Over 60 Russians ‘Held Hostage’ in US, Arrested on False Charges, Deputy Foreign Minister Says
Samizdat – 20.12.2022
MOSCOW – The United States is practically holding over 60 Russians hostage by arresting people on false charges and sentencing them to dozens of years in prison, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Vershinin told Sputnik on Tuesday.
“The US authorities have been literally hunting Russians across the globe especially in countries that have bilateral treaties on extradition with the US, seeking the arrest of our citizens on false charges… The overall number of Russian citizens basically held hostage exceeds 60,” the deputy minister said.
Vershinin said that US courts sentence Russians to dozens of years in prison, with the tendency becoming even stronger under the current US administration amid rising political tensions between the two countries.
The senior Russian diplomat also urged Russian people to weigh up the risks they could face when traveling to unfriendly countries if there is even the “slightest suspicion” that they could be of specific interest to US secret services and law enforcement as Russians are presumed guilty in this country.
Russia’s foreign ministry, embassy in Washington, general consulates in New York and Houston will continue to provide all possible help to Russians who are in trouble and seek their return home, Vershinin added, noting that Moscow would decisively respond to all hostile actions by the US authorities.
‘Twitter Files’ Make it Clear: We Must Abolish the FBI

By Ron Paul | December 19, 2022
As we learn more and more from the “Twitter Files,” it is becoming all too obvious that Federal agencies such as the FBI viewed the First Amendment of our Constitution as an annoyance and an impediment. In Friday’s release from the pre-Musk era, journalist Matt Taibbi makes an astute observation: Twitter was essentially an FBI subsidiary.
The FBI, we now know, was obsessed with Twitter. We learned that agents sent Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth some 150 emails between 2020 and 2022. Those emails regularly featured demands from US government officials for the “private” social media company to censor comments and ban commenters they did not like.
The Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), a US government entity that included the FBI as well as other US intelligence agencies expressly forbidden from domestic activities, numbered 80 agents engaged regularly in telling Twitter which Tweets to censor and which accounts to ban. The Department of Homeland Security brought in outside government contractors and (government-funded) non-governmental organizations to separately pressure Twitter to suppress speech the US government did not like.
US Federal government agencies literally handed Twitter lists of Americans it wanted to see silenced, and Twitter complied. Let that sink in.
This should be a massive scandal and likely it would have been had it occurred under a Trump Administration. Indeed, Congress would be gearing up for Impeachment 3.0 if Trump-allied officials had engaged in such egregious behavior. But since these US government employees were by-and-large acting to suppress pro-Trump sentiment, all we hear are crickets.
What is interesting about these Twitter revelations is how obsessed the FBI and its government partners were with satire and humor. Even minor Twitter accounts with small numbers of followers were constantly flagged by the Feds for censorship and deletion. But knowledge of history helps us understand this obsession: in Soviet times the population was always engaged in joking about the ineptitude, corruption, and idiocy of the political class. Underground publications known as samizdat were rich with satire, humor, and ridicule.
Tyrants hate humor and cannot withstand satire. That is clearly why the FBI (and CIA) was determined to see a heavy hand raised against any American poking fun at the deep state.
There is good news in all of this, however. As Constitutional Law Professor Jonathan Turley wrote over the weekend, a new Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll found that even though the mainstream media has ignored the “Twitter files,” Americans have not. Nearly two-thirds of respondents believe that Twitter was involved in politically-motivated censorship in advance of the 2020 election. Some 70 percent of those polled believe Congress must take action against this corporate/state censorship.
As Professor Turley points out, although the First Amendment only applies to the US government, “it does apply to agents or surrogates of the government. Twitter now admits that such a relationship existed between its former officials and the government.”
So now we have proof that the FBI (along with US intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security) have been acting through “private” social media companies to manipulate what Americans are allowed to say when they communicate with each other.
Is there anything more un-American than that? Personally, I find it sickening.
We do not need the FBI and CIA and other federal agencies viewing us as the enemy and attacking our Constitution. End the Fed… and End the Federal Bureau of Investigation!
Copyright © 2022 by RonPaul Institute
After Twitter revelations, Rep. Comer says Google and Facebook need to be investigated for similar censorship collusion
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | December 18, 2022
Commenting on the recent Twitter Files’ revelation of the FBI’s constant communication with Twitter, including recommending account bans, Republican Ranking Member of the House Oversight Committee Rep. James Comer said investigations should go beyond Twitter to Google and Facebook.
