Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Children’s Health Defense founder and chairman on leave, this week filed a lawsuit against YouTube and its parent company, Google, alleging the social media giant violated his First Amendment rights.
According to Kennedy, who is running for the Democratic nomination for president of the U.S., YouTube engaged in a “censorship campaign” that included removing videos of his speech at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire and interviews he did with clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson and podcaster Joe Rogan.
The complaint, filed Aug. 2 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges the U.S. government has taken “extraordinary steps” under Joe Biden’s leadership “to silence people it does not want Americans to hear,” including himself and many others.
That censorship makes it difficult for Kennedy to reach millions of voters and also for his supporters to amplify his message, the complaint says.
The lawsuit predicts the censorship will continue throughout Kennedy’s campaign, intensifying as the primaries approach.
“Mr. Kennedy often speaks at length about topics people would like to ignore, including the negative health effects of toxic chemicals and potential safety concerns about the COVID-19 shots,” the complaint reads. Then YouTube uses its “medical misinformation” policies — developed in partnership with federal government agencies and the Biden administration — to justify removing his videos.
In doing so, the platform censored not only Kennedy’s comments on medical issues, but the entire content of his speeches and interviews, according to the suit.
Although YouTube is a private company, it is not simply a publisher, the complaint alleges — it has become “an important platform for political discourse in America, a digital town square that voters trust as a place to get news and opinions about the issues of the day.”
According to the complaint:
“YouTube operates as a public forum, the digital equivalent of a town square. As such, it cannot remove protected speech, especially political speech, based on its viewpoint. …
“There is a sufficiently close nexus between YouTube and the federal government such that YouTube’s actions may be fairly treated as that of the government itself.”
Although YouTube cited its own COVID-19 vaccine misinformation policies to censor Kennedy, those policies “rely entirely on government officials to decide what information gets censored,” according to the lawsuit.
For example, the suit says YouTube doesn’t allow content that “contradicts local health authorities’ (LHA) or the World Health Organization’s (WHO) medical information about COVID-19,” and the guidance on those policies only changes based on government decisions.
Kennedy also called YouTube’s medical misinformation policies “unconstitutional” because they are “vague” and “overbroad” and “because they give unnamed government officials, who the policies depend entirely on, the unfettered discretion to decide what information gets removed from YouTube.”
Kennedy is seeking injunctive relief to prohibit YouTube from further censoring his speech, and the restoration of any videos of his political speech removed during the campaign.
Kennedy also seeks a declaration that Google and YouTube violated his First Amendment rights and that its medical disinformation policies are unconstitutional.
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
On an unanticipated front of the fight to uphold free speech, US Representative Jim Jordan recently entered the ring. Jordan, a staunch proponent of free speech and transparency, has launched a probe questioning the authority and influence of a certain digital entity, namely, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).
Operating from the perspective that censorship stifles conversation and growth, Jordan aims to expose how the CCDH could have been instrumental in directing the Biden administration’s censorship policies.
At the epicenter of this is a damning report titled “The Disinformation Dozen.” The tract, according to Jordan’s probing letter, has been instrumental in encouraging the Biden administration’s campaign to apply pressure on social media platforms. This is in order to suppress and control content, a move that in the broader picture, clashes with the standard tenets of freedom of speech and open discourse.
Representative Jordan’s stance, while controversial to some, nonetheless positions him as a bulwark against what many consider an encroachment on constitutionally enshrined freedoms. Whilst dragging the CCDH into the spotlight, Jordan has made clear his commitment to ensuring that checks and balances are preserved in the increasingly murky waters of the digital age.
The decision to question the CCDH has served to underscore the often obscured mechanics of the Biden administration’s strategy, revealing the extent to which outlying groups could potentially be influencing federal policy decisions.
As this probe unfolds, it becomes increasingly evident that the crux of this matter extends beyond the CCDH, or even the Biden administration’s alleged censorship practices. This exploration by Jordan and his associates has made apparent the need for a deeper investigation into the structures that regulate digital discourse in order to safeguard the freedoms that lie at the heart of our democracy. The pivot point here is not just about who gets to decide what can and cannot be said, but also about the incalculable value of a society’s right to open and unrestricted dialogue, as well as for transparency.
This unexpected turn of events demonstrates the ongoing measures and countermeasures by political figures such as Jim Jordan, to ensure that the ideals of free speech and anti-censorship that the nation was built on, sustain in the rapidly evolving internet landscape.
The CCDH is also currently facing a lawsuit from X owner Elon Musk, who alleges that the work of the activist group has been a vindictive move to turn advertisers away from the platform.
This evening at dinner, Dr. McCullough talked about the troubling signs that the noose is tightening on the Medical Freedom movement, with Drs. Paul Marik and Pierre Kory recently receiving ‘Notice of Potential Disciplinary Sanction’ from the American Board of Internal Medicine. The once intellectually sound institution now resembles a Maoist Tribunal. Equally alarming was Chase Bank’s recent decision to shut down the bank account of Dr. Joseph Mercola, apparently for no reason apart from his unorthodox views of health and medicine.
Then there was RFK, Jr.’s abominable treatment at the hands of Democratic members of Congress at a hearing about the federal government’s flagrant violation of the First Amendment. As I watched the shocking rudeness, arrogance, and brutality of the Representatives, I was reminded of accounts I’ve read about so-called People’s Courts and Tribunals—i.e., Kangaroo Courts—that have been erected by various totalitarian regimes. Last but not least is the constant legal harassment of former President Donald Trump, who is accused of being “a threat to democracy,” even though he is apparently the preferred candidate of roughly half the electorate.
