The Empire of Lies Strikes Back… Extraordinary Cover-Up of Nord Stream Terrorism
Strategic Culture Foundation | March 10, 2023
The New York Times and other Western news media ran with clumsy and blatantly diversionary claims this week, which in the end only serve to draw even more attention to the guilt of the United States in blowing up the Nord Stream gas pipelines.
Not only is the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden even more indictable over the criminal act; the absurd cover-up attempt this week exposes the Western media as nothing but a ministry of propaganda masquerading as journalism.
Four weeks ago, the eminent independent American journalist, Seymour Hersh, published a blockbuster investigative report that revealed how President Biden and senior White House staff ordered the explosive detonation of the natural gas pipelines connecting Russia to the European Union via the Baltic Sea and Germany. The legendary Hersh has an impeccable record of groundbreaking stories, from the My Lai massacre committed by U.S. troops in Vietnam in 1968 to the Abu Ghraib prison torture in Iraq under American occupation to the operation of ratlines to funnel weapons and mercenaries from Libya to Syria to fight Washington’s proxy war for regime change in Damascus.
In his seminal report on the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, Hersh relied on insider Washington sources. He published claims that the United States carried out the covert operation using a team of U.S. Navy divers under the cover of NATO war maneuvers known as BALTOPS 22 last summer. Explosives were planted on the seabed during the exercises held in June 2022 and then later detonated on September 26 with the help of Norwegian military aircraft.
The convincing aspect of Hersh’s report was not just the credible detail of the operation, but that it confirmed what many independent observers had already concluded from strong circumstantial evidence about who had the motive and means to conduct the sabotage. Readers are referred to a recent editorial by Strategic Culture Foundation which compiles the background of why the United States is deemed to be the culprit.
Now here is a curious thing. While Hersh’s report provoked shockwaves around the world, Western governments and the mainstream media chose to ignore his report. In a weird parallel universe sort of way, they pretended that Hersh’s resounding revelations did not exist.
One would think that given Hersh’s reputation for world-news-breaking scoops, and given that his latest report revealed a rock-solid plausible account of how a major civilian infrastructure project was sabotaged, and further given that the implication of this report was the inculpation of the United States and its president and his senior staff in ordering an act of terrorism – one would think that, maybe, just maybe, the Western media would be obliged to give some reportage on that matter. No, far from it, they unanimously kept schtum. In a way that is quite shocking and a travesty.
The charade of silence was maintained for a month until this week when the New York Times published a report claiming an alternative explanation for the Nord Stream explosions. As if on cue, there then followed a rash of other Western media reports regurgitating or spinning the same story.
Laughably, the New York Times claimed its report was “the first significant known lead about who was responsible for the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines”. This after a month of pointedly ignoring and effectively censoring from the public any knowledge of the spellbinding Hersh article.
The thrust of this week’s “reports” (if they could be called that) are that the sabotage was carried out by “pro-Ukrainian groups” which may have involved Ukrainian or Russian nationals. The source of the claims was anonymous US officials citing purported “new intelligence”. It was also claimed that a private yacht owned by Ukrainians was used and that the CIA had tipped off German intelligence about the impending attack months before it happened.
The information reported is so vague as to be impossible to verify, or frankly to even merit credibility. We are led to believe that a sophisticated, highly technical military operation on the Baltic seabed was somehow carried off by a group of unknown paramilitaries. The New York Times and other Western media outlets published stories that on their face are outlandish. This is gutter press stuff.
Furthermore, from the way the reports are formulated it is obvious that they are meant to serve as a rebuttal to the Hersh report without actually properly acknowledging the Hersh report. Thus, the United States denies any involvement in a criminal act that it barely refuses to acknowledge. This double-think is itself indicative of guilt in the Empire of Lies.
The problem for the Western propaganda peddlers – besides sheer implausibility – is the further burden of having to provide an alibi for the Kiev regime. The U.S. and its NATO allies need to distract from Washington as the obvious author of the crime, but they also cannot afford to implicate the Kiev regime because that could inflame European and American public antipathy towards the NATO-sponsored junta. This is why the New York Times & Co appear to be involved in a tortuous balancing act of blaming Ukrainian militants for the Nord Stream blasts but also claiming that these intrepid militants managed to do so without the knowledge of President Vladimir Zelensky and his cabal. Which again makes the narrative doubly ridiculous.
There is also an important element of timing to all these Western media shenanigans. Last week, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was hosted in the White House by Joe Biden on March 3 in what was a bizarrely private meeting. Their conversations behind closed doors were not disclosed. Both leaders stonewalled reporters about their discussions. It can be fairly speculated that Scholz was pleading with Biden for some political cover because of the mounting anger among the German public about the economic consequences of America’s policy over Ukraine and Russia. Germany’s industry and export-led economy have been ravaged by the loss of Russia’s traditional natural gas supply. Scholz and his government are seen to be behaving treacherously by going along with what appears to be American vandalism of the German economy. For the Hersh report to go unanswered is causing massive public pressure on the Berlin government. Hence this week, we saw attempts to divert public attention with a concerted Western media campaign about who supposedly blew up Nord Stream. The aim is to absolve Washington and its lackeys in Berlin.
Another timing issue was the sudden appearance of Ukrainian and Russian fascist commandoes who carried out the terrorist attack in Russia’s Bryansk region on March 2 last week. Two adults were killed and a young boy was badly injured in what was a gratuitous atrocity that made international headlines. That daring raid, however, brought to public attention the existence of pro-Ukrainian militants who appear to act as lone wolves in international operations. This is the very kind of profile that the New York Times and other Western media outfits attributed to the Nord Stream sabotage. That begs the reasonable question: was the Bryansk terror attack enabled by Western military intelligence handlers in order to promote the subsequent media disinformation effort concerning the Nord Stream pipelines?
Let’s cut to the chase. The Western media disinformation campaign is a crude joke. It can’t distract from the glaring facts that the United States and its NATO allies carried out an act of international terrorism against European companies and governments, and an act of war against Russia as the main owner of the 1,200-kilometer Nord Stream pipelines worth at least $20 billion to construct. That criminal act was plausibly ordered by an American president and his White House aides. The geopolitical motives are overwhelming as are the self-indicting admissions by Biden and his aides before and after the odious event.
The cack-handed attempts this week to cover up by the Western media only serve to further incriminate the United States and its NATO crime partners. In addition, the Western media are exposed more than ever as being complicit in propagandizing war crimes. The New York Times and other Western news outlets pompously claim to be pinnacles of journalism and defenders of public interest and democracy. They are nothing but the propaganda ministry for Washington – the Empire of Lies.
In Nord Stream attack, US officials use proxy media to blame proxy Ukraine
One month after Seymour Hersh reported that the US blew up the Nord Stream pipelines, US regime finds a scapegoat in Ukraine and stenographers in the NYT.
By Aaron Maté | March 8, 2023
Nearly six months after the Nord Stream pipelines exploded and one month after Seymour Hersh reported that the Biden administration was responsible, US officials have unveiled their defense. According to the New York Times, anonymous government sources claim that “newly collected intelligence” now “suggests” that the Nord Stream bomber was in fact a “pro-Ukrainian group.”
The only confirmed “intelligence” about this supposed “group” is that US officials have none to offer about them.
“U.S. officials said there was much they did not know about the perpetrators and their affiliations,” The Times reports. The supposed “newly collected” information “does not specify the members of the group, or who directed or paid for the operation.” Despite knowing nothing about them, the Times’ sources nonetheless speculate that “the saboteurs were most likely Ukrainian or Russian nationals, or some combination of the two.” They also leave open “the possibility that the operation might have been conducted off the books by a proxy force with connections to the Ukrainian government or its security services.” (emphasis added)
When no evidence is produced, anything is of course “possible.” But the Times’ sources are oddly certain on one critical matter: “U.S. officials said no American or British nationals were involved.” Also, there is “no evidence President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine or his top lieutenants were involved in the operation, or that the perpetrators were acting at the direction of any Ukrainian government officials.”
Despite failing to obtain any concrete information about the perpetrators, the Times nonetheless declares that the US cover story planted in their pages “amounts to the first significant known lead about who was responsible for the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines.”
It is unclear why the Times has deemed their evidence-free “lead” to be “significant”, and not, by contrast, the Hersh story that came four weeks earlier. Not only does Hersh’s reporting predate the Times’, but his story contained extensive detail about how the US planned and executed the Nord Stream explosions.
Tellingly, the Times distorts the basis for Hersh’s reporting. “In making his case,” the Times claims, Hersh merely “cited” President Biden’s “preinvasion threat to ‘bring an end’ to Nord Stream 2, and similar statements by other senior U.S. officials.” In falsely suggesting that he relied solely on public statements, the Times completely omits that Hersh in fact cited a well-placed source.
By contrast, the Times has no information about its newfound perpetrators or about any other aspect of its “significant” lead.
“U.S. officials declined to disclose the nature of the intelligence, how it was obtained or any details of the strength of the evidence it contains,” The Times states. Accordingly, US officials admit that “there are no firm conclusions” to be drawn, and that there are “enormous gaps in what U.S. spy agencies and their European partners knew about what transpired.” For that apparent reason, “U.S. officials who have been briefed on the intelligence are divided about how much weight to put on the new information.” The Times, by contrast, apparently feels no such evidentiary burden.
