How Big Pharma Weaves Its Web
By Kim Witczak | Brownstone Institute | April 5, 2025
Inever set out to be an advocate. I wasn’t a doctor, scientist, or policy expert. I was just a regular person who, like so many, blindly trusted that our healthcare system was designed to protect us.
But life has a way of pulling us into the arena when we least expect it.
After the tragic and unexpected loss of my husband Woody to the antidepressant Zoloft he was prescribed for insomnia, I was thrust into a world I never imagined—one where medicine wasn’t solely about healing, but deeply entangled in a system that prioritizes profit over safety, buries harms, and keeps the public in the dark.
For over two decades, I’ve had a front-row seat to how this system truly operates—not the illusion of rigorous oversight we see in medical journals or glossy pharmaceutical ads, but the reality of how industry influence is woven into every stage.
I’ve met with regulators, testified before the FDA and Congress, filed a wrongful death and failure-to-warn lawsuit against Pfizer, and earned a seat on the FDA’s Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee as a consumer representative.
I’ve also spoken at and participated in global conferences like Selling Sickness, Too Much Medicine, and the Harms in Medicine meeting in Erice, Italy—where some of the world’s leading experts acknowledge what few in mainstream medicine dare to say:
Our healthcare system isn’t about health—it’s about business.
And in this business, harm isn’t an accident. It’s built into the system.
The more I uncovered, the more I realized:
We aren’t just patients. We are customers.
And we are all trapped in Big Pharma’s spiderweb of influence.
The Spiderweb of Influence
The more I learned, the more I saw just how deeply embedded the pharmaceutical industry is—not just in drug development and marketing but in every corner of our healthcare system.
That’s why I created the Big Pharma Spider Web of Influence—to visually map out how the system is designed not to prioritize health but to sell sickness while minimizing, downplaying, or outright hiding harms.
From clinical trial design to regulatory approval, from direct-to-consumer advertising to medical education, from controlling medical journals to silencing dissenting voices, the industry has built an intricate and self-reinforcing web—one that traps doctors, patients, and even regulators in a cycle of pharmaceutical dependence.
How the Web Works
- Clinical trials are often designed, funded, and controlled by the very companies that stand to profit. They manipulate data to exaggerate benefits and obscure risks, ensuring that negative results are buried, spun, or never published at all.
- Regulatory agencies like the FDA are deeply entangled with the industry they’re supposed to oversee. More than 50% of the FDA’s budget comes from industry-paid user fees, and a revolving door ensures that many key decision-makers come from—and later return to—pharmaceutical companies.
- Medical journals depend on pharmaceutical funding through advertising, reprint sales, and industry-sponsored studies—severely limiting independent scrutiny of drug safety. Many studies are ghostwritten or crafted by paid “key opinion leaders” (KOLs) who serve as pharma’s trusted messengers.
- Doctors receive education through industry-funded programs, learning “best practices” based on treatment guidelines crafted by the very system that profits from overprescription.
- Patient advocacy groups, once independent grassroots organizations, have been co-opted by industry money, ensuring that the loudest voices often serve pharma’s interests rather than patients’ needs. I call them “astroturf” patient groups—they look like real grassroots organizations, but they’re anything but.
- Screenings and guidelines continuously expand the definitions of disease, turning more people into lifelong customers.
This isn’t about one bad actor or isolated corruption—it’s a systemic issue. The entire structure is designed to push more drugs onto the market, medicalize normal human experiences, and only acknowledge harm when it becomes too big to ignore.
It’s a brilliant business model—but a catastrophic public health strategy.
“To Sell to Everyone:” The Business Model of Medicine
If this sounds like a conspiracy, consider the bold admission made by Henry Gadsden, former CEO of Merck, in a 1976 interview with Fortune Magazine:
“The problem we have had is limiting the potential of drugs to sick people. We could be more like Wrigley’s Gum…it has long been my dream to make drugs for healthy people. To sell to everyone.”
– Former Merck CEO Henry Gadsden
Let that sink in.
This wasn’t about curing disease—it was about expanding markets. Gadsden’s vision wasn’t just to treat illness, but to medicalize everyday life—creating a cradle-to-grave model where every person, healthy or sick, became a customer for life. Just like selling a variety of gum—something for everyone. Juicy Fruit, Big Red, Doublemint, Spearmint, and so on.
And that’s exactly what happened.
Today, we live in a system where:
- Everyday emotions—sadness, worry, shyness—are rebranded as medical conditions requiring treatment.
- Preventive medicine often means lifelong prescriptions, not lifestyle changes.
- Drugs are marketed to the “worried well”, turning normal human experiences into diagnoses.
This isn’t just theory—it’s well documented. In Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All into Patients, Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels expose how pharmaceutical companies create diseases, expand diagnostic criteria, and convince the public that normal life experiences require medical intervention.
The goal?
Make medication the default—not the last resort.
Harms Are Always an Afterthought
Harms from medication are not rare, nor are they unexpected.
But in this system, they are treated as acceptable collateral damage—something to be dealt with only after the damage is done, after lives are lost or forever changed.
I’ve sat in FDA Advisory Committee meetings, reviewing new drug applications, and have seen firsthand how safety concerns are often dismissed in favor of “innovation” or “unmet medical need.”
I’ve heard industry representatives and advisory committee members argue that safety signals can be addressed post-market, meaning after a drug is already in circulation and causing harm or a required REMS (Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies) program upon approval.
But by the time post-market safety issues are acknowledged, it’s often too late.
We’ve seen this play out over and over:
- Opioids—marketed as “non-addictive” and pushed aggressively onto patients, leading to an epidemic of addiction and death.
- SSRIs and antidepressants—long linked to increased risks of suicide and violence, particularly in young people, yet downplayed or dismissed for decades. Other hidden harms include withdrawal syndromes and Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction (PSSD), conditions that many patients were never warned about.
- Antipsychotics—widely prescribed for off-label use, leading to severe metabolic and neurological side effects.
- Covid-19 vaccines—an experimental mRNA platform rushed to market, mandated, and imposed on society despite limited long-term safety data and growing concerns over harms.
Every time, the pattern is the same:
The industry sells the benefits while downplaying the risks—until those risks become too big to ignore.
By then, the drug is a blockbuster, billions have been made, and the system moves on to the next new “breakthrough.”
More Than Degrees: The Truth of Lived Experience
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in this fight is that real-world experience matters just as much as credentials.
Over the years, I’ve been invited to speak at medical schools, PhD programs, and universities, thanks to brave academics willing to challenge the narrative. I share my journey as an accidental advocate—someone who didn’t have a medical degree but discovered America’s broken drug system the hard way.
But let’s be honest—the medical world is driven by credentials. Or, as I like to say, the alphabet soup.
At conferences, attendees wear name tags listing their titles—MD, PhD, JD, MPH. It’s a quick way to size someone up, to assess credibility before even speaking. And I’ve seen it happen: people glance at my name tag, see no impressive letters after my name, and walk right by.
Years ago, I was speaking at the Preventing Overdiagnosis Conference and noticed my badge read: Kim Witczak, BA.
I was horrified. Was that really necessary? Did my name tag need to remind everyone that I only had a BA?
Later, I was telling the story to a doctor friend, and he laughed.
“Next time, tell them BA stands for Bad Ass.”
And he was right.
Because real expertise doesn’t always come from an advanced degree—it comes from lived experience, from asking the right questions, from refusing to accept the status quo.
The Counterargument: But Don’t We Need Experts?
Of course, some will argue that only experts with MDs and PhDs should be trusted to shape healthcare policy.
But that assumes that the system they operate in is free from bias, conflicts of interest, or financial incentives.
The reality is that many of those with the most letters after their names are also the ones benefiting from pharma funding—whether through consulting fees, research grants, or advisory roles.
Meanwhile, patients and their families—the ones living with the consequences—are too often ignored.
That needs to change.
Asking Better Questions: Reclaiming Our Power
If there’s one thing I’ve learned on this journey, it’s this: no one is coming to save us. The institutions meant to protect us are too entangled in the web to act with true independence.
My late husband, Woody, used to say: “Follow the money.” And when you do, the truth becomes impossible to ignore. Pharmaceutical profits—not patient well-being—drive the system. That’s why the only way to create real change is through awareness, transparency, and fundamentally shifting how we think about medicine and health.
That starts with asking better questions:
- Who funded this research?
- Does this person or institution have financial ties, intellectual bias, or self-interest that could impact their recommendations?
- Who benefits from this treatment?
- What aren’t we being told?
- What are the long-term consequences of this drug or intervention?
- Are there safer, non-drug alternatives being ignored because they aren’t profitable?
But asking the right questions isn’t enough.
We have to stop outsourcing our health to a system built on financial incentives and guided by corporate interests.
We must demand full transparency, challenge the status quo, and recognize that sometimes the best medicine isn’t a pill but a deeper understanding of what our bodies truly need.
Because once you see the web, you can’t unsee it.
And once you recognize how deeply medicine has been shaped by profit, you’ll realize the most important question isn’t just “What can I take?”—it’s “Who benefits if I do?”
Final Thoughts: Tearing Down the Web
I never wanted to be in this fight, but once you see the web, you can’t unsee it. That’s why I continue to speak out, to challenge the system, and to push for real accountability.
Because the stakes aren’t theoretical. They’re deeply personal.
For me, this fight began over two decades ago with Woody. But for countless others, it begins the moment they or someone they love is caught in the web—trusting a system that was never truly designed to protect them.
It’s time to tear down the web.
And it starts with seeing it for what it really is.
Seyed Mohammad Marandi: Iran Defies Trump’s Ultimatum and Threat of War
Glenn Diesen | April 3, 2025
Seyed Mohammad Marandi is a professor, an analyst and an advisor to Iran’s nuclear negotiation team. Prof. Marandi discusses Iran’s rejection of Trump’s ultimatum and the possible nuclear escalation.
Substack: https://glenndiesen.substack.com/
Five martyrs, wounded in US aggression in past hours: Yemen
Al Mayadeen | April 3, 2025
Al Mayadeen’s correspondent in Yemen reported that the number of US airstrikes on Saada Governorate has increased to 27 in the past 12 hours.