All of the above remind’s me of Arthur Koestler’s classic 1941 novel, Darkness at Noon, which he wrote in 1940 while living in France. A Hungarian Jew, Koestler studied at the University of Vienna, and then embarked on an adventurous life, residing in various European countries and in Palestine, working as a reporter and author. A socialist in his youth, he was discerning enough to recognize that for all of its idealistic promises, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia quickly became a corrupt and tyrannical regime.
Darkness at Noon is set between 1938-1940, after Stalin’s Great Purge of dissidents (real, perceived, and fabricated) and the Moscow Show Trials. The action takes place in an unnamed prison in which the protagonist — an old guard Bolshevik named Nikolai Salmanovich Rubashov — has been arrested as part of Stalin’s campaign to eliminate all potential rivals. Rubashov undergoes a series of interrogations, which initially have a strange air of affability, but then turn progressively more severe and doctrinal.
At no point is it clear what law Rubashov has allegedly broken, or why those who have arrested him perceive him to be a threat. For some mysterious and frightening reason, it seems that he simply cannot be tolerated.
When I first read Darkness at Noon as a junior in high school, I found it fascinating and terrifying, and it left an indelible impression on me. At the same time, I assumed (in the year 1988) that such a scenario could never happen in the United States.
Now I’m not so sure. The English title comes from Job 5:14: “They meet with darkness in the daytime, and grope in the noonday as in the night.” As Koestler recognized, evil may, at any moment, become ascendent and prevail. Unfortunately, most people fail to perceive the gathering darkness until it’s too late to stop it.
Is it too late to stop it now? I’m not sure, but Dr. McCullough and I are bracing for further reprisals against heterodox doctors like Pierre Kory, Paul Marik, and Joseph Mercola, and heterodox political candidates like RFK, Jr.
Dr. McCullough has already been stripped of his entire academic medical career, but he continues to communicate with the citizenry through Substack, Twitter, and independent media outlets. I continue to express my thoughts on Substack.
Will our few remaining free speech platforms be shut down? Will our bank accounts be frozen? Will we ultimately — like Rubashov — be arrested and imprisoned for reasons that aren’t really clear to us, apart from the fact that we express heterodox views?
At this moment it is difficult if not impossible to predict if the disturbing trend we are observing will abate, or if it is the early expression of a regime that will eventually obtain full dictatorial power. If history is any guide, we are justified in feeling very alarmed by what is going on.
Sept. 1, 2022: President Biden gives speech characterizing Donald Trump and his Republican supporters as a dangerous threat to American democracy.
Americans hear about a new “information war” strategy, formally known as wartime propaganda. Most don’t realize that it is a disinformation war, and they are the target. Most Americans don’t understand that the corporate media does not exist to inform them, but to mislead them. The US military has formed huge propaganda units, with each service training thousands of military personnel and paying contractors to influence social media. They post information on-line and make comments as regular anonymous folks to support the official government narrative. They demean truth tellers, target them with complaints that they violate comment guidelines, and pressure websites to censor comments.
Last week was the 70th anniversary of the armistice that ended the fighting between North and South Korea. In a low-key commemoration, the White House Press Office issued a statement from President Biden calling to “renew our commitment to the democratic values for which [American troops] served and sacrificed.” In reality, almost 40,000 American soldiers died pointlessly in that conflict to buttress the principle that presidents could deceive the nation and intervene wherever they damn well chose.
If politicians and policymakers were honest and prudent, the Korean War would have vaccinated America against the folly and evil of foreign intervention. Instead, the war was retroactively redefined. As Barack Obama declared in 2013, “That war was no tie. Korea was a victory.”
The war began with what Harry Truman claimed was a surprise invasion on June 25, 1950, by the North Korean army across the dividing line with South Korea that was devised after World War Two. But the U.S. government had ample warnings of the pending invasion. According to the late Justin Raimondo, founder of antiwar.com, the conflict actually started with a series of attacks by South Korean forces, aided by the U.S. military: “From 1945-1948, American forces aided [South Korean President Syngman] Rhee in a killing spree that claimed tens of thousands of victims: the counterinsurgency campaign took a high toll in Kwangju, and on the island of Cheju-do — where as many as 60,000 people were murdered by Rhee’s US-backed forces.”
The North Korean army quickly routed both South Korean and U.S. forces. A complete debacle was averted after Gen. Douglas MacArthur masterminded a landing of U.S. troops at Inchon. After he routed the North Korean forces, MacArthur was determined to continue pushing northward regardless of the danger of provoking a much broader war. By the time the U.S. forces drove the North Korean army back across the border between the two Koreas, roughly 5,000 American troops had been killed. The Pentagon had plenty of warning that the Chinese would intervene if the U.S. Army pushed too close to the Chinese border. But the euphoria that erupted after Inchon blew away all common sense and drowned out the military voices who warned of a catastrophe. One U.S. Army colonel responded to a briefing on the Korea situation in Tokyo in 1950 by storming out and declaring, “They’re living in a goddamn dream land.”
The Chinese military attack resulted in the longest retreat in the history of America’s armed forces — a debacle that was valorized in the 1986 Clint Eastwood movie, Heartbreak Ridge. By 1951, the Korean War had become intensely unpopular in the United States — more unpopular than the Vietnam War ever was. Truman insisted on mislabeling the war as a “police action,” but it destroyed his presidency regardless. When the ceasefire was signed in 1953, the borders were nearly the same as at the start of the war.
While the Friends of Leviathan paint Truman as the epitome of an honest politician, he was as demagogic on Korea as Lyndon Johnson was on Vietnam. When Republicans criticized the Korean war as useless, President Harry Truman condemned “reckless and irresponsible Republican extremists” and “the false version of history that has been copyrighted by the extremists in the Republican Party.”