In sum, US officials have “much they did not know about the perpetrators” – i.e. everything; “enormous gaps” in their awareness of how the (unknown) “pro-Ukraine group” purportedly carried out a deep-sea bombing; uncertainty over “how much weight to put on” their “intelligence”; and even “no firm conclusions” to offer. Moreover, all of this supposed US “intelligence” happens to have been “newly collected” — after one of the most accomplished journalists in history published a detailed report on how US intelligence plotted and conducted the bombing.
Given the absence of evidence and curious timing, a reasonable conclusion is not that a Ukrainian “proxy force” was the culprit, but that the US is now using its Ukrainian proxy as a scapegoat.
As the standard bearer of establishment US media, the Times’ “reporting” is perfectly in character. Days after the September 2022 bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipelines, the Times noted that “much of the speculation about responsibility has focused on Russia” – just as US officials would certainly hope. The narrative was echoed by former CIA Director John Brennan, who opined that “Russia certainly is the most likely suspect,” in the Nord Stream attack. Citing anonymous “Western intelligence officials”, CNN claimed that “European security officials observed Russian Navy ships in vicinity of Nord Stream pipeline leaks,” thus casting “further suspicion on Russia,” which is seen by “European and US officials as the only actor in the region believed to have both the capability and motivation to deliberately damage the pipelines.”
With the story that Russia blew up its own pipelines no longer tenable, the Times’ new narrative asks us to believe that some unnamed “pro-Ukraine group”, which “did not appear to be working for military or intelligence services” somehow managed to obtain the unique capability to plant multiple explosives on a heavily sealed pipeline at the bottom of the Baltic Sea.
That narrative is already being laundered through the German media. Hours after the Times story broke, the German outlet Die Zeit came out with a story, sourced to German officials, that claims the bombing operation was carried out by a group of six people, including just “two divers.” These supposed perpetrators, we are told, arrived at the crime scene via a yacht “apparently owned by two Ukrainians” that departed Germany. How a yacht managed to carry the equipment and explosives needed for the operation is left unexplained.
The saboteurs somehow possessed the capability to carry out a deep-sea bombing, but not the awareness to properly clean up their floating crime scene. According to Die Zeit, the boat was “returned to the owner in an uncleaned condition,” which allowed “investigators” to discover “traces of explosives on the table in the cabin.” Should this lean “pro-Ukraine” crack team of naval commandos conduct another act of deep-sea sabotage, they will only need to hire a cleaning professional to get away with it.
As for motivation, we are somehow also asked to forget that Biden administration officials not only expressed the motivation, but the post-facto satisfaction. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward,” senior US official Victoria Nuland vowed in January 2022. President Biden added the following month that “if Russia invades… there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” After the Nord Stream pipelines were bombed, Secretary of State Antony Blinken greeted the news as a “tremendous strategic opportunity.” Just days before Hersh’s story was published, Nuland informed Congress that both she and the White House are “very gratified” that Nord Stream is “a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”
Not only are global audiences asked to ignore the public statements of Biden administration principals, but their blanket refusal to answer any questions. This was put on display in Washington this past weekend, when German Chancellor Olaf Scholz paid Biden a White House visit. Unlike Scholz’s last DC trip, there was no joint news conference. This was understandable: the last time they appeared together, Biden blurted out that he would “bring an end” to Nord Stream, leaving Scholz to stand next to him in awkward silence. This time around, the two briefly sat before a group of reporters who were quickly shooed out of the room, much to Biden’s apparent glee.
Inadvertently, the Times’ account exposes new holes in the failed attempts to refute Hersh’s story.
Members of the NATO state-funded website Bellingcat, falsely presented to NATO state audiences as an independent investigative outlet, have attempted to cast doubt on Hersh’s claims by arguing that open-source tracking at the time of the bombing fails to detect the vessels he reported on. But as the Times story notes, investigators are seeking information about ships “whose location transponders were not on or were not working when they passed through the area, possibly to cloak their movements.” Hersh has made this same point in interviews, noting that when Biden flew into Poland before his visit to Kiev last month, his “plane switched off its transponder” to avoid detection, as the Associated Press reported. Unfortunately for self-styled digital sherlocks, major international crimes – particularly those involving intelligence agencies – cannot be solved from their laptops.
Hersh was also pilloried for citing a single anonymous source. The Times’ story, by contrast, relies on multiple anonymous sources, who, unlike Hersh, have no tangible information to offer. After ignoring Hersh’s story for a full month, the Times’ news section was forced to acknowledge it for the first time. And the best that its anonymous sources could come up with is not only an evidence-free, caveat-filled narrative, but a story that does not challenge a single aspect of Hersh’s detailed account.
In another contrast, Hersh is one of the most accomplished and impactful journalists in the history of the profession. Two of the journalists on the Times story, Julian E. Barnes and Adam Goldman, have bylined multiple stories that spread demonstrable falsehoods sourced to anonymous US officials.
In the summer of 2020, Barnes and Goldman were among the Times journalists who laundered CIA disinformation that Russia was paying bounties for dead US troops in Afghanistan. When the Biden administration was forced to acknowledge that the allegation was baseless, the Times tried to water down its initial claims in an attempt to save face.
In January, Barnes co-wrote a Times story which claimed, citing unnamed “U.S. officials” more than a dozen times, that “Russian military intelligence officers” were behind “a recent letter bomb campaign in Spain whose most prominent targets were the prime minister, the defense minister and foreign diplomats.” But days later, as the Washington Post reported, Spanish authorities arrested “a 74-year-old Spaniard who opposed his country’s support for Ukraine but appears to have acted alone.” (Moon of Alabama is one the few voices to have called out the Times’ fraudulent reporting).
That same month, Goldman shared a byline, alongside fellow “Russian bounties” stenographer Charlie Savage, on a Times story which argued that Special Counsel John Durham has “failed to find wrongdoing in the origins of the Russia inquiry,” even though Durham’s findings have yet to be released. As I reported for Real Clear Investigations, the Times made its case by omitting countervailing information and distorting the available facts – as is the norm for establishment media coverage of Russiagate.
The US officials behind the Times’ latest Nord Stream tale presumably believe that they have offered the best counter to Hersh that they could. That it is devoid of concrete information, and written by Times staffers with a track record of parroting US intelligence-furnished propaganda, ultimately has the opposite effect.
The Times’ narrative can only be seen as further confirmation that Hersh found the Nord Stream bomber in Washington. That explains why anonymous US officials are now using proxies in establishment media to scapegoat their proxy in Ukraine.
Watch or listen to my recent interview with Seymour Hersh here.
Ukraine responds to Nord Stream claims
RT | March 8, 2023
Kiev had nothing to do with the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, the Ukrainian defense minister has said in response to media reports blaming last September’s explosions in the Baltic Sea on a “pro-Ukraine” group.
“For me, it’s a little bit strange story,” Aleksey Reznikov replied when asked about the issue after his arrival at an informal meeting of EU defense ministers in Stockholm on Wednesday.
“This story has nothing [to do] with us,” he said, expressing confidence that “the investigation [by] the official authorities will describe every detail” of what had happened.
The claims of Ukrainian involvement in the sabotage are “like a complement for our special forces, but this is not our activity,” the minister added.
Journalists asked Reznikov if he was concerned that the latest media reports could lead to a reduction in EU support for Kiev amid the conflict with Moscow. “No, I’m not concerned. Everything would be OK,” he said.
On Tuesday, the New York Times reported, citing US officials and unspecified new intelligence, that a “pro-Ukrainian group” may have been behind the September attack that disabled the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, which were built to deliver Russian gas to Europe via Germany. The US paper’s anonymous sources stressed that “no American or British nationals were involved” in the sabotage.
A few hours later, several German outlets claimed the country’s investigators looking into the Nord Stream blasts had found that a yacht reportedly used in the attack belonged to a Polish-based firm, owned by two Ukrainians.
Kremlin press-secretary Dmitry Peskov described the reports in the US and German media as “a coordinated media hoax campaign,” aimed at diverting attention from the actual “masterminds” of the sabotage.
Last month, veteran American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh released a bombshell report blaming Washington for destroying the Nord Stream pipelines. According to an informed source who talked to Hersh, explosives were planted on the pipelines in the Baltic Sea back in June 2022 by US Navy divers under the guise of a NATO exercise, and detonated remotely two months later. The White House has denied the report by the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, calling it “utterly false and complete fiction.”
The Censorship of Mercola — A Timeline
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | January 30, 2023
While the drug and chemical industries have attacked and tried to discredit me for years, blatant censorship didn’t begin until 2020, after the outbreak of the COVID pandemic.
For legal and historical purposes, I am sharing a timeline of events with you that document a chain of coordinated events and attacks against me and this website. My first article about the pandemic came out February 4, 2020, in which I predicted that it was a grossly exaggerated threat that would enrich pandemic vaccine makers.
March 8, 2020, I published an interview with bioweapons expert Francis Boyle, Ph.D., in which he warned that SARS-CoV-2 had all the hallmarks of a genetically engineered bioweapon. Boyle was among the first, if not the first, to suspect the outbreak was the result of a lab leak.
While every health authority on the planet insisted there was no treatment, and that patients simply go to the hospital to be placed on mechanical ventilation and die, I interviewed medical experts working on early treatment options and published articles detailing the potential benefits of vitamin D, zinc, quercetin and other nutraceuticals that boost immune function, as well as decades-old drugs like hydroxychloroquine.
I also published the testimony of whistleblowers such as Erin Marie Olszewski, a frontline nurse, who warned that patients were being intentionally killed on ventilators as it quickly proved to be a deadly intervention for COVID-19.