Today, reconnaissance aircraft from the US-led coalition targeted a civilian car in the Majz district of Saada governorate, following two airstrikes by warplanes on the same district.
Overnight Wednesday, US aircraft struck the Kitaf district and the Kahlan area, east of Saada governorate.
Alongside the ongoing aggression in Taiz, southern Yemen, Al Mayadeen’s correspondent reported that US aircraft also targeted the communications network in Jabal Namah, located in the Jablah district of Ibb Governorate in central Yemen.
In an interview with Al Mayadeen, Yemeni Health Ministry spokesperson Anis al-Asbahi reported that five people were killed, five others were injured, and one person went missing in airstrikes on Yemen over the past 24 hours. He emphasized that Yemenis are fully aware of the challenges they face and are prepared to confront them.
Yemen MoH reports 61 martyrs from US aggression
Al-Asbahi has confirmed to Al Mayadeen that the death toll from the US-led aggression on Sanaa and other governorates since mid-March has reached 61 martyrs and 139 wounded.
He also stated that since Yemen began its support operation for Gaza, the US-British-Israeli aggression has left 964 civilian casualties, including 250 martyrs.
This toll reflects data recorded up until April 1.
Since Yemen resumed its operations at sea and against occupied territories in response to the renewed Israeli aggression on Gaza, the United States has intensified its attacks on Yemen, conducting airstrikes on various governorates.
Sights set on Somaliland: The threat of a total US–UK–Israeli takeover
By Kit Klarenberg – The Cradle – April 3, 2025
In recent weeks, Somaliland has drawn unprecedented attention from western media. As Israeli and US officials scramble to find a destination to forcibly relocate Gaza’s population, the globally unrecognized breakaway territory is increasingly floated as a potential solution.
Multiple mainstream reports suggest Tel Aviv and Washington are making quiet overtures to Hargeisa. On 14 March, the Financial Times revealed:
“A US official briefed on Washington’s initial contacts with Somaliland’s presidency said discussions had begun about a possible deal to recognize the de facto state in return for the establishment of a military base near the port of Berbera on the Red Sea coast.”
Somaliland’s President Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi has made international recognition his central foreign policy objective. Since the territory declared independence in 1991, no country has recognized it as a sovereign state. But late last year, before entering the White House, US President Donald Trump made the surprise announcement that he intended to officially recognize Somaliland, which would make Washington the first foreign capital to do so.
For the internationally isolated statelet, the prospect of a permanent US military footprint, which would shield the East African statelet from Somalia’s endemic instability, is no doubt enormously appealing, especially as it would be attached to official recognition of statehood by a major global power.
Search for a new ‘Nakba’
From Washington’s perspective, the deal would yield far more than just a convenient dumping ground for displaced Palestinians, evicted to make way for Trump’s fantasized “Gaza-Lago.” Somaliland’s strategic location on the Red Sea makes it an ideal staging post for operations against Yemen.
A current map of the Horn of Africa
Such a move would grant the US a critical new foothold in the Horn of Africa at a time when American and French forces are being ejected from countries across the continent at breakneck speed.
It could also serve as a counterweight to China and Russia’s expanding presence in northern Africa. Beijing established its first overseas military base in neighbouring Djibouti in 2017, and has since emerged as an aggressive critic of western policies in the region – while also welcoming Iranian naval vessels at its ports.
The strategic utility of recognizing Somaliland is not lost on Washington’s foreign policy architects. Project 2025 – a sprawling, right-wing policy blueprint by the Heritage Foundation, intended as a roadmap for Trump’s second term—explicitly advocates “[countering] malign Chinese activity” in Africa. It specifically recommended “the recognition of Somaliland statehood as a hedge against the US’s deteriorating position in Djibouti.”
Another neocolonial outpost
Keep in mind that Trump’s interest in the territory was made public well before Somaliland was floated as a relocation site for Gaza’s 2.4 million Palestinians. In November 2024, former British defence secretary Gavin Williamson announced he had held “really good meetings” with Trump’s “policy leads” on the matter, expressing confidence that recognition was on the horizon.
Williamson has long been an ardent advocate of Somaliland’s independence, regularly undertaking all-expenses-paid trips to the breakaway territory, and receiving honorary citizenship for his lobbying efforts.
Williamson’s interest exposes a rarely acknowledged truth: Somaliland is, in practice, a modern British colony. Though it claimed independence from Somalia in 1991 and was formally granted independence by Britain in 1960, the territory remains under London’s shadow.
Should Palestinians be forcefully relocated there, they would be trapped in yet another open-air prison – under the watchful eye of British-trained security forces with a long history of violent repression.
‘ASI Management’
In April 2019, British government contractor Aktis Strategy abruptly declared bankruptcy, leaving staff unpaid and suppliers out of pocket, despite having secured tens of millions of pounds from the UK’s Foreign Office for “development” programs across Africa and West Asia.
The Somaliland Chronicle published a detailed exposé on the company’s collapse, which came while it was overseeing a “justice and security sector reform project” in the statelet.
Official records reveal that between 2017 and 2022, London allocated over £18 million (around $23.5 million) to that project alone. It was one of many UK-financed schemes in the breakaway region that placed Somaliland’s state architecture – government, military, judiciary, prisons, police, intelligence – under effective British management.
Internal files reviewed by The Cradle lay bare the extent of this control.
One document details how notorious British intelligence cutout Adam Smith International (ASI) provided “ongoing training and mentoring” to Somaliland’s National Intelligence Agency and Rapid Response Unit, while managing the territory’s forensics services, border surveillance, and even prosecution procedures via the Attorney General’s Office. The British-created Counter-Terrorism Unit was established in 2012 with Foreign Office funds – “under ASI management.”
Elsewhere, ASI boasts of its “proven history of establishing close professional relationships” with senior government, armed forces, police, “security sector,” and Ministry of Defense officials. One file notes the contractor “deployed ex-UK military advisers” to train Somaliland’s army and coastguard intelligence units, “[mentoring] senior officers in leadership, management, and military doctrine,” and even drafted legislation later adopted as law.
Meanwhile, British contractor Albany Associates focused on teaching Somaliland’s leaders the mechanics of propaganda and information warfare. Its mission: to train ministers and senior officials to generate a “steady flow of information” and proactively manage the media, in order to counter independent outlets.
It was noted that “unsatisfied public demand for information” from the government “on nationally significant events” gave independent information sources significant influence locally, which was to be countered at all costs.
In Somaliland, public distrust of their government was fueled by frequent arrests of journalists and media shutdowns, so Albany’s role was to consolidate state control over information – ensuring one narrative, “one voice,” no dissent.
An official document reviewed by The Cradle
A prison camp in waiting
While ASI touted its reforms, documents from another contractor – Coffey International – presented a more candid picture. Somaliland’s military, the files noted, was “the largest and most costly institution of state,” yet evaded oversight, with its funds likely diverted for opaque ends. Accountability for military abuses was virtually nonexistent.
The police, meanwhile, had “a history of applying disproportionate force,” and no “dedicated public order unit.” Coffey proposed creating one within the Special Protection Unit – a paramilitary force protecting foreign organizations and their staff. At the time, the unit had no mandate for crowd control or responding to peaceful protests.
That July 2015 document recommended Somaliland police be trained in the UK by the National Police, covering human rights, crowd engagement, and first aid. The aim: instill “proportionality, lawfulness, [and] accountability” throughout Somaliland’s police forces. Yet if this training occurred, it had no visible impact.
In late 2022, mass protests erupted in the contested city of Las Anod. Somaliland forces responded with lethal force, killing dozens. The crackdown escalated, and in 2023, Somaliland’s military indiscriminately shelled the city. Amnesty International described the attack as “indiscriminate,” targeting schools, hospitals, and mosques, displacing hundreds of thousands and killing scores.
This is the context in which Somaliland appeals to Israel and its western patrons: a brutal, British-run security apparatus capable of extinguishing any form of dissent – ergo, the perfect dumping ground for Gazan refugees. If Washington establishes a base to launch strikes on Yemen, Palestinians could also be held hostage – literal human shields – to deter reprisals from the Ansarallah-aligned armed forces.
One can only hope this depraved plan collapses as swiftly as earlier US–Israeli schemes to expel Gazans to Egypt or Jordan.
The real question now is whether Somaliland’s leaders are desperate enough for international recognition to trade their 34 years of independence for total US–UK–Israeli military, political, and security hegemony.
Top Russian official visits US to discuss improving bilateral ties
Al Mayadeen | April 3, 2025
Russia’s top economic negotiator visited Washington on Thursday for talks on improving ties, in the highest-level Kremlin trip to the US since the war in Ukraine started in 2022.
Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, said he was meeting with Trump administration officials in Washington but gave no details, while US media reported that Dmitriev arrived on Wednesday and is expected to meet Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, at the White House.
“The dialogue between Russia and the United States, which is crucial for the entire world, was completely destroyed under the Biden administration,” Dmitriev wrote on his telegram channel, adding, “Restoring dialogue is not an easy process, and it’s gradual. But every meeting, every frank conversation allows us to move forward.”
Dmitriev, a sanctioned former Goldman Sachs banker and Stanford graduate, could visit after temporary restrictions were lifted. Having previously participated in February talks with Trump officials in Saudi Arabia, he has been instrumental in US-Russia rapprochement efforts.
The White House has not commented on the visit, while the Kremlin stated that details would be shared only after the meetings conclude. Although Dmitriev has not revealed the discussion topics, his visit follows Trump’s criticism of the slow progress in Ukraine ceasefire negotiations.
The United States and Russia reached a diplomatic row, with Trump expressing his annoyance at the Russian President Vladimir Putin for rejecting an unconditional ceasefire, and conditioned a US-proposal for a truce in the Black Sea to the lifting of certain sanctions.
Economic coercion under the guise of diplomacy
Russia announced on March 25 that a US-mediated deal to suspend military operations in the Black Sea would only take effect if certain sanctions, particularly those targeting its state-owned agricultural bank, were lifted.
Amid rising tensions, President Trump has threatened to escalate pressure—not through diplomacy, but via punitive economic measures. In a recent interview with NBC News, Trump said he would impose secondary tariffs of up to 50% on all Russian oil exports if he concludes that Moscow is not cooperating on a peace deal.
