Hepatitis B Vaccination of Newborns: Seriously Misleading Media Reports
By Peter C. Gøtzsche | Brownstone Institute | December 19, 2025
Fiction or faith. It is a major failure to give equal prominence to people presenting scientific facts and people talking about their feelings or beliefs with no evidence in their support, or to allow them to contradict unchallenged the most reliable evidence we have.
However, virtually every time I know something about a healthcare issue considered controversial, this is what I see in the news, and the hepatitis B vaccine controversy illustrates this abundantly.
On 5 December 2025, with a vote of 8 versus 3, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) ended the recommendation that all newborns in the United States receive a hepatitis B shot at birth. The birth dose was recommended only if the mother had tested positive for the virus or if her infection status was unknown.
The change was very rational, and as in Western Europe, only Portugal recommends a universal birth dose, it would seem difficult to argue against it. But the media did and failed us badly. Two days after the vote, I downloaded news stories from 14 major media outlets, and they were all very negative. The media used three main tactics to support their beliefs:
They denigrated the Secretary of Health, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the members of ACIP he had selected, and some of the presenters at the meeting.
They gave undue prominence and praise to the three dissenting ACIP voices and outsiders, who were depicted as experts or scientists, as if to say that they must be right, and they were widely quoted for their remarks, which were rarely rational or evidence-based.
They didn’t check if what the critics of the policy change claimed was correct.
The Denigration of Kennedy
Of the 14 news outlets, only Nature did not denigrate Kennedy.
Reuters started its press release by saying it was “a major policy win” for Kennedy that vaccine advisers named by him reversed a decades-long recommendation “that disease experts say will reverse decades of public health gains.” So, Kennedy’s advisers were not experts, and as the critics were experts, they must be correct, right?
Reuters noted that the CDC is “now run by a Kennedy-appointed acting head, Jim O’Neill, who is not a scientist;” that Kennedy founded the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense; fired ACIP’s previous 17 “independent” experts and replaced them with a group that largely supports his views; dropped broad recommendations for the Covid vaccine and cut funding for mRNA vaccines.
The facts are that several of the previous experts at the ACIP were not independent but had conflicts of interest in relation to vaccine manufacturers and other drug companies; that recommending Covid vaccines only to high-risk groups brought the US on par with Europe; and that cutting funding for mRNA vaccine research was well motivated. Kennedy said that his team had reviewed the science and found that these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like Covid and flu. His department was therefore shifting the funding toward “safer, broader vaccine platforms that remain effective even as viruses mutate.”
Reuters misrepresented the ACIP meeting entirely, claiming that “many of Kennedy’s committee members criticized the vaccine as unsafe.” What they said was that safety had not been adequately studied, which was correct.
The other media called Kennedy a vaccine sceptic (The Hill, Health Policy Watch, CBC), a vaccine activist (CNN, the Guardian), or an anti-vaccine advocate (PBS), who fired all 17 previous members of the ACIP, replacing them with people who largely shared his scepticism (New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio, CNN, PBS, CBS News, Time, Health Policy Watch, CBC, BBC, Guardian ) with a “goal of upending vaccine policy” (New York Times ), and the vote fulfilled a long-held goal of the anti-vaccine movement (The Hill ).
The CBC, the largest news broadcaster in Canada, noted that Kennedy had promoted debunked theories linking vaccines to autism. It is correct that studies of the MMR vaccine and aluminium adjuvants did not find a link, but the aluminium study is seriously flawed, some studies have claimed a link, and as it has not been studied if the extensive US childhood vaccine program might cause autism, the CDC has suggested additional research projects.
The Washington Post said that aluminium had become a focal point for anti-vaccine groups that claim cumulative exposure may harm neurological development and that vaccine researchers note that aluminium is present naturally in breast milk, food, and water at far higher levels than in vaccines and is rapidly cleared from the body. It is highly misleading to compare dietary intake with injections, as very little aluminium is absorbed from the gut and the rest is effectively eliminated via the kidneys, and as aluminium adjuvants in vaccines are harmful.
The Hill and CNN noted that aluminium adjuvants in vaccines have been proven to be safe (which is false), but that vaccine sceptics like Kennedy have long said they are linked to allergies and other health conditions (which is correct). Natural infection protects against allergies, and studies comparing vaccinated with unvaccinated children have shown vaccines increase the occurrence of asthma and other atopic diseases.
The Denigration of ACIP Members and Meeting Presenters
Nature noted that several panel members continued to express broad criticism of vaccines.
The New York Times lamented that most of the new ACIP members and some of the presenters have no experience in vaccine research or clinical practice and that the divisiveness and dysfunction of the committee in making the decision raised questions about the reliability of the advisory process.
This is terribly misleading. People who have learned to read can assess the merits of vaccines, and scientific debate is what furthers science. Acting ACIP chair Robert Malone said that the committee’s work must be guided by evidence, transparency, and a willingness to scrutinise assumptions rather than protect them.
Health Policy Watch wrote that Malone has been criticised for vaccine misinformation, which is a meaningless comment without any mention of what the issues were. Some of the most outstanding vaccine researchers in the world, professors Peter Aaby and Christine Stabell Benn from Copenhagen, have been criticised for misinformation and have had lectures and interviews removed from YouTube even though everything they said was correct.
CBS News noted that ACIP member Retsef Levi, a mathematician with no medical training (so what?), had falsely claimed that experts had never tested the vaccines appropriately, and the New York Times called it incorrect when lawyer Aaron Siri, a presenter, said that “not one” of the shots administered to children had been compared against a placebo or an inert substance. But Levi and Siri were correct. No childhood vaccine on CDC’s schedule was studied in placebo-controlled trials or relied upon before licensure.
The CBC also described Levi as a person with no medical degree who had questioned the safety of the Covid-19 vaccines and called for Covid vaccine programs to be halted. Well, I have observed repeatedly that Levi’s arguments were far more persuasive than those offered by people with medical degrees, e.g. by ACIP member Cody Meissner, a paediatric infectious-disease specialist (see below).
And Covid vaccines are definitely not safe; they have killed children who developed myocarditis and adults who developed blood clots. It was very prudent to change the “all-inclusive” US Covid vaccine programs when by far most people have been infected, whether vaccinated or not, and because repeated boosters can weaken the immune system and increase the risk of respiratory infections, also for flu shots. Healthcare workers themselves have already delivered a verdict. According to the CDC’s own data, fewer than 10% received a booster in the past year.
National Public Radio denigrated Siri: an anti-vaccine lawyer with no medical or scientific training, and the Washington Post failed their readers, too: “Aaron Siri, a Kennedy ally and lawyer for the anti-vaccine movement, delivered a presentation for more than 90 minutes. Siri said clinical trials for vaccines have not been properly performed, that safety surveillance after vaccines are licensed is lacking and that the efficacy of vaccines in reducing deaths and spread of disease has been overstated. Siri and Kennedy-aligned activists argue that the cumulative number of shots places an undue burden on child immune systems. Scientists counter that… the immune system can safely handle far more antigens than vaccines contain.”
Siri is correct and the reason why he was given so much time is that he is evidence-based and very knowledgeable. His book about vaccines is outstanding. And “scientists” have no evidence that the immune system can safely handle many vaccine antigens injected simultaneously. This is unknown and needs studying.
The Washington Post also noted that “Siri petitioned the government in 2022 on behalf of the anti-vaccine group Informed Consent Action Network, which is run by Kennedy’s former communications director, to reconsider its approval of Sanofi’s stand-alone polio vaccine. Siri argued that the government had relied on inadequate data, a claim regulators rejected.”
However, the petition notes that “the clinical trials relied upon to license this product did not include a control group and only assessed safety for up to three days after injection. These trials therefore did not comply with the applicable federal statutory and regulatory requirements necessary to prove the product was ‘safe’ prior to licensure.” As live, attenuated polio vaccines can mutate and cause polio, I agree with Siri that this drug had not been adequately studied before licensure.
The New York Times and National Public Radio wrongly implied that Siri wanted to remove all polio vaccines (“polio vaccines” or “the polio vaccine”).
Praising “Experts” and Giving Them Undue Prominence
Safety was a major issue. Dissenting ACIP member Cody Meissner said at the meeting that we know that the vaccine is safe, and his reassurances were quoted by the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Public Radio, Nature, the BBC, and Time.
However, when the Institute of Medicine in 2013 was commissioned to review the safety of the CDC childhood vaccine schedule, they could not find a single study that had compared health outcomes in vaccinated children with those in children who had not received any vaccines and they concluded: “There is no evidence that the schedule is not safe.” Similarly, Time wrote about the hepatitis B vaccine that there is “no evidence in regard to lack of safety.” My comment on this kind of reasoning was: “If the brakes in a new car model have never been tested, the reassuring conclusion would be: ‘There is no evidence that the brakes don’t work.’”
At the ACIP meeting, Meissner accused Siri of presenting “a terrible, terrible distortion of all the facts” (New York Times, National Public Radio, The Hill, CNN, Time ) and of making “absolutely outrageous statements about safety.” This was totally false and Meissner should know better. ACIP members were shown that the clinical trials underpinning approval of the hepatitis B vaccine were small, lacked a placebo group, and followed infants for no more than seven days after vaccination, which would not detect any long-term adverse outcomes. Normally, such findings would have shocked people and prompted caution, but Meissner insisted that “There is no evidence of harm.” Well, if you don’t look, you won’t find.
Levi hit the nail on the head: “What is the number needed to vaccinate – among babies born to hepatitis B-negative mothers – to prevent one case of chronic hepatitis B?” No one supplied an answer. But if the true number was “in the millions,” then any credible harm-benefit analysis would require showing a number-needed-to-harm one infant seriously even higher.
Meissner, however, opined that the move was rooted in baseless scepticism and that we will see more hepatitis B infections (Washington Post, Nature ). He was also against possibly using fewer than three doses of the vaccine (New York Times, The Hill ), arguing that antibody titres are not a good correlate of protection and did not have scientific backing (Nature ). The inconsistency was unmistakable. Antibodies are embraced as proof of vaccine efficacy when convenient, e.g. in drug regulation, otherwise not.
Another dissenting ACIP member, psychiatrist Joseph Hibbeln, was quoted a great deal although he said nothing of substance: The revised guidance was “unconscionable” (Washington Post ), “the decisions should be based on data” (The Hill ), “Those are all speculations” (Time ), “Is there any specific evidence of harm of giving this vaccination before 30 days?” (Guardian ). Not a single journalist wondered why a psychiatrist sat in a vaccine committee.
Dr Tracy Beth Høeg, a presenter at the meeting, noted that the US was an outlier recommending around 72 childhood vaccine doses, while countries like Denmark use fewer than 30. PBS and Time argued that the US is not an outlier in recommending hepatitis B vaccines for newborns because 116 of the 194 WHO member states did the same. This is not a proper comparison, and, as noted above, in Western Europe, only Portugal recommends a universal birth dose.
Levi noted that “The policy in the US is completely misaligned with many countries that… care about their children just as much as we do,” and when Meissner viewed the growth of the childhood vaccine schedule as an achievement for child health, Siri countered correctly that the US “has the worst health outcomes amongst all developed countries.”
