Trump’s Second Indictment Shows Democrats Uninterested in ‘Fair’ 2024 Election
Sputnik – 10.06.2023
The federal indictment against former US President Donald Trump was unsealed earlier Friday and revealed he was being charged with 37 felony counts, 31 of which were for violating the Espionage Act through his “willful retention” of classified records. The remaining offenses were for false statements and obstruction of justice.
The latest indictment filed against former US President Donald Trump highlights how much Democrats are uninterested in holding a “fair election” ahead of the 2024 presidential cycle, Ethan Ralph, a conservative political commentator and host of the Killstream, told Sputnik.
Ralph noted that “Democrats don’t seem to be interested in a fair election.”
“The increase in lawsuits, indictments, and other legal assaults on Trump is directly related to the viability of his 2024 candidacy,” the commentator said. “The Democrats themselves do not seem to think that they can beat Trump in a fair fight. Just look at their actions.”
The latest indictment filed against Trump centers around classified documents retrieved by FBI agents during a raid on his Mar-a-Lago residence. Although Trump has stated records were unclassified prior to him leaving office, his claims have not proven concrete as he did not follow government protocol.
Prior to this week’s indictment, Trump was previously hit with a 34-count indictment in New York for business fraud in April, and was later found liable for sexual abuse and defamation in early May in relation to a civil case filed by columnist E. Jean Carroll.
Asked whether the indictment had the potential of affecting the former president’s chances at returning to the Oval Office, Ralph admitted it was not likely Trump would wind up behind bars before the election kicked off.
“The latest federal indictment could hurt him with independents and other potential voters, but the polarization of the electorate and hardened views on Trump himself mean that it’s unlikely to hurt him very much,” he pointed out.
Not long after records were retrieved from Mar-a-Lago, classified documents began to turn up in the possession former US Vice President Mike Pence and US President Joe Biden.
In Biden’s case, several documents had been found at his Delaware home and office, as well as the Penn Biden Center in Washington, DC. However, unlike steps taken at Trump’s Florida residence, both the Biden and Pence cases did not involve a full blown raid and they haven’t received the same treatment in the media.
Ralph pointed out that “it’s particularly egregious” in how American media treated the cases – specifically that involving Biden. He noting that if outlets are going to cover the topic, it’s best to “have an equal playing field for Trump and non-Trump alike.”
“Last night on the cable news, you heard them making excuses for Biden’s behavior. But the fact remains; he mishandled classified material,” he pointed out. “It’s my opinion that this is a pretty common thing that goes on. It seems to cross both parties. It would be better not to politicize it to this degree.”
In the hours since Trump first revealed via a Truth Social post that he had been indicted, multiple political figures have come forward to condemn what they see as the weaponization of the US justice system against the former commander-in-chief.
Among the critics are Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who said late Thursday that it was “unconscionable” that Biden indicted “the leading candidate opposing him” in the 2024 election.
While the Biden White House has claimed it only found out about the indictment through the media, Ralph stated that the weaponization of federal law enforcement by Democrats is unlikely to ease up.
“I think as we move forward, the real danger is not just political retribution that the parties take on each other, but the retribution they eventually try to take on the other side’s voters,” Ralph said. “If empowered by a reelection and perhaps gains elsewhere, there’s a likelihood they take things further.”
“The useless US media certainly won’t do anything other than cheerlead the moves,” he concluded, pointing out that the “trend is towards repression by the West.”
Trump Indictment: FBI Veteran Raises Red Flags Over ‘Abnormal’ Mar-a-Lago Raid
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 11.06.2023
A senior FBI official charged with executing the raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago last year has raised a red flag about “abnormalities” and apparent violations in the Justice Department’s handling of the case.
Former Assistant Director of the FBI’s Washington Field Office (WFO) Steven D’Antuono has reached out to the US Congress citing concerns and frustration with the manner President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice arranged the August 2022 raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home.
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan unveiled the damning testimony earlier this week and sent a letter to US Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding answers.
First, D’Antuono, who had two decades of FBI experience, drew attention to the fact that the bureau’s headquarters made the decision to assign the execution of the search warrant in Trump’s Miami residence to… the Washington Field Office. As per D’Antuono, it looked strange given that the search occurred in the territory of the Miami Field Office, which should have been assigned with the task under the bureau’s rules.
Second, the DoJ failed to assign a US Attorney’s Office to the investigative matter of that magnitude which was “unusual” as per the FBI veteran. This triggered D’Antuono’s deep concerns as it was “out of the ordinary.” He noted that he “never got a good answer” from DoJ with regard to this decision.
Third, the FBI did not first seek consent to effectuate the search. D’Antuono recalled that at the meeting between FBI and DoJ officials, the Department of Justice pushed the bureau to execute the search warrant as quickly as possible. Referring to his experience, the FBI veteran underscored that the agency should have sought consent to search the premises prior to the raid. D’Antuono suggested that either AG Garland or FBI Director Christopher Wray made the decision to seek a search warrant despite “opposition” from the agents working on the case in the WFO. D’Antuono pointed out that “there was a good likelihood that [Trump’s legal team] could have given consent.”
Fourth, the FBI refused to wait for Trump’s attorney to be present before the raid, as per D’Antuono. The bureau veteran claimed that the FBI sought to exclude Trump’s lawyers from the search, which again sounded an alarm for the senior officer.
The FBI veteran’s testimony has prompted US Republican lawmakers to make a repeated request for bureau documents and information concerning the raid. In his latest letter to AG Garland, Jordan pointed out that a previous request regarding the matter was rejected by the Department of Justice.
The alleged expose of DoJ misconduct during the August raid comes after the department indicted Republican presidential candidate Trump earlier this week, charging him with 37 counts including the mishandling of classified materials. The charges further include obstruction of justice, destruction or falsification of records, conspiracy and false statements, as well as one charge under the Espionage Act.