“If Russia and I are unable to make a deal on stopping the bloodshed in Ukraine… I am going to put secondary tariffs on oil, on all oil coming out of Russia,” he said, warning that countries or companies buying Russian oil could also face US penalties.
Though Western sanctions have led to a reported 16% decline in shipments by Russian state-owned Sovcomflot in 2024, Moscow has adapted by working with non-Western partners and employing a fleet of independent vessels—dismissively labeled a “shadow fleet” by Western officials—to sustain its oil trade.
The Company That Wants All Your Data Can’t Protect Its Own
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | April 2, 2025
While Oracle co-founder, executive chairman, and CTO Larry Ellison is busy trying to position his company as just the right provider of future centralized surveillance systems powered by AI and containing massive amounts of sensitive information – Oracle’s existing solutions are suffering embarrassing data breaches.
Two reported recent incidents affecting Oracle Cloud, and Oracle Health – a subsidiary providing software for the healthcare industry – revealed not only technical shortcomings but also the giant’s puzzling lack of transparency, which reports say extremely frustrated those affected.
In fact, Oracle continued to deny that the first breach happened at all – even as customers were starting to confirm it.
A hacker calling themselves “rose87168” earlier in March offered data belonging to six million Oracle Cloud customers, only for Oracle to tell Bleeping Computer, “There has been no breach of Oracle Cloud. The published credentials are not for the Oracle Cloud. No Oracle Cloud customers experienced a breach or lost any data.”
The company attempting to “wordsmith statements” is how cybersecurity expert Kevin Beaumont reacted to this.
“Oracle is attempting to wordsmith statements around Oracle Cloud and use very specific words to avoid responsibility. This is not okay,” Beaumont wrote in a blog post, noting that the platform that has highly likely been affected is managed by Oracle.
A threat actor named “Andrew” is behind the second incident, which has left a number of healthcare organizations and hospitals in the US exposed to attempts to extort millions in cryptocurrency from them, in exchange for not leaking or selling the stolen patient data.
Once again, when the news about the privacy nightmare broke, Oracle started to look like something of a nightmare itself for its customers, refusing to formally admit there was a breach, and then going to considerable lengths to try and disassociate itself from the event.
This includes communicating with affected organizations without using the company’s letterhead, and even, according to reports, instructing them to communicate with the Oracle Health security officer only by phone and not email.
Oracle did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment when asked about the two incidents.
Merely a month prior, Larry Ellison was presenting his case for allowing Oracle to be the one to centralize pretty much all the data available in the US, including DNA.
Another of his distinctly dystopian ideas is to keep citizens on their “best behavior” via a constant AI-powered surveillance system.
HHS Ousts Peter Marks, Sending Vaccine Stocks Tumbling and Biopharma Lamenting Loss of ‘Ally’ at FDA
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | March 31, 2025
Pharma stocks tumbled today after Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., director of the agency within the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) responsible for authorizing vaccines, resigned under pressure from his new boss, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“If Peter Marks does not want to get behind restoring science to its golden standard and promoting radical transparency, then he has no place at FDA under the strong leadership of Secretary Kennedy,” an HHS official said in a statement.
Shares of Moderna, BioNTech, Novavax and Pfizer declined 11%, 7%, 6% and 2%, respectively, on the news, Fast Company reported. STAT News reported that Marks’ departure “is a worst-case scenario realized” for investors and “a biopharma industry that saw him as an ally.”
“Given Dr. Marks’ influence on the development of biologics and uncertainty as to who will replace him and how his legacy might continue, his departure will create a significant near-term overhang,” William Blair analyst Matt Phipps told Reuters.
The Biotechnology Innovation Organization, an industry lobbying group, said it was “deeply concerned” Marks’ resignation would “broadly impact the development of new, transformative therapies to fight diseases for the American people.”
Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), said the reaction to Marks’ departure on the part of the markets and the pharmaceutical industry is indicative of the influence Big Pharma had over the FDA. He said:
“Marks gave an over $100 billion gift to Pfizer and Moderna via the woefully undertested and outright dangerous COVID-19 mRNA vaccine. So, yes, for the short term, I would imagine that some investors would not like his departure from the FDA.
“Marks’ departure also signals a shift from ‘sick care’ and ‘customers for life’ where, unfortunately, Pharma invests now, to ‘Make America Healthy Again’ where everyone benefits from ending chronic disease in the U.S.”
John Gilmore, executive director of the Autism Action Network, welcomed Marks’ departure. “The American people are well-served by Marks’ resignation.” Gilmore cited the “institutional failure” of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) “to use the highest standards for evaluating the safety and efficacy of products that are injected in almost all American children.”
Marks has led the FDA’s CBER since 2012 and “played a key role,” The Wall Street Journal reported, in Operation Warp Speed in 2020, leading to the development of the COVID-19 vaccines.
In his resignation letter, Marks wrote: “It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.”
Marks’ ‘support of immunizations conflicted with Kennedy’s skepticism’
According to the Journal, an HHS official gave Marks a choice between resigning or being fired. His resignation is effective April 5. Marks wanted to remain in his position, but “his support of immunizations conflicted with Kennedy’s skepticism.”
“Undermining confidence in well-established vaccines that have met the high standards for quality, safety, and effectiveness that have been in place for decades at FDA is irresponsible, detrimental to public health, and a clear danger to our nation’s health, safety. and security,” Marks wrote in his resignation letter.
Marks said he was “willing to work to address” Kennedy’s concerns on vaccine safety, including through a series of public meetings, but that these proposals were rejected. He also accused Kennedy of spreading “misinformation and lies” during the “ongoing multistate measles outbreak.”
But in a post on X, Steve Kirsch, founder of the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation, said that while Marks “claimed he wanted to stop misinformation,” he “refused all offers to meet with the ‘misinformation spreaders’ to settle the question on just who is spreading the misinformation.”
While Marks claimed he was willing to address questions on vaccine safety, he also wrote, “Efforts currently being advanced by some on the adverse health effects of vaccination are concerning.”
One day before Marks’ resignation, Kennedy announced the creation of a new sub-agency under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to focus on vaccine injuries — part of a broader restructuring of public health agencies, including the FDA.
In February, Kennedy promised that under his watch, HHS and CDC would develop a better system for tracking vaccine injuries.
Earlier this month, Reuters reported that unnamed sources within the CDC said the agency was planning to study the possible link between vaccines and autism. The story triggered negative mainstream news reports claiming the study isn’t needed.
Last week, The Washington Post, citing anonymous sources, reported that HHS had tapped researcher David Geier — a researcher and expert on the connections between toxic exposures and autism — to lead a study of possible links between vaccines and autism. The Post and other media outlets used the opportunity to attack Geier and the need for such a study.
Marks’ resignation also came as the FDA is considering a petition a group of scientists submitted earlier this year, calling upon the FDA to suspend or withdraw the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.
Marks ‘became a cheerleader for the jab’
Writing on Substack, investigative journalist Maryanne Demasi, Ph.D., said it’s “evident there was a significant clash over vaccine safety” that led to Marks’ resignation. She said Marks’ departure “may be an opportunity for the FDA to refocus on its mission of protecting public health rather than rubber-stamping new vaccine approvals.”
Epidemiologist Nicolas Hulscher agreed. “Those who believe vaccine safety must not be questioned do not belong in our regulatory agencies. When it comes to injectable products, safety is more important than blind faith in vaccine ideology.”
According to The New York Times, while Marks “was viewed as a steady hand by many during the Covid pandemic,” he was criticized “for being overly generous to companies that sought approvals for therapies with mixed evidence of a benefit.”
The Times cited Marks’ role in pressuring two FDA scientists to approve full licensure of Pfizer’s mRNA COVID-19 vaccine in 2021, leading to the researchers’ resignation. Pfizer’s vaccine was fully licensed in August 2021 — one day later, the Biden administration mandated COVID-19 vaccination for military service members.
The rushed licensure of the Pfizer vaccine was the topic of a congressional hearing last year in which Marks testified. In a post on X Saturday, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) wrote, “Instead of verifying safety and efficacy of the shots, Marks swept things under the rug and became a cheerleader for the jab.”
“In order to get the vaccines to people in need when thousands of people were dying, we actually allowed the safety to be authorized with just two months of median follow-up, rather than the normal six to 12. But we were confident that that would capture adverse events,” Marks testified at last year’s hearing.
‘It was clear that he did not want to know about our injuries’
While Marks was actively engaged in the licensure of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, he “remained steadfast” in dismissing concerns about injuries related to the COVID-19 vaccines as “misinformation,” Demasi wrote.
In 2023, The BMJ wrote that “more than once” during FDA meetings, Marks “expressed confusion about why it would matter to doctors whether or not regulators acknowledged that a condition might be related to the vaccine.”
Documents CHD obtained last year through a Freedom of Information Act request showed that Marks was aware of COVID-19 vaccine injuries in early 2021 when several vaccine injury victims emailed him for help. Marks blew off scheduled meetings with them.
According to TrialSite News, even though Marks was aware of the growing number of COVID-19 vaccine injuries, “vaccine injury became a political hot potato under the Biden administration,” leading Marks to abandon the vaccine-injured.
Brianne Dressen, co-founder of React19, an advocacy group for the vaccine-injured, sustained serious injuries after participating in a clinical trial for the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine in 2020 and later sought meetings with Marks but was rebuffed.
“Constant emails and calls with Marks … sent while I was in constant pain, literally begging for help, begging for them to help others, begging for a lifeline. A lifeline that never ever came,” Dressen said.
Dr. Danice Hertz, a retired gastroenterologist from California injured by the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, also communicated with Marks but said he “brushed off anyone who contacted him regarding vaccine side effects.”
“He systematically refused to hear our pleas for acknowledgment and help,” Hertz said. “This is why the medical community is unaware of these injuries and cannot help us. One would think that the FDA would want to know about serious adverse reactions to the novel COVID vaccines. I can say from first-hand experience that they don’t … It was clear that he did not want to know about our injuries.”