The media quoted three previous CDC directors. Rochelle Walensky said that over the past few months, she had observed “a systematic undermining of the nation’s vaccine program” (National Public Radio) and that the “US vaccine-safety monitoring system can detect very, very rare safety events“ (Nature ). Maybe, but she ignored them. In April 2021, cases of myocarditis after Covid-19 vaccination, particularly among young male vaccine recipients, had been reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System at the CDC, but Walensky said by the end of the same month: “We have not seen a signal and we’ve actually looked intentionally for the signal in the over 200 million doses we’ve given.”
Tom Frieden provided a doomsday statement: “The ACIP recommendation… puts millions of American children at greater risk of liver damage, cancer and early death.” He advised everyone to “stand up for fact-based care” and “not accept this misguided and dangerous recommendation” (Time).
Demetre Daskalakis had a weird argument: “This will signal to clinicians that there is something wrong with the vaccine – there is not” (Reuters, CNN). It could also signal greater responsibility at the CDC than under previous directors. But the BBC and the Washington Post joined the folly arguing that public health experts, representatives of medical organisations, and some ACIP members worried the vote could raise unfounded safety concerns about the vaccine and undermine hard-won trust in vaccines leading to more sickness.
The media gave organisations undue prominence without ever considering if they were impartial. They urged people to look to “independent recommendations,” e.g. from the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, for “science-based advice” (National Public Radio).
I would call it advice based on money. The Academy would continue to support the birth dose of the vaccine (Reuters, CBS News, Health Policy Watch, CNN, Time, CBC) but all journalists forgot to say that it receives many millions of dollars from vaccine manufacturers and other drug companies. Unsurprisingly, hepatitis B vaccine makers Merck, Sanofi, and GSK defended their products as safe, and Merck was “deeply concerned by the vote” (Reuters ). Perhaps because Merck’s shares dropped?
“Don’t listen to ACIP at all… listen to the American Academy of Pediatrics” (CNN), which said that the “irresponsible and purposely misleading” guidance would harm children; called it a “deliberate strategy to sow fear and distrust among families” (CBC); and delivered a gigantic falsehood: “Vaccine recommendations are largely similar across developed countries” (CBS News).
Reuters noted that ACIP members had said that the birth dose “was out of step with peer countries, particularly Denmark,” but then quoted “a CDC disease expert” for saying that the US is not comparable to Denmark with its universal healthcare and more thorough screening for the virus. The Washington Post said that “public health experts” had noted that European countries recommending fewer shots for children were smaller and had better health care systems, and that medical associations had argued that the US schedule had been thoroughly studied (which is blatantly false). None of the media quoted Levi, who mentioned that the US and Denmark have the same background rate of hepatitis B despite different policies on the birth dose.
The American Medical Association is also heavily corrupted by industry money and said that ACIP’s decision was “reckless and undermines decades of public confidence in a proven, lifesaving vaccine. Today’s action is not based on scientific evidence” (CNN).
The American College of Physicians said that “This vote… will only endanger children and increase risk of death for millions,” and a hepatitis researcher urged people to “go back to our true experts… our CDC colleagues” (Health Policy Watch).
Time noted that “A group of several dozen professional medical organizations and health advocacy groups, including the American Medical Association” expressed alarm over the committee’s decisions: “Previously, we could expect science to drive decisions.”
Some panellists and media noted that universal hepatitis B vaccination at birth had helped to nearly eliminate cases among newborns in the United States, and that there was no evidence of harm (New York Times, Washington Post, The Hill, Guardian ). However, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. When Levi countered that the risk for a child of getting infected was extremely low, supporters of the birth dose noted that the virus can be spread by household objects like toothbrushes, razors, or combs used by an infected person. This is a fake argument and the CDC website is explicit: “Although HBV can be found in saliva, it is not spread through kissing or sharing utensils. It is also not spread through sneezing, coughing, hugging, breastfeeding, or food or water.”
Levi also said that the decline in hepatitis B cases occurred long before the birth-dose policy was introduced and was concentrated in older age groups, not among infants, which supported a risk-based policy, focused on infants born to hepatitis B-positive mothers and on high-risk adult populations. When ACIP liaison Dr Flor Muñoz of the Infectious Diseases Society of America claimed that much of the discussion amounted to “misinformation,” Levi responded: “It’s not misinformation… this is CDC data.” When Muñoz pushed back, presenting her disagreement as established fact, Levi replied: “I appreciate your beliefs and feelings about this, but these beliefs and feelings are not supported by the data that were presented.”
Levi also pointed to ACIP’s prior recommendation of Covid-19 vaccination for healthy, extremely low-risk children, which he described as “one of the most outrageous” examples of framework failure.
ACIP’s decision sparked anger from Republican Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a doctor, who said the vaccine is safe and effective (BBC, CBS News, Time, Health Policy Watch). He wrote on X that “Siri, a prominent anti-vaccine lawyer, makes his living suing vaccine manufacturers and is presenting as if an expert on childhood vaccines. The ACIP is totally discredited” (Washington Post, The Hill ).
The Hill was particularly critical. It wrote about an ardent objection from major medical organisations, internal spats among ACIP members, and a stark lack of data to support altering decades-long vaccine guidance, in fact, “There’s been great data and studies done on these vaccines, and they are safe and effective.” The Hill quoted top figures from Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York City for their rants, which included that they would not abide by ACIP’s “irresponsible attacks on clear, evidence-based science.”
When journalists “dial-a-quote,” they call organisations or people whom they know will respond in a way that mirrors their own bias pretending they have asked an “independent expert.”
The media were full of evidence-free, derogatory comments that were meaningless because they could not be contested:
- “We can no longer trust federal health authorities when it comes to vaccines,” “heartbreaking to see this science-driven agency turn into an ideological machine” (New York Times );
- “Medical experts have argued that it’s important to vaccinate all newborns for hepatitis B” (Washington Post );
- “The vaccine is incredibly safe,” experts decried the move (Reuters );
- the American Association of Immunologists is “extremely disappointed” in the decision;
- the American College of Physicians called the meeting “completely inappropriate” (CBS News); “many experts expressed dismay at today’s decision” (CNN);
- “A long lineup of medical experts…strongly urged against changing the vaccination schedule” (Health Policy Watch);
- “Public health experts decried the move,” CDC and the ACIP are no longer trustworthy sources and are becoming increasingly irrelevant (CBC);
- “a forum for the discussion of falsehoods,” ACIP members promoted their own sceptical views on vaccines, looking for a bogeyman, and you’re not going to find something if it doesn’t exist (Time );
- “Experts say any change to the current hepatitis B vaccination recommended schedule could have significant and far-reaching consequences for childhood health in the US” (Guardian ).
When the media presented statements that could be contested, they were usually wrong or seriously misleading, e.g. “Siri’s presentation was replete with ‘falsehoods and misrepresentation of the data,’ and he conflated informed consent with mandates” (New York Times ); “fierce objections from medical groups that said the recommendation had proved a successful public health strategy, nearly eradicating the dangerous virus among U.S. children” (Washington Post); a “Minority of members argue the change is not supported by data” (Reuters ).
Persuasion by Big Numbers
Like the drug industry does, the media used big numbers in their propaganda.
Globally, the vaccine has prevented millions of infections (Health Policy Watch). Before the vaccine, around 200,000 to 300,000 people were infected each year; since the vaccines began being universally administered to babies, overall cases are down to around 14,000 annually (PBS).
After a birth dose was recommended in 1991, the shots have prevented an estimated 90,000 deaths in the US (BBC) and reduced hepatitis B infections among infants and children by 99% (CBS News, Time, Health Policy Watch, Nature ).
All these claims are false or seriously misleading. Data presented at the meeting showed that much of the decline in hepatitis B infections over past decades occurred before the birth dose was recommended and it was largely driven by behaviour change, screening, and targeted vaccination of high-risk groups.
Senator Cassidy wrote on X that “Before the birth dose was recommended, 20,000 newborns a year were infected with hepatitis B. Now, it’s fewer than 20” (CBS News, CNN, Health Policy Watch). This was an error of 133 times. CDC data show that in 1990, only around 150 children below one year of age became infected.
Vaccinologist Paul Offit Lied on CNN
The most high-profile vaccinologist in the world, after vaccine “Godfather” Stanley Plotkin, is Paul Offit, but that may be a thing of the past after Siri’s recent revelations and his self-destructing appearance on CNN on the second day of the ACIP meeting.
Offit told viewers he had not been invited to speak at the meeting but internal documents show his claim is false. CDC officials had contacted him repeatedly – via emails, phone calls and a speaker-request form – inviting him to present.
Offit warned viewers that “50% of people in this country have chronic hepatitis B and don’t know it” (only about 0.3% have chronic disease) and suggested newborns were at risk through everyday contact with nannies, daycare workers, and family members because of sharing toothbrushes, towels, or simply being held by an infected adult, which the CDC denied could happen.
Offit described ACIP as a “clown show,” an “anti-vaccine advisory committee” that “puts children in harm’s way.” He lied monstrously saying that before universal infant vaccination, “30,000 children under the age of 10” contracted hepatitis B each year. CDC data presented at the ACIP meeting showed that new hepatitis B cases in children under the age of 10 were around 400 per year before the universal birth dose was introduced.
I am very indebted to journalist Maryanne Demasi, PhD, who wrote many of the articles I quoted above. She gave Offit the opportunity to clarify his remarks but he did not respond. This silence contrasts sharply with the certainty he brings to national television, where his claims are delivered without scrutiny and his financial ties to vaccine manufacturers are almost never mentioned.
Offit is not an impartial commentator. He earned millions from the sale of his stake in Merck’s rotavirus vaccine, RotaTeq, and has long been aligned with the pharmaceutical industry whose products he routinely defends. Yet major news outlets present him as a neutral authority and take his statements at face value.
Conclusions
The media’s reporting on the hepatitis B issue was seriously misleading and their advice that we should trust the “experts” who condemned the ACIP committee’s wise decision is horribly misguided.
The new ACIP’s first chair was biostatistician Martin Kulldorff. He developed the monitoring system the CDC uses for quick detection of vaccine harms, considered the best in the world. On 1 December, Kennedy announced that Kulldorff was appointed to a senior role at the Department of Health and Human Services after he had “transformed ACIP from a rubber stamp into a committee that delivers gold-standard science for the American people.” NIH director Jay Bhattacharya said that “Five years ago, Martin Kulldorff and I co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration calling for an end to pandemic lockdowns. That evidence-based approach to public health now permeates HHS.”
What the media presented was what we call eminence-based medicine, and the medical journals’ reporting on vaccine issues is also a disaster. I shall end with the abstract of an article I published on 10 November:
The reactions to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s initiatives to improve vaccine safety have been almost uniformly negative. I studied how the narratives were framed in a cohort of 33 articles in the BMJ of which 30 were written by journalists or the editor. I focused on whether the reporting was balanced and informative, and whether the articles saw any merit in Kennedy’s reforms in his role as Secretary of Health and Human Services or supported the status quo.
The reporting in the BMJ was highly biased. Much of the information provided in Kennedy’s disfavour was misleading, and some was wrong. All initiatives at improving vaccine safety were condemned, without any analysis of their merits in an evidence-based fashion. Instead, the BMJ cited people who had their own agendas and who condemned Kennedy without providing any evidence in their favour while expressing faith in vaccines, with the industry mantra that they are safe and effective, although all drugs will harm some people.
The BMJ did not take any interest in the widespread and lethal corruption in US healthcare institutions – one of Kennedy’s focus points – but toned it down.