Perhaps the biggest disaster of the Korean war was that intellectuals and foreign-policy experts succeeded in redefining the Korean conflict as an American victory. As Georgetown University professor Derek Leebaert noted in his book Magic and Mayhem, “What had been regarded as a bloody stalemate transformed itself in Washington’s eyes; ten years later it had become an example of a successful limited war. Already by the mid-1950s, elite opinion began to surmise that it had been a victory.” Leebaert explained, “Images of victory in Korea shaped the decision to escalate in 1964-65 helping to explain why America pursued a war of attrition.” Even worse, the notion that “‘America has never lost a war’ remained part of the national myth, and the notion of having ‘prevailed’ in Korea became a justification for going big in Vietnam.” But as Leebaert noted, “in Vietnam, [the U.S. Army] had forgotten everything it had learned about counterinsurgency in Korea as well.”
On last year’s armistice anniversary, President Biden proclaimed, “During the Korean War, nearly 1.8 million Americans answered the call to serve and defend the freedoms and universal values that the people of South Korea enjoy today.” The “call to serve” mostly came from summons from draft boards for military conscription. American media commemorations of the Korean War have almost entirely ignored perhaps the war’s most important lesson: the U.S. government has almost unlimited sway to hide its own war crimes.
During the war, Americans were deluged with official pronouncements that the U.S. military was taking all possible steps to protect innocent Korean civilians. Because the evils of communism were self-evident, few questions arose about how the United States was thwarting Red aggression. When a U.S. Senate subcommittee appointed in 1953 by Sen. Joseph McCarthy investigated Korean War atrocities, the committee explicitly declared that “war crimes were defined as those acts committed by enemy nations.” This same standard prevailed in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and practically any other place where the U.S. militarily intervened.
In 1999, forty-six years after the cease fire in Korea, the Associated Press exposed a 1950 massacre of Korean refugees at No Gun Ri. U.S. troops drove Koreans out of their village and forced them to remain on a railroad embankment. Beginning on July 25, 1950, the refugees were strafed by U.S. planes and machine guns over the following three days. Hundreds of people, mostly women and children, were killed. The 1999 AP story was widely denounced by American politicians and some media outlets as a slander on American troops.
The Pentagon promised an exhaustive investigation. In January 2001, the Pentagon released a 300-page report purporting to prove that the No Gun Ri killings were merely “an unfortunate tragedy” caused by trigger-happy soldiers frightened by approaching refugees.
President Bill Clinton announced his “regret that Korean civilians lost their lives at No Gun Ri.” In an interview, he was asked why he used “regret” instead of “apology.” He declared, “I believe that the people who looked into it could not conclude that there was a deliberate act, decided at a high-enough level in the military hierarchy, to acknowledge that, in effect, the Government had participated in something that was terrible.” Clinton specified that there was no evidence of “wrongdoing high-enough in the chain of command in the Army to say that, in effect, the Government was responsible.”
But the atrocities against civilians had been common knowledge among U.S. troops 50 years earlier. As Charles Hanley, Sang-Hun Choe, and Martha Mendoza noted in their 2001 book, The Bridge at No Gun Ri, the Pentagon in 1952 “withdrew official endorsement from RKO’s One Minute to Zero, a Korean War movie in which an Army colonel played by actor Robert Mitchum orders artillery fire on a column of refugees.” The Pentagon fretted that “this sequence could be utilized for anti-American propaganda” and banned the film from being shown on U.S. military bases.
In 2005, Sahr Conway-Lanz, a Harvard University doctoral student, discovered a letter in the National Archives from the U.S. ambassador to Korea, John Muccio, sent to Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk on the day the No Gun Ri massacre commenced. Muccio summarized a new policy from a meeting between U.S. military and South Korean officials: “If refugees do appear from north of U.S. lines they will receive warning shots, and if they then persist in advancing they will be shot.” The new policy was radioed to Army units around Korea on the morning the No Gun Ri massacre began. The U.S. military feared that North Korean troops might be hiding amidst the refugees. The Pentagon initially claimed that its investigators had never seen Muccio’s letter. Louis Caldera, who was Army secretary in 2001, declared, “Millions of pages of files were reviewed and it is certainly possible they may have simply missed it.” But Muccio’s letter was in the specific research file used for the official exoneration report.
Conway-Lanz’s 2006 book Collateral Damage: Americans, Noncombatant Immunity, and Atrocity after World War II quoted an official U.S. Navy history of the first six months of the Korean War stating that the policy of strafing civilians was “wholly defensible.” An official Army history noted, “Eventually, it was decided to shoot anyone who moved at night.” A report for the aircraft carrier USS Valley Forge justified attacking civilians because the Army insisted that “groups of more than eight to ten people were to be considered troops, and were to be attacked.”
In 2007, the Army recited its original denial: “No policy purporting to authorize soldiers to shoot refugees was ever promulgated to soldiers in the field.” But the Associated Press exposed more dirt from the U.S. archives: “More than a dozen documents — in which high-ranking U.S. officers tell troops that refugees are ‘fair game,’ for example, and order them to ‘shoot all refugees coming across river’ — were found by the AP in the investigators’ own archived files after the 2001 inquiry. None of those documents was disclosed in the Army’s 300-page public report.” A former Air Force pilot told investigators that his plane and three others strafed refugees at the same time of the No Gun Ri massacre; the official report claimed that “all pilots interviewed … knew nothing about such orders.” Evidence also surfaced of massacres like No Gun Ri. On September 1, 1950, the destroyer USS DeHaven, at the Army’s insistence, “fired on a seaside refugee encampment at Pohang, South Korea. Survivors say 100 to 200 people were killed.”
