinic that aimed to treat teens without parental consent.
“The reason they’re doing this is because they don’t want parents to be able to exercise their rights, which is to … make medically informed decisions on behalf of their children. And so, they’re usurping the parents,” Sextro said.
“Parents need to be front and center in their child’s medical care,” Borek said. “These centers are cleaving that relationship by promoting medical assessments and treatment without the presence of a parent.”
A proposed bill in New Hampshire (SB 343) would require parents to be present when services are provided at an SBHC.
“Schools are clearly not the place to introduce school health centers,” de Araujo-Recchia said. “Our children are neither guinea pigs for mass medical experimentation nor beings to be sacrificed.”
Notably, UNESCO suggests SBHCs can help children “educate” their parents on health matters. According to the 2020 Health Promotion Perspectives paper, SBHCs can help children “become health trainers of their parents, relatives and friends, impacting positively the entire society.”
Gates ‘has a direct financial benefit’ from SBHCs
Earlier this year, Melinda French Gates announced a $23 million investment in the School-Based Health Alliance, alongside fellow billionaire MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
The Gates Foundation has also provided financial support for the publication of at least two WHO reports on SBHCs.
“The Gates Foundation and Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance [founded and funded by Gates] fiercely promote childhood vaccination, and make a lot of money from it,” de Araujo-Recchia said. “This is not philanthropy at all, but a stranglehold and ideology,” citing the WHO’s partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation as another example.
Sextro said Gates “has a direct financial benefit and interest in promoting these school-based health centers, because they will directly promote everything from the pharmaceutical to the vaccine interest that he and the Gates Foundation have.”
The WHO’s global standards for SBHCs include calls for the delivery of “comprehensive school health services based on a formal agreement between schools (or local education departments) and health service providers.”
According to the School-Based Health Alliance, 21% of funding for SBHCs in the U.S. came from private foundations in 2022, while according to the AAP, “local hospitals [may] provide … financial support for SBHCs.”
The WHO “is mainly financed by private funds from companies or foundations owning pharmaceutical labs,” de Araujo-Recchia said. “The capital links between the mainstream media, digital giants, American financial giants and the WHO demonstrate real collusion.”
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
By Patrick Lawrence | ScheerPost | June 8, 2024
It is not difficult to be astonished these days, given how many things going on around us warrant astonishment. To pull something out of a hat at random, the Democratic apparatus has openly, brazenly politicized the judicial system—weaponized it, if you prefer—in its determination to destroy Donald Trump and now has the temerity to warn in the gravest terms that a second Trump term would mean… the politicization of American justice.
Again at random, in The Washington Post’s June 7 editions George Will tells us President Biden “has provided the most progressive governance in U.S. history.” Yes, he wrote that. Give in to your astonishment.
It is interesting in this case to note that, during the reign of Ronald Reagan 40 years ago, our George thought big government was bad, bad, bad. Now it is a fine thing that Biden is “minimizing the market’s role by maximizing the government’s role in allocating society’s resources and opportunities.” Apart from turning his own argument hourglass upside-down, this assessment of our swiftly declining president is preposterously, right-before-your-eyes false.
You cannot tell the AC’s from the DC’s these days. But this is not the half of it in the way of astonishing events, things done, things said and such like.
Last week, as many readers will have noticed, Scott Ritter, the former weapons inspector and now a widely followed commentator, was about to board a plane bound for Turkey when armed police officers stopped him, confiscated his passport and escorted him out of Kennedy International Airport. Ritter was booked to transit through Istanbul for St. Petersburg, where he planned to attend the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, an annual gathering.
Here is Ritter recounting this incident in an interview with RT International:
I was boarding the flight. Three officers pulled me aside. They took my passport. When asked why, they said, “Orders of the State Department.” They had no further information for me. They pulled my bags off the plane, then escorted me out of the airport. They kept my passport.
No passport, no freedom to travel, no explanation. I have it on good authority that Ritter subsequently advised other Americans who were to attend the St. Petersburg events not to risk it.
I have had countless conversations over many years in which the question considered has been “Is this as bad as the 1950s?” The matter has been especially vital since the Russiagate fiasco began during the Clinton–Trump campaign season in 2016. It was in the ensuing years that the authoritarianism implicit in American liberalism from the first burst upon us like some weird grotesque out of a Dr. Seuss book.
I always urge caution when invoking comparisons between our corruptions and ideological extremes and those of the McCarthy era. Hyperbole and exaggeration never serve one’s understanding or one’s argument. But the confiscation of Scott Ritter’s passport on the instructions of Antony Blinken’s State Department seems to me a radical step too far. The liberal authoritarians now in command of the nation’s major institutions, the House of Representatives among the only exceptions, have just signaled they are quite prepared to act at least as undemocratically as the House Un–American Activities crowd, the FBI and the rest of the national-security state did during the 1950s to preserve their political hegemony.