Summer of 2020 — The Suppression of Vitamin D Begins
Early on, it became apparent that vitamin D levels and spending time outdoors played an important role in the risk of infection and the ultimate outcomes. This has been true for all respiratory infections, so it should come as no surprise it is also true for coronavirus infections. Despite that, health authorities insisted vitamin D was useless.
The only way out of the pandemic, they said, would be a vaccine — and this despite the fact that no previous attempts at creating a safe and effective coronavirus vaccine had ever succeeded because of its rapid ability to mutate.
In June 2020, I launched an information campaign, StopCovidCold, about vitamin D. I released a downloadable scientific report detailing how and why optimizing vitamin D levels among the general population could minimize the impact of the next wave of COVID. Optimizing vitamin D is a rational, safe and inexpensive measure that no sane health official would object to. And yet, they all did.
July 21, 2020, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) issued a press release1 calling on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) “to bring enforcement proceedings against Mercola and his companies for their unlawful disease claims that falsely and misleadingly claim to treat, cure or prevent COVID-19 infections.”
CSPI accused me of falsely claiming “that at least 22 vitamins, supplements and other products available for sale on his web site can prevent, treat, or cure COVID-19 infection.” This despite the fact that their Appendix of Illegal Claims2 clearly show I made no COVID-19-related claims to any specific products and only referenced published studies and mainstream media articles to support my opinions.
In an August 12, 2020, email, CSPI president Dr. Peter Lurie — a former FDA associate commissioner — also made the spurious claim that I was “profiting from the pandemic” through “anti-vaccine fearmongering:” 3
“Mercola brazenly has claimed that many of his products are coronavirus treatments or cures, including vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc, selenium, ‘molecular hydrogen,’ licorice, and other substances.
Besides profiting from the pandemic, Mercola has seemingly advised people to contract COVID-19 after taking supposedly ‘immunity boosting’ supplements (which of course he sells). Making matters worse, Mercola is a leading proponent of anti-vaccine conspiracy theories — and has been fearmongering against prospective COVID-19 vaccines even before such vaccines are available!”
By mid-August, a comprehensive campaign to put an end to Mercola.com had been launched, with Laurie asking CSPI members to flood the FDA and FTC with prewritten Tweets, urging them to take action against us. He also urged “state attorneys general to investigate how they may further protect consumers from Mercola’s illegal marketing.”4
Not surprisingly, CSPI is funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Rockefeller Family Fund, Bloomberg Philanthropies and other billionaire-owned foundations. It’s also partnered with Bill Gates’ agrichemical PR group, the Cornell Alliance for Science. Greg Jaffe, who heads up CSPI’s Biotechnology Project, is also the associate director of legal affairs at Alliance for Science.
Winter of 2020 — Vitamin D Attacks Heat Up
The attacks against me really heated up though after I published a peer-reviewed scientific paper5 on the benefits of vitamin D at the end of October 2020. With that, I established my medical and scientific merit and my right to a professional opinion, which is something the U.S. Constitution absolutely provides for.
The paper, “Evidence Regarding Vitamin D and Risk of COVID-19 and Its Severity,” published in the journal Nutrients, was coauthored by William Grant, Ph.D., and Dr. Carol Wagner, both of whom are part of the GrassrootsHealth expert vitamin D panel.
As noted in that paper, dark skin color, increased age, pre-existing chronic conditions and vitamin D deficiency are all features of severe COVID disease, and of these, vitamin D deficiency is the only factor that is modifiable. As such, it would be foolish to ignore, especially since vitamin D supplements are readily available and low cost.
Christmas Eve 2020, attorney general Letitia James sent us a cease and desist notice, demanding we stop sharing information about how immune-boosting nutritional supplements might lower your risk of COVID, including vitamin D, zinc, NAC and vitamin C.
February 2021, FDA Tries to Silence Protected Speech
After the new presidential administration took over, on February 18, 2021, the Rockefeller-funded CSPI and AG James got their wish, as the FDA sent us a warning letter for “Unapproved and Misbranded Products Related to Coronavirus Disease 2019.”6 Laurie even publicly bragged7 about his ability to influence the FDA to take action against us.
The FDA’s letter highlighted statements in articles on my website that were fully referenced and supported by published science, and none of the articles cited had any commercial advertising linking the information to my products, as per the law. We had done nothing illegal or irregular in that regard, and my professional opinions are protected under the U.S. Constitution.
Needless to say, we fully addressed both James’ cease and desist notice and the FDA’s warning letter, putting them both on notice that they cannot censor protected speech simply because they don’t like what’s being said.
On a side note, William Correll, the director of the Office of Compliance at the FDA who signed the warning letter, sadly “passed away suddenly” just two months later, on April 18 “after a short battle with COVID-19.”8
Gates-Funded Front Group Gets on the Bandwagon
The agrochemical front group Cornell Alliance for Science (CAS),9 the primary funding for which comes from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,10 also jumped on the bandwagon, falsely stating11 that “pages advertising vitamin C and quercetin as having ‘synergistic effects that make them useful in the prevention and early at-home treatment of COVID-19′” were still available on my website nearly a month after the FDA’s warning letter.
To be clear, we had fully referenced scientific news articles. News articles are NOT “advertising,” as they do not link to any specific products, nor do they refer to or recommend any specific brands. In the case of the warning for vitamin C, the article discussed hospitals utilizing IV vitamin C for the treatment of COVID-19 and sepsis.
Such coordinated attacks are to be expected, though, considering Gates’ influence over the operation, and seeing how CAS and CSPI work closely together — a fact CAS admitted in its hit piece.12
March 2021, Booksellers Urged to Ban My Book
Around that same time (February 11, 2021), my book “The Truth About COVID-19” also went up for presale, and by early March, booksellers in the U.S., U.K. and Australia were being pressured not to sell it, or to add some sort of misinformation warning label to it. As reported by Sky News March 5, 2021:13
“In the UK, more than 20 million vaccine doses have been administered as part of efforts to defeat COVID-19, but worries continue that misinformation is stopping some people from having the jab. Shadow health minister Alex Norris told Sky News:
‘Getting our population vaccinated is a massive priority and it is very sad to see these things so freely available. We would hope that retailers would act responsibly and have a look at whether they want to be associated with such products and whether they want to be seen to be profiting off such products.'”
Shady ‘Anti-Hate’ Outfit Publishes Hit List
March 3, 2021, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) — a shady U.K.-based organization with anonymous funding led by Imran Ahmed — also got in on the action, publishing a hit list14 of the “Top 10 anti-vaxxers” it wanted permanently silenced and eradicated from public forums. The list showed, by way of crossing out names, which had already been successfully deplatformed, and from which social media.
While precious little was (and still is) know about the CCDH, some digging revealed Ahmed had been appointed to the steering committee of the U.K. government’s Commission on Countering Extremism Pilot Task Force in April 2020, just as fearmongering about the COVID-19 pandemic was ramping up. The CCDH is also linked to a number of technocratic centers within the globalist network through its board members.15
More Fabrications and Lies From the CCDH
A couple of weeks later (March 15), Ahmed somehow managed to get an article titled “Dismantling the Anti-Vaxx Industry”16 published in the journal Nature Medicine. In it, Ahmed lied, claiming he’d “recorded a private, three-day meeting of the world’s most prominent anti-vaxxers,” when in fact it was a public, international conference given online, attended by thousands around the world, all of whom had access to the recordings.
He could have done the normal, ethical and truly journalistic thing and admitted he simply attended a public virtual conference, but instead he twisted it into some risky undercover agent mission where he secretly recorded private discussions that revealed the inner workings of “the opposition.”
Then, March 21, 2021, the CCDH published the fabricated “Disinformation Dozen” report,17,18,19 in which Ahmed falsely claimed 12 people and/or organizations, including yours truly, were responsible for 65% of all anti-vaccine content on social media.
March 24, 2021 — AGs Try to Censor Protected Speech
March 24, 2021, 12 attorneys general sent a letter20 to the CEOs of Twitter and Facebook, seeking their “cooperation in curtailing the dissemination” of COVID jab “misinformation” — all based on the fabrications of the CCDH. According to the AGs:
“The people and groups spreading falsehoods and misleading Americans about the safety of coronavirus vaccines are threatening the health of our communities, slowing progress in getting our residents protected from the virus, and undermining economic recovery in our states.
As safe and effective vaccines become available, the end of this pandemic is in sight. This end, however, depends on the widespread acceptance of these vaccines as safe and effective. Unfortunately, misinformation disseminated via your platforms has increased vaccine hesitancy …
According to a recent report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, so-called ‘anti-vaxxer’ accounts on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter reach more than 59 million followers … Given ‘anti-vaxxers’ reliance on your platforms, you are uniquely positioned to prevent the spread of misinformation about coronavirus vaccines …”
Facebook Set the Record Straight
August 18, 2021, after conducting an internal investigation, Monika Bickert, vice president of Facebook content policy, publicly called out the falsehoods in “The Disinformation Dozen” report, stating:21
“In recent weeks, there has been a debate about whether the global problem of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation can be solved simply by removing 12 people from social media platforms. People who have advanced this narrative contend that these 12 people are responsible for 73% of online vaccine misinformation on Facebook.
There isn’t any evidence to support this claim … In fact, these 12 people are responsible for about just 0.05% of all views of vaccine-related content on Facebook. This includes all vaccine-related posts they’ve shared, whether true or false, as well as URLs associated with these people.”
Bickert highlighted the fact that Ahmed had preselected the 12 individuals listed in the report, and that his “faulty narrative” was based on nothing more than “a narrow set of 483 pieces of content over six weeks from only 30 groups, some of which are as small as 2,500 users.”