Slaughtering civilians en masse became routine procedure after the Chinese army intervened in the Korean war in late 1950. MacArthur spoke of turning North Korean-held territory into a “desert.” The U.S. military eventually “expanded its definition of a military target to any structure that could shelter enemy troops or supplies.” Gen. Curtis LeMay summarized the achievements: “We burned down every town in North Korea … and some in South Korea, too.” Yet, despite the hit-anything-still-standing bombing policy, most Americans believed the U.S. military acted humanely in Korea. Historian Conway-Lanz noted: “The issue of intention, and not the question of whose weapons literally killed civilians or destroyed their homes, became the morally significant one for many Americans.”
A million civilians may have been killed during the war. A South Korean government Truth and Reconciliation Commission uncovered many previously unreported atrocities and concluded that “American troops killed groups of South Korean civilians on 138 separate occasions during the Korean War,” the New York Times reported.
Truth delayed is truth defused. The Pentagon strategy on Korean War atrocities succeeded because it left facts to the historians, not the policymakers. The truth about No Gun Ri finally slipped out — ten presidencies later. Even more damaging, the Rules of Engagement for killing Korean civilians were covered up for four more U.S. wars. If U.S. policy for slaying Korean refugees (or anyone who “moved at night”) had been exposed during that war, it might have curtailed similar killings in Vietnam (many of which were not revealed until decades after the war).
Former congressman and decorated Korean War veteran Pete McCloskey (R-Calif.) warned, “The government will always lie about embarrassing matters.” The same shenanigans permeate other U.S. wars. The secrecy and deceit surrounding U.S. warring has had catastrophic consequences in this century. The Bush administration exploited the 9/11 attacks to justify attacking Iraq in 2003, and it was not until 2016 that the U.S. government revealed documents exposing the Saudi government’s role in financing the 9/11 hijackers (15 of 19 whom were Saudi citizens). The Pentagon covered up the vast majority of U.S. killings of Iraqi civilians until Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks exposed them in 2010.
When politicians or generals appear itching to pull the United States into another foreign war, remember that truth is routinely the first casualty. Governments that recklessly slay masses of civilians won’t honestly investigate and announce their guilt to the world. Self-government is a mirage if Americans do not receive enough information to judge killings committed in their name.
WASHINGTON – The Department of Justice is committing election interference by attempting to prosecute former President and 2024 presidential hopeful Donald Trump, US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said in a statement.
“Biden’s Department of Justice is actively participating in election interference by trying to put his top political opponent, President Donald Trump, behind bars,” Greene said on Thursday.
Earlier in the day, Trump pleaded not guilty to four criminal charges brought against him by Special Counsel Jack Smith for allegedly attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 US presidential election.
Trump called the charges against him “persecution of a political opponent.” Greene characterized the prosecution as “pure corruption.”
The charges against Trump were announced amid his 2024 presidential campaign. Trump currently leads the pack of Republican candidates ahead of the debates and primary elections.
The charges also come as lawmakers in Congress investigate potential weaponization of the US government and its justice system.
On Wednesday, Congressman Matt Gaetz said lawmakers must demand an interview with Smith to provide information on his decision to charge Trump, as well as be willing to issue a subpoena and hold the special counsel in contempt of Congress.
MOSCOW — Russia’s fifth-generation Su-57 fighter has been equipped with new short-range missiles, the RVV-MD2, which outperform similar American munitions, representatives of the developer company, JSC GosMKB Vympel, said in an article for the Arsenal Otechestva (lit. Arsenal of the Fatherland) magazine.
“It is a fact that Russia’s development of the fifth generation of ‘air-to-air’ missiles, now in industrial production, is five to ten years ahead of similar developments in the United States,” the report stated.
The authors emphasized that, unlike the United States, Russia has managed to develop and test these missiles quickly, and the stage of their introduction into service has already begun.
The RVV-MD2 can be installed in the internal fuselage compartments of the fifth-generation Su-57 fighter, the specialists explained.
The RVV-MD2 is the first short-range missile to use an inertial guidance system to control and stabilize the missile during autonomous flight, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Viktor Murakhovskiy, pointed out.
The inertial system allows the munition to autonomously determine its coordinates in space without relying on external references or signals.
In addition, Murakhovskiy noted that the RVV-MD2 is equipped with a radio correction line, which allows the aircraft to refine target coordinates from onboard, increasing the likelihood of hitting enemy aircraft.
According to the editor-in-chief of “Arsenal Otechestva,” another advantage of the new missile is its multi-element dual-band infrared homing head with improved anti-jamming capabilities.
The new missile is capable of attacking targets from all angles, including from the rear. In other words, the RVV-MD2 is launched forward, maneuvers in the air and engages the enemy aircraft located behind the Su-57, Murakhovsky explained.
The Biden Administration’s Ukraine strategy is increasingly disconnected from political and military realities on the ground, Judge Andrew Napolitano told Sputnik’s New Rules podcast.
“Joe Biden cannot articulate what the goal of the American military involvement [in Ukraine] is,” Judge Andrew Napolitano, former New Jersey superior court judge and host of the Judging Freedom podcast, told Sputnik. “The neocons around him just love the concept of war, particularly war against Russia, particularly against Russia while Vladimir Putin is in office.”
Delusional Neocons Set Biden’s Ukraine Agenda
The US has been involved in the Ukraine conflict for 17 months and has already transferred over $68 billion. Nevertheless, Kiev cannot boast any considerable progress on the ground with their much-discussed counteroffensive having eventually stalled. As the conflict is continuing to drag on, Biden administration officials and the US president are still asserting to Kiev that Washington will support it “as long as it takes.”