Dressen said it “didn’t matter what we said or how we said it, COVID vaccine injuries were not a priority at the FDA. Didn’t matter if it was safety signals for MIS-V, dysautonomia, neuropathy, tinnitus or reports of suicides. It was never enough. We begged, we pleaded, we pushed as hard as we could, and came up with nothing.”
According to Demasi, Marks instead “blurred the line between regulation and promotion” by participating in FDA videos promoting the COVID-19 vaccines and by authorizing COVID-19 mRNA vaccines for children without sufficient testing.
“Without randomized data regarding clinical outcomes, he repeatedly approved COVID boosters for kids as young as 6 months,” Dr. Vinay Prasad, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote on Substack, calling these “some of the biggest regulatory errors in the 21st century.”
Demasi said Marks “repeatedly pointed to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) as proof of rigorous safety monitoring, yet failed to improve its efficiency.”
During last year’s congressional hearing, Marks claimed that numerous false reports of vaccine injuries are submitted to VAERS, a government-run database. However, he acknowledged, “We probably have not done a good enough job of communicating sometimes the actual numbers of deaths versus what’s in VAERS.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
New Info on How the Feds Helped Censor a Bombshell
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | April 2, 2025
The US House Judiciary Committee has released internal chat logs, that show the FBI moved into cover-up mode the very day the New York Post published the Hunter Biden laptop story, on October 14, 2020.
The logs, first reported about by journalists Michael Shellenberger and Catherine Herridge, reveal that the FBI employees were immediately instructed “not to discuss the Biden matter,” while an intelligence analyst who, during a call with Twitter, accidentally confirmed that the story, i.e., the laptop, was real, was placed under a “gag order.”
The reason the analyst, who was with the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division, was able to so quickly confirm the reporting was based on credible information was the fact the FBI had seized and authenticated Hunter Biden’s laptop several months earlier.
Big Tech platforms – notably Twitter and Facebook – then started censoring the article, branding it falsely “Russian disinformation.” By maintaining the “no comment” policy instead of confirming that the laptop was real and under investigation, the FBI was in effect tacitly promoting the false narrative about foreign interference.
These moves originated from the Foreign Influence Task Force, which was shut down earlier this year for its activities related to censorship through pressure on social platforms.
The laptop scandal was unfolding during a crucial time in the 2020 campaign and represents one of the most egregious publicly known examples of political censorship of free speech and media orchestrated by government agencies.
The chat logs that have now been published reveal that one of the FBI staff involved in the Hunter Biden laptop story suppression was Bradley Benavides.
Only weeks prior, Benavides featured in another controversy: that time in what appeared to be a smear campaign against Senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley, who were allegedly “advancing Russian disinformation.”
At the time, the senators just so happened to be investigating Hunter Biden’s financial connections to foreign governments.
A letter the Judiciary Committee sent Benavides in June 2023, shows that he had by that time gone through the Big Tech-Big Government “revolving door” – and was senior risk manager at Amazon.
Iran presses the IAEA on Trump’s ‘bombing’ threat, reaffirms no nukes pursuit
IRNA – April 2, 2025
Tehran – The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) must adopt a clear position regarding threats against Iran’s civilian nuclear facilities, Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said Tuesday, days after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to “bomb” Iran.
Araqchi was speaking on the phone with the secretary general of the IAEA, Rafael Grossi.
He emphasized that given the recurrence of such threats, the Islamic Republic will take every necessary measure to protect its nuclear program.
Grossi, for his part, said he would talk with other parties to create a suitable atmosphere to help resolve existing issues. He also asked to visit Iran, which Araqchi accepted.
Trump said on Sunday that he would order military strikes against Iran if Tehran did not strike a new deal with Washington on its nuclear program. “If they don’t make a deal, there will be bombing,” he said in an interview with NBC News.
Iran has warned to respond swiftly and decisively to any act of aggression on its soil.
Reacting to Trump’s threat, a senior adviser to Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei said that even though Iran doesn’t seek nuclear weapons, any strike on the country by the United States or Israel on that false pretext would force the country to develop atomic bombs for defensive purposes.
“If America or Israel bomb Iran under the nuclear pretext, Iran will be compelled to move toward producing an atomic bomb,” Ali Larijani said during a televised interview on Monday.
Araqchi, however, once again clarified Tehran’s long-standing position, which is based on a religious decree (fatwa) by Ayatollah Khamenei prohibiting the development, possession, and use of nuclear weapons, reaffirming that the country will never produce or acquire any atomic bombs under any circumstances.
He said in an X post on Tuesday that ten years after signing the Iran deal and seven years after the U.S. unilaterally walked away from it under Trump’s first term, “there is not ONE SHRED OF PROOF that Iran has violated this commitment.”
Meanwhile, UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric was asked on Tuesday to comment on Trump’s threat, to which he said, “We urge everyone to avoid inflammatory rhetoric.”
“I think the UN Charter is very clear in encouraging Member States to settle all disputes through diplomatic means,” he said in response to the question asked by IRNA’s correspondent.
On March 12, Trump sent a letter to Iran via an emissary from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), requesting that negotiations be opened into a deal that he says would stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon. This is while, in 2018, he pulled out of a multinational nuclear deal with Iran. On February 4, the U.S. president signed a presidential memorandum to restore a hostile policy from his first term of “maximum pressure” on the Islamic Republic.
Iran, which has relayed its response to the U.S. president’s letter via Oman, has ruled out direct negotiations with the United States as long as the “maximum pressure” policy and the military threats are in place.
“Diplomatic engagement worked in the past and can still work. BUT, it should be clear to all that there is—by definition—no such thing as a ‘military option’ let alone a ‘military solution,’” Araqchi said in his X post.
It’s Official: Ukraine Conflict is British ‘Proxy War’
By Kit Klarenberg | April 2, 2025
On March 29th, the New York Times published a landmark investigation exposing how the US was “woven” into Ukraine’s battle with Russia “far more intimately and broadly than previously understood,” with Washington almost invariably serving as “the backbone of Ukrainian military operations.” The outlet went so far as to acknowledge the conflict was a “proxy war” – an irrefutable reality hitherto aggressively denied in the mainstream – dubbing it a “rematch” of “Vietnam in the 1960s, Afghanistan in the 1980s, Syria three decades later.”
That the US has since February 2022 supplied Ukraine with extraordinary amounts of weaponry, and been fundamental to the planning of many of Kiev’s military operations large and small, is hardly breaking news. Indeed, elements of this relationship have previously been widely reported, with White House apparatchiks occasionally admitting to Washington’s role. Granular detail on this assistance provided by the New York Times probe is nonetheless unprecedented. For example, a dedicated intelligence fusion centre was secretly created at a vast US military base in Germany.
Dubbed “Task Force Dragon”, it united officials from every major US intelligence agency, and “coalition intelligence officers”, to produce extensive daily targeting information on Russian “battlefield positions, movements and intentions”, to “pinpoint” and “determine the ripest, highest-value targets” for Ukraine to strike using Western-provided weapons. The fusion centre quickly became “the entire back office of the war.” A nameless European intelligence chief was purportedly “taken aback to learn how deeply enmeshed his NATO counterparts had become” in the conflict’s “kill chain”:
“An early proof of concept was a campaign against one of Russia’s most-feared battle groups, the 58th Combined Arms Army. In mid-2022, using American intelligence and targeting information, the Ukrainians unleashed a rocket barrage at the headquarters of the 58th in the Kherson region, killing generals and staff officers inside. Again and again, the group set up at another location; each time, the Americans found it and the Ukrainians destroyed it.”
Several other well-known Ukrainian broadsides, such as an October 2022 drone barrage on the port of Sevastopol, are now revealed by the New York Times to have been the handiwork of Task Force Dragon. Meanwhile, the outlet confirmed that each and every HIMARS strike conducted by Kiev was entirely dependent on the US, which supplied coordinates, and advice on “positioning [Kiev’s] launchers and timing their strikes.” Local HIMARS operators also required special electronic key [cards]” to fire the missiles, “which the Americans could deactivate anytime.”
Yet, the investigation’s most striking passages highlight London’s principal role in influencing and managing Ukrainian – and by extension US – actions and strategy in the conflict. Both direct references and unambiguous insinuations littered throughout point ineluctably to the conclusion that the “proxy war” is of British concoction and design. If rapprochement between Moscow and Washington succeeds, it would represent the most spectacular failure to date of Britain’s concerted post-World War II conspiracy to exploit American military might and wealth for its own purposes.
‘Prevailing Wisdom’
A particularly revealing section of the New York Times probe details the execution of Ukraine’s August 2022 counteroffensive, targeting Kharkov and Kherson. Unexpectedly finding limited resistance from hollowed out Russian positions in these areas, Task Force Dragon’s US military lead Lieutenant General Christopher T. Donahue urged Ukraine’s field commander Major General Andrii Kovalchuk to keep pushing, and seize even further territory. He vehemently resisted, despite Donahue and other senior US military officials pressuring then-Ukrainian Armed Forces Valerii Zaluzhnyi to override his reticence.
Subsequently, the sense among Kiev’s foreign puppet masters that a golden opportunity to inflict an even more egregious blow on the Russians had been lost was pervasive. Irate, then-British defence minister Ben Wallace asked Donahue what he would do if Kovalchuk were his subordinate. “He would have already been fired,” Donahue said. Wallace succinctly responded, “I got this.” At his direct demand, Kovalchuk was duly defenestrated. As the New York Times explains, the British “had considerable clout” in Kiev and hands-on influence over Ukrainian officials.
This was because, “unlike the Americans,” Britain had formally inserted teams of military officers into the country, to advise Ukrainian officials directly. Still, despite Kiev failing to fully capitalise as desired by London and Washington, the 2022 counteroffensive’s success produced widespread “irrational exuberance”. Planning for a followup the next year thus “began straightaway.” The “prevailing wisdom” within Task Force Dragon was this counteroffensive “would be the war’s last”, with Ukraine claiming “outright triumph”, or Russia being “forced to sue for peace.”
Zelensky boasted internally, “we’re going to win this whole thing.” The plan was for Ukrainian forces to cut off Russia’s land-bridge to Crimea, before seizing the peninsula outright. As the New York Times records though, Pentagon officials were considerably less enthused about Kiev’s prospects. This scepticism seeped out into the public sphere in April 2023 via the Pentagon Leaks. One document warned Ukraine would fall “well short” of its goals in the counteroffensive, forecasting “modest territorial gains” at most.