“Further, there is no explanation for how the organization behind the report identified the content they describe as ‘anti-vax’ or how they chose the 30 groups they included in their analysis,” Bickert noted. “There is no justification for their claim that their data constitute a ‘representative sample’ of the content shared across our apps.”
Apparently, no one in government was smart enough to see the flaws in the CCDH’s report though, and a long list of officials cited the CCDH’s fabricated claims throughout the remainder of 2021, even long after Facebook denounced its claims. What’s more, even though Facebook admitted the CCDH’s claims were bogus, they still took action against accounts by applying penalties and/or bans.
April 8, 2021 — AGs Call on Social Media to Ban ‘the 12’
April 8, 2021, attorneys general James and William Tong published an op-ed in The Washington Post,22 again calling on social media companies to ban the “disinformation dozen” identified by the CCDH. The lack of acceptance of novel gene therapy technology, they claimed, was all because a small group of individuals with a social media presence — myself included — were successfully misleading the public with lies about nonexistent vaccine risks.
April 27, 2021 — Dr. Hotez Calls for Cyberwarfare
April 27, 2021, Dr. Peter Hotez, president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute23 — which has received tens of millions of dollars from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,24,25 — escalated the threat even further in an article published in the journal Nature.
Citing the CCDH’s findings, Hotez called for cyberwarfare experts to be enlisted in the war against vaccine safety advocates and people who are “vaccine hesitant.” He wrote:26
“Accurate, targeted counter-messaging from the global health community is important but insufficient, as is public pressure on social-media companies. The United Nations and the highest levels of government must … move to dismantle anti-vaccine groups in the United States.
Efforts must expand into the realm of cyber security, law enforcement, public education and international relations. A high-level inter-agency task force reporting to the UN secretary-general could assess the full impact of anti-vaccine aggression, and propose tough, balanced measures.
The task force should include experts who have tackled complex global threats such as terrorism, cyber attacks and nuclear armament, because anti-science is now approaching similar levels of peril. It is becoming increasingly clear that advancing immunization requires a counteroffensive.”
In short, Hotez called for the use of warfare tactics on law abiding American citizens, and the Nature journal actually published this blatant threat. One day later, April 28, the CCDH published a second report, “Disinformation Dozen: The Sequel,”27 which focused on Big Tech’s failure to get rid of us “despite bipartisan calls from Congress.”
To understand the massive reach the CCDH gained, despite no one having heard of them before COVID, consider this: By the end of August 2021, there were 84,700 Google search results for CCDH’s defamatory phrase “disinformation dozen,” including 16,000 news stories in the international press, nearly all of which parroted the CCDH’s defamatory statements verbatim and reported them as fact.
May 2021 — Financial Warfare Led to Removal of COVID Articles
Shortly after the op-ed by AGs James and Tong appeared, our business bank accounts were abruptly shut down and our credit cards canceled. Our business partners also had their PayPal accounts shut down.
This new threat, which I could not defend against in a court of law, led to my May 4 decision to remove all articles related to vitamin D, vitamin C, zinc and COVID-19 from my website.
July 2021 — The White House Publicly Calls for Censorship
In mid-July 2021, the White House stepped in to pressure Facebook to purge “anti-vaxxers” from its platform. Then-press secretary Jen Psaki regurgitated the CCDH’s false claims, saying:28
“There’s about 12 people who are producing 65% of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms. All of them remain active on Facebook, despite some even being banned on other platforms, including ones that Facebook owns.
Facebook needs to move more quickly to remove harmful, violative posts. Posts that would be within their policy for removal often remain up for days, and that’s too long. The information spreads too quickly.”
In another mid-July press conference, President Joe Biden himself demanded social media take action against “the disinformation dozen,” claiming our “misinformation” was “killing people.”29,30 None of these officials ever questioned the authority of the CCDH. Facebook spokesperson Dani Lever responded to the White House’s demands, saying:
“We will not be distracted by accusations which aren’t supported by the facts. The fact is that more than 2 billion people have viewed authoritative information about COVID-19 and vaccines on Facebook, which is more than any other place on the internet … The facts show that Facebook is helping save lives. Period.”
Summer of 2021 — A Parade of Hit Pieces
July 24, 2021, the New York Times named me the No. 1 superspreader of COVID misinformation online.31 According to the NYT itself, this was the most-read article of the year up to that point. Penned by Sheera Frenkel, it was so littered with blatant lies, my attorneys sent her a retraction demand.32
For example, she claimed the FDA has levied multimillion-dollar fines against me. This is a complete fabrication, as I’ve never been fined by the FDA. She also implied that I misrepresented myself as a published author of a paper on vitamin D for COVID-19, stating she was “unable to verify” my claim. This despite being given a direct link to the paper! My paper can also be located on PubMed.gov in seconds by searching my name.
Frenkel boldly claimed that I am the No.1 spreader of misinformation online, but she didn’t even qualify what “misinformation” actually is. Without qualifying what it is you’re looking for, how can you quantify it? She also provided no proof that I in fact had the greatest reach of all the individuals reporting on COVID injections. My name didn’t even show up in the Top 15 in a Crowdtangle search for anti-vax Facebook posts.
Frenkel’s hit piece was followed up by CNN, which August 4 aired a segment show CNN reporter Randi Kaye stalking me across central Florida. And, of course, Kaye’s primary citation for her accusations against me was the CCDH.
August 4, 2021 — Mercola Deletes Articles After 48 Hours
August 4, 2021, I also implemented yet another change on my website. I had already removed all articles relating to COVID-19 and vitamin D. At this point, I deleted over 15,000 articles from the past 20-plus years from my website as the business and personal threats grew out of hand.
After 48 hours, articles were instead migrated over to Substack, where only paid members through a private membership agreement have access to them. This was a painful but necessary workaround, as the paid subscription provides a layer of protection against these threats.
September 7, 2021 — Senator Warren’s Book Burning Campaign
September 7, 2021, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren sent a letter33 to Andy Jassy, chief executive officer of Amazon.com, demanding an “immediate review” of Amazon’s algorithms to weed out books peddling “COVID misinformation.”34,35,36
While she didn’t spell out what laws Amazon might be breaking, she warned Jassy that the company may be held legally responsible for wrongful death and homicide by selling books that “misinform” readers about COVID-19, and she specifically singled out “The Truth About COVID-19” as a prime example of the kinds of books she wanted banned.
Warren again relied on the fabrications of the CCDH, even though Facebook had refuted the CCDH report as baseless three weeks before she sent that letter.
“Dr. Mercola has been described as ‘the most influential spreader of coronavirus misinformation online,'” Warren wrote, adding: “Not only was this book the top result when searching either ‘COVID-19’ or ‘vaccine’ in the categories of ‘All Departments’ and ‘Books’; it was tagged as a ‘Best Seller’ by Amazon and the ‘#1 Best Seller’ in the ‘Political Freedom’ category.
The book perpetuates dangerous conspiracies about COVID-19 and false and misleading information about vaccines. It asserts that vitamin C, vitamin D and quercetin … can prevent COVID-19 infection … And the book contends that vaccines cannot be trusted, when study after study has demonstrated the overwhelming effectiveness and safety of COVID-19 vaccines.
It should come as no surprise that the book is rife with misinformation. One of the authors, Dr. Mercola, is one of the ‘Disinformation Dozen,’ a group responsible for 65% of anti-vaccine content on Facebook and Twitter …”
YouTube Deplatforms Mercola in Breach of Contract
Warren’s attempt at getting Amazon to ban my book was swiftly followed up by YouTube, which deleted my account September 29, 2021, allegedly for violating community guidelines. The problem was, they’d published and implemented those new guidelines that very morning.
While I disagreed with YouTube’s censorship, when its “COVID-19 misinformation” policy was implemented back in April 2021, I carefully avoided posting any content on YouTube that might violate that guideline. At no point had I ever received a violation notice from YouTube.
On the morning of September 29, 2022, at 9 a.m. EDT, The Washington Post published an article titled “YouTube Is Banning Joseph Mercola and a Handful of Other Anti-Vaccine Activists.” According to the WaPo :37
“YouTube is taking down several video channels associated with high-profile anti-vaccine activists including Joseph Mercola … As part of a new set of policies aimed at cutting down on anti-vaccine content on the Google-owned site, YouTube will ban any videos that claim that commonly used vaccines approved by health authorities are ineffective or dangerous.
The company previously blocked videos that made those claims about coronavirus vaccines, but not ones for other vaccines like those for measles or chickenpox.”
In short, as of September 29, 2021, you could no longer post any video discussing or stating that any vaccine is dangerous or ineffective. Six minutes after the publication of that WaPo article, I received an email from YouTube informing me that my entire channel had been deplatformed, having been found in violation of this new policy.
October 2021 — CNN’s Second Hit Piece
October 4, 2021, two months to the day after their first attempted hit piece against my book, “The Truth About COVID-19,” CNN aired a follow-up in which they echoed Warren’s call for Amazon to ban the sale of my book.
Like something straight out of George Orwell’s “1984” newsspeak dictionary, CNN host Anderson Cooper said my book is loaded with “mistruths” about COVID. Yet he failed to present a single piece of evidence to back up that claim.
This is one of the oldest propaganda trick in the book. If you just spew out enough derogatory terms about your opponent, people will forget the fact that you provided zero proof to back up your position.
November 2021 — Mercola Sues Sen. Warren
November 7, 2021, two months after Warren tried to get my best-selling book “The Truth About COVID-19” banned from Amazon, I, my coauthor Ronnie Cummins, my publisher and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who wrote our foreword, sued Warren,38 both in her official and personal capacities, for violating our First Amendment rights and scaring book sellers into pulling and/or suppressing sales.