“The Department [of Justice] will indict President Donald Trump, despite declining to indict former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for her mishandling of classified information and failing to indict President Biden for his mishandling of classified information,” Jordan wrote. “The indictment creates, at the minimum, a serious appearance of a double standard and a miscarriage of justice.”
The latest row between House Republicans and the DoJ erupted amid the congressional investigation into the apparent “preferential treatment” of Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, who has been probed for tax crimes since at least 2018. The House GOP is also presently looking into an uncorroborated report about Joe Biden receiving a $5 million bribe, which has recently been provided by the FBI to lawmakers.
Kiev’s NATO-Backed Counteroffensive Is The West’s Most Important Military Campaign Since WWII
More Than Meets The Eye
BY ANDREW KORYBKO | JUNE 11, 2023
Kiev’s NATO–backed counteroffensive has captivated the world’s attention as everyone watches to see whether it’ll push Russia out of the territory that Ukraine claims as its own. Progress on that direction would likely lead to continued Western support, while the failure to fulfill expectations might lead to the aforesaid being curtailed and ceasefire talks commencing. Either outcome is important, but what many observers have overlooked is the historical significance of this campaign.
The Unexpected Proxy War
It’s the first time since World War II that the West has conventionally fought a military peer, albeit indirectly in this case since they’re fighting Russia via their Ukrainian proxy. The US envisaged transforming that former Soviet Republic into a platform for threatening Russia through conventional, hybrid, and unconventional means with the aim of coercing it into never-ending concessions. The goal was to strategically neutralize then Balkanize it in order to facilitate doing the same to China afterwards.
While Ukraine was cooperating with NATO to this end prior to the start of Russia’s special operation, including through the secret hosting of that bloc’s bases as well as joint biological and nuclear weapons programs, everything was supposed to accelerate after its planned reconquest of Donbass in early 2022. President Putin narrowly preempted his opponents’ first move once he concluded that the West didn’t want to resolve their problems through peaceful means after they rejected Russia’s security requests.
Mutual Surprises Lead To A Stalemate
The fast-moving events that were set into motion caught both sides by surprise. The West didn’t really expect a large-scale intervention, predicting instead that Russia would likely concentrate its forces in Donbass in the unlikely scenario that it got involved, but they still secretly dispatched plenty of anti-air and -tank missiles to Ukraine ahead of time just in case. Likewise, Russia didn’t expect such formidable resistance from Ukraine, but the West was also surprised that Russia didn’t collapse due to sanctions.
Neither side has thus far been able to defeat the other as a result of the NATO-Russian “race of logistics”/“war of attrition” that Secretary-General Stoltenberg finally admitted in mid-February has been going on this whole time. His bloc continued pumping Ukraine full of increasingly higher quality arms and training more of its troops to NATO standards exactly as it planned to do had Donbass been reconquered, while Russia partially mobilized its trained reservists and ramped up its military-industrial production.
The New York Times Spills The Beans
Instead of settling for the present stalemate by seeking to freeze the Line of Contact via a Korean-like armistice, the West saw the opportunity to put its proxy war plans against Russia into action ahead of schedule. Had Donbass been reconquered by Ukraine last spring like NATO envisaged, then Kiev would have been armed to the teeth and extensively trained for years prior to provoking a crisis over Crimea, but the decision was made to test it now since it’s partially ready and the pretext already exists.
The New York Times (NYT) hinted at this motivation in their recent article titled “As Ukraine Launches Counteroffensive, Definitions of ‘Success’ Vary”, which revealed that “Essentially, the United States and its allies will be looking at the counteroffensive for evidence that their plan of remaking the Ukrainian army into a modern force that fights with NATO tactics, and that can use complex maneuvers and advanced equipment to allow a smaller force to defeat a larger one, is sound.”
The West’s Reality Check
The influx of over $165 billion worth of military support to Ukraine from NATO proved too tempting of an opportunity for the bloc’s most hawkish decisionmakers to pass up in terms of finally testing their arms and strategies against a peer competitor. Considering the likelihood of Russia entrenching itself even deeper into those territories that Ukraine claims as its own and recalling the neck-and-neck NATO-Russian “race of logistics”, the decision was made to test it now instead of face greater difficulties later.
The NYT reported that expectations are tempered as a result of this newfound context: “Privately, U.S. and European officials concede that pushing all of Russia’s forces out of occupied Ukrainian land is highly unlikely. Still, two themes emerge as clear ideas of ‘success’: that the Ukrainian army retake and hold on to key swaths of territory previously occupied by the Russians, and that Kyiv deal the Russian military a debilitating blow that forces the Kremlin to question the future of its military options in Ukraine.
The outlet then proceeded to indicate some tangible benchmarks for “success” such as “retaking some parts of the Donbas or pushing Russia out of agricultural and mining areas in southeastern Ukraine”, “Seizing the nuclear plant in Zaporizhzhia”, and/or “cut[ting] off, or at least squeez[ing], the so-called land bridge.” These moderate goals are a far cry from the maximalist one that’s officially being pursued by NATO and Ukraine, which shows what a reality check the past 15 months of fighting have been.
NATO’s Utter Humiliation By Russia
Even worse for them is that Russia didn’t just destroy a sizeable amount of their so-called “wunderwaffen” over the past few days, but even released videos proving its accomplishments, thus utterly humiliating NATO. The bloc’s most hawkish decisionmakers were so eager to receive large-scale battlefield data from their Ukrainian proxies’ fielding of NATO equipment against the West’s Russian peer competitor that they arrogantly overlooked all the signs that this risked tremendously backfiring.