“The entire FBI needs to be dismantled, we need to start all over. We need to enact strict reforms, and there need to be checks and balances at the FBI,” Comer said, speaking to Tammy Bruce on Fox News’ Hannity. He added that fixing and holding the FBI accountable should start with the budget process, which is why he is against the push for an omnibus.
“My concern was that this was a rogue FBI employee or two…but what we found today is the FBI had its own ministry of propaganda,” Comer continued.
“This is serious. What else are they involved in at the FBI? The entire FBI needs to be dismantled. We need to start all over. We need to enact strict reforms and there need to be checks and balances at the FBI.”
Bruce then asked, “I trust, though, that you are going to expand this beyond Twitter. You mentioned Google, you mentioned, perhaps, Facebook… are you going to expand and include those platforms, which we also know, at least from Mark Zuckerberg, he too was contacted by the FBI. I think we only know a portion of that. Are you going to expand this investigation?”
The Republican lawmaker, set to chair the Oversight Committee starting in January, replied: “Yes. This is going to take several committees focusing a lot of attention. Big tech is going to be a priority for the Republican majority…”
He added that “the FBI was involved in censorship… they have stepped in where the government does not belong. And this has to end. People have to be held accountable and we’re going to have to start with the budget, that’s what is so frustrating about what’s going on right now in Washington.”
NYT, after deciding lockdowns are authoritarian and bad when China does them, now mildly terrified as Xi Jinping reopens & infections rise
You can take the New York Times out of lockdown, but you can’t take the lockdowns out of the New York Times.
eugyppius: a plague chronicle | December 19, 2022
“From Zero Covid to No Plan: Behind China’s Pandemic U-Turn” is the headline of the latest highly revealing Times reporting on the end of Zero Covid in China. “After micromanaging the coronavirus strategy for nearly three years,” we read, “… Xi Jinping has suddenly left the populace to improvise.”
The essence of the piece is that the Chinese have rightly regained their freedoms, but they’re now left to face a terrifying virus alone and undefended by their government, which is also very bad, and possibly worse than the lockdowns, as bad as they were.
China’s party-run media has cast the shift [from Zero Covid] as a stressful but well-considered exit, opening the way back to good economic times. Warnings about the dangers of the coronavirus have swiftly disappeared, replaced by official claims that the Omicron variant is generally mild. By holding off from easing until now, the government has saved many lives, the People’s Daily said on Thursday in a long article defending Mr. Xi’s pandemic strategy as “totally correct.”
In reality, an examination of how the shift unfolded in Chongqing and elsewhere reveals a government overtaken by a cascade of Covid outbreaks, confusion over directives, economic woes and then rare political protests. …
It’s almost like mass containment doesn’t do anything aside from wrecking the economy and ruining everyone’s lives. I’m glad the Times can finally come close to admitting this now, in the last weeks of 2022.
By changing only a handful of words, you could make key sections of the article apply to Germany, or any western nation aside from Sweden or Belarus:
Even the Chinese Communist Party, a virtuoso at controlling the narrative, is finding it difficult to sell the policy lurch to anxious residents.
[Xi] turned China’s intense top-to-bottom mobilization against the pandemic into a showcase of the party’s organizational strength. For two years, his Covid war enjoyed widespread public acceptance, but eventually the effort exhausted staff, strained local finances, and appeared to drown out attempts to discuss, let alone devise, a measured transition.
Whereas in the West, we had totally open and honest discussions about the insane, enduring closures, that weren’t marked by massive censorship and government intimidation at all. Otherwise, Western nations were themselves locked in exactly this same international competition, eager to display the fruits of their superior pandemic planning to the world, and terrified that failure would cost them legitimacy. One of the reasons Germany locked down so hard during Fall 2020, was that the Merkel government had collected many international plaudits for their handling of the first wave — effectively taking credit for the seasonality of infections. They were unwilling to surrender the regard they had earned so easily.
Mr. Xi has no likely successor and could stay in power for at least another decade. But the scars from the abrupt change may feed distrust in his domineering style.
It’s not subjecting his whole country to absurd containment theatre over what is no more than an influenza-level risk that poses a political problem for Xi, but rather “the scars from the abrupt change” in policy.