When I think of confiscated passports I think of Paul Robeson, the gifted singer, the courageous political dissenter, the civil rights advocate — here he is singing his famous Water Boy — whose documents were seized in 1950 because he refused to indulge in the Cold War paranoia that was already prevalent. His performing career collapsed and he nearly went broke before a Supreme Court decision restored them in 1958. Or I think of all the screenwriters, novelists, poets, painters and activists whose papers were canceled while they were in Mexico — or in France or in Sweden or in England — to avoid HUAC and expatriation turned into exile.
And when I am finished thinking of these people, about whom there is a rich, inspiring literature, I think of how far America descended into a derangement we tend to look back upon in some combination of wonder, derision and contempt.
We can no longer look back in this fashion. The revocation of Scott Ritter’s passport, along with the destruction of the judicial system, the myth-spinning about our purported leaders and all the rest pushes this in our faces. Let us give this a moment’s thought to see if we can determine what is likely to be in store.
Why Scott Ritter, I have wondered these past few days. Of all the dissident commentators of too many stripes to count, why Scott? I reply to myself, “Because Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer, a former U.N. arms monitor in Iraq and he enjoys big-time credibility as a patriotic American.” His voice, in short, is the sort that can carry weight in sectors of the voting public that may well prove key in determining the outcome in the Trump–Biden election this Nov. 5.
Viewed in this context, I take the full-frontal suppression of Ritter’s rights last week as very likely tied to the liberals’ political prospects, other than brilliant as they are at this point. Censorship, suppression of various kinds taking various forms, “canceling”—these are nothing new, of course. But I sense things may get a great deal worse from here on out.
This is a year of global elections, as has often been remarked. The Associated Press counted 25 major national elections in a piece published at the start of the year. Taiwan, El Salvador, Indonesia, Russia, Slovakia, India, Mexico: These are among the big ones that have already taken place. The European Union is holding parliamentary elections June 6–9, cited in liberal quarters as the most important in decades. When Americans vote Nov. 5, it will be in this context.
In many of these elections — not all but many — the core issues are variants on a theme. The liberal order, such as we have it, is cast as defending itself against the onslaughts of —take your pick — populists, authoritarians, here and there a dictator. This is certainly how liberal media encourage American voters to view the Biden – Trump contest. And it is for this reason I think we must all brace ourselves for what may turn out to be a very major disaster for what remains of American democracy — and by extension the West’s.
Cast your mind back to 1992, when the Soviet Union was no more, an incipient triumphalism was taking hold in the U.S. and Francis Fukuyama published his famous (or infamous) The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press). Fukuyama, then a middling bureaucrat at the State Department, made the case that liberal democracy had won out and would stand as the ultimate, unchallenged achievement of humankind. A sort of happy political monoculture was destined to prevail eternally across the planet.
However sophomoric you may find this thesis, and I find it almost juvenile in its silliness, it came to define the expectations of all righteous American liberals. There was the Bush II administration, a major setback for the liberal narrative, although at the horizon this was merely a variation on the liberal theme. Then came the Obama years. And the Obama years set up the Democrats for a kind of fateful consummation in 2016. Hillary Clinton’s ascendancy that November was incontrovertibly the surest of outcomes because it was… what is my phrase?… a matter of historical destiny.
This is why Clinton’s defeat landed so hard among the mainstream Democrats. It was more, much more, than a loss at the polls. Trump’s victory contradicted what had become a prevalent consciousness among American liberals. Biden’s win in 2020 was a kind of salvage job: It put the liberal narrative back on track. But something had happened in the years after Clinton’s November 2016 loss. Liberals had assumed an uncompromising ideological righteousness such that we can now legitimately call them authoritarians—soft despots in de Tocqueville’s terminology, apple-pie authoritarians in mine. The cause is upside-down to the Cold War cause, but these people are at least as dangerous as the McCarthyites, and, as I have suggested, maybe more so.
We learned something important during those years. Deprived of what they considered their right as conferred by the force of history, liberals demonstrated that they would stop at nothing in the cause of retrieving it. Even those institutions that must stand above the political pit if a democracy is to have any chance of working, notably but not only the judiciary, were intruded upon in the liberal authoritarian project. Nothing was off limits.
Here we are again. We are headed into another confrontation of the kind that set liberals on the path of destruction they began to walk in 2016. We are already seeing a new wave of preposterous, utterly unsubstantiated charges of Russian or Chinese interference. Trump will turn America into a dictatorship. Trump will go on a rampage of retribution. Trump—we hear this already, as noted—will corrupt the courts, our courts, the courts we have kept pristine.
The Scott Ritter affair astonishes me yet more than any of the other astonishing developments of late. I read it as a warning of how extreme things may get, what irreparable damage to the American polity may be done, if liberal authoritarian cliques determine that a broad campaign to suppress dissent will be necessary if Biden is to have a chance of winning a second term and they are to fulfill their end-of-history destiny.
Let me put it this way. Liberal media now routinely bait Trump to say whether he will automatically accept the outcome this Nov. 5. One would have to be naïve in the extreme to make any such commitment as things now stand.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a media critic, essayist, author and lecturer. His new book, Journalists and Their Shadows, is out now from Clarity Press. His website is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.