It was wrongly thought after Russia’s pullbacks in Kharkov and Kherson Regions late last year that the entire front would collapse if it was pushed strongly enough by NATO-trained Ukrainians fielding some of that bloc’s most famous equipment during the planned counteroffensive over half a year later. This assessment ignored the particularities of those two situations and assumed that Russia was incapable of learning from its prior shortcomings, which directly led to the West’s disaster over the past few days.
That’s not to say that Ukraine’s counteroffensive might not achieve some success despite the enormous physical costs that this would certainly entail, but just that global perceptions about Western power have just been shattered after Russia shared videos of it destroying their “wunderwaffen”. If more sober-minded decisionmakers had the final say in whether the counteroffensive should go ahead, they might have calculated that it’s better to preserve the illusion of dominance than risk having it dispelled.
Great Power Competition
It might have been inevitable in hindsight that the greenlight would be given to Kiev’s NATO-backed counteroffensive, however, when remembering that the US has been planning to test its new proxy war model against a peer competitor since at least December 2017. The National Security Strategy that was released at the time declared that “great power competition has returned”, specifically identifying China and Russia as the two that the US must actively contain.
Despite Trump continuing to arm Ukraine and impose sanctions against Russia during his tenure, he appears to have sincerely wanted to strike a deal with the Kremlin in order to then focus entirely on containing China, but he was thwarted by his permanent bureaucracy. Upon Biden coming to power, the Democrats’ plot to have Kiev reconquer Donbass as part of their grand strategic plan to contain Russia before China was once again back in play, which would have happened earlier had Hillary won in 2016.
The Biden Administration’s Gamble
The West didn’t expect Russia to stop them, let alone intervene far beyond Donbass in the unlikely scenario that it got involved, and then they wrongly predicted that it would soon collapse under sanctions. They were wrong on all three counts, which led to them being pulled by rapidly accelerating mission creep into waging a proxy war against Russia a lot earlier than they planned. Instead of being satisfied with their test data and freezing the conflict, they want even more at a much larger scale.
The most hawkish decisionmakers downplayed Russia’s proven military improvements since its pullback from Kherson last November and authorized the counteroffensive for this purpose since they were convinced that Ukraine’s NATO-trained and -armed forces would smash through the entire front. They couldn’t resist the chance to finally test their arms and strategies against a peer competitor at this scale after NATO poured over $165 billion worth of military aid into their proxy these past 15 months.
Concluding Thoughts
Awareness of these real motivations explains why the counteroffensive is the West’s most important military campaign since World War II, which was the last time that they conventionally fought a military peer. Even though they’re only doing so by proxy right now, they’re still receiving the large-scale data that they require in order to fine-tune their plans ahead of possibly waging a direct war against one. What the West has learned over the past few days, however, is that they shouldn’t take victory over Russia for granted.
What are UFO Disclosure Gatekeepers Acclimating the Public To?
By Susan A. Manewich and Jefferey Jaxen | IET Evolve | June 10, 2023
The public received another drop of military intelligence agency-led ‘disclosure’ this week. Vetting the story was, well, impossible. Why? Because it’s classified.
Unlike whistleblowers like Edward Snowden or Julian Assange, both revealing actual evidence, David Grusch’s ‘whistleblowing’ storytelling and ‘evidence’ are two different things altogether.
Grusch is alleging there is a secret UFO retrieval program.
Interviewer, “Do we have bodies? Do we have species?” Grusch replies, “When you recover something that has either landed or crashed, sometimes you encounter dead pilots.”
Interviewer asks, “We have spacecraft from another species?” Grusch replies, “Yes, we do.”
Was he (Grusch) part of that program? No.
Did he (Grusch) see the craft or bodies himself? No.
Grusch says, “we’re definitely not alone.”
There are two major points here; first is the continuity of media chosen to release these type of stories and second is the progression of a narrative through the same media sources.
Breaking the story first on June 5th, in written form, was Leslie Keane and Ralph Blumenthal. It was NewsNation who did the first sit-down recorded interview of Grusch, also released on the same day with a pre-recorded appearance by Keane. Coincidently on the same day, June 5th, a live panel discussion at one of the largest UFO conferences in the world also picked up the story and excitedly integrated it into their segment with Danny Sheehan and Richard Dolan giving a live synopsis.
NewsNation claimed they have not seen or verified the alleged proof Grusch claims he provided to investigators. They also state that Grusch has not seen photos of the alleged craft himself but has talked extensively with other intelligence officials who have.
Keane and Blumenthal were the journalists who kicked off the intelligence agency-led ‘disclosure’ in their co-authored article which appeared in the NY Times on December 16, 2017 titled Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program which featured former Pentagon official Lue Elizondo.
Then, three days later, CNN added to the intelligence agency-led ‘disclosure’ on December 19, 2017. “My personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone,” says Lue Elizondo.
So who is NewsNation? Owned by Nexstar Media Group, America’s largest local TV and media company boasting a record $1.26 billion in first quarter revenue of 2023, NewsNation is also the platform the untrusted former CNN notable Chris Cuomo now leads. There is a continuity of media shepherding the story throughout the past six years. Albeit, the facing organizations of it have changed.
Elizondo’s statement in 2017 “My personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone.” And Grusch in 2023, “we’re definitely not alone” hint at the building of a narrative in lockstep.
Embedded within this current disclosure narrative are both subtle and not so subtle directives. First, if we don’t know what is ‘out there,’ the military, and by extension, the public must treat it as a threat. Second, the focus should be on the mechanistic and materialist aspects of this phenomena, nothing more because that’s what the military is looking at. How does it maneuver? What material are they made of? Can we back-engineer it?
Are forces at work crafting this narrowly defined disclosure narrative?