Finally the reporters get around to discussing the protests.
In Zhengzhou in central China, thousands of workers clashed with police at an iPhone plant, angry about a delay in bonuses and the handling of an outbreak.
In Haizhu, a textile manufacturing district in southern China, laborers poured onto the streets over food shortages and hardships under lockdown. Migrant workers, who depend on daily work for their livelihoods, went weeks without jobs.
“I couldn’t make a living this year,” said Zhou Kaice, a street porter in Chongqing. “Some bosses I worked for started up for a few days but were then shut by lockdowns.”
Despite the strains, officials still insisted China must win its pandemic war. Provincial leaders throughout November declared their commitment to “zero Covid,” often citing Mr. Xi as their lodestone.
“If pandemic controls were loosened, that would inevitably create mass infections,” said a Xinhua editorial on Nov. 19. “Economic and social development and the public’s physical health and safety would be seriously hurt.”
How many times did we have to read that lockdowns were the ultimate way to grow the economy, because without them, the virus would somehow destroy all business activity?
It’s also interesting how anti-lockdown protestors in the West are thugs and stupid conspiracy-crazed Nazis, while in China they are “students, workers and homeowners.”
By [November], China’s most widespread protests since 1989 had begun. Students, workers and homeowners in Beijing, Shanghai and elsewhere vented against Covid controls, angered by a fire in western China that many believed, despite official denials, had killed residents trapped in their apartments by lockdowns.
“I tell you that in this world there’s only one sickness, and that’s poverty and having no freedom, and we’ve got plenty of that,” said a Chongqing man whose tirade went viral in China.
“Give me liberty or give me death,” he shouted, using the Chinese version of the American revolutionary battle cry.
Sounds like the Canadian trucker protests — you know, those guys who posed such a threat to freedom and democracy that it proved necessary to freeze their bank accounts.
At the end, the Times assures its heavily masked and vaccinated readership that “most people are staying home,” but that “if deaths rise sharply, public anger could revive” because “infections could hinder a quick economic rebound.”
Until we Decovidify the newsrooms, there will never be sane reporting on SARS-2 in any major press outlet, ever.
25 Peruvians Murdered in a Week of Intense Repression

“Terrorists are the lawmakers and the Lima City’s press.” | Photo: Twitter/ @mario_campa
teleSUR | December 19, 2022
On Sunday, Peru’s Health Ministry acknowledged that 25 people have died during the protests against President Dina Boluarte and in favor of an immediate call for general elections.
According to official data, the departments where these deaths occurred were Ayacucho (9), Apurimac (6), Cusco (3), Junin (3), La Libertad (3), and Arequipa (1).
The Health ministry also reported 287 injured people who have already been discharged. They are distributed as follows: Apurimac (56), Ayacucho (45), Lima (37), La Libertad (36), Arequipa (35) , Junin (35), Cusco (16), Puno (15), and Huancavelica (12).
Nevertheless, 69 people remain hospitalized in Ayacucho (20), Junin (17), La Libertad (12), Ucayali (6), Apurimac (5), Lima (4), Arequipa (4), and Huancavelica (1).
Boluarte announced that the Public Ministry and the Military Justice would investigate the death of civilians during the social protests.
On Tuesday, she will appoint new officials to replace the president of the Council of Ministers and the ministers of education and culture, who resigned on Dec. 16 after stating their disagreement with the violent repression of the population.
Peruvians have been staging huge protests since Dec. 7, when Congress appointed Dina Boluarte as president after removing Pedro Castillo, who is currently sentenced to 18 months in preventive prison for rebellion. Mexico will grant political asylum to his family.
The Myth of Pandemic Preparedness
The entire effort is based on the false assumption that pandemic preparedness would actually work. In fact, all it has done is create new pandemics.
1. The most recent WHO-declared Public Health Emergencies of International Concern (PHEICs) for SARS-CoV-2 and Monkeypox were both caused by lab-created viruses, based on many careful analyses of their genomes.
2. There is no evidence that pandemic preparedness ever benefited anyone but the preparedness industry, and substantial evidence that it led to the creation of the COVID pandemic.
3. The Democrat majority staff report, “Preparing for and preventing the next public health emergency.” echoes the WHO Amendments.