“If you ask him, as long as it takes to do what he can’t answer the ‘To do what?’ As long as it takes to produce a stalemate? As long as it takes to produce a cease fire? As long as it takes, if you ask Victoria Nuland, to drive President Putin from office? I mean, they can’t answer that question,” Napolitano noted.
Can Trump Strike Ukraine Peace Deal?
The Ukraine conflict has been presented in the Western mainstream press as a way to bleed Russia dry and drain President Vladimir Putin’s “political standing with the Russian people,” the judge opined.
In February 2023, President Biden made a claim in front of a Polish crowd that suggested he wanted to see the Russian president deposed: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden stated. The White House later downplayed this rally cry as a gaffe.
Still, what Team Biden and their neocon allies “don’t understand is that President Putin is enormously popular, that he’s fighting a patriotic war for a return of land, for which there is a valid legal argument, it has always been a part of Russia, culturally a part of Russia, linguistically a part of Russia,” according to Napolitano.
“They think they can use Ukraine as a battering ram to drive President Putin from office. They’re crazy. It’s not going to work. Joe Biden does not have an off ramp. He doesn’t have the ability to say, okay, we’ve we’ve succeeded. It’s time for us to stop. There’s no goal and there’s no off ramp. His internal goal is to run for reelection as a wartime president like his hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt did in 1940. But this is not a war like World War Two. This is not a war that the American public perceives as a threat to American national security. All the politicians will argue that. But they’re so tied up with the military industrial complex that, you know, you have a majority in the Congress, Republicans and Democrats, that like all wars because it enriches the military industrial complex and keeps people working in the factories.”
What’s more, there is no American national security interest at stake in Ukraine, despite US neocons arguing to the contrary, according to the judge.
US war hawks are continuing to claim that Washington’s military aid to Kiev is a great investment since Russia is being bashed without American lives being lost. “The Russians are dying. The best money we’ve ever spent,” as US Senator Lindsey Graham said back in May. As long as no American body bags are coming home, the public is buying into this argument.
Still, it’s no longer a secret that a limited contingent of US servicemen has been operating on the ground in Ukraine. “We know the US military is there in Ukraine out of uniform. We know it is there in Poland, operating equipment that is shooting projectiles at Russian boys,” noted the judge. US mercenaries have also joined Ukrainian battalions on the battlefield.
And these Americans are dying in Ukraine: a sad statistic has already found its way out, indicating that dozens if not hundreds of US citizens have been killed in the conflict zone since February 2022.
Dissent is Brewing Within the US Military and Intel Community
Meanwhile, the US president and his administration are continuing to assert to the American public that Russia is losing and that Ukraine is going to prevail.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently insisted that Russia had “already lost” while speaking to an American broadcaster. However, this triumphalist stance is not unanimously shared by US Department of Defense officials and the US intelligence community. The so-called Pentagon leak – that caught the headlines in April – shed some light on what the US military and spies really think about the situation on the ground in Ukraine.
“There is a 21 year old young Massachusetts National Guardsman sitting in a federal jail cell as we speak, named Jack Teixeira, who is accused of leaking secret documents – to which he had access by virtue of his work in the National Guard – to a chat room,” said Napolitano.
“The documents, the authenticity and accuracy of which have never been challenged by the government, reveal the government’s own internal deliberations as showing it expects Ukraine to lose. To lose. So if the Department of Defense expects Ukraine to lose and the Secretary of Defense goes before a Senate committee and says under oath ‘Ukraine is going to win’, who are you going to believe? You’re going to believe their candid, unvarnished statements recorded in documents that they believed would forever remain secret.”
Prior to the scandalous leak, American army and intelligence veterans voiced their skepticism with regard to Biden’s Ukraine strategy in their podcasts or interviews with alternative media.
“On my podcast, Judging Freedom, where we have a number of ex-CIA and ex-military harshly critical of the current CIA and the current US government, who are, I believe, giving a far more accurate version of what’s happening there,” Napolitano pointed out, referring to former US Marine Corps intelligence officer Scott Ritter, retired US Army colonel and government official Douglas Macgregor, former CIA analyst Larry Johnson and ex-CIA officer Ray McGovern. All of them have stated loud and clear that “it is inconceivable that the Ukraine military can prevail,” the judge underscored.
On top of that, it has been almost impossible for the US and NATO military officials to ignore massive casualties sustained by the Ukrainian Armed Forces in terms of military equipment and manpower since the beginning of their counteroffensive.
As of mid-July, Ukraine had lost 26,000 servicemen, 21 aircraft, five helicopters, some 1,244 tanks and armored vehicles, including 17 Leopard tanks, five French AMX wheeled tanks, 914 units of special vehicles, two air defense systems, and 25 MLRS vehicles, according to the Russian Ministry of Defense.
Thus, unsurprisingly, Western leaders in private conversations cast doubt on Kiev’s odds of winning at the recent Aspen Security Forum despite publicly trying to put a positive spin on Ukraine’s military efforts.
Why is the US Public Buying Into Biden’s Ukraine Narrative?
Meanwhile, the Western mainstream press has been busy spreading the one-sided Biden administration’s Ukraine narrative since the outset of the conflict. Judging from polls, most of the public in the West appear to have swallowed the bait.
“The American public still seems to be in favor of the war. Again, they only hear one side,” highlighted the judge.