Despite the constant ad hominem attacks, Kennedy has succeeded to introduce important changes and plans related to vaccine safety, guidance about how vaccines are used, and about avoiding neurotoxic metals in vaccine adjuvants.
Dr. Peter Gøtzsche co-founded the Cochrane Collaboration, once considered the world’s preeminent independent medical research organization. In 2010 Gøtzsche was named Professor of Clinical Research Design and Analysis at the University of Copenhagen. Gøtzsche has published over 100 papers in the “big five” medical journals (JAMA, Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, British Medical Journal, and Annals of Internal Medicine). Gøtzsche has also authored books on medical issues including Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime.
Fact Checking The New York Times
Tony Heller | December 6, 2025
The New York Times has a website claiming to show an increase in 90 degree days in US cities. In this short video I fact check their claims using app.visitech.ai
How Much Hotter Is Your Hometown Than When You Were Born? – The New York Times
New York Times’ Bret Stephens Baselessly Blames Israel Critics For Bondi Terrorist Attack
The Dissident | December 14, 2025
The New York Times published an opinion article by the neo-con columnist Bret Stephens, where he baselessly blamed critics of Israel for today’s horrific terrorist attack targeting Jews while they were celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach in Australia, killing 16 people and severely injuring at least 40.
Despite the fact that very little information has even emerged as to what the motivation of the attackers was, Bret Stephens jumped the gun and used the massacre of civilians to smear his political enemies.
Among the people Stephens blamed for the terrorist attack are:
- Green Party legislator Jenny Leong for her criticism of the Israel lobby.
- Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, because he “recognized a Palestinian state and has been outspoken in its condemnation of Israeli actions in Gaza”.
- Palestinian protestors for saying “globalize the intifada”, “resistance is justified”, and “by any means necessary” while protesting the genocide in Gaza.
Stephens admits in the article that there is no evidence that the attack even had anything to do with Gaza or Israel and admitted that it was baseless speculation on his part, writing, “Though we’ll probably learn more in the weeks ahead about the mind-set of Sunday’s killers, it’s reasonable to surmise that what they thought they were doing was ‘globalizing the intifada.’”
Stephens blamed critics of Israel for the attack at Bondi, admitting that the people he slandered have a “political attitude in favor of Palestinian freedom rather than a call to kill their presumptive oppressors,” but added, “But there are always literalists — and it’s the literalists who usually believe their ideas should have real-world consequences. On Sunday, those consequences were written in Jewish blood.”
Stephens’ smear closely mirrors that of the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who similarly weaponized the massacre to score political points, blaming Australia’s recognition of a Palestinian state for the attack, saying, “your call for a Palestinian state pours fuel on the antisemitic fire” and calling for more censorship of Israel-critical protests, saying, “Calls such as ‘Globalise the Intifada’, ‘From the River to the Sea Palestine Will be Free’, and ‘Death to the IDF’ are not legitimate, are not part of the freedom of speech, and inevitably lead to what we witnessed today.”
While Bret Stephens’ repetition of Netanyahu’s claim that opposition to Israel’s mass murder campaign in Gaza led to the senseless violence against civilians at Bondi is baseless-Bret Stephens has openly called for and cheered on the same mass violence against civilians he baselessly blames Israel’s critics for.
In March of 2024, Bret Stephens, in a New York Times article, said that “Israel Has No Choice but to Fight On” and called for the Biden administration to “help Israel win the war decisively” in reference to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which included shooting children in the head and chest, opening fire on starving civilians at aid sites, bombing hospitals and targeting doctors, slaughtering journalists, mass raping and torturing detainees, bombing fertility clinics and setting refugee camps on fire, among other genocidal crimes.
In Ocotber of 2024, Stephens wrote another Op-Ed where he wrote that “We Should Want Israel to Win,” again referring to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, where even the IDF’s own internal data shows that at least 83 percent of people killed were civilians.
Similarly, in a 2023 article, Stephens wrote, “20 Years On, I Don’t Regret Supporting the Iraq War,” adding, “Readers will want to know whether, knowing what I know now, I would still have supported the decision to invade. Not for the reasons given at the time. Not in the way we did it. But on the baseline question of whether Iraq, the Middle East and the world are better off for having gotten rid of a dangerous tyrant, my answer remains yes”, in reference to the criminal U.S. invasion which killed 187,499 – 211,046 civilians.
Most recently, Stephens wrote an article titled, “The Case for Overthrowing Maduro”, cheering on the Trump administration’s slaughter of 80 people on boats in the Caribbean – who they admit they don’t know the identity of- and calling for more strikes on Venezuela in service of a regime change war.
Bret Stephens is using the massacre of civilians at Bondi Beach to smear opponents of the much larger-scale massacres of civilians that he openly supports.
‘The Silence after the Screams’: How Western Media Helped Justify the Rape of Palestinians
Western media amplified Israel’s unverified claims of Hamas “mass rape” while downplaying documented Israeli sexual crimes against Palestinians
By Romana Rubeo | The Palestine Chronicle | November 5, 2025
On Monday, November 3, a group of Israeli soldiers stood outside the Supreme Court in West Jerusalem wearing black masks. They weren’t there to apologize; they were there to defend themselves.
The soldiers, accused of torturing and raping a Palestinian detainee at the notorious Sde Teiman prison, demanded “gratitude” for their actions.
“Instead of appreciation, we received accusations,” one said defiantly. Israeli media covered the scene while Western outlets mostly ignored it.
The same soldiers are part of a criminal case that Israeli prosecutors reluctantly opened in 2024 after video evidence surfaced showing Palestinian detainees stripped, beaten, and sexually assaulted at Sde Teiman.
One Palestinian man was hospitalized with seven broken ribs and a rectal tear, injuries consistent with violent sexual abuse.
The Times of Israel reported the indictment of five reservists for “severe abuse,” while other sources cited evidence of sodomy inside the facility.
Yet, in Western coverage, the word rape almost never appeared. Headlines spoke of “abuse” or “mistreatment,” as though sexual torture were a matter of workplace misconduct.
Contrast this silence with the wall-to-wall coverage of October 7, when Israel accused Hamas fighters of “mass rape.” Those claims, still unproven, became the moral foundation of Israel’s campaign of annihilation in Gaza.
In his latest interview with American journalist Candace Owens, political scientist Norman Finkelstein called the Israeli allegations “genocidal atrocity propaganda.”
After examining more than 5,000 photographs and fifty hours of footage from that day, Finkelstein said he found “not a single shred of evidence of even one rape.” Yet those unverified stories, repeated endlessly by Western outlets, were enough to cast an entire population as subhuman and to legitimize the killing of more than 68,000 Palestinians.
In December 2023, the New York Times published a sprawling investigation titled “Screams Without Words: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.”
The article claimed Hamas fighters had systematically raped Israeli women during the attack. Its pages were filled with graphic descriptions and lurid imagery. The story relied on anonymous witnesses, unverified videos, and second-hand testimony, yet it was presented as conclusive evidence of mass rape.
Within days, it shaped international discourse. Then US President Joe Biden, European leaders, and prominent feminists invoked the Times’ story to condemn Hamas and morally justify Israel’s “retaliation”.
But when journalists and scholars began checking the evidence, the story fell apart. Forensic experts found no physical proof of rape. Several of the supposed witnesses cited by the Times contradicted one another or were later discredited.
In April 2024, more than 50 journalism professors sent a public letter demanding an independent review of the article’s sourcing and editorial process. The Washington Post reported internal dissent within the Times newsroom itself, where reporters said the piece had been “rushed” to meet political expectations.
Meanwhile, the Sde Teiman scandal, an Israeli atrocity supported by video evidence, medical reports, and judicial proceedings, has never received a fraction of the attention that the Times story did. This imbalance is not merely linguistic. It is structural, reflecting the hierarchy of human worth built into Western coverage of the war.
This is how “atrocity propaganda” works. It does not require lies to function, only selective truth. By repeating unverified claims of Hamas rape while downplaying verified Israeli sexual crimes, Western media transformed journalism into a weapon of war.
Romana Rubeo is an Italian writer and the managing editor of The Palestine Chronicle. Her articles appeared in many online newspapers and academic journals. She holds a Master’s Degree in Foreign Languages and Literature and specializes in audio-visual and journalism translation.
NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch is Turning New York City into a Surveillance Colony
By Matt Wolfson | The Libertarian Institute | October 29, 2025
In a recent report for the Libertarian Institute, I investigated Zionists’ role in creating the crisis point at which New York City now finds itself: caught between a colonial elite which has commandeered government and a progressive-socialist backlash to that elite which proposes to expand government. In this report, I will trace how, in response to the progressive-socialist threat to their power, Zionists and their allies are expanding government in new and frightening directions. The leading player in this operation, like in all good intelligence ops, is not a colorful or charismatic character. But she has all of the subtler qualities—connections, management prowess, presentational understatement—that the city’s minders look for in those who hold actual power.
Jessica Tisch, the New York Police Department Commissioner since 2024 who will definitely stay on if either Zohran Mamdani or Andrew Cuomo wins the mayoralty according to public statements made by both men, is the third generation of the billionaire Zionist family that has had prominent roles in shaping the city since the 1980s. Her grandfather, Laurence Tisch, bought CBS in the 1980s not long before his brother Robert bought the New York Giants, establishing the family, which had started in hotels and movie theaters, as the owner of two of the city’s landmark organizations. In the 1990s, Laurence Tisch was a member of The Study Group, the informal philanthropic Zionist gathering co-founded by Leslie Wexner and Charles Bronfman, which led directly and indirectly to the foundation of Taglit Birthright, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and various other projects for Zionist continuity. Laurence’s son and Jessica’s father, James Tisch, is the chairman of the Board of Leows Corporation, the family’s flagship business. James’ wife and Jessica’s mother, Merryl, was the chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, responsible for supervising all educational activities in the state; and is the chair of the State University of New York Board of Trustees, responsible for supervising the state university system.
Within this context of a family involved in media, finance, philanthropy, and part-time politics, Jessica Tisch, who is now 44, charted her own specific path: from security to administration to the cusp of politics with the backing of money. She started in the NYPD in the decade of the September 11 attacks; continued in the department in the 2010s; moved in the first half of the 2020s to the Sanitation Department, arguably New York’s most important after police and fire. She has returned in the mid-2020s to the NYPD as its commissioner, while also widely being considered a potential future mayor. Like Mamdani, Tisch is a product, this time a direct one, of the decades of Zionist influence that preceded her rise. Like Mamdani, rewinding Tisch’s career shows how she is the capstone to a project of military policing that began in the 1990s and 2000s but that has sharpened under pressure into a full-blown project of social control.
That project began when crime rose in New York in the 1980s and 1990s in response to displacement and homelessness facilitated by WASPs, Zionists, and their allies co-opting city government to the benefit of finance and real estate. In response, Eric Breindel, the neoconservative Zionist editor of the New York Post who had extensive connections to Wall Street, arranged for the Post to back the then-longshot Rudolph W. Guiliani as a tough-on-crime candidate, delivering him Staten Island and so the city.
At the same time, Michael Steinhardt, the Zionist financier who was integral in the reinvention of Wall Street in the 1980s, became the major donor for the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which in turn was the major backer of President Bill Clinton, who shepherded to passage in Congress as his main legislative priority the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. This act provided newly elected Mayor Giuliani and his police commissioner William Bratton federal funds for law enforcement, with certain conditions attached that increased local spending on policing as well as the size of the NYPD. The NYPD’s budget increased from $1.7 billion to $3.1 billion between 1993 and 2000, also leading to increased city spending, since, under the terms of the Clinton crime legislation, to receive federal funds the city had to spend funds of its own.