4. The Global Preparedness Monitoring Board has also geared up to push the identical program as the WHO: surveillance, One Health, and investment — “all topics that the GPMB has long recognised are crucial for the advancement of resilient pandemic preparedness mechanisms.”
5. The G20 nations agreed last April to a $50 Billion dollars a year price tag for gloval pandemic preparedness.
6. The Globalist agenda is out in the open for all to see.
The pandemic preparedness concept is based on fantasy; it is a dangerous money grab for a new biodefense industry. It brought:
· Many more high-containment BSL-3 and BSL-4 labs,
· 15,000 new scientists trained to research biowarfare pathogens,
· Poorly tested drugs and vaccines for which the manufacturers had no liability
· More corruption and pork for politicians to distribute.
· Nathan Wolfe’s company: biolabs in Ukraine, squire to Ghislaine Maxwell, funding by Hunter Biden’s investment group
· Peter Daszak’s ‘nonprofit’ that collected dangerous viruses from over 30 countries to bring to the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DOD’s DTRA) for further investigation
· Extremely dangerous anthrax, smallpox and COVID vaccines
· The COVID drug paxlovid, which led to relapses of COVID in President Biden, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and NIAID Director and Presidential COVID adviser Anthony Fauci and millions of Americans, presumably prolonging their infectiousness and causing more cases of COVID
· Expensive new federal agencies (ASPR, BARDA in DHHS, and subagencies within DHS and within DOD) and new funding streams to the NIH
· An excuse to censor alternate medical/scientific views
Fauci says not pushing back against online “misinformation” would be a blow to society
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | December 17, 2022
President Joe Biden’s outgoing chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci dismissed criticism from Twitter owner Elon Musk, adding that the platform has become a “cesspool of misinformation.”
“I don’t pay attention to that,” Fauci said in an interview with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “I mean, yeah, he has a big megaphone, but, I mean, the Twittersphere as it is has really gone berserk lately. It’s kind of become almost a cesspool of misinformation.”
Last Sunday, Musk criticized Fauci and called for his prosecution for lying to the American public and funding research that might have been the origin of the virus.
“My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” Musk wrote.
He later shared a meme showing Fauci telling Biden, “Just one more lockdown, my king.”
In another interview on David Axelrod’s podcast, Fauci also dismissed criticism from Musk.
“I don’t respond to him,” Fauci said. “I don’t pay any attention to him because that’s merely a distraction,” he said. “And if you get drawn into that, and I have to be honest, that cesspool of interaction … there’s no value added to that, David. It doesn’t help anything.”
Dr. Fauci was asked by MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell if society was becoming “anti-science,” referring to the rise of what she called “disinformation and misinformation” spreading online.
“The answer is yes,” Fauci responded. “The short answer to your question, Andrea. But the other thing is that there is so much misinformation that we were experiencing the normalization of untruths. Where there is so much disinformation that spreads predominately through social media that people just get so used to the untruths that it becomes normalized which is really bad because then you don’t push back against it. You say, well, that’s just the way it is. That would be a terrible blow to society. And I believe to our democracy if all of a sudden people say, well, what’s the use?
“There’s so much untruth out there we might as well not even push back on it. It’s hopeless. We’ve got to not accept the normalization of untruths.”
Dr. Fauci is currently facing a lawsuit for allegedly working with social media platforms to suppress speech.
Two-Thirds of Voters Believe Social Media Engaged in Politically-Motivated Censorship and Demand Congressional Action
By Jonathan Turley | December 17, 2022
The December Harvard CAPS / Harris Poll is out this week and Mark Penn and his colleagues have some interesting results to share. Despite the refusal of many in the media to cover the Twitter files, nearly two-thirds of voters believe Twitter shadow-banned users and engaged in political censorship during the 2020 election. Seventy percent of voters want new national laws protecting users from corporate censorship.
This week, the media continued to fulfill that common view of a de facto state media by ignoring new evidence of FBI coordination in censorship targets with Twitter in the latest news blackout.
On Friday, Twitter released additional information showing that the FBI and CIA actively pushed for censorship, supplying lists of accounts to be suspended or banned.
Journalist Matt Taibbi described Twitter as acting as a “subsidiary” of the FBI and wrote that “between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.”
The evidence continues to establish a system of censorship by surrogate or proxy. While the First Amendment applies to the government and not private corporations generally, it does apply to agents or surrogates of the government. Twitter now admits that such a relationship existed between its former officials and the government.