“While the Biden administration, through the American Central Intelligence Agency and British MI6, has succeeded in taming the press,” continued Napolitano. “So the press and the American media, even my friends and former colleagues at Fox, are giving a version of these events which is not based in reality on the ground. The version of events that Americans are getting is that the so-called spring offensive, even though we’re now in the middle of the summer, is slow, methodical, but but a steady movement eastward by the Ukrainian forces, Whereas in reality, as you just pointed out, the Russian military has established three runs of defenses and the Ukrainians haven’t even approached, much less breached the first of those three rings. So the American public is not getting a true and accurate view of the so-called spring effect offensive from mainstream media.”
What’s making the West’s Ukraine narrative even less credible is that there are very few American journalists on the ground, according to the judge.
“The military won’t allow them there, Napolitano said. “The Ukrainians won’t allow them there. They don’t want the true story to be told. So the American public hears that same drumbeat over and over and over again, which you so nicely articulated. But in reality, it is not our war, it is not our fight. We shouldn’t be losing any blood and we shouldn’t be losing any money over it. And we are losing.”
In addition, most US presidential candidates from both sides of America’s political aisle are also promoting the US proxy war in Ukraine. Just two major candidates – Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – are against the conflict. “Everybody else is lockstep in favor of it for a variety of what I think are nonsensical reasons,” Sputnik’s interlocutor added.
However, over the past two weeks or so, a growing number of mainstream media outlets have started to release unflattering reports about the Ukraine situation on the front lines. They are even publishing interviews with Ukrainian soldiers where they talk about how this counteroffensive is not exactly going to plan. This could be a harbinger of some potential change, according to the judge, even though Team Biden is still wearing a brave face.
“It’s very telling that that is beginning to happen. So that would mean the president’s political advisers are taking polls saying the American public’s getting tired of this war. There doesn’t seem to be any progress. We need an off ramp. The off ramp is not going to come all at once. The off ramp is going to come gradually and slowly with the American public acclimated to the coming off ramp. If the Biden administration were to say, that’s it, we’re not involved anymore, well then everybody would say, what about the $68 billion already spent? Are we going to get that back. I mean, was it wasted? What was accomplished by it? So in order to prevent that kind of a blowback, they need this gradual acclimation to the likelihood of Russian success and Ukrainian defeat,” Napolitano concluded.
Court documents stemming from Hunter Biden’s failed plea-bargain deal on federal criminal charges have revealed that US President Joe Biden’s son brought in income of more than $4.4 million, mostly from China and Ukraine, while paying no taxes in 2017 and 2018.
In 2017 alone, Hunter Biden netted nearly $2.3 million from foreign sources, including over $1.6 million from his Chinese business interests and $500,000 in director’s fees from a Ukrainian energy company, according to a filing released on Wednesday by US District Court Judge Maryellen Noreika in Wilmington, Delaware. He also had $70,000 in earnings from a Romanian business and $48,000 from a multinational law firm.
The president’s son belatedly reported an additional $2.1 million in earnings from 2018. He didn’t pay taxes for either year, despite having enough money and being repeatedly urged by his accountant to do so, according to the documents, which Noreika released in response to a request from NBC News.
Biden became addicted to crack cocaine in 2016, contributing to the collapse of his marriage and his most significant business relationship the following year. Despite his escalating drug use, “Biden successfully entered into business ventures and landed legal clients, earning millions of dollars.”
Republican lawmakers have accused the Biden family of soliciting bribes through Hunter Biden’s overseas business forays, including a stint serving as a director for Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings. Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky reportedly urged Hunter Biden, whose father was then the US vice president, to help end a corruption investigation against the company in 2015.
Zlochevsky later told an FBI informant that he was coerced into paying a $10 million bribe to the Bidens and that he had multiple recordings to verify his claims.
Hunter Biden’s substance abuse worsened in 2018, when he moved to Los Angeles for a “spring and summer of nonstop debauchery,” according to the plea agreement. Weeks before his 2017 tax return was due to be filed, he received a $1 million payment for legal services to Chinese business associate Patrick Ho, but he spent almost all of the money over the next six months on travel, entertainment and other expenses. Similarly, around the time his 2018 return was due, in April 2019, he received $758,000 and spent almost all the money by the end of May.
The documents showed that an unidentified third party paid Biden’s nearly $2 million in combined tax liabilities for 2017 and 2018 in October 2021. That same person also paid about $243,000 on Biden’s behalf for unresolved tax liabilities from 2016 and 2019. Media outlets have identified that backer as Kevin Morris, Hunter Biden’s “sugar brother” lawyer in Los Angeles.
Noreika refused to accept the plea agreement last week, saying she had concerns about the terms granted to Biden. Republicans had accused prosecutors in the Biden administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) of giving the president’s son a “sweetheart” deal on the tax charges against him and a separate case involving an illegal gun purchase. Republican lawmakers launched an investigation this week of the DOJ’s handling of the plea and diversion agreements in Hunter Biden’s cases.
Everyone seems to know someone taking Ozempic these days. But, it’s not all roses for the wonder weight loss drug, with serious side effects including suicidal ideations and stomach paralysis. Jefferey Jaxen reports.
A Louisiana woman who sued the manufacturers of popular diabetes and weight loss drugs Ozempic and Mounjaro is alleging the drugmakers failed to warn the public about the risk of severe gastrointestinal problems.
Jaclyn Bjorklund, 44, who on Wednesday filed the 26-page lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana Lake Charles Division, claims she was “severely injured” after taking the two medications.
According to the complaint, Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, the manufacturers of Ozempic and Mounjaro, respectively, “downplayed the severity of the gastrointestinal events,” such as gastroparesis and gastroenteritis, caused by the drugs.