As a government official, it is illegal for her violate the U.S. Constitution, and pressuring private businesses to do it for her is not a legal workaround.
February 2022 — NIH Director Blames Mercola For Pandemic Continuation
In February 2022, former National Institutes of Health director Dr. Francis Collins blamed me personally for the government’s inability to bring the COVID pandemic to a close. This despite the fact that I was by then heavily censored just about everywhere. The only people, really, who could see my information were those who subscribed to my newsletter and received it by email.
August 2022 — NYT Airs Hit Piece Documentary
Fast-forward to August 2022, The New York Times published the documentary “Superspreader,” featuring yours truly, on FX and Hulu (both of which are owned by Disney). They clearly went through a lot of trouble, trying to dig up dirt from anyone they could find from my past — some going back 40 years, to my medical school days — who would be able to share some tidbit with which they could discredit me with.
But it seems they came up empty handed: After a year of investigation, they couldn’t come up with anything. Surprisingly, they even showed two people who claimed I’d saved their lives. All the other interviews were with people who don’t actually know me. One was with a Chicago journalist who interviewed me once — 13 years ago. Two classmates from med school, whom I haven’t seen in over 40 years, also described their impressions.
Ironically, yet again, just one week before the “Superspreader” program aired, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reversed all of its COVID-19 guidelines, thereby proving my position on COVID was correct all along. Of course, this was never mentioned in their program though.
September 23, 2022 — Mercola Website Taken Down in Cyberattack
Next up was a cyberattack that took down my entire website and destroyed our servers. Cyberattacks have been ongoing for the past six years, but the one that took place September 23, 2022, finally got through our defenses. By that time, my reach on social media had been throttled back to next to nothing, and my website was about the only place you could find my articles (with the exception of republications, which I allowed).
September 28, 2022 — Mercola Sues Google and YouTube
Warren isn’t the only one I’ve had to sue to protect my First Amendment right. In September 28, 2022, I also filed a lawsuit39 against Google, YouTube and Alphabet Inc. for breach of contract.40
As detailed in my complaint, YouTube unilaterally amended the contract without notice, which is a violation of its own terms of service, and then used this last-minute amendment to justify removing my content, which went back to 2005, the same year YouTube was founded. At the time YouTube deleted my content, I had more than 300,000 subscribers, and my videos had collectively garnered more than 50 million views.
The WaPo article was embargoed until the morning of September 29 in order to prevent me (and anyone else affected by this change) from reviewing the new policy, take steps to bring my channel into compliance, or move my content to another platform. Instead, they simply deleted 16 years’ worth of intellectual property, without warning.
This is a clear violation of its own terms of service, which state that YouTube “will provide reasonable advance notice” of any changes to the terms of service, and that users will have “the opportunity to review them” and to remove content if they do not agree to the new terms.
YouTube’s terms of service also include a “three strikes” policy, where users are given three warnings and opportunities to remove content that violates the guidelines before being banned. I had no “strikes” against my channel on the day I was deplatformed and deleted.
I’m also suing YouTube for unjust enrichment, as for the last 16 years, my video content, having generated in excess of 50 million views, has been of great financial benefit to YouTube, allowing them to increase advertising revenue on the site. Additionally, they’ve refused to allow me to retrieve any of this content, which they still have in their possession. So, YouTube has unjustly benefited at my expense.
January 2023 — Third Lawsuit Filed to Protect Free Speech
January 10, 2023, I, along with several other plaintiffs, also filed a lawsuit41 against The Washington Post, the BBC, the Associated Press and Reuters — also known as the Trusted News Initiative (TNI),42 a self-appointed Pharma and Big Tech industry partner that has spent the past couple years playing judge and jury of news.
It has been doing everything it can to censor what it doesn’t want the public to hear. As noted in the complaint, the TNI has not only censored free speech, it has also engaged in antitrust activity. Specifically, “Federal antitrust law has its own name for this kind of ‘industry partnership’: it’s called a ‘group boycott’ and is a per se violation of the Sherman Act.”
As evidence of this allegation, our complaint references multiple public statements by TNI partners, including a March 2022 statement by Jamie Angus, then-senior news controller for BBC News, who explained TNI’s “strategy to beat disinformation.”
The Fight for Truth and Freedom Continues
The globalist cabal is extremely coordinated, as you can see. What’s more, they play dirty. But we will not give up, nor give in. Our freedom is far too precious for that, and freedom depends on getting the truth out. So, I will continue doing my part. You can help by sharing articles you think are important with family and friends, in whatever ways are available.
Sources and References
- 1 CSPI July 21, 2020
- 2 Illegal Claims Pertaining to Mercola Group Products (PDF)
- 3 CSPI July 19, 2017
- 4, 7 SCPInet.org March 4, 2021
- 5 Nutrients October 31, 2020;12, 3361; doi:10.3390/nu12113361
- 6 FDA Mercola Warning Letter February 18, 2021
- 8 Sun Gazette April 24, 2021
- 9 USRTK September 23, 2020
- 10 Cornell Alliance for Science Our Funders
- 11, 12 Cornell Alliance for Science, March 2021, FDA Warns Mercola
- 13 Sky News March 5, 2021
- 14 Twitter CCDH March 3, 2021
- 15 In-this-together.com, CCDH The Center for Cancel Culture and Digital Hypocrisy Part 2
- 16 Nature Medicine March 15, 2021
- 17 Counterhate.com Disinformation Dozen March 21, 2021
- 18 The Disinformation Dozen
- 19 PR Newswwire March 24, 2021
- 20 Letter to Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg March 24, 2021
- 21 Facebook August 18, 2021
- 22 Washington Post April 8, 2021
- 23 Texas Children’s Hospital Peter Hotez
- 24 PND July 1, 2011
- 25 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
- 26 Nature April 27, 2021
- 27 CCHD Disinformation Dozen: The Sequel April 28, 2021
- 28 Reason July 15, 2021
- 29 CNN July 16, 2021
- 30 AP July 16, 2021
- 31 New York Times July 24, 2021 (Archived)
- 32 Twitter Dr. Joseph Mercola July 26, 2021
- 33 Warren’s letter to Andy Jassy September 7, 2021
- 34 National Interest September 12, 2021
- 35 The Guardian September 13, 2021
- 36 New York Times September 8, 2021
- 37 Washington Post September 29, 2021
- 38 US District Court Western District of Washington Case: 2:21-cv-01508
- 39 Complaint for Contract Breach Mercola vs Google, YouTube, Alphabet Inc. September 28, 2022
- 40 Reuters September 29, 2022
- 41 US District Court Northern District of Texas Case: 2:23-cv-00004-Z
- 42 The Defender January 10, 2023
What if the NY Times covered the Project Veritas Pfizer revelations?
By Bill Rice, Jr. | January 29, 2023
This is an addendum to yesterday’s “thought exercise” …. example No. 10,000 of how the mainstream press exerts its real power through its intentional (and daily) decisions to NOT write articles about important news.
The main thought here is that if the mainstream media doesn’t cover X, X is not really “news.” At least not news that’s “fit to print.”
Here are a few of the known knowables about the Project Veritas undercover sting operation.
- An executive with Pfizer seems to say that his company is performing, or will soon perform, “gain of function” research on viruses … although the company doesn’t label these type of virus manipulations “gain-of-function” research. They instead manipulate the language and call them “directed evolution” experiments.
- The executive admits that Covid “vaccines” – which increasing numbers of every-day citizens and the company knows are not effective at preventing infection or spread – are still a “cash cow” for the company and will probably remain a “cash cow” for the company for many years, maybe for the rest of our lives.
- The executive admits this is not good for the public, but this is very good for Pfizer.
- The executive acknowledges that the “regulators” who are supposed to regulate Pfizer are captured and that many of them will end up working in the industry they are supposed to be regulating.
In a sane world, all of the above revelations would be “newsworthy” as Pfizer is the company that is producing a “vaccine” and booster shots that have been injected into billions of arms.
The question reporters might want to ask is should the people of the world really trust such a company … or the government regulators who are supposed to regulate such a company.
The real question is why wouldn’t these revelations qualify as a “story” that’s worth reporting to the billions of people who are receiving experimental shots from this company and other vaccine producers?
* The Project Veritas videos have now been viewed by approximately 20 million people in the world. This right here tells us there is tremendous interest in this story.
But, still, as of this writing, I don’t think The New York Times has published one story about any of this.
Building on my theme that the Times is the “leader of the pack” of “pack journalism,” I also note that The Washington Post, USA Today, L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune, Associated Press, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN (I’m going to stop here for space reasons) have also found this “story” is unworthy of any coverage.
* YouTube (owned by Google) pulled the video for violating one of its “guidelines.” (Apparently, sting journalism – the type journalism that made “Sixty Minutes” a cultural icon – now violates their guidelines).
That is, per the organizations that helped create and defend all the official narratives, this story is actually NOT a story. In fact, any story that challenges any important narrative cannot become a story.
I would argue that all the stories that can never be allowed to become “stories” is the great unreported story (scandal) of our times.
If you read my piece on “Good vs. Evil,” you might believe as I do that this is, in fact, a silver lining of our New Normal times. At least “Evil” has shown its face. Some of us at least know – without question – the news sources we should NEVER trust.
The news organizations that will not run stories like this are the Bad Guys who must be exposed.
In fact, they long ago exposed themselves as operatives who exist to conceal and cover-up important stories and facts. The silver lining is that more people are starting to understand this valuable lesson, which can’t be a bad thing.