The leaked intelligence assessment attributed this to “shortfalls” in Ukraine’s “force generation and sustainment”, extensive Russian defences constructed following their retreat from Kherson. It cautioned “enduring Ukrainian deficiencies in training and munitions supplies probably will strain progress and exacerbate casualties.” The New York Times notes Pentagon officials moreover “worried about their ability to supply enough weapons for the counteroffensive,” and wondered if the Ukrainians “in their strongest possible position, should consider cutting a deal.”
Even Task Force Dragon’s Lieutenant General Donahue had doubts, advocating “a pause” of a year or more for “building and training new brigades.” Yet, intervention by the British was, per the New York Times, sufficient to neutralise internal opposition to a fresh counteroffensive in the spring. They argued, “if the Ukrainians were going to go anyway, the coalition needed to help them.” Resultantly, enormous quantities of exorbitantly expensive, high-end military equipment were shipped to Kiev by almost every NATO member state for the purpose.
Western-supplied tanks obliterated during Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive
The counteroffensive was finally launched in June 2023. Relentlessly blitzed by artillery and drones from day one, tanks and soldiers were also routinely blown to smithereens by expansive Russian-laid minefields. Within a month, Ukraine had lost 20% of its Western-provided vehicles and armor, with nothing to show for it. When the counteroffensive fizzled out at the end of 2023, just 0.25% of territory occupied by Russia in the initial phase of the invasion had been regained. Meanwhile, Kiev’s casualties may have exceeded 100,000.
‘Knife Edge’
The New York Times reports that “the counteroffensive’s devastating outcome left bruised feelings on both sides,” with Washington and Kiev blaming each other for the catastrophe. A Pentagon official claims “the important relationships were maintained, but it was no longer the inspired and trusting brotherhood of 2022 and early 2023.” Given Britain’s determination to “keep Ukraine fighting at all costs”, this was bleak news indeed, threatening to halt all US support for the proxy war.
Still, there was one last perceived ace up London’s sleeve to keep Washington invested in the proxy conflict, and potentially escalate it into all-out hot war with Moscow. The New York Times reports that in March 2023, the US discovered Kiev “was furtively planning a ground operation into southwest Russia.” The CIA’s Ukraine chief confronted General Kyrylo Budanov, warning “if he crossed into Russia, he would do so without American weapons or intelligence support.” He did so anyway, “only to be forced back.”
Rather than deterring further incursions, Ukraine’s calamitous intervention in Russia’s Bryansk region was a “foreshadowing” of Kiev’s all-out invasion of Kursk on August 6th that year. The New York Times records how from Washington’s perspective, the operation “was a significant breach of trust.” For one, “the Ukrainians had again kept them in the dark” – but worse, “they had secretly crossed a mutually agreed-upon line.” Kiev was using “coalition-supplied equipment” on Russian territory, breaching “rules laid down” when limited strikes inside Russia were greenlit months earlier.
As this journalist has exposed, Ukraine’s Kursk folly was a British invasion in all but name. London was central to its planning, provided the bulk of the equipment deployed, and deliberately advertised its involvement. As The Times reported at the time, the goal was to mark Britain as a formal belligerent in the proxy war, in the hope other Western countries – particularly the US – would follow suit, and “send more equipment and give Kyiv more leeway to use them in Russia.”
Initially, US officials keenly distanced themselves from the Kursk incursion. Empire house journal Foreign Policy reported that the Biden administration was not only enormously unhappy “to have been kept out of the loop,” but “skeptical of the military logic” behind the “counterinvasion”. In a further rebuke, on August 16th Washington prohibited Ukraine’s use of British-made, long-range Storm Shadow missiles against Russian territory. Securing wider Western acquiescence to such strikes was reportedly also a core objective behind Kiev’s occupation of Kursk.
However, once Donald Trump prevailed in the November 2024 presidential election, Biden was encouraged to use his “last, lame-duck weeks” to make “a flurry of moves to stay the course… and shore up his Ukraine project.” In the process, per the New York Times, he “crossed his final red line,” allowing ATACMS and Storm Shadow strikes deep inside Russia, while permitting US military advisers to leave Kiev “for command posts closer to the fighting.”
Fast forward to today, and the Kursk invasion has ended in utter disaster, with the few remaining Ukrainian forces not captured or killed fleeing. Meanwhile, Biden’s flailing, farewell red line breaches have failed to tangibly shift the battlefield balance in Kiev’s favour at all. As the New York Times acknowledges, the proxy war’s continuation “teeters on a knife edge.” There is no knowing what British intelligence might have in store to prevent long-overdue peace prevailing at last, but the consequences could be world-threatening.
The Zionist Destruction of American Higher Education
By Ron Unz • Unz Review • March 31, 2025
We may be witnessing the ongoing destruction of one of the greatest pillars of postwar American global influence and hegemony.
Late last week an astonishing event occurred in American society, and video clips of that incident quickly went viral across the Internet.
A 30-year-old Tufts doctoral student and Fulbright Scholar from Turkey was walking across her Boston-area neighborhood on the way to a holiday dinner at a friend’s house when she was suddenly seized and abducted in the early evening by six masked federal agents of the Department of Homeland Security. The terrified young woman was handcuffed and taken to a waiting car, secretly detained for the next 24 hours without access to friends, family, or lawyers, then shipped off to a holding cell in Louisiana and scheduled for immediate deportation, although a federal judge has now temporarily stayed the proceedings.
Just one of the Tweets showing a short clip of that incident has been viewed more than 4.5 million times, with a much longer YouTube video accumulating another couple of hundred thousand views.
That very disturbing scene seemed like something out of a Hollywood film chronicling the actions of a dystopian American police state, and that initial impression was only solidified once media reports explained why Rumeysa Ozturk was snatched off the streets of her home town. Her only reported transgression had been her co-authorship of an op-ed piece in the Tufts student newspaper a year earlier sharply criticizing Israel and its ongoing attacks on the civilian population of Gaza.
Apparently, one of the many powerful pro-Israel censorship organizations funded by Zionist billionaires became outraged over her sentiments and decided to make a public example of her, so its minions in the subservient Trump Administration immediately ordered her arrest.
CBS News covered a local protest demonstration demanding the young woman’s release, and quoted the remarks of one of the participants:
“The university campus should absolutely be a place for the free and open exchange of ideas and the fact that someone can just be disappeared into the abyss for voicing an idea is absolutely horrifying,” said rally attendee Sam Wachman.
Now supposed that such a scene—for such a reason—had taken place on the streets of Russia, China, Iran, or any other country viewed with great disfavor by our government. Surely that incident would have quickly become the centerpiece of a massive global propaganda offensive aimed at blackening the reputation of the regime responsible. Audiences worldwide would have been forcefully told that the arrest demonstrated the terrible dangers of living in a society lacking the freedoms guaranteed by our own Constitution and our Bill of Rights. I don’t recall seeing any recent propaganda campaigns along these lines, so that suggests that such incidents are extremely rare in those countries.
But unfortunately that is hardly the case in today’s America. A day or two before that Tufts graduate student was snatched off the streets of her city, a 21-year-old Columbia University junior went into hiding to avoid a similar fate after federal agents raided her campus dorm to arrest her. As the Times reported, high school valedictorian Yunseo Chung had moved to the U.S. with her family from South Korea when she was 7, but her permanent residency was suddenly revoked for her public criticism of Israeli policy. She was ordered immediately deported back to a country that she barely even remembered.
This followed the storm of controversy unleashed earlier this month by the very high profile arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate student heavily involved in last year’s campus protests against the Israeli attacks on Gaza. Seized in an early morning raid on his campus student housing, which he shared with his wife, an American citizen eight months pregnant, he was taken off to detention, first in New Jersey and then transferred to a holding cell in Louisiana, once again with no initial access to his family, friends, or lawyers.
As a Green Card holder—a permanent legal resident of the U.S.—he was considered fully entitled to all the normal rights and privileges of an American citizen, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that his Green Card would be canceled and he would be deported based upon an obscure legal doctrine never previously employed for that purpose, eliciting a strong legal challenge in federal court. Moreover, his transfer from a New Jersey jurisdiction to a different one in the Deep South also seemed to violate normal legal procedures.
A week after that arrest, Ranjani Srinivasan, another Columbia doctoral candidate from India on a Fulbright Scholarship, hurriedly packed her bags and fled the country to Canada when she narrowly missed being arrested by federal authorities who raided her student housing. As the New York Times reported:
“The atmosphere seemed so volatile and dangerous,” Ms. Srinivasan, 37, said on Friday in an interview with The New York Times, her first public remarks since leaving. “So I just made a quick decision.”
A day earlier Rubio explained that he had already authorized the arrest and immediate deportation of more than 300 students around the country for their criticism of Israel, so these particular cases obviously represented merely the tip of a very large iceberg.
In past decades, the academic leadership of a top Ivy League school such as Columbia might have stoutly defended the students in its community. But any such resistance was broken when the Trump Administration suddenly pulled $400 million in annual funding. The demands included full cooperation with the arrest of any students critical of Israeli policies, the creation of a new internal security force to suppress any anti-Israel campus protests, and “receivership” for the university’s prestigious Middle Eastern Studies Program, presumably resulting in firm Zionist control.
Acting President Katrina Armstrong bowed to those demands, sacrificing the academic freedom of her faculty members and the personal freedom of her students. But faced with such enormous conflicting pressures, she then resigned on Friday evening, some seven months after her predecessor had resigned for roughly similar reasons.
That same day newspapers also reported that the top leadership of Harvard University’s equally prestigious Middle Eastern Studies Center had been dismissed, probably ensuring that after more than seventy years this independent academic organization would henceforth become firmly pro-Israel in its orientation. Last year, after Harvard’s previous president had strongly defended academic freedom before a hostile Congressional committee, she was quickly forced to resign.
As I casually examined the home page of the New York Times website on Saturday, I noticed five different articles reporting these striking blows to intellectual freedom at a number of our top American universities, and it’s quite possible that I may have missed one or two others.