Once again, however, the major networks and newspapers have largely ignored the story. There has been a full mobilization of media, political, and business interests against Elon Musk and Twitter to oppose the restoration of free speech protections at the company. The media is heavily invested in suppressing this story after years of denials of any problems of censorship. Previously, they denied censorship was occurring. When such censorship became obvious, they denied that there was any involvement of the FBI and the government. Now that such involvement is confirmed, they are simply not covering the story.
Instead, the media is “all-in” on the doxxing suspensions (which Musk has now lifted). I have been critical of Musk’s response to the doxxing controversy. In part this is due to the scope of the suspensions and the fact that they occurred only 24 hours after the new policy was implemented. I would have preferred warnings and further clarity on the issue, particularly in what constituted doxxing in some of these tweets from journalists.
Despite the overwhelming coverage, there is little explanation of the media’s approach to the underlying doxxing question. Some have said that this is a “grey area” or may be below the threshold.
For years, the media has supported suspensions due to doxxing. In this case, the location of Musk’s plane may have been used by an individual to threaten his family. Most reports omit any discussion of whether the sending of such live locations information is doxxing. If it is, it has long been banned by most sites and journalists are not exempt.
Previously, figures connected with mainstream media from CNN to the Washington Post have been accused of doxxing. Liberal groups were accused of doxxing conservative justices and others, including dangerously posting information on the children of Justice Amy Coney Barrett. It does not seem to matter when the targets are conservative, Republican, or libertarian.
Writers who have long advocated the banning of others with opposing views are some of the loudest objecting in the wake of the doxxing controversy. The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz expressed fear that she could be next. It may not be a groundless fear since Lorenz has been previously accused of doxxing others and described the reintroduction of free speech protections for others as the opening of “the gates of hell.”
Jack Sweeney, the creator of this site (using publicly available information), has expressed shock at being sued and suspended. However, these articles continue to tellingly omit one of the critical issues. Is it doxxing to supply people with the minute-by-minute movement of the plane used by Musk and his family? That would seem relevant to weighing the merits of these suspensions.
Such slanted coverage is clearly losing its hold on the public or its view of Twitter. Indeed, the media continues to write off a large percentage of readers and viewers with openly biased coverage. The public is not buying it. It is buying Twitter. Not only are users signing up in record numbers, but a recent poll shows a majority of Americans “support Elon Musk’s ongoing efforts to change Twitter to a more free and transparent platform.”
In the wake of the latest release, the FBI issued a statement that said that there was nothing to see here and that “the FBI regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities.”
The statement is notable for what it does not contain: any recognition of the seriousness of the allegations or pledge to conduct its own investigation in whether this relationship crossed over to de facto government censorship. According to some reports, as many as 80 FBI agents may have been tasked to assist in the censorship efforts. Yet, the FBI has offered little more than a shrug in the face of credible constitutional concerns.
According to the Harvard/Harris poll, the public believes that such censorship occurred and warrants action. The denials of the FBI and the dismissal of the mainstream media will only serve to magnify such calls for action.
Opposition to Childhood Vaccine Mandates on the Rise, More Parents Say They Want the Right to Choose
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. – The Defender – December 16, 2022
A growing number of parents oppose vaccine mandates as a precondition for public school attendance, and interest among adults in receiving COVID-19 booster shots is waning, according to a national poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF).
The results of the latest KFF COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor survey, released today, show more than one-third (35%) of parents now believe they should be the ones to decide whether their children receive a slate of childhood vaccines.
The poll encompassed a nationally representative sample of 1,259 adults who were interviewed between Nov. 29 and Dec. 8. According to The New York Times, the KFF is a “nonpartisan health care research organization.”
“It’s unfortunate that it took a wave of injuries and deaths from vaccines that never should have been released into the market — much less mandated — to draw long-overdue attention to the issue of vaccine safety,” said Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., chairman and chief litigation counsel for Children’s Health Defense.
Kennedy told The Defender :
“This latest poll is encouraging for those parents, physicians and scientists who for decades have been calling for an investigation into the relentless promotion by FDA, CDC and Big Pharma of inferior medical products without rigorous safety testing.
“As more parents begin to question the forced, routine administration of vaccines on healthy children, perhaps we will move closer to protecting children and holding vaccine makers and government agencies accountable for the harm these products cause.”