Keane said in an interview three days after the Grusch story was released, “It’s a matter of strategically bringing out aspects one step at a time and letting people acclimate to that.”
That sounds like gatekeeping of information.
Who’s making the decisions to strategically pick and choose what parts of this huge story the public gets to ‘acclimate to?’ And to what is the public acclimating? Acclimating to this type of narrative of disclosure? The words used, whom they are from and the authoritative voice has an ongoing psychological impact to how the public formulates their thoughts, emotions and values approaching the UFO and ET conversation.
If we are being told that now these flood gates have opened and individuals within the government and ex government want transparency for the American people around this topic, because the public “has a right to know” why the strategic drip on a narrow perspective?
The fallout from this story particularly has seen several credible journalists and pundits checking basic due diligence and scrutiny at the door to parrot stories and talking points from intelligence agencies that have been rightfully discredited in previous reporting of the last few years, sometimes by their own hand.
Things the current military intelligence agency-led ‘disclosure’ doesn’t seem to want to address at this stage, is that there is a long history of the U.S. government actively working to discredit and neutralize researchers and citizen information around these topics.
And what about the large community of people around the world who have multifaceted experiences of contact with these alleged craft and intelligence which the government has actively sought to disrupt, ignore, and ridicule?
Furthermore, what about individuals who, in some cases, speculate that it has been the U.S. government itself responsible for the negative abduction experiences American citizens have reported?
Whipping up humanity into fear of a purportedly unknown, uncontrollable threat that could appear at any moment from anywhere poses a greater, more immediate concern. As evidenced from the pandemic response of the last three years, there is now a well-trained reflex from the political, scientific and military communities, acting in concert, to lockdown populations and suspend civil liberties, Constitutional rights and wage all-out psychological and information warfare on their populations at the hint of any threat you are told is dangerous.
Is there another lens to view this subject matter from besides fear and threat? Besides technology and material from the craft?
In the 2018 book Beyond UFOs: The Science of Consciousness & Contact with Non-Human Intelligence several PhD researchers surveyed thousands of people around the globe who claimed to have contact with non-human intelligences and they paint a very different picture than what the slow drip of disclosure is attempting. The respondents overall main points were that, the planet is energetically changing and so are us human beings as a species. Our consciousness is primary. The capacity to heal ourselves from fear and traumas and to spiral up to a more loving species is necessary for this next phase in humanity’s evolution. Beings that many people reported in their encounters were teachers assisting in guiding this evolutionary process.
When you look up at the sky, do you think about the government first? Do you fear human beings are no longer top of the food chain in a predatory system? Or is your wonderment still intact towards something infinite, beautiful and expansive where you are a part of this next phase in co-creation?
‘Reckless in the Extreme’: FDA Panel Recommends New RSV Shot for Use in Healthy Infants
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | June 9, 2023
Advisors to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Thursday recommended approval of AstraZeneca’s new monoclonal antibody, which the drugmaker said is designed to protect infants and toddlers up to age 2 from respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).
The drug, nirsevimab, would be delivered to newborns in a single shot at birth or “just before the start of a baby’s first RSV season, or as a larger dose in a second RSV season in children who are highly vulnerable,” CNN reported.
Members of the independent committee, which includes several pediatricians, “were enthusiastic about the potential” of the antibody, STAT reported, as was Thomas Triomphe, executive vice president of vaccines at Sanofi, which will market the drug in the U.S.
In a statement, Triomphe said:
“Most babies hospitalized with RSV are born at term and healthy, which is why interventions specifically designed to protect all infants are likely to result in the greatest impact.
“We are encouraged by the advisory committee’s positive vote based on the compelling clinical development program supporting nirsevimab and its breakthrough potential to reduce the magnitude of annual RSV burden.”
But medical experts interviewed by The Defender raised a number of concerns, including what they said was inadequate safety testing.
“It’s preposterous to give this drug prophylactically, especially without adequate safety testing,” said Brian Hooker, Ph.D., P.E., senior director of science and research for Children’s Health Defense (CHD).
AstraZeneca reported only 48% efficacy for the drug. And Hooker noted that the “circulating half-life of the antibodies is probably less than one month so the protection would be minimal at best.”
Hooker also commented on the fact that 12 infant deaths were recorded during the clinical trial, which the FDA committee claimed were “unrelated” to the antibody:
“It appears that this vote was meant to bolster uptake and popularity of the RSV vaccines that are now approved for maternal use. The very low rate of effectiveness for such a therapy is troubling as the conservative estimate is below 50%, which is usually a hard metric for drug approval.
“Also, it seems odd that four infants in the trial would die of cardiac arrest — with no information given, it leaves one to wonder why these children would die in such a way. Also, there should be further investigation into the two SIDS [sudden infant death syndrome] deaths that occurred during the trial.”
Dr. Meryl Nass, an internist, biological warfare epidemiologist and member of CHD’s scientific advisory committee, told The Defender,“It is reckless in the extreme to inject very young babies with an inadequately tested monoclonal antibody drug to prevent a condition that for most of them will be no more than a cold.”
Cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough told The Defender that while monoclonal antibodies are “generally safe” for children, he questioned the benefit of such a treatment for what he called a “mild” infection. He said:
“Monoclonal antibodies are generally safe in children and adults; however, I am concerned broad infant population uptake may disrupt normal thymus and immune system development that easily handle infections such as RSV, influenza, rhinovirus, adenovirus and SARS-CoV-2.
“RSV is a characteristically mild infantile infection easily resolved with conventional nebulizers. I believe nirsevimab would not be clinical-indicated for all infants and likely would be utilized in high-risk babies with congenital heart or lung disease, such as cystic fibrosis, or those with prior thoracotomies for heart surgery, where respiratory mechanics would be compromised.”