During this period, “crime”—defined as everything from murder to unlicensed street vending—fell in response to across-the-board enforcement. After 2001, Raymond Kelly, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s police commissioner, pushed this practice to its limit with the aggressive practice of “stop and frisk” in minority neighborhoods: a daily distillation of the broader disenfranchisement the black and Latino communities of New York had been experiencing since the 1970s.
Kelly also made sure that the NYPD would benefit from post-9/11 funding of counter-terrorism measures, measures which hinged heavily on techniques for surveillance. And it was by channeling this new priority for social control that Jessica Tisch made her career beginning in 2000s. Fresh out of Harvard, she took “an analyst position available in what was then the counterterrorism bureau” of the NYPD. According to a recent profile in The New York Times:
“Kelly…did not normally meet with applicants for such entry-level jobs, but he ended up interviewing her. ‘Probably because she was a Tisch,’ he said, adding that he had been impressed with her three Harvard degrees.”
“Probably because she was a Tisch” seems like a fair assessment of why the supervisor of 55,000 employees took the time to meet a twenty-something about an entry-level position. But Kelly and Tisch also shared the promising ground of a professional focus: Kelly was committed to surveillance-as-policing, and Tisch’s main interest was data and surveillance. At the NYPD, she began “developing the Domain Awareness System, one of the world’s largest networks of security cameras, including handling contracts to build and expand it.” According to a description of this work in a recent profile of Tisch in New York Magazine, she was Domain’s driving force and Domain her career-maker:
“… Tisch, 27, was tasked with figuring out what to do with more than $100 million in unspent grant money from the federal Department of Homeland Security, which had just built a surveillance network to prevent another terror attack downtown. What if, she asked, the Domain Awareness System went citywide? And what if, instead of trying to stop a suicide bomber, the system tried to spot all kinds of crooks? What if it included the NYPD’s trove of arrest reports and criminal histories? When Tisch sent the privacy guidelines for the system to the lawyers at the New York Civil Liberties Union, they retched…The bosses had the opposite reaction: ‘No, you’ve made it. Congratulations,’ the former colleague recalls them saying.”
Based on an initial grant of $350 million from the Department of Homeland Security and developed with Microsoft technology, the System consists today of “a surveillance network of more than 18,000 interconnected cameras—including those in the private sector—as well as law-enforcement databases.” The system, in one description, “assimilates data from several surveillance tools—license plate readers, closed-circuit television streams, facial recognition software and phone call histories—and uses it to identify people.” As these descriptions suggest, private corporations and nonprofits, for example Rockefeller University in Midtown East Manhattan, can buy in: providing their own cameras then linking them to the surveillance system run out of the NYPD. “And,” according to one report, “when Microsoft turns around and sells the technology to other cities, New York gets a cut.”
Tisch was not only one of the developers, if not the developer, of the system; she also so impressed Kelly with her tenacity dealing with the various technology sub-vendors put in play by the project that he moved her up through the ranks. (She also may have impressed Kelly with her access to funds; the nonprofit the New York Police Foundation, which her uncle chaired and where two of her family members still sit on the board, provided some of the early contributions for testing her surveillance system.) Within a decade, “she became the city’s first information technology commissioner… and within months she was in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, struggling to create a contact tracing system and then a vaccine distribution system.” Throughout this time, Tisch was working with at least one like-minded colleague from a similar background. This was fellow Harvard graduate Rebecca Ulam Weiner, the granddaughter of the Zionist nuclear scientist Stanislav Ulam of the Manhattan Project, whose view of her grandfather’s work is instructive:
“As someone whose job it is to keep secrets, I often wonder whether such an experiment [as the Manhattan Project] would be possible today, scientifically or socially.”
Fast forward to November 2024, and an embattled Mayor Eric Adams, whose allies in the black community have increasingly moved away from him even as powerful Zionists have edged closer, appointed Tisch Commissioner. He did this despite vocal concerns from civil liberties advocates that, in the words of one, “It’s really alarming to see a commissioner who built her career on the infrastructure of mass surveillance.” Weiner is Tisch’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism, and has let it be known that her department “relies on a mind-boggling suite of assets that Americans might otherwise assume are controlled by the CIA, FBI, DHS, Secret Service, or other agencies.” These include:
“… a legion of intelligence analysts, counterassault and dignitary-protection teams, a flotilla of boats…surveillance aircraft, the nation’s biggest bomb squad, a counter-drone unit, a remote contingent of NYPD detectives… and a network of multilingual undercover operatives…”
Among this “remote contingent” is NYPD Detective Charlie Benaim, “[whose] office could be any squad room in Brooklyn, but for years [has been] an Israeli police station near Tel Aviv,” where “Benaim’s been feeding an endless stream of information, in real time, to his bosses back at One Police Plaza.” According to Weiner, Benaim’s function is “asking the New York question, when something is happening, what would it look like it if it were to happen in New York City, and more importantly than that, how do you prevent it?” A new model for Benaim in answering these questions, apparently, is the Hamas uprising of October 7. This suggests either that the NYPD expects a coordinated attack from foreign operators; or that New York’s security leaders see the city as potentially under siege by its own displaced and ghettoized underclass and plan to respond accordingly.
Telling in this regard is the fact that Tisch’s top priority as commissioner is “doubling down on data-driven policing and surveillance,” an aim which has “sparked fierce criticism from watchdog groups that New Yorkers are living in a surveillance state.” According to New York Magazine, Tisch’s proposed reforms fall along four lines. First, she wants to expand actual surveillance capacities by expanding the city’s camera network “to include more privately owned cameras.” Second, she wants to extend the contract of one of Domain’s less reliable components, “the ShotSpotter gunshot-detection system” which “may result in confirmed shootings only less than 15 percent of the time, according to the comptroller’s office,” a fact which Tisch dismisses, “arguing that something is better than nothing.” Third, she wants to use data collected “to surge police resources down to a single block,” allowing for the department to deploy overwhelming force to tackle individual incidents in small areas. (This means essentially treating city policing as counterinsurgency warfare, and it’s not too different than the LAPD tactics that led to the abuse of Rodney King and the fallout that followed.) Finally, “perhaps the biggest change is that she wants to use those same systems and processes to fight ‘chaos,’ not just crime,” meaning that minor noise disturbances or unusual behavior could qualify for police enforcement via surveillance and surges. (Again, this is a retread of the 1990s: “Giuliani-style crackdowns, only with better gear.”)
More instructively still, she feels this way despite at least one recent controversy suggesting that her policies have adverse effects on the very communities historically at the blunt end of militarized policing. According to The New York Times, in an August report, the NYPD used Domain Awareness System’s facial recognition software to identify and arrest for indecent exposure in April a 230 pound 6-foot-2 black man, Trevis Williams. The arrest was made even though a witness said that the offender was about 160 pounds and 5-foot-6 and even though “location data from [Williams’s] phone put him about 12 miles away at the time.” According to the Times, the fact that “a facial recognition program plucked his image from an array of mug shots and the woman identified him as the flasher was enough to land Williams in jail.” This is despite the fact that “other police departments… require investigators to gather more facts before putting a suspect identified by facial recognition into a photo lineup,” and despite advocacy from groups like the American Civil Liberties Union to “ban… the use of facial recognition by the police because of the risk of misidentification.”
“In the blink of an eye, your whole life could change,” Williams told the Times about his experience, adding that he still gets panic attacks since his April arrest and subsequent imprisonment. The Times investigation did not report asking for a comment from the NYPD or its Commissioner. Nor did it report that, as early as 2019, 11,000 cases per year were being investigated by the NYPD with the help of facial recognition software.
Despite collateral damage from her policies, positive media profiles of “Commish Tisch” and her subordinates have been plentiful since her accession. In an April 2025 report in The News section of The New York Times, the paper had the following to say about her: She has “an unlikely and remarkable career”; is “the daughter and granddaughter of two strong women, neither of whom came from money”; “learned hard work by example”; is “talkative and purposeful, but circumspect”; is a “no-nonsense technocrat” and “incredibly competent”; commands “a huge amount of respect”; is “very businesslike,” “[takes] no guff,” and should run for mayor. New York Magazine, the city’s go-to venue for fashion and culture commentary, had run an equally complimentary profile in March of 2025 that included the same political prediction.
And, the month before New York Magazine’s profile of Tisch, Vanity Fair ran a profile of Tisch’s deputy Weiner titled “NYPD Confidential.” Headed by a black-and-white photo of Weiner flanked by members of her squad that seemed ripped from a promotional poster of Captain America, the article’s text gave its subject an equally marquee treatment, describing her as “laser focused,” “unfazed,” “poised, cultivated, pin-sharp, convivial, boundlessly curious, charmingly profane,” and “a lightning-quick study” who had “a wicked sense of humor.” All three of these profiles also emphasized, as The New York Times’ editorial board regularly emphasizes, a recent rise in crime in the city without honing in on its obvious causes: financialization, gentrification, and displacement.
The Times is owned by the Sulzberger Family, whose members are ambivalent about Zionism but who have deep connections to Zionists. (Their executive editor, Joseph Kahn, is the son of a committed Zionist corporatist and runs in the billionaire Zionist milieu; their editorial page is dominated by Jewish Zionists of all political persuasions; and the former head of the Sulzberger family wealth office now heads Bill Ackman’s.) Vanity Fair is still owned by the Newhouse Family, which, as I reported in my recent investigation on the rise of Zionist power in New York, was vital to that project thanks to its ownership of Conde Nast. New York Magazine is dependent for its scoops on access to the city’s financial and philanthropic elite, many of them Zionists—its recent profile subjects include not just Jessica Tisch but Barry Diller and Diane Von Furstenberg and Bill Ackman. The message from these media venues seems clear: the Zionist financial powers of New York are squarely behind Jessica Tisch, and want their readers to know it.
It is not, in this context, a coincidence that the Times ran an article soon after Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic mayoral primary citing anonymous sources to report that Mamdani was being urged to keep Tisch on if he wins the mayoralty as a “steady pair of hands.” It is also not a coincidence that this story came during a period when Dan Loeb and Bill Ackman, younger Zionist financial-philanthropic operators, were attacking Mamdani as soft-on-crime almost daily and shifting their funding focus to Mamdani’s Independent mayoral competitor, Mayor Eric Adams, to the point of personally vetting Adams’s campaign manager before the position was filled. What this suggested at the time was a pincer movement, in which attacks by Loeb and Ackman pressured Mamdani into keeping Tisch on as a sign of faith in the establishment and détente with Zionism.
And, in late October, with Mamdani still attacked by connected Zionist players for purportedly making Jews feel unsafe despite the fact that he has attracted significant Jewish support, this is exactly what occurred. On October 22, Mamdani announced, four days after Andrew Cuomo had announced the same, that he would ask Tisch to stay on should he win the election. The reported terms on which this “ask” was made are not encouraging when it comes to Mamdani’s leverage over Tisch if he is elected mayor. Details in The New York Times painted a scenario in which Mamdani had publicly (and factually erroneously) made Tisch the poster child for safety in the city without extracting any concessions from her camp in return. According to the Times,
“… Mr. Mamdani confirmed his decision during the final televised debate before the Nov. 4 election. ‘Commissioner Tisch took on a broken status quo, started to deliver accountability, rooting out corruption and reducing crime across the five boroughs,’ Mr. Mamdani said at the debate. “I’ve said time and again that my litmus test for that position will be excellence’… Ms. Tisch’s allies have signaled for months that she would want to stay in the job regardless of the election’s outcome. [Mamdani] campaign officials declined to detail any conversations between the candidate and the commissioner, but said they were confident she would accept. Delaney Kempner, a spokeswoman for Ms. Tisch, referred a reporter back to an earlier statement from the commissioner stressing that ‘it is not appropriate for the police commissioner to be directly involved or to seem to be involved in electoral politics.’”