Continuing with yesterday’s “thought exercise,” what would happen if The New York Times did fairly cover all of the news elements of the Project Veritas story?
If this happened, even more people would know about this story, including every New York Times subscriber who has (inexplicably) bought the official narrative that Pfizer is doing great good for the world.
At least a few of these subscribers might conclude, “Maybe we should reconsider our blind trust in this company.”
Would Pfizer continue to shower this newspaper with advertising spends if the Times wrote a few Page-1 stories that called into question Pfizer’s wonderful humanity?
Would the Bill Gates Foundation continue to dole out hundreds of millions of its “excellence in journalism” grants/subsidies to news organizations that questioned or attacked Big Pharma?
If The New York Times wrote a critical story that followed-up on the Project Veritas revelations, would any other mainstream news organization follow their lead and do the same thing?
If the Times did fairly report the newsworthy elements of this story, wouldn’t this set a precedent that the working press no longer views the pronouncements of supposedly infallible companies and science experts as “settled science” after all?
If some prestigious news organization can produce journalism that embarrasses Pfizer’s top brass, couldn’t the same journalists do other pieces that embarrass the leaders of the government/science complex? You know … “hypothetically speaking.”
My thought all along has been that these “news organizations” (or officials) can’t do one real investigation because if they did one, they’d have to keep going. People would say, “Well, if they lied about that, they might have also lied about that …”
So the “key to the operation” is NOT performing the first real investigation.
Which leads me to this thought … If someone would just do the first big-time real investigation … all the faux-narrative dominoes might start to fall.
Or … maybe not. Per my thought-exercising, the first news organization that breaks ranks and performs real journalism is going to be attacked unmercifully by the rest of the pack (club). A message will be sent: Do not go THERE.
Julian Assange and WikiLeaks got that message loud and clear – which is probably why nobody else has started another version of WikiLeaks.
Fox News is a very interesting player in this “groupthink” landscape. Fox News did cover the Project Veritas bombshell. Tucker Carlson led with this story the other night.
Tucker Carlson happens to host the highest-rated primetime news/commentary show in North America …
… so there’s probably a key lesson here: If you do report the truth, you are not going to lose audience. You are going to gain audience.
At least in the “mainstream press,” Tucker Carlson had/has a monopoly on this shocking story.
So we have a story that tens of millions of people are very interested in … that 98 percent of the rest of the mainstream press won’t even cover.
If they do eventually cover it, it will be some kind of “fact check” that tries to tell us that this guy’s comments were all “misinformation.”
The message will be: Don’t trust what this guy said – or none of what he said matters. Or Project Veritas is a front for Q-Anon and its founder should be thrown into the gulag just like Assange was.
NYT, after deciding lockdowns are authoritarian and bad when China does them, now mildly terrified as Xi Jinping reopens & infections rise
You can take the New York Times out of lockdown, but you can’t take the lockdowns out of the New York Times.
eugyppius: a plague chronicle | December 19, 2022
“From Zero Covid to No Plan: Behind China’s Pandemic U-Turn” is the headline of the latest highly revealing Times reporting on the end of Zero Covid in China. “After micromanaging the coronavirus strategy for nearly three years,” we read, “… Xi Jinping has suddenly left the populace to improvise.”
The essence of the piece is that the Chinese have rightly regained their freedoms, but they’re now left to face a terrifying virus alone and undefended by their government, which is also very bad, and possibly worse than the lockdowns, as bad as they were.
China’s party-run media has cast the shift [from Zero Covid] as a stressful but well-considered exit, opening the way back to good economic times. Warnings about the dangers of the coronavirus have swiftly disappeared, replaced by official claims that the Omicron variant is generally mild. By holding off from easing until now, the government has saved many lives, the People’s Daily said on Thursday in a long article defending Mr. Xi’s pandemic strategy as “totally correct.”
In reality, an examination of how the shift unfolded in Chongqing and elsewhere reveals a government overtaken by a cascade of Covid outbreaks, confusion over directives, economic woes and then rare political protests. …
It’s almost like mass containment doesn’t do anything aside from wrecking the economy and ruining everyone’s lives. I’m glad the Times can finally come close to admitting this now, in the last weeks of 2022.
By changing only a handful of words, you could make key sections of the article apply to Germany, or any western nation aside from Sweden or Belarus:
Even the Chinese Communist Party, a virtuoso at controlling the narrative, is finding it difficult to sell the policy lurch to anxious residents.
[Xi] turned China’s intense top-to-bottom mobilization against the pandemic into a showcase of the party’s organizational strength. For two years, his Covid war enjoyed widespread public acceptance, but eventually the effort exhausted staff, strained local finances, and appeared to drown out attempts to discuss, let alone devise, a measured transition.
Whereas in the West, we had totally open and honest discussions about the insane, enduring closures, that weren’t marked by massive censorship and government intimidation at all. Otherwise, Western nations were themselves locked in exactly this same international competition, eager to display the fruits of their superior pandemic planning to the world, and terrified that failure would cost them legitimacy. One of the reasons Germany locked down so hard during Fall 2020, was that the Merkel government had collected many international plaudits for their handling of the first wave — effectively taking credit for the seasonality of infections. They were unwilling to surrender the regard they had earned so easily.
Mr. Xi has no likely successor and could stay in power for at least another decade. But the scars from the abrupt change may feed distrust in his domineering style.
It’s not subjecting his whole country to absurd containment theatre over what is no more than an influenza-level risk that poses a political problem for Xi, but rather “the scars from the abrupt change” in policy.
Finally the reporters get around to discussing the protests.
In Zhengzhou in central China, thousands of workers clashed with police at an iPhone plant, angry about a delay in bonuses and the handling of an outbreak.
In Haizhu, a textile manufacturing district in southern China, laborers poured onto the streets over food shortages and hardships under lockdown. Migrant workers, who depend on daily work for their livelihoods, went weeks without jobs.
“I couldn’t make a living this year,” said Zhou Kaice, a street porter in Chongqing. “Some bosses I worked for started up for a few days but were then shut by lockdowns.”
Despite the strains, officials still insisted China must win its pandemic war. Provincial leaders throughout November declared their commitment to “zero Covid,” often citing Mr. Xi as their lodestone.
“If pandemic controls were loosened, that would inevitably create mass infections,” said a Xinhua editorial on Nov. 19. “Economic and social development and the public’s physical health and safety would be seriously hurt.”
How many times did we have to read that lockdowns were the ultimate way to grow the economy, because without them, the virus would somehow destroy all business activity?
It’s also interesting how anti-lockdown protestors in the West are thugs and stupid conspiracy-crazed Nazis, while in China they are “students, workers and homeowners.”
By [November], China’s most widespread protests since 1989 had begun. Students, workers and homeowners in Beijing, Shanghai and elsewhere vented against Covid controls, angered by a fire in western China that many believed, despite official denials, had killed residents trapped in their apartments by lockdowns.
“I tell you that in this world there’s only one sickness, and that’s poverty and having no freedom, and we’ve got plenty of that,” said a Chongqing man whose tirade went viral in China.
“Give me liberty or give me death,” he shouted, using the Chinese version of the American revolutionary battle cry.
Sounds like the Canadian trucker protests — you know, those guys who posed such a threat to freedom and democracy that it proved necessary to freeze their bank accounts.
At the end, the Times assures its heavily masked and vaccinated readership that “most people are staying home,” but that “if deaths rise sharply, public anger could revive” because “infections could hinder a quick economic rebound.”
Until we Decovidify the newsrooms, there will never be sane reporting on SARS-2 in any major press outlet, ever.
How to Trash a Movie in Support of a Lie
The cover-up of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians during the Nakba continues
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • DECEMBER 13, 2022
Israel’s new government is planning to give de facto operational control of the national police and heavily armed border police to Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of a party of right wing, racist extremists. It can perhaps be regarded as the prelude to the last phase in the uprooting and displacement of the Palestinian people. Those who resist will be killed and not a single Israeli soldier or policeman will be punished for carrying out what the Benjamin Netanyahu government will frame as a war against terrorists blessed by Yahweh in support of his “Chosen” people.
The Zionist view of what should be done to the indigenous inhabitants of a place once called Palestine has been unflinching since the founding of the state of Israel. The Zionist historic boast that a Jewish homeland would be built on “A land without a people for a people without a land” ignored the fact that Palestine already had plenty of inhabitants and a well-established economy where Jews were a distinct minority, less than 20% of the population in the 1930s.
The solution to correct the numbers was to compel the natives to leave by one means or another. Israel’s founding father David Ben Gurion early on endorsed a policy of removal by force if necessary the Christians and Muslims. The fighting that followed in 1948 after the United Nations’ partition of the country into two separate states left the mostly unarmed Palestinians helpless before the well-armed Jewish militias, which quickly expanded their zone of control well into the area that was granted on paper to the Palestinians. It is estimated that 15,000 Palestinians were killed outright by the Zionist forces while 800,000 more were driven from their homes, to which nearly all were denied any right to return. Four hundred Palestinian occupied villages were “ethnically cleansed” and in some cases physically destroyed.
The de facto seizure of the remainder of historic Palestine outside the borders of the Jewish state after the June 1967 Six Day war gave Israel direct control of all key strategic areas as well as land in Syria and Lebanon. Since that time, successive Israeli governments have pursued an ethnic cleansing policy both in Israel itself and on the West Bank consisting of gradually forcing the remaining Palestinians to leave to be replaced by all-Jewish towns and settlements. The Palestinians know that the final push is indeed coming and have begun to resist, though having few weapons they are helpless against the heavily armed Israel Defense Force (IDF), which has killed 195 Palestinians, mostly teenagers, in the past eleven months.