The FDA committee’s positive recommendation for nirsevimab, also known as Beyfortus, comes just weeks after the agency approved GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals’ Arexvy, the first-ever RSV vaccine for older adults, and recommended Abrysvo, Pfizer’s RSV vaccine for pregnant women.
According to CNBC, the FDA is expected to make a final decision on nirsevimab in the third quarter of this year.
Nass told The Defender that while the FDA is not obligated to follow the panel’s advice, “it almost always does so.”
FDA: Infant deaths during clinical trial ‘unrelated’ to the treatment
CNBC reported that the FDA review identified no safety concerns with nirsevimab, but also reported that 12 infants died during the trials.
According to CNBC:
“Four died from cardiac disease, two died from gastroenteritis, two died from unknown causes but were likely cases [of] sudden infant death syndrome, one died from a tumor, one died from COVID, one died from a skull fracture, and one died of pneumonia.”
Dr. Melissa Baylor, who according to CNBC is “an FDA official,” said, “Most deaths were due to an underlying disease. None of the deaths appeared to be related to nirsevimab.”
But according to STAT, “There are questions that remain to be answered” about nirsevimab that require “further study.”
For instance, no data are available “about whether giving nirsevimab to a baby whose mother was vaccinated against RSV during pregnancy would give the infant more protection or would be a waste of the product.”
STAT noted that several members of the FDA committee “worried that the dose given in the first year of life might be too small to benefit a baby who was 8 months or older when receiving the injection, depending on the size of the baby.”
Baylor also expressed concerns about how nirsevimab would interact with vaccines in development — such as Pfizer’s Abrysvo — that confer protective antibodies to the fetus by administering the shot to the mother.
CNBC reported that “Other monoclonal antibodies have been associated with serious allergic reactions, skin rashes and other hypersensitivity reactions.”
According to Baylor, the FDA did not identify “any cases of serious allergic reactions in the nirsevimab trials,” while “cases of skin rash and hypersensitivity reactions were low in infants who received the antibody.” She added that cases of such side effects are expected to be observed if the treatment receives FDA approval.
Manish Shroff, AstraZeneca’s head of patient safety, said, “Safety is of utmost importance” to the drugmaker and that it will “keep a close eye” on the safety of nirsevimab via a “global monitoring system,” CNBC reported.
According to Endpoints News, nirsevimab has already received regulatory approval in the EU, U.K. and Canada, but “it has not yet launched in any of those markets.”
According to CNBC, “Nirsevimab is administered as a single injection with the dose depending on the infant’s weight.”
Infants weighing less than 5 kilograms will receive a 50 mg dose for their first RSV season, while those over 5 kilograms will receive a 100 mg injection. Children under age 2 who “remain at risk for severe RSV” in their second season would then receive an additional 200 mg injection of the antibody.
Nirsevimab is not the first monoclonal antibody for RSV. According to STAT, AstraZeneca’s Synagis (palivizumab) is approved in the U.S. and EU, and “protects against infection in high-risk infants.”
According to CNBC, it is intended “only for preterm infants and those with lung and congenital heart conditions that are [at] high risk of severe disease” and is administered monthly, whereas nirsevimab “would be administered to healthy infants.”
Endpoints News reported that “AstraZeneca leads all development and manufacturing activities” for nirsevimab, “while Sanofi is responsible for marketing activities and revenue recognition” — for which the drugmaker paid $129 million “to be part of the collaboration.”
Is RSV really a danger for most infants?
CNBC previously reported that the U.S. “suffered an unusually severe RSV season” this past winter. The New York Times reported on a “tripledemic” involving RSV, flu and COVID-19, “that swamped children’s hospitals and some I.C.U. wards.”
One U.S. county — Orange County, California — declared a local health emergency and issued a proclamation of local emergency in November 2022, citing rising RSV cases among children in the region, and the Biden administration subsequently declared a public health emergency that month.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), nearly all children are infected with RSV before the age of 2.
While CNBC characterized RSV as a “public health threat” that “kills nearly 100 babies in the United States every year,” Nass questioned the danger it poses to most infants.
In May, Nass wrote that the CDC published a paper on RSV deaths in infants between 2009 and 2021, which found “were only a total of 300 deaths in children less than one year over the 12 years, or 25 on average per year.”
Nass added that the number of injuries that may be caused by vaccines or other treatments during pregnancy “is almost certainly going to outweigh the loss of 25 babies a year from RSV.”
In her remarks to The Defender, Nass drew comparisons with the hepatitis B vaccine for children, saying that adverse effects from the treatment may appear later in childhood and are not likely to be connected to the drug:
“The hepatitis B vaccine, recommended for all children at birth in the US, and received by about 75%, was never tested for babies’ safety — over more than a few days — before the program started, or since.
“Because no one can know what a very young baby will become at birth, it is impossible to attribute a lower IQ, hyperactivity, less nimble limbs or any other problem that shows up later, to an injected drug given shortly after birth. So those connections, if any, are unlikely to be identified.”
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Beware of Studies Concluding Autism is Not Associated with Childhood Vaccination
By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | June 3, 2023
As an epidemiologist, I can tell you it takes considerable training and scholarship to determine whether or not a study is valid and to determine if the conclusions are supported by the data. When it comes to childhood vaccines, the world is becoming skeptical of the vaccine industry since the CDC ACIP panel has added the EUA unsafe, ineffective mRNA COVID-19 vaccines for infants starting at 6 months of age.
With the ever expanding ACIP schedule of vaccine quantity and intensity of injections there has been a skyrocketing rate of autism. This has triggered scientists to go back and look at the studies published at the time to reassure parents that routine vaccines did not cause autism. Because so many shots are given at once, it is probably not any individual product that is the culprit, rather “hyper-vaccination” of a bundle of vaccine products that invokes a neurotropic, cytokine mediated inflammatory reaction that in some causes febrile seizures, autism, and immediate death. There are factors related to susceptibility including older parents and siblings with autism, but it remains that hyper-vaccination is a likely provocateur.