Tisch’s strategic mix of aggressive behind-the-scenes lobbying and Olympian public detachment sends a message: as New York Magazine put it less than twenty-four hours after Mamdani made the announcement, she is “the Heiress Who Could Make or Break the Socialist Mayor.” Not long after this article ran, Hakeem Jeffries, the New York Democratic leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, ended five months of ostentatious non-endorsement of Mamdani with a statement endorsing Mamdani—specifically praising his willingness to keep on Tisch. Already, then, thanks to a series of private maneuvers and public feints, Tisch has been placed in the driver’s seat: the establishment’s cooperation with Mamdani is clearly conditioned on Mamdani’s continued acceptance of her.
One difficulty of critiquing moves like these is that the conflation of “Jewish power” and New York is an old trope, in part because New York has been since the early twentieth century a Jewish city. So it should be emphasized, as I have emphasized in my previous report on this topic, that New York’s problem is not a problem of Jewish power. It is a problem of government-tied financialization at the hands of a small number of WASPs and then a small number of Zionists, and it has come at the expense of the people who live in the city, among them many Jews. Now, with a direct threat to Zionists’ influence in the person of Zohran Mamdani, the operation is out front. Zionist financiers have sent one of their own to occupy the most powerful security position in the city, and they are intent on keeping her there. If they fail to install their ally Andrew Cuomo in the mayoralty, which will give Tisch carte blanche, the prospect of them working to sabotage a Mamdani mayoralty in the lead-up to a Tisch For Mayor campaign in 2029 is a very real one.
They will likely do this much like they managed the securance of Jessica Tisch’s job: with media attacks meant to maximize pressure on Mamdani; followed by private assurances to Mamdani that the attacks will stop if concessions follow. These public-private feints, in turn, will push Mamdani into concessions which will make him lose face with his base, isolating him between an unfriendly establishment and a disillusioned electorate. (This trend is already occurring, albeit at the edges, after Mamdani’s public commitment to keeping Tisch, whom many Mamdani voters see as a threat to civil liberties.) Tisch’s allies will manage these plays with the help of The New York Times and other organs of influence (the Conde Nast publications, New York Magazine, the New York Post) which by their own admission are pining for technocratic government predicated on what they call “effective management.”
But there is another equally bad outcome that could accrue should Mamdani win the mayoralty and Tisch stay on as police commissioner. This is the fusion of the most dangerous potential aspect of socialism, total government direction of the economy, with the most dangerous potential aspect of Zionism: total techno-military colonial control. It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to see how, under a de facto power-sharing agreement between Mamdani and Tisch (Mamdani in charge of domestic welfare, Tisch in charge of security) the worst impulses of both systems will merge to create a city government which is totalistically involved in every aspect of its citizens’ lives, Singapore transfused with Sweden. This outcome for a city which for a century has been read as a triumph of American individualism would be, to understate the case, a seismic shift.
How Zionist Influence in New York Gave Rise to Zohran Mamdani
By Matt Wolfson | The Libertarian Institute | October 14, 2025
Coverage of Zohran Mamdani’s run for New York City mayor is focused on the outsized politics at play in the race: democratic socialism, Islam, state-owned grocers, former Governor Andrew Cuomo, until recently incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, and President Donald Trump. But this risks missing the real story in New York, which is the decades-long creation and maintenance of a financialized, factionalized city of free market distortions and middle class displacement at the hands of powerful Zionists and their allies that led to backlash and Mamdani’s rise. Rewinding Mamdani’s catapault to politcal stardom reveals that New York’s current situation—its transition from a city hospitable to the working and middle classes and genuine free exchange of goods and services to a feudal one of government-backed financiers and service workers—is in many ways the work of a little more than a dozen Zionist financiers who twisted government to their ends.
Zionism in New York was part of a shift in the city begun by establishment-connected WASPs away from government by wards and organizers and toward rule by government-connected finance. The originator was Nelson Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller’s grandson and the governor of New York from 1959 to 1973, who floated New York City’s bills by arranging for banks like Chase Manhattan (run by his brother David) to buy bonds. These new bonds covered the old bills even though the bonds were not backed by actual assets of the city’s but by anticipated returns; e.g. “tax anticipation bonds,” “bond anticipation notes,” and “moral obligation bonds.” This meant the city borrowed from the bankers, paid a portion of the interest, and borrowed again, while having no long-term way to pay back the full amount of ever-increasing debt.
The fix to this problem created by financiers came from financiers: a consortium set up in 1975 by Nelson Rockefeller, now vice president, to “solve” the city’s $6 billion debt. The consortium operated through various vehicles with names like the Municipal Assistance Corporation and the Emergency Financial Control Board and it achieved this “fixing” in a predictably self-interested way. It cut out of influence the city’s old political power brokers—Jewish, Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican, and black politicians with connections to their communities. It then executed a bait-and-switch. It cut city funds from supporting welfare and unions in the name of small government while actually redirecting those funds to support financial development via investing in a real estate boom driven by a handful of connected players that attracted new “talent” to the city.
The main beneficiaries were rising Wall Street power brokers, the most notable ones Zionist, for whom the 1980s was a kind of heyday. The roster included Laurence and Robert Tisch, Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, Michael Steinhardt, the Bronfmans, Michael Milken, Stephen Schwarzman, and high-end retailers like Victoria Secret’s Leslie Wexner and Leonard and Ronald Lauder, the sons of Estee Lauder and heirs to her fortune. One difficulty of critiquing a cohort like this is that the conflation of “Jewish power” and New York is an old trope, in part because New York has been, since the early twentieth century, a Jewish city. So it should be emphasized that this cohort was small and highly specific. It was distinct from older generations of New York Jews—not just Jewish ward players like Abraham Beame, New York’s last mayor under its old power dispensation, but Jewish financiers like Felix Rohatyn, who played a major role in stabilizing the city’s debt in the 1970s.
Players like Beame and Rohatyn had planted their stakes firmly in America and nowhere else. Having experienced the rise of the Nazi Party in an economically cratered Germany as a childhood reality, they were committed to creating the conditions for what they hoped would be lasting social peace. Zionists, by contrast, had their eye on the military-corporate apparatus and its ties to Israel, and they were not especially concerned with the effects of their actions on the ground. They also rejected what would become the mores of the majority of Jews and especially Jews of a later generation: intermarriage, mixing, diverse assimilation. Their style was self-consciously distinctive and gloves off, and beginning in the 1980s they executed an aggressive reinvention not just of the financial markets but of New York.
Part of this reinvention was done, much as the Rockefellers’ rise to influence in New York had been done, through philanthropy, but at a much greater scale. Among these Zionist players’ direct bequests were the Steinhardt Conservatory at the Bronx Botanic Gardens, the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, the NYU Tisch School of the Arts, NYU Langone’s Tisch Hospital, the Tisch Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum, the Tisch Children’s Zoo in Central Park, the Leonard Lauder Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, Ronald S. Lauder’s Neue Museum, and the NYU Bronfman Center.
Another part of this reinvention was done through real estate, which, like Wall Street, was increasingly dominated by Zionists. Perhaps most notable among them was Lawrence D. Ackman of Ackman-Ziff, the firm which redeveloped West 34th Street, West 42nd Street, and Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side in the 1970s and 1980s and turned portions of 9th Avenue into the high-end Chelsea market in the 1990s.
So far, government had been indirectly incentivizing development; then, in the 2000s, government got directly involved. Philanthropy and real estate became direct tools of government with the mayoralty from 2002 to 2014 of Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire financial services provider and the man most connected to this class by Zionism and finance. Bloomberg’s projects pushed in one direction: using government policy and finance capital to redevelop the city to create a tourist and tech mecca. His opening gambit was re-zoning 40% of the city. He then filled those rezoned spaces with public-private projects—parks, high-rises, high-end department stores—displacing middle and working class New Yorkers and driving up rents for everyone else.
This was not a free market experiment, where the best contractor gets the development job or the philanthropic bequest. This was explicitly a project of wealthy and connected Zionists with ties to the mayor. As Leonard Lauder told it to The New York Times some years later, “When Mike Bloomberg was the mayor, he was the ultimate power broker. He would call me up on the phone and say, ‘I need this and this and this, OK?’” Hollywood Zionists who came East were mobilized too, notably the media executive Barry Diller and his wife, the designer Diane von Furstenburg, and the music producer David Geffen. So was a new generation of real estate Zionists like Steven M. Ross of Related Companies, the developer of Columbus Circle, and Gary Barnett of Extell Development Company, the son of a rabbi and former diamond trader with significant holdings in Israel. So, finally, was a new generation of Zionist financiers like the hedge fund operators Daniel Loeb and Bill Ackman, Lawrence Ackman’s son.
Development proceeded from there. Bill Ackman’s first wife Karen Herskovitz and Laurence Tisch’s niece Laurie Tisch were major backers of the public park The High Line and the High Line’s anchor building, the relocated Whitney Museum of American Art. This was Bloomberg’s pioneer re-development project: a park built on former railway lines that cut through the Lower West Side to Midtown West, from 4th to 34th Street. Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg provided the funds for Little Island off West 13th Street west of the High Line, which “replace[d] the dilapidated Pier 54, envisioning an extraordinary new pier combining public Park and performance space.” Stephen M. Ross, facilitated by Bloomberg and later backed by an infusion from the Saudi Public Investment Fund, developed Bloomberg’s culminating project: the mega-mall Hudson Yards on West 34th Street at the top of the High Line. Stephen Schwarzman donated $100 million to the New York Public Library. David Geffen donated $100 million to refurbish the New York Philharmonic, with the help of Leonard Lauder and Bloomberg confidante (and Zionist) Barbara Walters.
Then there was real estate. A bevy of “supertall” skyscrapers which cast shadows over the surrounding buildings and streets were developed by Gary Barnett’s Extell, among the most prolific developers in Manhattan. (The occupants of Extell’s and other supertall developments were mostly financial workers and Saudi princes, who complained when the buildings leaked from the inside and swayed in the wind.) Smaller versions of Extell’s developments appeared in Brooklyn neighborhoods, built with cheap materials and generally agreed by locals to be eyesores meant for purchase by out-of-towners. Imitators of these projects abounded, thanks to Bloomberg’s largesse via not just re-zoning but also his provision of incentives to developers and his personnel intercession to make some projects happen. During his mayoralty, seven of the twenty tallest buildings in the city were built, along with smaller towers in areas ranging from downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn to Harlem.
In all of these spaces, the natural circulation of neighborhoods, which depends on small businesses and schools and places of worship, was replaced by “excursion destinations” constructed with enormous capital investment from powerful financiers with access to government. These high rises, parks, and cultural centers and the luxury apartments surrounding them also functioned as surveillance spaces, with manicured lawns for “relaxation” flanked by buildings which were easy to watch and patrol. And they functioned as class filters, siphoning from Manhattan the middle income earners priced out by rising rents and replacing them with finance workers or wealthy foreign nationals looking for second apartment homes. These new arrivals, in turn, relied for their needs on a growing number of service workers working low-wage shifts in restaurants or at Doordash—many of them undocumented.