A recent killing captured on surveillance video shows an Israeli border policeman shooting a young man dead after an encounter on the main street of a West Bank town. Far-right Otzma Yehudit Party leader and incoming National Security Minister Ben-Gvir, praised the policeman who did the shooting as a “hero,” citing his “Precise action, you really fulfilled the honor of all of us and did what was assigned to you.”
The Palestinians refer to their dispossession and killing at the hands of the Jewish soldiers in 1948 as the Nakba, meaning “catastrophe,” which has sometimes been popularized as the Arab version of the so-called holocaust. I have recently watched a controversial film called Farha, made in Jordan by a woman filmmaker of Syrian descent, which views the Nakba through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old village girl. She, the eponymous Farha that gives the film its title, was preparing to go off to advance her education, presumably in Jerusalem, when Israeli soldiers attacked her village. The Israelis used loudspeakers to announce that all residents must leave immediately. Anyone seeking to remain would be killed. In a panic, the girl’s father, the village chief, locked her into a storage shed for safety as he tried to figure out what to do, but he then disappears from the tale and it might be presumed that both he and the rest of the family were killed.
Farha has only a crack in the door to witness what is going on outside. In a particularly dreadful sequence, a Palestinian man and his family who are trying to escape but are apparently confused regarding what way to go are detained by an Israeli officer and his men. After some perfunctory questioning, the father, mother and two children are lined up against a wall and shot dead. A newborn baby was left lying on the ground, alive, crying for its mother. The officer tells one of his men to kill it, but adds “Don’t waste a bullet on it.” The soldier prepares to stomp on the baby’s head to carry out the order, but cannot bring himself to do it and walks away. The baby continues to wail until later that day it stops, presumably dead from exposure or other factors.
Eventually Farha escapes from her prison and the movie concludes with her walking away in tears to an uncertain future. The film is very powerful, with excellent acting, cinematography and direction and it is based on a true story as handed down by Director Darin J. Sallam’s mother’s best friend, but I ended up wishing that it were stronger in its depiction of the savagery exercised by the Israelis, perhaps recreating an actual major massacre of Palestinian civilians, like occurred at Deir Yassin, where 107 Arabs, including many women and children, were shot dead by Israeli militiamen from the Irgun and Lehi groups. Other massacres took place in hundreds of villages across Galilee as well as in cities like Haifa or Akka, all far worse than what is revealed by the film. For those who are interested, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine describes, in detail, the brutality of what Israeli forces unleashed on the largely unarmed Palestinian people during the Nakba.
But even though the film deliberately avoided cliched scenes of mass violence, it has proven very powerful with supporters and critics lined up along the completely predictable political lines. The Israelis have in particular come down hard on the film and they and their many friends in the United States, have reacted in their usual tribal fashion, attacking Netflix, which is streaming Farha on its network including in the United States and Europe. The Israel firsters are advocating striking back against Netflix for its temerity by canceling the service and attacking the decision to air the film at all. Ironically though not surprisingly, Netflix has hitherto been a leader in obtaining and streaming Israeli films and even television series.
In Israel, the government has declared war on the film, also a characteristic of that nation’s circle-the- wagons paranoid response to anything that might even suggest that Jews are just as capable of evil as anyone else. Last month ultra-nationalist Israeli Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman moved to block scheduled screenings of the film in Jaffa, saying that “Israel is a place to present Israeli and international works, but is certainly not the place to slander IDF soldiers and the security forces who are acting day and night to defend and protect all the citizens and residents living here.”
Lieberman, a Russian Jew known for his ethnocentric and essentially racist views, apparently does not believe that soldiers and security forces should actually protect Palestinians and afford them at least some measure of free speech, which is only allowed to Jews. Israel’s ironically titled Culture Minister the oddly named Chili Tropper also attacked the film for its so-called “false plots against IDF soldiers” denouncing how their actions were presented as similar to “behavior of the Nazis in the Holocaust.”
Former IDF soldier and current right wing apologist, Yoseph Haddad also tweeted, “I saw the movie ‘Farha’ and I can tell you that it is much worse than you think. The IDF soldiers are presented there as inhuman with unimaginable evil, all they care about is murdering and slaughtering without mercy (which is the exact opposite of the truth). This is a blood libel that will certainly increase antisemitism and incitement against Israel. If you haven’t canceled your Netflix subscription yet – do it now.”
In an Instagram post, Israeli model Nataly Dadon also demanded that Israelis and their supporters internationally should drop their Netflix subscriptions in an Instagram post, claiming that Farha’s “sole purpose is apparently to increase anti-Semitism against the Jewish people.” Mondoweiss also reports how “author and photographer Laura Ben-David tweeted a photo of her cancellation message with the streaming app and wrote, ‘Buh-bye Netflix! Supporting the false and anti-Israel film Farha is unacceptable.’”
So Israel, which is passionate about its rejection of the non-violent pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) economic pressure movement, is united in its desire to punish Netflix’s bottom line. And the old reliable anti-Semitism tag is being liberally attached to how the argument is being framed. Former Al Jazeera reporter Ahmed Shihab-Eldin suggested to the Middle East Eye that “The pacing of [all the negative posts] reveals it was coordinated. With each passing hour, dozens and dozens of vapid and vile reviews would appear, making wild accusations trashing the film. It was clear people had not seen the film, and only wanted to damage its reputation.”
Finally, it would not be about Israel and Jews if there were not space in The New York Times to twist and spin the story. A review of the film by one Beatrice Loayza, a Peruvian-American film critic based in Brooklyn, describes the movie oddly as a “brutal coming-of-age-story.” At one point, Farha discovers an old handgun wrapped up within a sack of lentils. She eventually uses it to shoot the lock and escape the storage room. But this is how the Times reviewer describes the sequence: “She finds a gun buried inside a sack of grains — was the threat present all along? One day, a scene of great barbarity plays out before her tiny window.” Aha! So those crafty Arabs actually were potentially using the old handgun among the lentils trick to threaten the friendly Israel soldiers who just happened to drop by to shoot to death a Palestinian family, which is dismissed as a “scene of great barbarity” without any suggestion of what that might have been. In truth, the garbage being peddled by the Times as a review of a story of an atrocity committed by Jews is actually achieved without having to include any context or feature any Jews at all. “Remarkable” is all I have to say in conclusion.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
New York Times Decides Lockdowns are Actually Draconian and Economically Destructive when China Does Them
“Right-wing conspiracy theorists with ties to anti-Xi opposition elements spread baseless rumours, deny science, and endanger lives” – strangely not how the NYT chose to caption this image.
eugyppius: a plague chronicle | November 28, 2022
Three years ago, Zero Covid was the aspiration of public health bureaucrats and politicians across the West. Charlatan techbros like Tomas Pueyo appeared on national television to demand nationwide house arrest; leaders like Angela Merkel surrounded themselves with virus-eradicationist modellers and imposed unprecedented months-long closures upon their countries. When protests inevitably broke out, they were violently suppressed; the protesters were slandered as conspiracy theorists and fascists.
The New York Times played a leading role in this long and excruciating charade. In April 2020, they reported that “an informal coalition of influential conservative leaders and groups, some with close connections to the [Trump] White House” was responsible for “quietly working to nurture protests and apply … pressure to overturn state and local orders intended to stop the spread of the coronavirus.” In March 2021, they ran an obnoxious opinion piece about What Happened When Germany’s Far-Riught Party Railed Against Lockdowns, which called the German protesters “an amorphous mix of conspiracy theorists, shady organizations and outraged citizens” and appeared to accuse the right-populist party Alternativ für Deutschland of opportunism for joining their ranks.
What a difference a few years have made.
China Protests Break Out as Covid Cases Surge and Lockdowns Persist is a lead headline in today’s New York Times : “Strict Covid restrictions are hurting the country’s economy and angering members of the public, who are taking to the streets,” we read in the article that follows. Western anti-lockdown protesters are fascists and conspiracy theorists; Chinese anti-lockdown protesters, on the other hand, are ordinary people protesting their oppression:
“Lift the lockdown,” the protesters screamed in a city in China’s far west. On the other side of the country, in Shanghai, demonstrators held up sheets of blank white paper, turning them into an implicit but powerful sign of defiance. One protester, who was later detained by the police, was carrying only flowers.
Over the weekend, protests against China’s strict Covid restrictions ricocheted across the country in a rare case of nationwide civil unrest. There had been signs of dissent, but the new wave of anger may pose a bigger challenge for the government.
Some demonstrators went so far as to call for the Communist Party and its leader, Xi Jinping, to step down. Many were fed up with Mr. Xi, who in October secured a precedent-defying third term as the party’s general secretary, and his “zero-Covid” policy, which continues to disrupt everyday life, hurt livelihoods and isolate the country.
Western lockdowns were necessary to save lives. Chinese lockdowns are the repressive tactic of an undemocratic regime.
The Chinese government on Monday blamed “forces with ulterior motives” for linking a deadly fire in the western Xinjiang region to strict Covid measures, a key driver as the protests spread across the country.
In much the same way, the New York Times blamed shadowy political actors with ties to Trump for anti-lockdown protests in 2020.
Outside China, the rest of the world has adapted to the virus and is near normalcy. Take soccer’s premier event, the World Cup. Thousands of people from across the globe have assembled in Qatar and are cheering on their teams, shoulder-to-shoulder, without masks, in packed stadiums.