Gastroparesis, a disorder that “slows or stops the movement of food from your stomach to your small intestine, even though there is no blockage in the stomach or intestines” is frequently caused by diabetes. Narcotics and antidepressants also are linked to gastroparesis.
According to NBC News, Bjorklund is the first person to come forward alleging that the drugs in question cause gastrointestinal injuries.
The two drugs are part of a new category of medicines known as glucagon-like peptide-1, or GLP-1, receptor agonists. They are intended to help people with Type 2 diabetes manage their blood sugar levels. However, the medications are also commonly prescribed off-label for weight loss.
According to CBS News, “These drugs were originally developed to treat patients with Type 2 diabetes as they produce insulin and lower blood sugar. They also release a hormone that slows down digestion and keeps food in a patient’s stomach longer.”
According to CNN, “The lawsuit is seeking compensatory and punitive damages for past and future pain and suffering Bjorklund will have including health care costs and medical monitoring as well as her attorney’s fees and court costs.”
Attorneys Paul Pennock and Jonathan Sedgh, of Orlando-based Morgan & Morgan, said during a press conference, that the basis of the lawsuit is “a failure to warn,” CBS News reported. Pennock told the press:
“It is our opinion that these drugs are causing these problems. We think that the evidence is sufficient for us to be able to prove it or we would not have filed the case, and we intend to file many more in the coming days and weeks.
“[Bjorklund’s] problems have been so severe that she’s been to the emergency room multiple times, including last weekend. She’s actually even thrown up so violently that she’s lost teeth.”
This is the first lawsuit alleging the two drugs caused gastrointestinal injuries, however, lawyers representing Bjorklund said hundreds more similar lawsuits are ready to be filed by victims across the U.S.
Ozempic recently was linked to a range of other health issues, including kidney disorders and causing suicidal thoughts.
Plaintiff suffered from ‘severe gastrointestinal events’
The lawsuit states that Bjorklund, who was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes in 2017, was prescribed Ozempic and took the drug for more than a year before switching to Mounjaro.
During this period, she experienced “severe gastrointestinal events,” including severe vomiting — which also led to the loss of teeth, gastrointestinal burning and stomach pain. As a result, the complaint states, Bjorklund “sustained severe and permanent personal injuries, pain, suffering, and emotional distress, and incurred medical expenses.”
The lawsuit also alleges the two companies “knew of the association between the use of GLP-1 receptor agonists and the risk of developing severe gastrointestinal issues, including gastroparesis and gastroenteritis.”
The companies’ “failure to disclose information that they possessed regarding the association between the use of GLP-1 receptor agonists and the risk of developing severe gastrointestinal issues, including gastroparesis and gastroenteritis, rendered the warnings for this medication inadequate,” the lawsuit adds.
According to The Hill, “While the labels for both medications note that they delay gastric emptying and can cause a variety of stomach problems — including nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain and constipation — they do not explicitly warn of gastroparesis as a risk.”
CNN reported that “Ozempic’sprescribing information says the most common adverse events related to the drug are nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain and constipation. Under a section on drug interactions, it says that Ozempic delays gastric emptying, which may impact absorption of oral medications.”
Similarly, “Mounjaro’sprescribing information also says nausea, diarrhea, decreased appetite, vomiting, constipation, dyspepsia, and abdominal pain are the most common adverse events, and that Mounjaro delays gastric emptying, which may impact medication absorption.”
However, due to the lack of an explicit warning regarding gastroparesis, the lawsuit alleges that Bjorklund “was and still is caused to suffer from severe gastrointestinal issues, as well as other severe and personal injuries which are permanent and lasting in nature, physical pain, and mental anguish.”
In statements, both companies defended their products. Novo Nordisk claimed that gastrointestinal events are “well-known side effects of the GLP-1 class,” according to CBS News. The company added:
“For semaglutide, the majority of GI side effects are mild to moderate in severity and of short duration. GLP-1’s are known to cause a delay in gastric emptying, as noted in the label of each of our GLP-1 RA medications. Symptoms of delayed gastric emptying, nausea and vomiting are listed as side effects.”
And, as reported by The Hill :
“Patient safety is of utmost importance to Novo Nordisk. … We are continuously monitoring the safety profile of our products and collaborate closely with authorities to ensure patient safety, including adequate information on gastrointestinal side effects in the label.”
Eli Lilly said patient safety is its “top priority,” according to CBS News, and the company is “actively engage[d] in monitoring, evaluating and reporting safety information for all our medicines.”
NBC News cited FDA spokesperson Chanapa Tantibanchachai, who said it’s “unclear” whether GLP-1 medications are connected to occurrences of gastroparesis.
A separate FDA statement cited by CNN states the agency has “received reports of gastroparesis with semaglutide and liraglutide, some of which documented the adverse event as not recovered after discontinuation of the respective product at the time of the report.”
‘This medicine made my life hell’
However, lawyers for Bjorklund say that many more patients are ready to come forward with lawsuits of their own.
According to CBS News, Pennock’s firm “is investigating 400 other inquiries from clients across 45 states,” while according to The Hill, Pennock ultimately expects to see “thousands of such cases.”
Several patients also spoke to media outlets regarding their injuries.
Brea Hand told CBS News, “The stomach pain was just unbearable and I couldn’t keep anything down. I would drink something and within minutes, like five, 10 minutes later, I would be throwing up.”
Hand visited the hospital six times while taking Ozempic and was admitted to an intensive care unit. She is not involved in the lawsuit.
A July 25, CNN featured the stories of other patients, including Louisiana resident Joanie Knight, 37, who said “I wish I never touched it. I wish I’d never heard of it in my life,” referring to Ozempic. “This medicine made my life hell. So much hell.”