This finance-and-philanthropy-based surveillance-and-extraction model is quite similar to the fundamentals of the “Raze-and-Rebuild” program being pushed by prominent Zionists for Gaza: a space meant to be serviced by undocumenteds and inhabited by financiers and tourists once the “locals” are “relocated.” It is also quite similar to the cities of authoritarian regimes in West Asia and the Gulf States that rose in the 2010s. And there is past precedent for it in the developments of Paris and Berlin at the hands of authoritarian regimes of the nineteenth century—developments which immiserated the working and middle class of these cities and seeded the ground for the cycle of revolt and reaction that created fascism.
But these explicitly feudal parallels have gone almost completely unremarked on in New York, probably because Zionist financiers have also assumed positions at the helms of the city’s education system and media nexus.
At the hands of Laurence Tisch’s daughter-in-law Merryl Tisch, as Chair of the Board of Regents (in charge of education in New York state) she and her allies Andrew Cuomo and Michael Bloomberg put a focus on standardized testing in the name of “merit.” This functioned to place “high achieving” outer borough students into private or “special” schools in Manhattan rather than giving outer borough schools the resources to help these students represent their communities. At the hands of the longtime presidents of New York University and Columbia, the city’s two most powerful universities have expanded their footprints off the real estate boom and muted critiques of the crony corporatism behind it. Successive Zionist executives and op-ed editors of The New York Times and Conde Nast, which is owned since the 1980s by the Zionist Newhouse Family and publishes Vogue and Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, media coverage of New York has celebrated expansion, “modernization,” modernizers, and the celebrities and fashion innovations these shifts bring to the city. So has CBS News, owned by first the Tisches in the 1980s and 1990s and then the Redstones, another Zionist family, from the 1990s to the 2020s. Despite the quiet admonitions of older players like Felix Rohaytn against the dangers of this insularity, the fantasy of empire management has turned New York into something closer to nineteenth century Europe than anything Americans might recognize.
This project only continues faster today. Zionists like New York Times columnists Thomas Friedman and Ezra Klein are backing the “Abundance Agenda,” a spate of policies to fast-track building permits in urban areas across the nation to combat housing scarcity, which will accrue to the benefit of governmentally connected developers and financiers able to manage large-scale projects. Academics from MIT, the site of lavish donations from New York Zionist financiers like Jeffrey Epstein and Stephen Schwarzman, have been calling for New York to become a “leisure city” catering to tourists and younger workers in the finance industry.
Of course, just as there is backlash to colonization abroad, there is backlash to it at home. In the 1980s and 1990s, the backlash came in the form of crime, boycotts, and riots, and protests from leftwing activists and the leadership of black and Hispanic communities whose influence had waned after the 1970s. In the 2010s, these marginalized figures received a new infusion of outside energy from political progressives who had built up their power in universities and the arts using state grants, in effect commandeering parts of the institutions Zionists had funded to enhance their own control. These players brought media sophistication and an ideological agenda to the on-the-ground communal left which had been rudderless. Meantime, the on-the-ground left brought to the table a close connection to the communities at the stick end of Zionists’ policies. The realization of the success of this synthesis was the mayoralty of the progressive Bill De Blasio, who within three months of beginning his first term was publicly criticized by allies of Zionist philanthropists for failing to give them the attention they felt they were due.
Then, in the 2020s, came De Blasio’s successor, Zohran Mamdani, a more effective progressive (as De Blasio freely admits) on every level. Where De Blasio talked about a “tale of two cities” and universal Pre-K, Mamdani talked, over and over and in original ways, about affordability, and took direct aim at the enemies of affordability in New York, finance, and Zionism. Historically, as I have reported elsewhere, socialism and its ideological cousin redistributionism have occurred in America after long periods when finance twisted around the state and distorted its functions. At a certain point in these processes, Americans respond to a program pushing for government money to flow not toward financial firms or weapons contractors but directly to them. Indeed, Mamdani’s victory speech when he won the primary, which emphasized returning the city to serve the interests of the working people who make New York run, was an emblem of exactly what New Yorkers appear to be looking for.
Bill Ackman, Dan Loeb, and other members of the club of Zionist financial elites have sounded the alarm of creeping socialism since Mamdani’s victory, but they have not blamed themselves for creating the distortive conditions that led to it. In fact, they’ve done the opposite. They’ve turned to a characteristically Zionist—which is to say colonialist—solution to rising discontent. This is a solution which they’ve slowly been developing since the 1990s and which had its antecedents or parallels in nineteenth century Europe and the twenty-first century Middle East: techno-military law enforcement to control “restive populations.” As I will show in a coming report, if Andrew Cuomo wins on November 4, the militarist play being run by Zionists will continue without any meaningful check, since Cuomo is both a close Zionist ally and not known for his concern for civil liberties. If Mamdani wins, there may be checks on this militarism, but these checks will not be absolute. Instead, some measure of militarized law enforcement will coexist with socialist government expansion. Together, these could lead New York on a path toward government control across sectors: security, economy, politics, society.
Quit Promoting Mad Schemes, New York Times, Blocking the Sun is a Dangerous Climate Gamble
By Anthony Watts | ClimateRealism | September 25, 2025
In The New York Times’ (NYT) op-ed, “Turns Out Air Pollution Was Good for Something,” Zeke Hausfather and David Keith argue that because sulfur particles from past industrial pollution once cooled the planet by reflecting sunlight, policymakers should now consider a deliberate version of that process. They suggest aircraft could inject sulfur into the upper atmosphere to mimic the cooling once provided by dirty smokestacks, pointing to volcanic eruptions such as Mount Pinatubo in 1991 as evidence the method would work. This idea is wrong-headed madness. Experience demonstrates geo-engineering ideas such as this have dangerous and unpredictable consequences.
The authors write that “geoengineering the climate in this way is not a new idea,” and claim that “a more modest approach” of maintaining present temperatures with controlled sulfur injections buys the world time for carbon dioxide reductions to continue.
But geoengineering by blocking the sun is a dangerous fool’s errand. First, the potential unintended consequences are enormous and unpredictable. Sulfur dioxide particles injected into the upper atmosphere would scatter sunlight differently depending on latitude. At middle to low latitudes, sunlight passes through less atmosphere, so scattering effects are modest. But at higher latitudes, sunlight travels through more atmosphere, amplifying scattering—just as sunsets turn red because of the increased distance light travels through more air and particles at low sun angles. Injecting reflective particles globally would therefore not create uniform cooling. It would over-cool the polar and sub-polar regions, while perhaps under-cooling equatorial areas. The result would be an uneven, artificial climate system with consequences no climate model can reliably predict.
These regional impacts would not just be academic. Farmers in Canada or Scandinavia might see shortened growing seasons. Populations in northern Russia could face colder winters. Developing nations in Africa or Asia could sue over disrupted rainfall patterns or crop failures. Geoengineering would open a legal and geopolitical Pandora’s box of claims, counterclaims, and lawsuits, as countries argue that someone else’s climate tinkering damaged their own livelihoods. Even Hausfather and Keith concede in their NYT op-ed that large-scale deployment “could exacerbate climate change in some locations, perhaps by shifting rainfall patterns.”
Aside from these uncertain consequences, one consequence of this scheme is certain, increased sulfur pollution, most likely resulting in acid rain which changes the pH of waters and damages buildings, statues, and other structures.
History warns us as well. The eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 produced the “year without a summer” in 1816, dropping temperatures, as seen in the figure below, devastating agriculture across Europe and North America. Crops failed, famines spread, and tens of thousands perished.
More recently, Mount Pinatubo’s eruption in 1991 cooled the globe by about half a degree Celsius (0.9 degree Fahrenheit) for at least 20 months, disrupting rainfall patterns in the process. The eruption also depleted the ozone layer.
Scientists have also raised red flags about such schemes mimicking the Pinatubo eruption. A 2018 study in Nature Ecology & Evolution warned that solar geoengineering could “abruptly terminate” and trigger rapid global warming if deployment stopped. Researchers published a paper in 2022 in the journal Science of the Anthropocene, have cautioned that stratospheric aerosol injection could delay, but not prevent, ocean acidification, and could undermine incentives for emissions reductions. Back in 2014, LiveScience argued that “Geoengineering Ineffective Against Climate Change, Could Make Worse.”
These papers together strongly suggest that geoengineering via sun-blocking/aerosol injection is not a benign or risk-free option and that its consequences are highly uncertain, with many potential negative side-effects that are difficult or impossible to predict. Deliberately blocking the sun is not a climate solution—it is climate roulette.
Even advocates of the idea admit it is nothing more than a Band-Aid. As Hausfather and Keith acknowledge, “sunlight reflection is no panacea” and “treats the symptoms of climate change but not the underlying disease.” They also admit the risk of political dependency: once started, stopping a geoengineering program could trigger rapid warming rebound, a scenario far more destabilizing than gradual warming itself.
Steve Milloy, writing in the Daily Caller, explained why this notion is absurd. In “Trump’s EPA Is Right To Be Skeptical Of ‘Sun-Blocking’,” he highlighted that sulfur dioxide particles are air pollution—pollution that once drove acid rain and deadly smog events. Milloy sulfur notes that particles eventually fall back to Earth, meaning a program of perpetual injections would be required. “It sounds like a great business model on paper,” he wrote, “but people can’t just launch potentially dangerous air pollutants into the sky without some sort of guidelines and monitoring.”
The unintended consequences are not only physical but political. If wealthy nations take it upon themselves to inject particles into the stratosphere, what happens if poorer nations see droughts or floods as a result? International lawsuits and even conflicts could follow. The specter of “climate weaponization” looms large—as Milloy noted, the ability to control sunlight could be seen as a tool of geopolitical leverage.
The NYT itself might have cooled to the idea. Shortly after the op-ed was first published, the title was changed from “A Responsible way to Cool the Planet” to “Turns Out Air Pollution Was Good for Something.” Perhaps other scientists raised similar concerns as have been highlighted here and the NYT decided to walk back the “responsible” part.
The bottom line is this: blocking the sun to cool the planet is an inherently dangerous idea. Sunlight is the basis of life on Earth. Corrupting its distribution and intensity will not stabilize climate but destabilize societies. History, common sense, and scientific warnings all converge on the same conclusion: geoengineering by aerosol injection is not a solution but an invitation to chaos.
The New York Times’s op-ed promoting intentional sulfur pollution is a reversal of decades of clean air progress, representing climate recklessness, not climate realism.
Western media’s pre-existing condition? Gaza atrocity denialism
By Rebecca Ruth Gold | The New Arab | September 10, 2025
In August 2025, for the first time in its 20 year history, the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) classified Gaza as having reached phase 5, the most acute phase in its system. This classification meant that Gaza was deep into a famine, and many of the starving have already suffered irreversible damage.
The IPC locates Gaza City as being fully within phase 5. The same level of food scarcity is expected to reach Deir al Balah and Khan Younis by late September.
Never before has the IPC made a full phase 5 famine classification outside Africa. It had certainly never reached this classification for a location that was just a few kilometres from world class restaurants. As UN Under-Secretary General Tom Fetcher put it in a memorable speech, the Gaza famine is taking place “within a few hundred meters of food, within a fertile land.”