Madsen et al used Danish automated health data to evaluate the association of the MMR at age 15 months and autism. Only 40/422 had charts reviewed to verify the diagnosis of autism. Because it is an important diagnosis, all 422 cases should have been adjudicated by two blinded expert child psychiatrists. This study was unlikely to find an association from the outset since not all the vaccines where considered as a “bundle” and compared to children who went “natural” meaning completely unvaccinated with any product.
Madsen KM, Hviid A, Vestergaard M, Schendel D, Wohlfahrt J, Thorsen P, Olsen J, Melbye M. A population-based study of measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination and autism. N Engl J Med. 2002 Nov 7;347(19):1477-82. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa021134. PMID: 12421889.
To make matters worse, the authors found 18% had missed the MMR at 15 months. That proportion seemed high to me so I checked another source. In 2015-2016 Holt et al performed a chart review and found that 55% of those MMR “unvaccinated” in the Danish system were indeed received the MMR documented in the medical record. Hence the Madsen analysis is invalid since both groups had largely received the MMR shot at age 15 months and there was no reporting of the true control group of interest—completely unvaccinated children.
Holt N, Mygind A, Bro F. Danish MMR vaccination coverage is considerably higher than reported. Dan Med J. 2017 Feb;64(2):A5345. PMID: 28157059.
In studies that are using unadjudicated, automated sources of data, misclassification often biases the results to the null hypothesis making a Type II error, that is, failing to find an association when indeed it is present.
Here is a summary of why Madsen does not rule out MMR or hyper-vaccination as a cause of autism:
- non-randomized study with no true placebo group
- all 442 cases of autism were not adjudicated by at least two independent child psychiatrists to confirm the diagnosis
- Danish automated data due no capture all the MMR vaccinations; some (~55%) of the “unvaccinated” had received the MMR vaccine
- MMR was not considered as part of the multi-injection bundle of hyper-vaccinated children compared to completely natural unvaccinated kids, which is the real control group of interest for autism
A similar paper using the same data sources, nearly identical study design, and equally flawed analysis was published similarly in Annals of Internal Medicine in 2019 (Hviid et al). In summary, we cannot rely on the Madsen or Hviid studies to rule out the MMR as a partial determinant of autism. Moreover, studies that make strong conclusions with such faulty data are suspect for investigator bias—meaning the authors intentionally wanted to rule out the association perhaps to advance the vaccine agenda, appease their institutions or research sponsors, or otherwise wished to be willfully blind to the possibility that childhood hyper-vaccination is a determinant of autism.
FDA admits it has no records indicating covid-19 vaccine safety protocols were followed
By Aaron Siri | ICAN | June 9, 2023
From early in the pandemic, the government has been promising the public that it was taking COVID-19 vaccine safety “very seriously,” and that the vaccines had been subject to “the most intense safety monitoring program in U.S. history.” ICAN likes to confirm these claims for itself but when it tried to do just that, it uncovered that the FDA actually deviated from long-standing protocols concerning vaccine safety.
Since May 9, 2008, the FDA has had vaccine safety procedures in place detailed in a Standard Operating Procedures and Policies (SOPP) document. This document “describes the procedures that the [FDA] staff should routinely follow to coordinate rapid responses to complex vaccine safety issues,” and discusses a Vaccine Safety Team whose “key purpose” is to “coordinate [FDA] rapid responses to vaccine safety issues … and to serve as a resource [] to identify data and policy needs pertaining to vaccine safety.”
One office in the FDA is crucial to this goal and acts as the “official contact for VAERS and is responsible for processing and review of the reports,” as well as “for forwarding those reports to the appropriate contacts within CBER for further action and follow-up.” For example, its staff members identify VAERS adverse event reports that “need a rapid response and complex coordination,” after which they are supposed to “immediately” inform certain FDA management who then alert other sub-agencies.
Given the lofty talk by federal health agencies claiming that COVID vaccines were subject to “the most rigorous – and accurate – review processes globally,” one would think that the FDA, at a minimum, subjected them to at least these already ridiculously weak pre-existing standards for vaccine safety monitoring.
But, after ICAN’s attorneys submitted records requests to the FDA seeking documents on the FDA’s policies concerning the identification of VAERS reports requiring a “rapid response,” as well as documents showing that the FDA had actually followed up on the individual VAERS reports that required a “rapid response,” the FDA replied more than year later with an incredible response: “A search of our records did not locate any documents responsive to your request.”
In a nutshell, the FDA has essentially admitted that it is not following even its own set of already watered-down procedures for vaccine safety monitoring that were in place prior to COVID.
When the curtain is pulled back on the purported “thorough” and “intense” safety monitoring, there is yet again nothing to see. So much for the FDA’s promise to look out for the American people. ICAN will continue to monitor the FDA and share any important updates.
See below for more instances where ICAN uncovered instances where “health” agencies made unsupported claims to the public:
US & NATO’s Ultimate Goal is to ‘Take Over Ukrainian Land, People and Resources’
By Andrei Dergalin – Sputnik – 10.06.2023
Shortly after the fabled Ukrainian counteroffensive finally started, it became increasingly apparent that NATO military equipment and training won’t be enough for the Kiev regime forces to penetrate Russian defensive lines.
With the Ukrainian offensive now underway, Kiev so far has virtually nothing to show in the way of gains, whereas images of wrecked Leopard tanks and Bradley infantry fighting vehicles used by Ukrainian troops have already started circulating on social media.