And Emily Wright, a 38-year-old teacher from Toronto, began taking Ozempic in 2018. Today though, despite not having taken the medication “for a year,” she said, “I’m still not back to my normal.” She told CNN she is now vomiting so frequently that she was obliged to take a leave of absence from her job.
In recent months, several reports have indicated that Ozempic in particular is linked to a range of other health problems.
Last month, health regulators in Iceland, followed by the European Medicines Agency, began investigating reports that Ozempic and other popular weight-loss drugs are linked to the inducement of suicidal thoughts.
Ozempic also was linked to an increased risk of adverse kidney events, diabetic retinopathy, and metabolic, nutritional, eye, retinal, urinary and cardiac disorders.
And in April, the FDA warned that Ozempic should be discontinued at least two months prior to pregnancy because it takes that long for the body to eliminate the drug.
However, those warnings are buried, and long-term testing won’t be completed for years. The drug was not studied in pregnant women during clinical trials.
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
Before there was the narrative pushed by the mainstream media that the 2016 US presidential election was rigged – there were the Democratic primaries, regarding which the evidence of actual rigging taking place has been much more solid.
The victim was hapless presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders – but now, this once great hope of left-wing citizens seems to be turning increasingly authoritarian, at least in his rhetoric.
He is, essentially, providing a solution to a problem that shouldn’t exist (not in a democracy) – namely, what to do, legally, to stop political opponents?
In this case, it’s about corporate skeptics around the “climate change panic.” And Sanders has the answer – prosecute them, and if found guilty, put them in prison.
Sounds fairly extreme, but here we are.
In a letter co-signed by Senator Sanders, a group of his Democrat colleagues is asking the US Department of Justice (DoJ) to do just such a thing, aimed at what’s termed the fossil fuel industry.
And although it seems careful to point the finger and demand retribution from companies that are accused of, basically, organizing campaigns to improve their business (shocking (NOT) – and, that business anyway is far from being illegal) – once a precedent of legally hounding dissenters is set, it can go anywhere.
ExxonMobile, Shell, and other giants are mentioned, perhaps as a way to soften the blow of that reality, but if what the senators are asking is to become reality, next up could be journalists, and then social media users, and just in general, it’s turtles all the way down.
Sanders and his companions would not want any of their actions to be seen that way, naturally. So they assert that, “the fossil fuel industry has had scientific evidence about the dangers of climate change and the role that burning fossil fuels play in increasing global temperatures for more than 50 years.”
The letter continues: “To coordinate their illegal misinformation campaign, the fossil fuel industry funded a multimillion-dollar plan through the American Petroleum Institute that sought to make climate change a ‘non-issue.’”
But the exact same argument could be used (in court) against any “regular Joe” not into the whole climate change – in court, down the line, should such extreme red lines as requested by the letter get established.
Of course, there’s no way to say that will happen – but also, that it won’t.
Kind of the same argument that climate change skeptics are trying to make about the climate change policy push.
With summer winding down and schools about to open, parents around the country (USA) have received or will receive letters of exclusion from their child’s school. The letter will state that your child is required to be up to date on their childhood immunizations according to the CDC, or they will not be allowed to attend school.
You are not told that other than a handful of states that have eliminated both the religious and the philosophical exemptions, you are free to do whatever you believe is best for your child. You can do some, all, or none of the childhood vaccines. Each state may have a different form or process but rest assured; it is the law of your state that you have this right; the freedom to choose.
To learn more about the specifics for your state, NVIC (National Vaccine Information Center) https://www.nvic.org has all the information you need.
If you live in California, New York, West Virginia, Maine, and possibly Mississippi, the only exemption allowed is a medical exemption. All states allow medical exemptions, which is where a doctor writes a medical exemption.
The challenge for doctors is that the states only allow medical exemptions according to the CDC guidelines, which means you can only get exemptions for a vaccine that has caused death or a severe anaphylactic reaction. They essentially don’t allow exemptions for all vaccines. More importantly, doctors who write medical exemptions invite an investigation by their state medical board and risk losing their medical license. This has made medical exemptions something, in theory, one could hope to get, but in reality, and practically speaking, medical exemptions no longer exist.
So, what do you do if you live in one of the states that only allow medical exemptions?
Basically, you either must get your child up to date, home school, or leave the state for one that allows religious or philosophical exemptions. If you feel you have no choice but to get your child up to date, I highly recommend that you consult a medical provider to help you figure out the safest way to do this.
I am available for coaching at https://www.kidsfirst4ever.com. I don’t diagnose or treat as I am retired and relinquished my license.
Parents and guardians, there is nothing more important in your role to nurture and protect your children than how you handle the vaccine situation. There is no one size fits all that makes sense. Each vaccine should be looked at individually, and you should determine if it makes sense for your child, given the prevalence of the disease for which there is a vaccine and the risks and benefits of giving the vaccine or not giving the vaccine.
Recent disclosures by the Zionist regime show that some 2,069 British nationals were serving in the IDF as of March 2025, according to Freedom of Information (FoI) requests submitted to the occupation forces (1,686 dual British-Israeli, plus 383 multinational). We cannot tell from the figures how many of these were already settler colonists and intend to stay in the colony, and how many will return or have returned to the UK. Presumably, those returning to the UK will number far fewer than 2,000, since many are known to have become permanently residents of the colony.
Additionally, the IDF figures only provide a snapshot, and do not tell us how many have served in the Jewish supremacist military either before or after March 2025. One way into the question of how many genocidaires are living in Britain is to ask how many current British residents were born in the Zionist colony. There is data on that, as we shall see. … continue
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.