- Columbia President Is Replaced as Trump Threatens University’s Funding
- Leaders of Harvard’s Middle Eastern Studies Center Will Leave
- University of Minnesota Student Detained by Immigration Agents
- Targeting of Tufts Student for Deportation Stuns Friends and Teachers
- How Colleges Are Cracking Down on Students Now
For the last several generations, America’s elite academic institutions have been among the most prestigious in the world, drawing top students from across the globe and constituting a central pillar of our country’s soft power. Until last year, no previous case came to mind of an Ivy League president having been abruptly removed for political reasons. But over the last twelve months, four or five different Ivy League presidents have suffered that fate.
Similarly, I had never heard of any previous cases of peaceful college students being arrested by teams of masked federal officers, either seized from their dorm rooms in sudden raids or snatched off the streets of their local city.
Consider an ironic historical comparison. During the early 1950s the Rosenbergs were convicted and executed for their involvement in a Soviet spy-ring that gave our nuclear weapons secrets to Stalin. But as far as I know their arrest was handled in a very subdued fashion, with merely a couple of FBI agents quietly taking them into federal custody despite the capital charges that they faced. So apparently public criticism of Israel is today regarded as a far more serious and dangerous offense than nuclear espionage had been at the absolute height of the Cold War.
Indeed, the closest historical example that comes to mind were the notorious Palmer Raids of late 1919 and early 1920, which led to the deportation of several hundred immigrants. But these round-ups occurred in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution and waves of terrorist bombing attacks across many American cities, with Attorney-General A. Mitchell Palmer narrowly surviving two separate assassination attempts, including a bombing that destroyed his own Washington, DC home. Meanwhile, most of the immigrants arrested and deported were relatively recent arrivals, generally anarchist or Bolshevik radicals who had declared their intent to overthrow the American government.
Perhaps there have been previous examples of college students arrested merely for writing campus newspaper op-eds advocating peaceful and perfectly legal positions. But I don’t recall reading of any such egregious cases in my introductory history textbooks so I tend to doubt it.
One rather strange aspect of the current situation is that no students seem to have been arrested for voicing public criticism of the American government or even President Donald Trump. Only criticism of the Jewish State of Israel or Jews themselves seems to provoke such severe legal repression. This brings to mind a very shrewd observation, widely misattributed to Voltaire:
To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.
Since World War II elite American universities have tended to attract the best and the brightest young men and women from around the world, thereby shaping the minds of so many future global leaders. So I suspect that these shocking news stories of harsh ideological crackdowns on academic freedom and sudden dramatic arrests by masked federal agents are already reverberating around the world, severely damaging one of the few remaining pillars of American geopolitical dominance.
Perhaps only small numbers of ordinary Americans have been following the sudden, desperate plight of these top students from Turkey, South Korea, or India, but I think that a very large fraction of the educated elites of those important American allies are fully aware of what has transpired, and they are utterly horrified.
Under the control of its pro-Israel masters, the leading figures of the Trump Administration seem determined to severely wound or actually destroy the foremost institutions of our globally-dominant system of higher education.
Indeed, even before the latest round of these striking incidents, the eminent political scientist John Mearsheimer had declared that the Israel Lobby posed the greatest threat to American freedom of speech, with his views strongly seconded by Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University and also former CIA Officer Philip Giraldi:
Although I was deeply shocked by these harsh Trump Administration attacks against freedom of speech and academic freedom, perhaps I should not have been. In many respects, they merely extended what had already occurred last year under his equally pro-Israel Democratic predecessor President Joseph Biden, as I had covered at the time in numerous articles.
For example, almost eleven months ago in early May 2024 I discussed the ongoing waves of university protests and the reasons behind their appearance, as well as the unprecedented crackdowns used to suppress them, a reaction so totally different than what had occurred regarding any previous campus political activism. Given the very harsh legal sanctions now imposed upon many of the participants, I think it’s worth revisiting that history at length:
From the years of my childhood I’d always been aware that political activism and protests were a regular feature of college life, with the 1960s movement against our Vietnam War representing one of its peaks, an effort widely lauded in our later textbooks and media accounts for its heroic idealism. During the 1980s I remember seeing a long line of crudely constructed shanties protesting South African Apartheid that spent weeks occupying the edges of the Harvard Yard or perhaps it was the Stanford Quad, and I think around the same time other shanties and protesters at UCLA maintained a long vigil in support of the Jewish Refuseniks of the USSR. Political protests seemed as much a normal part of college years as final exams and had largely replaced the hazing rituals and wild pranks of traditional fraternities, which were increasingly vilified as politically incorrect by hostile social censors among the students and faculty.
Over the last decade or so, the Black Lives Matter movement raised such nationwide protests by college students to new heights, both on and off campus, often involving large marches, sit-ins, or vandalism, and this may have been propelled by the increasing influence of smartphones and social media. Meanwhile, the mainstream media regularly praised and promoted this “racial justice movement,” which reached its sharp peak following the death of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. That incident triggered a massive wave of generally youthful political protests, riots, and looting that engulfed some 200 cities across America, the worst urban unrest since the late 1960s. But unlike that earlier era, most of our establishment media and political class fiercely denounced any suggestions that the police be deployed to quell the violence. Indeed, in many or most cases local law enforcement stood down and did nothing, even as some of their political masters loudly raised the outcry “Defund the Police!”
During those years many universities became heavily caught up in such controversies. Yale renamed its Calhoun residential college in early 2017 and the list of name changes due to the 2020 George Floyd protests is so long that it has its own Wikipedia page, a list that included some of our most storied military bases such as Ft. Bragg and Ft. Hood. Verbal or even physical attacks against the symbols and statues of America’s most famous presidents and national heroes became quite common and were often favorably reported in the media, with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Christopher Columbus all being vilified and denounced, sometimes with elite endorsement. A lead opinion piece in the New York Times called for the Jefferson Memorial to be replaced with a towering statue of a black woman while one of the regular Times columnists repeatedly demanded that all monuments honoring George Washington should suffer a similar fate. Many observers argued that America almost seemed to be undergoing its own version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution amid widespread claims that much of our entire historical past was irretrievably tainted and therefore had to be expunged from the public square.
Most of these political protests, especially those on college campuses, were widely hailed by those holding the media megaphones as signifying one of the greatest virtues of American democracy. The many elite defenders of such social and cultural upheavals argued that these events demonstrated the great strength of our society, which freely allowed the fiercest public attacks against our most sacred national icons and heroes. Americans accepted the sort of searing self-criticism that would surely be permitted almost nowhere else in the world.
That long history of permitting or even glorifying public protests against perceived injustices had naturally been absorbed and taken to heart by the young college students who began their classes in September 2023. Then within weeks, a remarkably daring surprise raid by the Hamas militants of long-besieged Gaza caught the Israelis napping and surmounted the high-tech defenses that had cost perhaps a half-billion dollars to construct. Many hundreds of Israeli soldiers and security officers were killed along with similar numbers of civilians, with most of the latter probably dying from the friendly-fire of Israel’s own panic-stricken and trigger-happy military units. Some 240 Israeli soldiers and civilians were captured and taken back to Gaza as prisoners, with Hamas hoping to exchange them for the freedom of the many thousands of Palestinian civilians who had been held for years in Israeli prisons, often under brutal conditions.
As usual, our overwhelmingly pro-Israel mainstream media portrayed the attack in extremely one-sided fashion, devoid of any historical context, a pattern that had been followed for three generations. As a result, Israel received an enormous outpouring of public and elite sympathy as it mobilized for a retaliatory attack against Gaza. Within days, our own Secretary of State Antony Blinken flew to Israel declaring that he came “as a Jew” and pledging America’s unwavering support in that moment of crisis, sentiments completely echoed by President Joseph Biden and his entire administration. But the Hamas fighters and their Israeli captives were hidden in a network of fortified tunnels and rooting them out might produce heavy casualties, so Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his advisors decided upon a different strategy.
Instead of attacking Hamas, Netanyahu took advantage of the wave of global sympathy by unleashing an unprecedented military assault against Gaza’s more than two million civilians, apparently intending to kill huge numbers of them and drive the remainder into Egypt’s Sinai desert, allowing Israel to annex their territory and resettle it with Jews. Soon afterward, the Israeli government began distributing assault rifles to the Jewish Settlers of the West Bank, ordering some 24,000 of those automatic weapons for that purpose. Putting such armaments into the hands of religious fanatics would surely lead to local massacres and these might provide an excuse for driving all those millions of Palestinians over the border into Jordan. The ultimate result would be the creation of a racially-pure Greater Israel stretching “From the River to the Sea,” the longstanding dream of the Zionist movement. So if he were successful, Netanyahu’s place in Jewish history might become a glorious one, with his many venal sins and blunders easily overlooked.
As American airlifts supplied an unending flood of the necessary munitions, the Israelis began a massive aerial bombardment campaign against densely-populated Gaza and its helpless residents. Secure in their underground tunnels, relatively few Hamas fighters were killed, but Gaza’s civilians suffered devastating losses, much of it inflicted by two thousand pound bombs, almost never previously deployed against urban targets. Large portions of Gaza were soon transformed into moonscapes, with some 100,000 buildings destroyed, including hospitals, churches, mosques, schools, universities, government offices, bakeries, and all the other infrastructure necessary for maintaining civilian life. After just a few weeks, the Financial Times reported that the destruction inflicted upon much of Gaza was already worse than had been suffered by German cities after years of Allied bombing attacks during World War II.
Although Netanyahu was strictly secular, he played to his religious base by publicly declaring the Palestinians to be the tribe of Amalek, whom the Hebrew God had commanded be exterminated down to the last newborn baby. Many other top Israeli leaders voiced very similar genocidal sentiments, and some of the more zealously religious Israeli soldiers and commanders probably took those statements quite literally.
This gigantic bloodlust was further inflamed as the Israeli government and its supportive propagandists began promoting outrageous Hamas atrocity-hoaxes such as beheaded or roasted Israeli babies, sexual mutilations, and gang-rapes. The notoriously pro-Israel global media credulously reported these stories, using them to deflect attention from the enormous ongoing slaughter of Palestinian civilians. To ensure that the coverage remained one-sided, the Israelis targeted independent journalists in Gaza for death, killing some 140 of them over the last few months, a figure as large as the combined total in all the world’s other wars over the last several years.