The Gaza famine has been engineered in a manner that is without precedent in world history. People have described Israel’s siege as medieval, but the famine is backed by the full force of modern technology. Rather than looking to early history for analogies, what is happening in Gaza is best understood as a grotesquely futuristic iteration of modern biopolitics.
“Pre-existing conditions”
Within days of report’s release, Israel immediately called for its retraction. There is nothing unusual about a state that has created a famine pulling all the levers at its disposal to deny it. What makes Israel different from the average perpetrator is the eagerness of US and European media outlets to spread the perpetrator’s denialist narrative.
Already in July, the groundwork had been laid in mainstream outlets like the New York Times, which ran a “correction” to the caption it provided on an image of Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, a child dying of starvation in Gaza. When the cover image of his emaciated body was used for the story on Gazans dying of starvation, Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), which controls the entry of food and medicine into Gaza, informed the Times that al-Mutawaq was born with cerebral palsy.
Israeli media, including I24 and The Jerusalem Post set to work spreading this misinformation and suggesting that vulnerable individuals dying of starvation could not be treated as evidence of a famine.
Soon after, the Times stated that al-Mutawaq had “pre-existing health problems.” But what they failed to disclose is that this “correction” was made in response to Israeli pressure and that all famines target the vulnerable first. While cerebral palsy is a lifelong condition, it is not typically fatal for young children absent conditions of siege and famine. Had the victims of starvation not been Palestinian, common sense would have prevailed. No one would have found it necessary to make the obvious point that death by starvation combined with co-morbidities is still death by starvation.
Other media outlets soon followed, adjusting their captions to reflect, even in the abstract and untethered from specific cases, the possibility that children dying of starvation were suffering from “preexisting conditions.”
The Associated Press captioned the images on a photo essay by Palestinian photojournalist Jehad Alshrafi documenting how starvation is attacking children’s bodies with the following disclaimer: “In Gaza, malnutrition is often worsened by preexisting conditions and compounded by illnesses linked to inadequate health care and poor sanitation, largely the result of the ongoing war.”
Perhaps the Associated Press thought that they were mitigating the harm done by such captions by acknowledging that these so-called “preexisting conditions” that Israel and its defenders are using to deny evidence of famine are in fact “the result of the ongoing war.” But they should not be excused so easily for their complicity in famine denial.
The “pre-existing conditions” discourse has a dark history in the US, where it was introduced during the 1940s to deny healthcare to ailing patients. Even more ominously in Gaza, the “pre-existing conditions” that the media uses to whitewash famine are themselves the direct result of two decades of siege.
Legitimising Israel’s narratives
The right-wing US media company Free Press further disseminated the Israeli narrative when it published a story claiming that the “symbols of Gazan starvation […] suffer from other health problems.” Once again, ableism was used to deny the Gaza famine.
If the sick were made sicker by Israel’s engineered famine, it was implied that it was their own fault, and Israel could not be blamed for Gaza’s starvation. Yet the “preexisting conditions” cited by the Free Press journalists—rickets and cystic fibrosis—are not typically fatal for young children.
The fact that children in Gaza afflicted with these diseases are at a much higher risk of imminent death only confirms the severity of the famine, as well as its wider impact on conditions of life and mortality rates. Yet some media outlets downplayed the famine by focusing on the medical challenges faced by children who are dying of starvation.
On the very day the IPC released its famine report, CNN redacted its own story on starvation in Gaza by “updating” its captions to “reflect new information regarding the condition of some of the subjects.”
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu—himself a war criminal whom the International Criminal Court has indicted with “crimes of starvation,” marking the first time it had ever charged any leader with that crime—endorsed the Free Press story. He did not acknowledge all that his own government had done to undermine accurate reporting and to block data collection on starvation in Gaza.
The Gaza famine is an atrocity, a war crime, and evidence for genocide not just because it leads to deaths from starvation. No less fundamentally, it contributes to the breakdown of a social order. Famine tears communities apart. Mothers are forced to watch their children starve, and children watch their parents risk their lives—sometimes getting shot and killed—while searching for food to keep them alive.
Having normalised famine denialism through a eugenicist discourse in July, Israel was well-prepared to escalate its information warfare when the IPC issued its landmark report in August.
Israel attacked the report on two fronts. First, by falsely claiming that the data was biased. Second, by smearing the report authors due to their alleged political biases. As for the data-related dispute, the official X account for the state of Israel falsely insisted that the IPC had “forged” a famine by lowering the threshold to 15% malnutrition among the general population, as measured by upper-arm circumference. Yet the 15% malnutrition standard, measured according to upper arm circumference, was also relied on for previous IPC reports for other locations that reached a phase 5 famine assessment, including Sudan in 2024 and South Sudan in 2020.
As Jeremy Konyndyk, President of Refugees International concludes, Israel’s misrepresentation “is not a good-faith misread. It is a campaign of concerted disinfo[rmation].” The IPC quickly refuted Israel’s false claims.
Denialism
Food security experts criticise the IPC for being too conservative in its metrics. The general consensus is that the IPC places the bar for phase 5 famine classification too high. By the time famine is assessed by the IPC, mortality rates will have sharply escalated (as happened in Gaza during the second half of July 2025), and for many of those who are starving it will be too late to save them.
Unlike most European countries, the US did not issue any official response to the IPC famine report. On 27 August, during an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council which had been convened to address the famine in Gaza, US Ambassador Dorothy Shea to the UN rejected the report by alleging that one of the authors was biased against Israel. Shea’s critique was based on guilt-by-association and did not engage with the substance of the report’s claims.
The US’s denialist stance was explicitly rejected by all other 14 of the 15 Security Council members, who issued a statement affirming that they “trust the IPC’s work and methodology.” However, this consensus will be meaningless unless further measures are taken in defiance of the US.
Indeed, denialism is a core feature of Israel’s information war and is one reason why the genocide persists. In October 2023, less than three weeks into the Gaza genocide, U.S. President Joe Biden stated that he doubted the veracity of the casualty reports provided by the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza. In a classic case of denying Palestinians the right to narrate their own extermination, he said “I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.”
These same reports that Biden cast doubt on had been deemed reliable by the United Nations, human rights groups, and mainstream—even the Israeli—media, not to mention Biden’s own State Department.
It was the first time a US President cast doubt on the validity of the figures provided by the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
Subsequent reporting and scholarship has shown that the Ministry of Health’s numbers are likely to be a drastic undercount; importantly, they don’t include indirect deaths from Palestinians who died due to lack of food, water, medicine, and medical care. Yet, mainstream US media started to refer to Gaza’s Ministry of Health as “Hamas-run” in order to undermine the source.
Around the same time, Israel launched a campaign questioning the casualty figures provided by the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza. The Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN uncritically absorbed Israel’s messaging and began attaching “Hamas-run” to every reference to casualty figures from the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza.
For no other nation does the media find it necessary to preface every reference to a civilian agency with the name of the political faction governing that country. Civilian agencies ought to be respected for the work they do, wherever they happen to be located.
Ending impunity, sanctions now
The crime of famine often converges in practice with the crime of genocide. For this reason, both kind of denialist narratives often flourish together. Just as complicity in genocide is a crime under international law, so should complicity in famine bring criminal sanctions.
In the first days of September 2025, as the famine and mass murder of civilians in Gaza continued to spiral out of control, Belgium announced that it would formally sanction Israel. The following day, Scotland announced similar measures. The majority of European states have maintained full complicity in this genocide, but the impunity that has been granted to Israel for decades is finally beginning to fray.
Famine expert Alex de Waal has compared famine to torture at the societal level. Systematic forced starvation creates a system in which “the biological imperative of survival turns against every impulse that makes us humans—compassion, solidarity, and love.”
The people of Gaza have pooled all their resources to resist this stage of social breakdown. That they have been able to withstand the pressures of famine for so long attests to the strong social and familial bonds that pre-existed the genocide.
However, no community can survive intact when their starvation becomes so acute that their bodies begin to consume themselves. Mass death by starvation awaits the people of Gaza unless we take action to stop the blockade and force Israel to open its borders and let aid flood Gaza.
Rebecca Ruth Gould is a Distinguished Professor of Comparative Poetics and Global Politics, at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.
Science-for-hire companies violate scientific norms, degrade public discourse, and facilitate the mass poisoning of society
By Toby Rogers | August 27, 2025
Last week, the New York Times published a bizarre “Guest Essay” on autism by Jessica Steier, a Pharma mercenary who has at least ten financial conflicts of interest and no background in autism research. I submitted a reply to the article to correct her disinformation and the NY Times refused to publish it.
Here are the facts for anyone who wants to read them:
Jessica Steier runs a science-for-hire company, “Unbiased Science.” She uses a number of pass-through organizations to launder contributions from large pharmaceutical and chemical companies. However, one can still figure out a lot of her funders (see article on “Unbiased Science Podcast” in SourceWatch). Steier advises an infant formula company and is an affiliate for a company that makes monosodium glutamate (MSG). Her podcast has taken money from 3M, Procter & Gamble, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, Moderna, and CSL Seqirus (a flu vaccine manufacturer).
Steier is cartoonishly evil. From SourceWatch:
Steier’s Unbiased Science Podcast:
• Described the herbicide glyphosate as “safe for use”
• Declared polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) in Teflon to be “non-toxic to humans”
• Called the Environmental Working Group Dirty Dozen list of produce with the most and least pesticide residues “a fear-based marketing ploy”
• Claimed GMOs are “safe,” “nutritious,” and “beneficial to consumers, producers, and the environment” and
• Called hydrogenated oil “a safe dietary fat.”
The Unbiased Science Podcast recorded two episodes on organic food and farming in December 2022 and January 2023 in which they argued that organic pesticides are more harmful than synthetic pesticides used in chemical farming…
Andrea C. Love [Steier’s co-host] defended the artificial sweetener aspartame as “safe,” said in an interview that she has “at least one diet soda a day,” and the Podcast posted on Instagram that “aspartame does not pose a health risk to humans, cancer or otherwise, especially at levels we would consume.”
Love and Steier were critical of the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s ranking of the chemicals considered possibly carcinogenic to humans in 2023.
SourceWatch provides even more evidence of Steier’s toxic sophistry here.
For those who are new to these topics, mountains of evidence from The Defender, Beyond Pesticides, and Moms Across America, among others, show why all of Steier’s claims listed above are junk science.
Nearly everything Steier writes in her “Guest Essay” on autism is demonstrably false. For example, Steier:
- Thinks mercury and aluminum in vaccines are fine even though they are known neurotoxicants (see Grandjean and Landrigan, 2014, Supplementary appendix).
- Omits the fact that Mark, Anne, and David Geier sued the Maryland Board of Physicians and won (and then a higher court retroactively granted “absolute immunity” to this private board even though the Maryland legislature never gave it that right).
- Has apparently not read any of the 55 autism prevalence studies in the U.S. since 1970, so she is oblivious to the fact that autism rates have increased 32,158% over that time period.
- Seems unaware that a Danish study she cited favorably recently issued a correction after they discovered, post-publication, 136% more neurodevelopmental events, including autism and ADHD, that changed their research findings.
- Has never read, or just plain ignores, the six vaccinated vs. unvaccinated studies that show that vaccines significantly increase autism risk (see summaries in Rogers, 2025).