26% of parents today: ‘Risks of childhood vaccines for measles, mumps, and rubella outweigh the benefits’
According to the KFF poll, 65% of parents of children under age 18 “think healthy children should be required to be vaccinated to attend public schools.”
This represents an 11% decline from an October 2019 Pew Research Center poll showing 76% of parents supported public school vaccine mandates.
More than one-third of parents surveyed (35%) “now believe parents should be able to decide not to vaccinate their children, up from 23% in 2019.”
The poll also revealed declines in support for specific vaccines. For instance, 71% of respondents said “healthy children should be required to get vaccinated for MMR in order to attend public schools” compared with 82% who supported the MMR vaccine mandate for healthy children in 2019.
Nearly 3 in 10 parents (28%) said parents should be able to choose whether their children receive the MMR vaccine, compared with 16% in the 2019 poll.
A similar percentage (26%) responded that the “risks of childhood vaccines for measles, mumps, and rubella outweigh the benefits.”
A smaller decline was noted in the percentage of adults (85%) who felt the benefits of childhood MMR vaccination outweigh the risk. This represented a three-percentage-point decline from the 2019 Pew Research Center poll (88%).
These declines were driven by increased vaccine “skepticism” and a growing movement toward parental choice, on the part of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents — 44% of whom responded that parents should have a choice about whether or not their children receive the MMR vaccine, up from 20% in 2019.
Only 11% of Democrats provided the same response.
Moreover, only 56% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said “healthy children should be required to be vaccinated to attend public schools,” a decline of 23 percentage points compared to 2019.
A similar divide was apparent among respondents in reference to their COVID-19 vaccination status. While 83% of vaccinated respondents said healthy children should be required to be vaccinated in order to attend public schools, 63% of unvaccinated parents said parents should instead decide.
‘Tepid’ interest in COVID ‘boosters’ and flu vaccine
Interest in the updated COVID-19 booster is “tepid,” according to the KFF poll, which showed only 1 in 5 adults (22%) surveyed said they have received the updated bivalent booster and an additional 16% said they plan to receive it “as soon as possible.”
However, 12% of respondents said they would “wait and see” before deciding whether to get the new booster, 13% said they would get it only if required and 9% said they would “definitely not” get it.
An additional 27% were unvaccinated or only “partially” vaccinated, which means they are not eligible to get the booster.
Interest in the bivalent booster was highest among adults 65 and older (39%) and Democrat voters (38%), though both figures fall significantly short of a majority. Conversely, only 12% of Republicans and 11% of young adults under 30 said they had received a dose of the updated booster.
Also, 36% of “fully vaccinated” adults 65 and older said they don’t think they need the updated booster, while a “similar percentage,” according to KFF, said they did not think the benefit of the updated booster was worth it.
Overall, fewer than half of parents of children under 18 said their child has received the updated booster or is likely to do so.
Combined with children who have not been vaccinated and who are therefore ineligible for the booster, 58% of parents of 12- to 17-year-olds and 70% of parents of 5- to 11-year-olds responded in this manner.
Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, even if vaccinated, expressed skepticism toward the updated booster, with 64% stating they do not think they need it, and 61% saying they did not believe the benefit was worth it.
Even among Democrats, a majority (51%) said they were too busy or hadn’t had the time to get the updated booster, indicating it was not a high priority for them.
Even in the face of a so-called “tripledemic” of COVID-19, flu and RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) this fall and winter, and despite the majority of parents saying they are worried their children will get sick from RSV (56%, and 73% of parents of children under the age of 5), only 34% of parents said their child has gotten a flu shot this season.
Parents’ rights movement growing in prominence
According to The Times, “The shift in positions appears to be less about rejecting the shots than a growing endorsement of the so-called parents’ rights movement.”
Dr. Sean O’Leary, chairman of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Committee on Infectious Diseases told The Times :
“The talking point that has been circulated is the concept of taking away parents’ rights. And when you frame it that simply, it’s very appealing to a certain segment of the population.”
O’Leary said he worried that the parental rights movement might slow down compliance with state-mandated childhood immunization schedules, telling The Times “We do have a global dip in vaccine coverage. So this is not a time to be considering a rollback of these laws.”
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.