With Israel’s leaders publicly declaring their genocidal plans for their Palestinian enemies and Israeli troops committing the greatest televised massacre of helpless civilians in the history of the world, international organizations gradually came under strong pressure to involve themselves in the ongoing conflict. In late December, South Africa filed a 91-page legal brief with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of committing genocide. Within a few weeks the ICJ jurists issued a series of near-unanimous rulings supporting those charges and declaring that the Gazans were at serious risk of suffering a potential genocide at Israel’s hands, with Israel’s own appointed judge, a former Chief Justice of the Israeli Supreme Court, concurring in most of those verdicts.
But instead of backing off, Netanyahu’s government merely redoubled its attacks against Gaza, tightening the blockade of food shipments by banning the UN organization responsible for distributing them. The Israelis apparently believed that the combination of starvation, bombs, and missiles would be the most effective means of killing or driving out all the Palestinians.
In past decades, these horrifying events might have gone relatively unnoticed, with the overwhelmingly pro-Israel gatekeepers of our mainstream media ensuring that little if any of this distressing information reached the eyes or ears of ordinary Americans. But technological developments had changed this media landscape since video clips on relatively uncensored social platforms such as TikTok and Elon Musk’s Twitter now easily circumvented that blockade. Despite their decades of suffering and oppression, Gaza’s Palestinians were a fully modern people, well-equipped with smartphones, and the scenes they filmed were shared worldwide, quickly attracting huge audiences among the younger Americans who relied upon social media as their primary source of news.
For generations, college students had been heavily indoctrinated with the horrors of the Holocaust, endlessly told that they must never remain silent while helpless men, women, and children were brutally attacked and slaughtered. The images they now saw of devastated cities and dead or dying children seemed exactly like something out of the movies, but they were instead happening in real-time in the physical world.
A couple of years earlier, the Trump and the Biden Administrations had both jointly proclaimed that the Chinese government was guilty of “genocide” against its Uighur minority despite lack of any evidence that significant numbers of Uighurs had been harmed let alone killed. So by that standard, the total destruction of Gaza and the massive slaughter or deliberate starvation of millions of its people obviously constituted an enormous “genocide,” and within weeks student activists all across college campuses had taken up that cry and begun organizing public protests against the horrendous massacre that Israel was committing.
Three years earlier, a lifelong career criminal named George Floyd had died of a drug overdose while in police custody, and a single, highly-misleading video of his last moments had provoked the greatest wave of American public protests since the late 1960s. So it was hardly surprising that the widespread dissemination of hundreds or thousands of videos showing dead and mutilated Gazan children inspired a powerful protest movement. But this time, instead of being praised for their humanitarian commitment, those students—and the university administrators who allowed their protests—were ferociously attacked and punished as I described at the time:
With graphic images of devastated Gaza neighborhoods and dead Palestinian children so widespread on Twitter and other social media outlets, polls have revealed that a majority of younger Americans now favor Hamas and the Palestinians in their ongoing struggle with Israel. This is a shocking reversal from the views of their parents, which had been shaped by generations of overwhelmingly pro-Israel material across broadcast television, films, and print publications, and such trends are only likely to continue now that Israel is being prosecuted in the International Court of Justice by South Africa and 22 other nations, accused of committing genocide in Gaza.
As a consequence of these strong youthful sentiments, anti-Israel demonstrations have erupted at many of our universities, outraging numerous pro-Israel billionaire donors. Almost immediately, some of the latter launched a harsh retaliatory campaign, with many corporate leaders declaring that they would permanently blacklist from future employment opportunities any college students publicly supporting the Palestinian cause, underscoring these threats with a widespread “doxxing” campaign at Harvard and other elite colleges.
A few weeks ago, our uniformly pro-Israel elected officials entered the fray, calling the presidents of several of our most elite colleges—Harvard, Penn, and MIT—to testify before them regarding alleged “antisemitism” on their campuses. Members of Congress severely brow-beat these officials for permitting anti-Israel activities, even ignorantly and absurdly accusing them of allowing public calls for “Jewish genocide” on their campuses.
The responses of these college leaders emphasized their support for freedom of political speech but were deemed so unsatisfactory by pro-Israel donors and their mainstream media allies that enormous pressure was exerted to remove them. Within days, the Penn president and her supportive Board chairman had been forced to resign, and soon afterward Harvard’s first black president suffered the same fate, as pro-Israel groups released evidence of her widespread academic plagiarism to drive her from office.
I am unaware of any previous case in which the president of an elite American college had been so rapidly removed from office for ideological reasons and two successive examples within just a few weeks seems an absolutely unprecedented development, having enormous implications for academic freedom.
I’d think that most of these students were absolutely stunned at such reactions. For decades, they and their predecessors had freely protested on a wide range of political causes without ever encountering even a sliver of such vicious retaliation, let alone an organized campaign that quickly forced the resignation of two of the Ivy League presidents who had allowed their protests. Some of their student organizations were immediately banned and the future careers of the protesters were harshly threatened, but the horrifying images from Gaza continued to reach their smartphones. As Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL had previously explained in a leaked phone call, “We have a major TikTok problem.”
Indeed, the Israelis continued to generate an avalanche of gripping content for those videos. Mobs of Israeli activists regularly blocked the passage of food-trucks, and within a few weeks, senior UN officials declared that more than a million Gazans were on the verge of a deadly famine. When the desperate, starving Gazans swarmed one of those few food delivery convoys allowed through, the Israeli military shot and killed more than 100 of them in the “Flour Massacre” and this was later repeated. All these horrific scenes of death and deliberate starvation were broadcast worldwide on social media, with some of the worst examples coming from the accounts of gleeful Israeli soldiers, such as their video of the corpse of a Palestinian child being eaten by a starving dog. Another image showed the remains of a bound Palestinian prisoner who had been crushed flat while still alive by an Israeli tank. According to a European human rights organization, the Israelis had regularly used bulldozers to bury alive large numbers of Palestinians. UN officials reported finding mass graves near several hospitals, with the victims found bound and stripped, shot execution-style. As Internet provocateur Andrew Anglin has pointed out, the behavior of the Israeli Jews does not seem merely evil but “cartoonishly evil,” with all their blatant crimes seeming to be based upon the script of some over-the-top propaganda-film but instead actually taking place in real life…
These grim developments have naturally sparked a continuing wave of student protests condemning Israel for committing these monstrous crimes and our own Biden Administration for enabling them with money and munitions. Prof. John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago is one of our highest-ranking mainstream academics, a very sober-minded scholar of the Realist School, and in an interview last week he expressed little surprise at these matters. After all, he pointed out, Israel was obviously an Apartheid-state currently committing a genocide before the eyes of the entire world so political protests on college campuses were only to be expected.
Throughout these last few months, pro-Israel partisans have regularly denounced the anti-Zionism of their opponents as antisemitic and insisted that it be suppressed. Back in February I had noted the ironic implications of their position:
This is certainly an odd situation, warranting careful analysis and explanation. The word “antisemitism” merely means criticizing or disliking Jews, and in recent years, Israel’s partisans have demanded with some success that the term should be extended to encompass anti-Zionism as well, namely hostility to the Jewish state.
But let us suppose that we concede the latter point and agree with pro-Israel activists that “anti-Zionism” is indeed a form of “antisemitism.” Over the last few months, the Israeli government has brutally slaughtered tens of thousands of helpless civilians in Gaza, committing the greatest televised massacre in the history of the world, with its top leaders using explicitly genocidal language to describe their plans for the Palestinians. Indeed, the South African government submitted a 91 page legal brief to the International Court of Justice cataloging those Israeli statements, prompting a near-unanimous ruling by the jurists that millions of Palestinians faced the prospect of genocide at Israeli hands.
These days most Westerners claim to regard genocide in a decidedly negative light. So does this not syllogistically require them to embrace and endorse “antisemitism”? Surely a visitor from Mars would be very puzzled by this strange dilemma and the philosophical and psychological contortions it seems to require.
It is rather surprising that the extremely “politically correct” ruling elites of America and the rest of the Western world are loudly cheering on the racially-exclusivist State of Israel even as it kills enormous numbers of women and children and works very hard to starve to death some two million civilians in its unprecedented genocidal rampage. After all, the far milder and more circumspect regime of Apartheid South Africa was universally condemned, boycotted, and sanctioned for merely the tiniest sliver of such misdeeds.
An important turning point may have come on April 17th when Columbia University President Minouche Shafik, herself of Egyptian origins, was raked over the coals by a Congressional Committee for permitting anti-Israel protests on her campus. Her interrogators claimed that these were “antisemitic” acts and caused some of Columbia’s Jewish students to “feel unsafe,” a dire situation that seemingly trumped both freedom of speech and academic freedom.
Shafik may or may not have agreed with those arguments, but she surely remembered that just a few months earlier her counterparts at Harvard and Penn had both been summarily purged for giving the wrong answers, and she hardly wished to share their fate. So she firmly promised to root out all such public antisemitism at her university and soon afterward 100 helmeted NYC riot police were invited onto the campus to crush the demonstrations and arrest the protesters, mostly charging the latter with “trespassing,” a rather strange accusation given that they were enrolled students on the grounds of their own campus.
This sort of harsh and immediate police crackdown seems almost unprecedented in the modern history of college political protests. Back in the 1960s, there were a few scattered cases of police being called in to arrest militant protesters who had seized and occupied administrative offices at Harvard, paraded around with firearms at Cornell, or burned down a campus building at Stanford. But I have never heard of peaceful political protesters being arrested on the grounds of their own college merely for the content of their political speech.
Although the crackdown at Columbia demanded by those members of Congress was obviously intended to quell American campus protests, it predictably had the opposite effect. Scenes of burly, helmeted riot police arresting peaceful college students on their own campus went viral on social media, inspiring a wave of similar protests at numerous other colleges across the nation, with police arrests quickly following in most locations. By latest count, some 2,300 students have now been arrested at dozens of universities.