Science-for-hire companies will say or do anything for money. Steier’s company, “Unbiased Science,” is relatively new. However, it uses the same playbook developed by other notorious science-for-hire firms, including Gradient, Exponent, and Ramboll. They are often referred to as “rented white coats” (see discussion in Rogers, 2019). Anyone citing Steier as a “public health expert” has no idea what they are talking about.
The NY Times devoted considerable resources, including two graphic designers and prominent placement online and in the Sunday print edition, in the attempt to make this trashy hit piece look presentable to its readers. The NY Times’ failure to disclose Steier’s extensive conflicts of interest and its refusal to publish critical comments in connection with this “Guest Essay” make me wonder if this was a paid advertorial at the behest of a pharmaceutical company.
The autism epidemic is a matter of enormous national importance. Yet everything that the NY Times publishes on autism is an attempt to cover up the causes and protect the powerful industries that are culpable. Unfortunately, in the midst of this crisis, the NY Times has abandoned its role as “the newspaper of record” and is now a criminal syndicate that is endangering the health of all Americans.
Toby Rogers has a Ph.D. in political economy from the University of Sydney in Australia and a Master of Public Policy degree from the University of California, Berkeley. His research focus is on regulatory capture and corruption in the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Rogers does grassroots political organizing with medical freedom groups across the country working to stop the epidemic of chronic illness in children. He writes about the political economy of public health on Substack.
The real Russiagate scandal blows away Watergate for crimes and treason by U.S. establishment
Strategic Culture Foundation | August 1, 2025
So the hoax is finally officially acknowledged. “Russiagate” – the mainstream narrative, that is – is now described by American intelligence chiefs as a fabrication that was concocted to overturn the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.
Tulsi Gabbard, the current Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and CIA director John Ratcliffe have both accused former President Barack Obama of engaging in a “treasonous conspiracy” to subvert the constitutional process. It’s not just Obama who is implicated in this high crime. Other former senior officials in his 2013-17 administration, including former DNI James Clapper, CIA director John Brennan, and head of the FBI James Comey, are also implicated. If justice is permitted, the political repercussions are truly earth-shattering.
The potential impact is not confined solely to the violation of U.S. laws and the democratic process – bad enough as that is. The Russiagate scandal that began in 2016 has had a lasting, damaging effect on U.S. and European relations with Russia. The frightfully dangerous NATO proxy war incited in Ukraine, which threatens to escalate into a full-scale world war, was fueled in large part by the hostility generated from the false claims of Russian interference in the U.S. elections.
The allegations that Russian President Vladimir Putin oversaw a subversion campaign against the 2016 U.S. election and colluded with Donald Trump to get him elected were always specious. The scandal was based on shoddy intel claims to purportedly explain how Trump defeated his Democrat rival, Hillary Clinton. Subsequently, the scandal was hyped into a seemingly credible narrative by U.S. intelligence chiefs at the direction of then-President Barack Obama as a way to delegitimize Trump’s incoming first-term presidency.
Years before the recent intelligence disclosures, many independent journalists, including Aaron Maté, and former intelligence analysts like Ray MacGovern and William Binney, had cogently disproven the official Russiagate claims. Not only were these claims false, they were knowingly false. That is, lies and deliberate distortions. Russia did not hack emails belonging to the Democratic National Committee to discredit Clinton. Clinton’s corruption was exposed by a DNC internal leak to Julian Assange’s Wikileaks whistleblower site. That was partly why Assange was persecuted with years-long incarceration.
A large enough number of voters simply despised Clinton and her warmongering psychopathy, as well as her sell-out of working-class Americans for Wall Street largesse.
Furthermore, Moscow consistently denied any involvement in trying to influence the 2016 U.S. election or attempts to favor Trump. Putin has said more than once that Russia has no preference about who becomes U.S. president, implying that they’re all the same and controlled by deeper state forces. Laughably, too, while Washington accused Moscow of election interference, the actual record shows that the United States has habitually interfered in scores of foreign elections over many decades, including those of Russia. No other nation comes close to the U.S. – the self-declared “leader of the free world” – in sabotaging foreign elections.
In any case, it is instructive to compare the Russiagate farce with the Watergate scandal. Watergate involved spying by the White House of President Richard Nixon against a Democrat rival in the 1972 election. The political crisis that ensued led to Nixon’s resignation in disgrace in 1974. The U.S. nation was shocked by the dirty tricks. Several senior White House officials were later convicted and served time in jail for crimes related to the affair. Nixon was later pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford, and avoided prosecution. Nevertheless, Watergate indelibly disgraced U.S. politics and, at the time, was described as “the worst political scandal of the 20th century.”
Subsequent cases of corruption and malfeasance are often dubbed with the suffix “gate” in a nod to Watergate as a momentous political downfall. Hence, “Russiagate.”
There are hugely important differences, however. While Watergate was a scandal based on factual crimes and wrongdoing, Russiagate was always a contrived propaganda deception. The real scandal behind Russiagate was not Trump’s alleged misdeeds or those of Russia, but the criminal conspiracy by Obama and his administration to sabotage the 2016 election and subsequently to overthrow the Trump presidency and the democratic will of the American people. Tulsi Gabbard, the nation’s most senior intelligence chief, has said that this amounts to “treason,” and she has called for the prosecution of Obama and other former senior aides.
Arguably, the real Russiagate scandal is far more criminal and devastating in its political implications than Watergate. The latter involved illegal spying and dirty tricks. Whereas, Russiagate involved a president and his intelligence chiefs trying to subvert the entire democratic process. Not only that, but the U.S. mainstream media are also now exposed for perpetrating a propaganda heist on the American public. All of the major U.S. media outlets amplified the politicised intelligence orchestrated by the Obama administration, claiming that Russia interfered in the election and that Trump was a “Kremlin stooge.” The hoax became an obsession in the U.S. media for years and piled up severe damage in international relations, a nefarious legacy that we are living with today.
The New York Times and Washington Post, reputedly two of the finest exponents of American journalism, jointly won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for their reporting on Russiagate, the official version, that is, which lent credibility to the hoax. In light of what we know now, these newspapers should be hanging their heads in shame for running a Goebbels-like Big Lie campaign to not only deceive the U.S. public but to subvert the democratic process and poison international relations. Their reputations are shredded, as well as those of other major media outlets, including ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC.
Ironically, The Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for its reporting on the Watergate scandal. The story was made into a best-selling book, All The President’s Men, and a hit Hollywood movie starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, playing the roles of intrepid reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Woodward and Bernstein and The Washington Post were acclaimed as the finest in U.S. journalism for exposing Watergate and bringing a crooked president to book.
How shameful and absurd that an even greater assault on American democracy and international relations in the form of Russiagate is ignored and buried by “America’s finest”. That the scandal is ignored and buried should be of no surprise because to properly reveal it would shatter the foundations of the U.S. political establishment and the sinister role of the deep state and its mainstream media propaganda system.
US media owe Putin an apology – Fox News host
RT | July 29, 2025
The US media need to make “serious” amends to many people, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, for their active role in spreading the Russiagate hoax following the 2016 presidential election, according to popular Fox News host Greg Gutfeld.
The political commentator, comedian, and author was responding to recent revelations made by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who released a trove of documents she described as “overwhelming evidence” of a coordinated effort by senior Obama-era officials – allegedly led by Barack Obama himself – to politicize intelligence and falsely accuse Donald Trump of colluding with Russia to win the election.
“We cannot let this go. They need to make serious amends because we are still living with the aftermath,” Gutfeld said on his latest show, aired last weekend. “People lost jobs, careers, friends. There need to be consequences.”
“They owe a lot of people an apology. Hell, they even include Putin.”
According to Gutfeld, major American news media outlets “played the starring role in amplifying the subversive plot against the president of the United States.” He dismissed recent claims by the press accusing the Trump administration of trying to “rewrite history,” calling them an “attempt to shift culpability away from themselves and hide the lie they perpetuated for almost a decade.”
Earlier this month, a similar assessment was made by former CIA Director John Ratcliffe. In an interview with the New York Post, he cited an internal review suggesting that American public opinion had been manipulated through repeated media leaks and anonymous sources quoted by The Washington Post, The New York Times, and other major outlets.
Allegations of “Russian collusion” persisted in mainstream media coverage even after Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation found no evidence to support the claims. Moscow has repeatedly denied interfering in the US election.
Gabbard described the Trump-Russia probe, widely referred to as Russiagate, as “a years-long coup” against Trump. The US president himself, who has consistently dismissed accusations of ties to Russia as fabricated, praised Gabbard for “exposing” the alleged plot and urged her to “keep it coming.”
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A Look Back At Israel’s Role In Selling The Iraq War
The Dissident | December 28, 2025
… As Netanyahu meets with Trump to push new lies to justify a new war in Iran, it is well worth remembering Israel’s previous role in pushing lies and pushing for the war in Iraq. – Read full article
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Aletho News- Ukraine’s Escalation May Be Aimed at Prolonging Conflict as Talks Advance — Ex-Pentagon Analyst
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- Hamas says disarmament linked to Palestinian State, end of occupation
- Guy Mettan: Russophobia Made War Inevitable
- Somali president rejects displacement of Palestinians from Gaza
- Arms, silence, and alignment: The moral and geopolitical cost of India-Israel military ties
- WHO Instructs Governments to Track Online Anti-Vaccine Messaging in Real Time with AI: Journal ‘Vaccines’
- Ireland’s Simon Harris to Push EU-Wide Ban on Social Media Anonymity
- Drone Attack on Putin’s Residence Planned by Forces Trying to Torpedo Ukraine Peace Push: Expert
- Ukraine launched 91 kamikaze drones at Putin’s state residence – Lavrov
- If Americans Knew
- Trump either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about Israel’s ongoing atrocities in Gaza – Not a ceasefire Day 81
- Netanyahu is coming to town, likely with war on his mind – Not a ceasefire Day 80
- Gaza hit with another winter storm – Not a ceasefire Day 79
- When will Israel’s crimes (and US complicity) end? – Not a ceasefire Day 78
- Christmas in the grip of genocide, occupation – Not a Ceasefire Day 77
- Palestinian Christians offer “Kairos,” an alternative Christmas Day sermon – Not a Ceasefire Day 76
- The Faces of AIPAC: the largest pro-Israel lobbying org in the US
- Gazan Christians mark 3rd Christmas under genocide – Not a Ceasefire Day 75
- Israeli scams children with cancer out of millions fundraised for their treatment, BBC finds
- Casey Kennedy Fired from AG Scientific Amid Zionist Troll Campaign Over Track AIPAC Work
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study Finds A Higher Rate Of Global Warming From 1899-1940 Than From 1983-2024
- Meteorologist Dr. Ryan Maue Warns “Germany Won’t Make It” If Winter Turns Severe
- Merry Christmas Everybody!
- Two More New Studies Show The Southern Ocean And Antarctica Were Warmer In The 1970s
- Der Spiegel Caught Making Up Reports About Conservative America (Again)
- New Study: 8000 Years Ago Relative Sea Level Was 30 Meters Higher Than Today Across East Antarctica
- The Wind Energy Paradox: “Why More Wind Turbines Don’t Always Mean More Power”
- New Study Reopens Questions About Our Ability To Meaningfully Assess Global Mean Temperature
- Dialing Back The Panic: German Physics Prof Sees No Evidence Of Climate Tipping Points!
- Astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon Challenges The Climate Consensus … It’s The Sun, Not CO2
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