If Being Frozen To Death Doesn’t Work, Being Starved To Death Comes Next
By Patrick Clarke | December 14, 2022
First we were placed under virtual house arrest. Now we are being frozen by soaring fuel bills and energy supply shortages in those same homes. Coming next, we are to be starved. All in pursuit of one of the Net Zero cults: Covid or carbon emissions. Too bleak a picture? We have only to look across the North Sea to one of our nearest neighbours, the Netherlands.
Surprisingly for such a small country (it is only about twice the size of Wales), the Netherlands is the second largest food exporter in the world, second only to the United States. It is Europe’s largest meat exporter. Four million cows, 13 million pigs and 104 million chickens are reared annually. It provides vegetables to many of its Western European neighbours.
One would assume this success story would be widely cherished, especially in an era of increasing food insecurity and shortages, with other key sources such as Ukraine under serious threat due to the continuing conflict there.
Remarkably, and many would say sinisterly, the polar opposite is the case. The supposed crime of the Dutch farmers? They have fallen foul of the ‘Zero Carbon’ fixation of the Climate Change Cultists who control so much of the current political and economic agenda.
One of that agenda’s chief targets is agriculture, particularly the use of nitrogen. The Dutch are at the top of the tree for nitrogen use per hectare of cultivated land, at nearly twice the European average.
The European Commission has given strict guidelines to EU member states to reduce their use of nitrogen. To comply with this the Dutch Government introduced laws to enforce a reduction of 50 per cent in nitrogen emissions by 2030. Such draconian targets can only come with draconian enforcement measures.
Dutch farming is being strangled through an assortment of regulations, including new flood prevention regulations, bizarrely given the success of the Dutch in preventing flooding over the centuries despite the fact that large parts of the country are below sea level, having been reclaimed from the sea.
Perhaps worst of all, one of the Government’s new laws bans the children of farmers from inheriting the farm when their parents retire or die. Once a farmer stops farming, their entire family becomes banned from farming in the Netherlands again. A whole way of life plus decades, sometimes even centuries, of experience is being gratuitously thrown away.
Where regulation fails, mandatory purchasing of land by the state is feared to be the next step as farmers have so far shown little interest in selling any of their land. Around 300,000 hectares of farmland is earmarked to be converted into nature conservation areas between now and 2040. More than 1,000 farms face forcible closure.
Nor is it just the Dutch Government that the farmers are battling. A panoply of NGOs are on the case too, using the courts to pursue any part of the government at national or provincial level deemed to be faltering in enforcing these objectives.
Those of us in the UK, long weary of seeing how political charities and activist lawyers run rings round attempts to enforce curbs on immigration, will be familiar with the process.
It’s worth pointing out too that, despite Brexit, Northern Ireland still has to implement these same EU directives as part of the Northern Ireland protocol. Thanks for that one, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. So while today it is Dutch farming under siege from its own government, tomorrow it will be farming in Northern Ireland that is compelled to go through the same pain.
Interestingly, no one has yet stepped forward with a credible plan for how these vital lost sources of food are going to be replaced. The Dutch Government hopes that it will come from artificially created meat from laboratories and is investing in this technology, though how it can be sufficiently scaled up remains to be seen. Given what is already widely known about the harmful effects of eating too many processed foods instead of natural foods, such as the triggering of obesity and potential heart disease, it has to be asked whether this is a desirable course, or indeed what the further health implications for users may be.
Some would say the whole agenda is a straight forward grab by bad actors intent on taking control of the world’s food resources, for whom Net Zero objectives provide a convenient camouflage for their own lust for power, control and yet more wealth than they already have. The usual suspects certainly spring to mind.
Others argue that out-of-control digital technocrats are so conditioned to assuming they can control anything, however complex, that they can’t accept that some things remain beyond human control, such as airborne viruses and the climate.
Each failure to learn that simple lesson is leading to ever more intensive efforts to achieve that control, control that must be achieved at all costs. Either way, vicious cycles of more authoritarianism, human misery arising from absurd and seriously harmful measures, plus more setbacks in failing to reach unobtainable goals lie ahead. Unless we can shake off the grip of these technocrats on our societies and the political institutions in thrall to them, the prospect of starving to death will become our grim reality in an increasingly tyrannical world.
Think that couldn’t happen here? Just look at Sri Lanka, though as with the Dutch farmers, most of the media and nearly every politician would prefer you not to!