The actions by the Georgia State Police at Emory University seemed particularly outrageous, and a Tweet containing a clip of one of those incidents has already been viewed some 1.5 million times. A 57-year-old tenured professor of Economics named Carolyn Frohlin was concerned at seeing one of her own students being wrestled to the pavement and walked towards him only to find herself brutally thrown to the ground, hogtied, and arrested by a couple of hulking officers led by a sergeant. CNN anchor Jim Acosta was utterly shocked when he reported this story…
Even worse scenes took place at UCLA as an encampment of peaceful protesters was violently attacked and beaten by a mob of pro-Israel thugs having no university connection but armed with bars, clubs, and fireworks, resulting in some serious injuries. A professor of History described her outrage as the nearby police stood aside and did nothing while UCLA students were attacked by outsiders, with 200 of the victims then arrested. According to local journalists, the violent mob had been organized and paid by pro-Israel billionaire Bill Ackman.
I have never previously heard of organized mobs of outside thugs being allowed to violently assault peaceful American student protesters on their own campus, something that seems far more reminiscent of turbulent Latin American dictatorships. The closest example that comes to mind might be the notorious 1970 “Hard Hat Riot” in New York City in which hundreds of pro-Nixon construction workers battled similar numbers of anti-war protesters on the streets of lower Manhattan, an incident so infamous that it has an extensive Wikipedia page of its own.
However, a somewhat different but much closer and more recent analogy may exist. After Donald Trump launched his unexpectedly successful presidential campaign, right-wing, pro-Trump speakers invited to college campuses were regularly harassed and assaulted along with their audiences by mobs of violent antifa, with many of the latter apparently recruited and paid for the purpose.
This sort of very physical “deplatforming” was intended to ensure that their threatening ideas never reached impressionable college students and led conservatives to begin organizing their own groups such as the Proud Boys to provide physical protection. Violent clashes occurred at Berkeley and some other colleges, while similar antifa riots in DC disrupted Trump’s inauguration. From what I remember, most of the organizers and financial backers of these violent antifa groups seemed to be Jewish, so perhaps it’s not surprising that other Jewish leaders have now begun employing very similar tactics to suppress different political movements that they regard as distasteful.
Some years ago a former senior AIPAC official once boasted to a friendly journalist that if he wrote anything on a simple napkin, within 24 hours he could get signatures of 70 Senators to endorse it, and the political power of the ADL is equally formidable. Therefore it was hardly surprising that last week an overwhelming bipartisan 320-91 majority in the House passed a bill broadening the meaning of anti-Zionism and antisemitism in the anti-discrimination policies of the Department of Education by codifying the definitions used in our Civil Rights laws to classify those ideas as discriminatory.
Although I haven’t tried to read the text, the obvious intent is to force colleges to expunge such noxious activities as anti-Israel protests from their campus community or face loss of federal funds. This represents a striking attack against academic freedom as well as America’s traditional freedom of speech and thought, and may also pressure other private organizations to adopt similar policies. In a particularly ironic twist, the definition of antisemitism used in the bill clearly covers portions of the Christian Bible, so the ignorant and compromised Republican legislators have now wholeheartedly endorsed banning the Bible in a country in which 95% of the population has Christian roots.
Israel/Gaza: The Masks Come Off in American Society
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • May 6, 2024 • 6,800 Words
Until now, revocation of a permanent residency Green Card could only occur if its holder had committed a serious felony such as murder or rape, but the empowered pro-Israel partisans of the Trump Administration have now stretched that law to include criticism of Israel or Jews, arguing that such criticism undermined the vital American national goal of combatting antisemitism across the world. When combined with last year’s bipartisan Congressional enactment of the Antisemitism Awareness Act, this might set a legal precedent for actually criminalizing such political views, especially if these can be portrayed as “providing material support” to such officially-designated terrorist organizations as Hamas.
Perhaps despite the determined efforts of the ADL and similar organizations, this legal transformation will not occur. But then again I had never expected to see masked federal agents abducting university students for writing campus newspaper op-eds criticizing Israel.
Similarly, consider the mass arrests and long prison sentences of the January 6th protesters in DC. Nearly all of the defendants had been guilty of nothing more than trespassing and perhaps petty vandalism, but their severe punishment demonstrated that strong ideological and media pressure can successfully force American courts to stretch the law in extreme ways in order to severely punish individuals engaging in political activity that has been sufficiently demonized.
From a broader perspective, we have already seen developments that suggest American society and its political life have reached a very strange point.
Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate are earnest young Jewish progressives who run the Grayzone, a webzine and YouTube channel of their own. In several articles last year, I noted their lengthy discussion of how the pro-Israel donor class had recently crushed any political dissent within the Democratic Party, contrary to the overwhelming views of its voter base.
In that same livestream, Blumenthal and Maté also focused on the methods used to keep American elected officials in line on this issue, noting that a few days ago Zionist billionaires spent an almost unprecedented $8 million to defeat Rep. Cori Bush in her own Democratic primary, angry that the black progressive member of “the squad” had called for a ceasefire in Gaza. Just a few weeks earlier, roughly twice as much money had been spent by similar individuals for very similar reasons to successfully eliminate her close political ally Rep. Jamaal Bowman.
Those two primary races were by far the most expensive in American history, and in their aftermath most members of Congress must surely realize that they only remain in office at the sufferance of AIPAC and its ideological allies. Although leading progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez denounced the role of big money in those primary races, she was obviously too fearful of pro-Israel donors to even mention whose big money had been involved. The Grayzone editors were far more candid and accurately characterized the dollars as being deployed by “the foreign agents of an Apartheid state.”
These incidents seem to suggest a rather peculiar situation. It appears that American elected officials will regularly be removed from office if they are deemed insufficiently loyal to a certain foreign country, hardly the sort of governmental framework usually discussed in our political science textbooks.
Despite their longstanding coverage of the Middle East conflict, I do not think that either of the Grayzone editors had ever contemplated the horrors currently being inflicted upon the suffering Palestinians, nor the totally slavish support for Israel expressed by the entire Biden Administration. These shocking developments prompted ideological reassessments and in May I’d described some ironic statements they had made in an earlier podcast:
This massive suppression of all political opposition to Zionism through a mixture of legal, quasi-legal, and illegal means has hardly escaped the notice of various outraged critics. Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate are young Jewish progressives very sharply critical of Israel and its current attack on Gaza, and in their most recent livestream video a day or two before that Congressional vote, they agreed that Zionists were the greatest threat to American freedom and that our country was “under political occupation” by the Israel Lobby.
They may or may not have been aware that their angry denunciation closely paralleled one of the most notorious Far Right phrases of the last half-century, which condemned America’s existing political system as nothing more than ZOG, a “Zionist Occupation Government.” Over time, obvious factual reality gradually becomes apparent regardless of ideological predispositions.
By August, I noticed that they had begun explicitly using that incendiary term in their most recent podcast:
That particular article of mine proved quite popular so it’s possible that my remarks may have directly or indirectly found their way to those individuals. Whether or not that was the case, in their current podcast they mentioned that although they’d always dismissed “ZOG” as some ridiculously antisemitic expression, recent events had demonstrated its reality, and Americans were obviously now living in “one nation under ZOG.” I think this marked an important step forward in their understanding of our world.
Soon afterward, their Grayzone channel was temporarily banned from YouTube, and when it returned a week later, the two hosts nervously joked about the acronym they must carefully avoid uttering, using several rhyming words to enlighten their audience. I suspect that many other thoughtful Americans have also recently begun entertaining notions that they would have always previously dismissed as ridiculous.
But over the last six months, these unfortunate trends have merely accelerated. So a couple of weeks ago the initial Columbia University arrest prompted them to release a new Grayzone podcast that they entitled “Shalom, the Occupation’s Home.”
Blumenthal emphasized that Americans were “living under some kind of Zionist occupation” and the two hosts then joked about how useful it would be if someone could come up with a catchy, three-letter acronym to describe our national predicament. They did so again later in the same show as they described the overwhelming Zionist control over the American government.
Such cautious circumlocutions are quite understandable given the very real risk of YouTube deplatforming, but individuals who have long since suffered that fate can afford to speak much more boldly.
As I have emphasized, obvious factual reality produces a certain amount of descriptive convergence even across the most disparate ideological camps. Late last year a fierce right-winger named Stew Peters released a video documentary entitled “Occupied” on many of these same issues and other related ones, running close to two hours. Although it unfortunately contained quite a lot of misinformation, I’d say that at least 70-75% of the material was correct, and it included many video clips that I hadn’t previously seen.
Although it was originally freely released across the Internet, those copies no longer seem available for viewing, but apparently it can still be watched on his website by anyone who registers with an email address.
Last week I published a lengthy article summarizing the strong, even overwhelming evidence that Israel and its American collaborators had been responsible for the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers. One of the leading motives for those killings had been the determination of the Kennedys to break the growing political power of the nascent Israel Lobby.
- How Israel Killed the Kennedys
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • March 24, 2025 • 11,500 Words
Now six decades later, that same political force has metastasized to such an extent that it largely controls both of America’s major political parties and nearly all the members of Congress, and may now be on the verge of successfully eliminating our traditional constitutional rights, including freedom of political speech. When university students are snatched off city streets by masked federal agents merely for writing an op-ed in their campus newspapers, matters have clearly reached a very perilous state in American society.
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From the Archives
How 1960’s French Nuclear Tests Are Still Claiming Lives in Algeria
Sputnik – 15.02.2018
On February 13, 1960, France carried out its first nuclear test in Algeria’s southern Reggane region. According to official statistics, 17 nuclear tests were carried out in total over the next 6 years. The area remains affected, and local scientists say that radioactive contamination has caused genetic mutations and irreversibly changed the region.
There are no official statistics on the number of victims. The only figures can be found in the records kept by the French representative of the local church, which lists 42,000 victims of nuclear tests. Three years ago, the French Ministry of Defense issued a statement, putting the number at 27,000 people. The victims include French soldiers as well as local Algerians who lived in the surrounding areas. … continue
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- Israeli Soldiers Inadvertently Prove Their Own Genocidal Guilt
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- Did Israel lose the midterms?
- If Americans Knew
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