China’s approach won praise during the beginning of the pandemic, and there is no doubt it has saved lives. But now that approach looks increasingly outdated. Almost three years after the coronavirus emerged, the contrast between China and the rest of the world couldn’t be starker.
Emphasis mine, because it’s probably the most amazing line in the whole piece. Here we have America’s foremost propaganda outlet, trying desperately to accuse China of unjust dictatorial repression, for the crime of implementing in a more organised and coherent way the very same Zero Covid policies that Times journalists spent nearly two years supporting. What’s actually wrong with the harsh Chinese lockdowns? Well, say the Times, because they can’t say anything else, they’ve become unfashionable.
The Times have also suddenly discovered that lockdowns are bad for the economy. “China’s economy has been hurt by the restrictions,” which have “hammered business both large and small,” they report. Major companies are seeking to escape the effects of closures by “expand[ing] production outside China”, all while “reduced foot traffic” hurts businesses in “the main streets of towns and cities.” That’s bad when it happens in China, but Germany or Canada it’s totally worth it.
On the one hand, we should be probably be happy about the implicit repudiation of lockdowns that articles like this represent, and the strong signal they send that none of our opinion makers wants to return to them. Some of you will have your own more detailed theories about why this is, but my broad view, is that mass containment adheres to the same trajectory everywhere: 1) There is the initial lockdown followed by a seasonally-induced collapse in cases, which encourages among policymakers to an illusion of control. 2) When infections inevitably surge the second time, they try to play the lockdown card again and again, always with less success. 3) Finally, in the face of growing protests and destruction, the policies are abandoned and everything reopens. The only difference between China and the West, is that a few years intervened before the first and the second of these steps.
On the other hand, the increasingly open hypocrisy and manipulation of the press are reaching terrifying levels I’d never imagined before, and I think this is very bad.
Who is Dr. Asish Jha (President Biden’s Covid Czar)?
Top public health empty suit is a pandemic planner and propagandist
Dr. Ashish Jha
By John Leake · Courageous Discourse · November 25, 2022
At at press briefing on November 22, White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator, Dr. Ashish Jha, reiterated that God gave us two arms in order to receive multiple vaccines and boosters. I write “reiterated” because he made the same stupid remark at a press briefing back in September.
I wasn’t surprised when the Biden Administration appointed Dr. Jha to serve as its Covid Czar. As we recount in our book, Dr. Jha was the minority witness at Senator Ron Johnson’s November 19, 2020 hearing on Early Outpatient Treatment. This hearing began with testimony from Drs. Peter McCullough, Harvey Risch, and George Fareed on the safety and efficacy of repurposed, FDA-approved drugs for treating COVID-19—especially in the disease’s early stage—to prevent hospitalization and death.
Following their testimony, Dr. Jha testified that their observations and findings were erroneous. In fact, he claimed, there were no effective early treatments for COVID-19, and that our best and only hope was the vaccine that was then in development.
An especially dramatic and somewhat comical moment in the hearing occurred when Dr. George Fareed said, “I wonder if Dr. Jha actually treats patients by the way he talks.” Senator Johnson took this remark as a cue for querying Dr. Jha.
“Have you treated any Covid patients,” Senator Johnson asked.
“I have not, sir,” Dr. Jha replied. We recount this scene in the following excerpt from The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex:
Dr. Jha had splendid academic credentials to match his splendid manners, but at this moment he lost a lot of credibility. It was perhaps the equivalent of an aeronautical engineer admitting that he’d never flown in a plane, or a marital counselor admitting he’d never been married.
He implied that Professor Risch—a distinguished epidemiologist twenty years his senior—was categorically wrong in his interpretation of the data. Then he implied that Dr. Fareed’s observations as a treating physician were an illusion—that the high-risk patients who received the Zelenko Protocol would have recovered in the same dramatic way without the intervention.
This was probably the most notable moment in the hearing. Since graduating from medical school in 1970, Dr. Fareed had logged fifty years as a medical researcher and treating physician. It would be hard to find a doctor in the entire country with more clinical experience. He testified to the U.S. Senate that he’d successfully treated 1,000 high-risk COVID-19 patients. A few minutes later, a doctor 25 years his junior—one who’d never treated a single COVID-19 patient—asserted that “there is now clear consensus in the medical and scientific community” that a key ingredient of Dr. Fareed’s treatment protocol doesn’t work. In effect, Dr. Jha told Dr. Fareed to reject the evidence of his own eyes and ears.
Shortly after the hearing, Dr. Jha published an opinion piece for the November 24, 2020, edition of the New York Times titled “The Snake-Oil Salesman of the Senate.” He opened with likening the event to a contagion.
There was a super-spreader event last week in the United States Senate. It wasn’t the coronavirus, however, that was spreading, but misinformation. … The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a hearing about early treatment for COVID-19. Yet instead of a robust discussion about promising emerging therapies or what Congress might do to accelerate such treatments, the conversation was all about the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine. … Neither Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin Republican senator nor his chosen witnesses—three doctors who have pushed hydroxychloroquine—displayed more than a passing interest in evidence. Intuition and personal experiences of individual doctors were acclaimed as guiding principles.[i]
Dr. Jha didn’t mention that he himself had focused his Senate remarks on hydroxychloroquine and hadn’t mentioned any “promising emerging therapies” apart from vaccines. He also didn’t state the names or credentials of the hearing’s witnesses or a summary of their findings or experiences. He compared them to the snake oil salesmen from the frontier past with their advocacy of the drug that President Trump had touted in the spring, implying they were equally lacking in medical sophistication.
“I was called reckless because I pointed to facts that could prevent people from getting the treatment,” he wrote, but he didn’t state these facts. The online version of his essay hyperlinked the word “reckless” to a similar hatchet job report on the hearing in the Washington Post. He claimed the witnesses had expressed a distrust of science and had even “suggested that scientists were part of a ‘deep state’ conspiracy to deny Americans access to lifesaving therapies.” This was, he asserted, “a powerful reminder that not even Congress is immune to toxic conspiracy theories…”
Dr. Jha’s New York Times opinion was, itself, evidence that early treatment of COVID-19 was the subject of a well-orchestrated smear campaign. Why else would such a distinguished academic pen such rank propaganda against his colleagues and their work? That he was personally stung by the revelation that he’d never treated a single COVID-19 patient could only partly account for it.
A possible answer to this question may be gleaned from Dr. Jha’s remarks at a January 10, 2017, Georgetown University conference titled “Pandemic Preparedness in the Next Administration.”
Like the participants at the October 2019 Pandemic Simulation Exercise at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Jha predicted that a devastating pandemic “is going to come at some point.” Dr. Fauci, the keynote speaker, made a more precise prediction.
“There is no question that there will be a challenge to the coming administration in the arena of infectious diseases,” he proclaimed. “The thing we’re extraordinarily confident about is that we’re going to see this in the next few years.”[ii]
As psychiatrist and author Peter Breggin, MD, remarked in his extraordinary book COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We Are the Prey, Dr Jha did not speak in a somber tone about the coming devastation. On the contrary, he emphasized that he was excited about the ambitious project of helping the U.S. and other governments, and equally excited about the many pandemic preparation events in Georgetown and Cambridge that lay ahead. The conference was, he said, the “beginning of a journey.”[iii]
Dr. Jha and his colleagues were animated with the same excitement that denizens of the military-industrial complex would feel at the prospect of a coming war in which they would assume leadership positions. At last, they would be able to deploy all of their forces. With the recognition that the coming war was inevitable, they could call upon the government to allocate far more resources for new technologies, weapons systems, bases, and military organizations. In an atmosphere of such heady excitement, the suggestion of defusing the coming war with diplomacy wouldn’t be received with much enthusiasm.
The irony of Dr. Jha’s excitement is that, when the pandemic he predicted arrived three years later, he didn’t attempt to treat patients or scramble to find consultants to intervene against the disease before it wrecked bodies and imprisoned people in hospitals. Instead, he penned propaganda against hydroxychloroquine and against Drs. McCullough, Risch, and Fareed. Why was the New York Times Editorial Board compelled to publish his misleading account of the Senate hearing? Did the editors even watch the C-SPAN recording of it?
It’s not plausible that their motive was a concern about hydroxychloroquine’s safety. Dr. Jha himself conceded in his testimony that he wasn’t particularly concerned about safety, so why the vast and ceaseless quibbling about whether its efficacy for outpatients had been proven? As Senator Johnson had said in the hearing, this makes no sense.
[i] Jha, Ashish, MD. The Snake Oil Salesmen of the Senate. New York Times, Nov. 24, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/opinion/hydroxychloroquine-covid.html
[ii] Georgetown University Center for Global Health Science & Security, Pandemic Preparedness in the Next Administration. January 10, 2017. https://ghss.georgetown.edu/pandemicprep2017/
[iii] Breggin, Peter R, MD and Ginger Ross Breggin, COVID-19 AND THE GLOBAL PREDATORS: WE ARE THE PREY. Ithaca: Lake Edge Press, 2021, p. 259.
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From the Archives
A short history of British torture
ICC | December 2005
When the House of Commons was debating how much to increase the time limit for detention without trial the question of torture came up. Officially this was limited to the nice considerations of whether it was all right to send people to places where torture is used and whether Britain can use information collected by the use of torture in other countries. This discussion gave an impression of democratic Britain as the home of civilised behaviour where the very idea of torture is repugnant to our legislators – unlike, say, the US with its secret CIA jails… In reality, the British state has a long history of using and developing a whole range of torture techniques. … continue
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