The witch hunts against dissident doctors continue
Health Advisory & Recovery Team | June 8, 2024
In June 2021, Dr. Sam White, a general practitioner, released a video calling out harmful covid policy. From a scientific perspective every word he said was entirely defensible. Moreover it is clear that he was speaking from an ethical position of wanting to protect his patients from harm. He pulled no punches in addressing the most prominent issues that were causing harm – lack of treatment for the frail, inappropriate gene therapies and masking. In interviews, in 2022, he called the situation a war between good and evil. In doing so he unleashed a torrent of anger among those in a position of power over him, which, three years on, continues to harm him.
He had already resigned from his GP partnership in protest at their vaccination policy in February 2021. His conscience had been keeping him awake at night because he did not want to be a part of the vaccine rollout. Consequently, after resigning he was signed off with stress rather than having to work his notice. NHS England still saw fit to suspend him with an emergency order in June. Dr White managed to record a conversation with an NHS senior clinical adviser who implied that he was mentally unwell. Dr White believes that possession of that recording led the NHS to revoke their suspension. However, by then the NHS had referred him for a GMC investigation and an automatic GMC suspension.
The GMC overturned the suspension in August 2021 but imposed restrictions on him including a ban on mentioning covid on social media and requiring the removal of his previous posts. The legal position is that doctors have a right to free speech but if the GMC could prove Dr White’s speech was a threat to the health of the public or undermined trust in the profession then he could be sanctioned.
Dr White looked to his indemnity provider for support to fund his legal case but they washed their hands of him saying it was a “conduct issue”. With the help of crowd funding support, Dr White took the case to the High Court in November 2021. The verdict was published in December 2021, overruling the GMC and saying they had not followed due process in their actions. The High Court documentation was removed from the judiciary’s website in September 2022 such that other doctors in a similar position will be unable to refer to it in their defence. It is available on the Wayback Machine.
Dr White has asked to be removed from the register, as he is no longer practising conventional medicine, but the GMC have refused and are continuing to persecute him. Every interview he has undertaken has been transcribed and put forward as evidence that he is undermining public health policy and causing the public to lose trust in the profession. The next tribunal hearing is scheduled to last three weeks in August and September 2024. This ongoing investigation, three years later, indicates a relentless effort to discredit and punish Dr. White for his dissenting views.
If that sounds bad, wait until you hear about the NHS’s role.
The same day as the High Court hearing, unbeknown to Dr White or his lawyers, NHSE had a meeting where they decided to refer Dr White for a health assessment, despite the fact he no longer worked in the NHS. This was an opportunity to reopen the investigation into him. They have repeatedly asked if he had returned to NHS work and said he must tell them if he did. What was their intent here? Were they planning to ask any future employer to suspend him all over again?
NHS England has a list of “approved providers”. Any doctor not on their list cannot work for the primary employer of doctors in the country. In 2023, NHS England removed Dr White from their list, effectively barring him from practising within the NHS. He had already shifted his practice to private healthcare with a holistic focus, but this further punishment leaves him with no other options.
The GMC is far from perfect but at least it has due process and a system of appeal for where there might be an injustice. NHS England can unilaterally destroy a career, with no legal recourse.
In some ways, the most disturbing aspect of the whole affair was revealed in the communications between the GMC and NHS England. Firstly, the derogatory terms used about the doctor to justify their behaviour are shocking and reveal a lack of professionalism and intolerance for differing opinions within the medical establishment. Moreover, this language served as a means to rationalise their harsh and unjust actions towards him. Secondly, they appeared to be acting in cahoots. The GMC’s apparent open and fair processes have been bypassed by direct communication with NHS England, stripping Dr White of a right to employment.
Dr. Sam White’s case is a stark example of systemic injustice and the erosion of professional rights within the NHS and the GMC. His ongoing persecution for voicing dissenting views underscores a troubling intolerance for ethical and scientific debate, reminiscent of a Kafkaesque nightmare where rationality and justice are subordinated to bureaucratic oppression.
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Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
Review by Marilyn Langlois | November 10, 2023
If you regard the United States as perhaps flawed but overall a force for good in the world . . .
If you scoff at the notion that the US, a republic founded on principles of freedom and democracy, has morphed into a world empire, perpetrating assassinations, coups d’état, acts of terror and illegal warfare . . .
If you want to promote peace but haven’t yet explored deceptive events that precipitate US warmongering . . .
. . . here is a volume that will clear the air and paint an honest picture of the significant, not-so-rosy impact US foreign policy and actions have had in the world around us.
USA: The Ruthless Empire, by Swiss historian and peace researcher Daniele Ganser, is the newly published English language translation of his book Imperium USA, originally written in German and published in 2020. Here is a summary of key points — including some lesser-known ones — along with remedies for a more peaceful future, that are covered in the book. … continue
Aletho News If Americans Knew No Tricks Zone
Aletho News 