Even though the United States and its allies have been generously supplying Ukraine with armaments and military vehicles during the ongoing conflict, it appears that Ukrainian forces are “institutionally and operationally unable to successfully absorb the wide and inconsistent variety of equipment and weaponry” while “under fire and duress,” said US Ret.Lt.Col Karen Kwiatkowski.
“This is the fault of the US and NATO which seeks to ride the back of Ukrainian patriotism in order to both confront and harass Russia, with an aim to take over Ukraine’s land, people and resources once there is little Ukraine left – in a kind of mini-Marshall Plan, this time completely and wholly managed and conducted by US and international crony capitalists, like Black Rock,” Kwiatkowsky, a former US Department of Defense analyst, told Sputnik.
She suggested that the United States and Britain were likely the ones who actually needed Kiev to launch this counteroffensive and that it would seem “as if Western governments see Ukraine little more than a snuff film, for their entertainment and profit.”
“Clearly, what Ukraine needs is to find a way to get out from under the US political cycle and NATO’s organizational expansion obsession, and make peace,” Kwiatkowsky mused, postulating that such a deal would likely entail the separation of the “Russian side of the former Ukraine” from the “Ukrainian side.”
She did point out, however, that so far the US and the UK politicians have been quick to suppress any attempts by the Ukrainian side to “make peaceful signs or noises.”
Meanwhile, Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest and former CIA station chief Phillip Giraldi has observed that some Western media outlets have been trying to make it look like the Ukrainian counteroffensive is succeeding and that Kiev regime forces are “overrunning the Russian positions.”
Commenting on this development, Giraldi suggested that politicians in the US, the UK and Germany “need to be able to speak positively about what is occurring” in Ukraine, since the public in their respective countries is starting to turn against the conflict “as it grinds on and on consuming hundreds of billions dollars worth of equipment.”
He further suggested that people in the United States, Britain and Germany are none too thrilled about their governments directly backing the regime in Kiev, which he described as “a regime that nearly everyone concedes is hopelessly corrupt.”
“There is talk here in Washington that the Ukrainian generals might depose Zelensky and enter into negotiations with Moscow,” Giraldi added.
Fact check: Blinken’s claim that US strived to revive JCPOA holds no water
By Syed Zafar Mehdi | Press TV | June 10, 2023
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken made a low-key visit to Saudi Arabia earlier this week, which coincided with the reopening of Iranian diplomatic missions in the Arab kingdom after seven years.
The whirlwind visit primarily focused on rebuilding ties between Washington and Riyadh but also involved other issues including the Joe Biden administration’s aggressive but unsuccessful push to mediate Riyadh-Tel Aviv normalization.
During the visit, the top American diplomat sat down for an interview with Arabic-language Asharq News, fielding questions on a range of subjects from Iran’s nuclear program to the Ukraine war.
Blinken’s responses were riddled with glaring inconsistencies and false assertions, in particular regarding efforts to revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal.
On being asked whether the US was “trying to revive the negotiations” over the 2015 nuclear accord, the US Secretary of State said “from day one” the US “made a significant effort in that direction”.
“So we, from day one, sought to determine whether a return to mutual compliance with the JCPOA was possible, and we made a significant effort in that direction, as did the European partners, and, for that matter, Russia and China,” Blinken said in the interview.
“But Iran either couldn’t or wouldn’t do what was necessary to get back into compliance with the JCPOA. So the JCPOA is not our focus,” he hastened to add.
A simple fact-check is in order to set the record straight.
It was the US government, under the megalomaniac former President Donald Trump, which unilaterally abandoned the landmark nuclear agreement in May 2018, and reinstated an array of sanctions on Iran.
The move was in complete breach of the agreement and Washington’s legal obligations under Resolution 2231, the United Nations Charter and international law.
Iran adopted strategic patience for one year, waiting for European signatories to salvage the deal, and only then announced retaliatory measures, which included gradually scaling up uranium enrichment in line with a law passed by the Iranian parliament.
Trump’s successor, Joe Biden, pledged to reverse the so-called “maximum pressure campaign” against Iran that violated the multilateral deal and laid bare the infamous American hypocrisy.
However, more than two years into office, Biden has not only failed to reverse his predecessor’s hard-nosed measures but has doubled down and escalated the situation.
Since April 2021, Iran and the remaining parties to the 2015 nuclear deal have been engaged in marathon negotiations in Vienna to revive the accord and lift sanctions, facilitated by the European Union.
Despite a degree of progress, the consensus has been eluding mainly due to the policy of procrastination adopted by the Biden administration, with Blinken and his Iran pointsman Rob Malley playing a key role in letting the process drag on.
Blinken’s remarks about the US mulling “a return to mutual compliance” with the deal and making “a significant effort in that direction” hold no water when we examine the ground realities and actions taken by the US over the past two years.
Iran continues to be a key party to the deal, unlike the US which unilaterally and irresponsibly walked out of it. Iran has maintained that measures it has taken since May 2019 to scale up its uranium enrichment are reversible if the US returns to the deal in good faith and lifts all illegal sanctions.
Blinken’s statement that Iran “either couldn’t or wouldn’t do what was necessary to get back into compliance with the JCPOA” also fails the fact-check test.
United States left the deal. United States reneged on its commitments under the deal. United States stopped compliance with the deal. United States imposed and reimposed sanctions on Iran. United States launched the so-called “maximum pressure campaign” against the Islamic Republic.
In the last two years, it is the United States that has failed to provide guarantees to Iran that it won’t violate the terms of the agreement again. It is the United States that has weaponized sanctions against the people of Iran while harping about human rights.
The United States has also refused to compensate Iran for the losses caused by sanctions while exerting pressure on the UN nuclear agency to politicize its purely technical work.
The culprit here is the United States. Iran is well within its rights as the signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) to pursue its nuclear energy program for peaceful, scientific purposes.
The peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program has been attested by the International Atomic Energy Agency which regularly conducts inspections at various nuclear facilities in the country and has to date failed to notice or report any activity that points to divergence or deviation in the program.
The ball is in the Biden administration’s court. It has to save the deal through action, not rhetoric.
Where Do 2024 US Presidential Candidates Stand on Ukraine?
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 09.06.2023
Over a dozen US presidential candidates have tossed their hats into the 2024 ring. Sputnik has analyzed what the contenders’ attitude to Washington’s ongoing proxy war in Ukraine is.
The Russo-Ukraine conflict remains one of the focal points of the 2024 election campaign. Republican and Democratic hopefuls are striving to rally support from the American public which appears to have grown impatient with the overseas standoff.
Despite roughly a half of Americans still backing the provision of military aid to Ukraine, a marked drop in the public’s willingness to pay a cost in terms of higher energy price, inflation, and plummetting living standards has been registered by pollsters over the last several months. Per Brookings, the realization that there is no end in sight for the conflict has seemingly become sobering to US voters.
Do US presidential candidates – who are polling at 1% or above in recent Ipsos polls and thus having a chance of coming out on top – meet the American people’s expectations when it comes to the Ukraine conflict?
Democratic Party
Joe Biden
Incumbent US President Joe Biden has repeatedly stated that he would support the Kiev regime for the long haul. The Biden administration is the most vocal advocate of fuelling the unfolding standoff and imposing a “strategic defeat” on Russia. To that end, Joe Biden has announced over $100 billion worth of Ukraine aid packages since the onset of the conflict.
“Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia. Never,” Biden told a crowd in Warsaw, Poland, on February 21, 2023.
During his June 8 meeting with UK Prime Minister Sunak, the US president signaled his readiness to continue providing the Kiev regime with weapons together with London. Simultaneously, Team Biden is stirring up the waters of the Pacific by beefing up US military presence in close proximity to China. Biden is continuing to go all in on the dual standoff with Moscow and Beijing, even though this policy is backfiring both on the US and its European allies.
Marianne Williamson
Marianne Williamson, the author of “A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles” (1992), former “Spiritual Leader” for the Church of Today and political candidate, has called for closing over 800 US military installations in over 80 countries in her May 27 Substack op-ed denouncing them as “nothing more than a continuation of the excessive militarization of American foreign policy.” She also condemned Washington’s “imperialistic ventures”, “actions regarding NATO, and putting Aegis missiles in Poland”, as exacerbating the situation vis-à-vis Russia.
Still, that does not mean that the US is “responsible” for the Russo-Ukraine conflict, “nor does it mean that our larger interests, the interests of the people of Ukraine or the interests of the rest of the world, are best served by our withholding support from Ukraine now,” insists Williamson. In short, the author is advocating further arming the Kiev regime.
Robert Kennedy Jr.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of the late US attorney general and senator Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of the 35th President of the United States John F. Kennedy, formally launched his presidential campaign on April 19, 2023. In contrast to his Democratic rivals, Kennedy does not support the US proxy war in Ukraine.
In his lengthy May 3 tweet, RFK pointed out that it was US neocons, who crossed all “red lines” and dragged Russia and Ukraine into the conflict:
“[Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky almost certainly could have avoided the 2022 war with Russia simply by uttering five words — ‘I will not join NATO’; But pressured by neocons in the Biden White House, and by violent fascist elements within the Ukrainian government, Zelensky integrated his army with NATO’s and allowed the US to place nuclear-capable Aegis missile launchers along Ukraine’s 1,200-mile border with Russia.”
“[US neocons] wanted war as part of their strategic grand plan to destroy any country such as Russia that resists American imperial expansion,” RFK Jr. reiterated on May 25 on Twitter.
Republican Party
Donald Trump
Former US President Donald Trump has made it clear that as president he would stop the Russo-Ukraine conflict in 24 hours after meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky.
“When I’m president, I will have that war settled in one day, 24 hours,” Trump said in a CNN town hall on May 11, adding that both Moscow and Kiev have their “weaknesses” and “strengths.”
Trump avoided answering the question, which country he would prefer to win: “I don’t think in terms of winning and losing. I think in terms of getting it settled so we stop killing all these people. I want everybody to stop dying,” the former president told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.
Ron DeSantis
In March, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wrote: “While the US has many vital national interests, becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them.”
In April, DeSantis reiterated his stance: “It’s in everybody’s interest to try to get to a place where we can have a ceasefire,” told Nikkei Asia. “You don’t want to end up in a [Battle of] Verdun situation, where you just have mass casualties, mass expense and end up with a stalemate.”
The Ukraine issue was not even mentioned in DeSantis’ campaign launched on Twitter in May.
Vivek Ramaswamy
Vivek Ramaswamy, an American entrepreneur and politician, also stands for ending the Ukraine conflict. On June 6, Ramaswamy outlined his foreign policy vision in a Twitter post, condemning President Joe Biden’s Ukraine support for “pushing Russia into a closer military alliance with China.”
The politician proposes “a Korean war style armistice agreement” between Russia and Ukraine, “which would cede most of the Donbass region to Russia”; suspend any US military assistance to the Kiev regime; establish “a permanent moratorium on Ukraine joining NATO”; lift sanctions against Russia; withdraw NATO troops from Ukraine and close all their bases in Eastern Europe; and accept Russia into the security infrastructure of Europe.
In return, per Ramaswamy, Russia should cease all sorts of technical military cooperation and security partnerships with China; withdraw its nuclear weapons and delivery capabilities from Kaliningrad and Belarus; pull out Russian security specialists from Latin America; and re-enter into the New START Treaty.
“I’ve offered a clear & specific path to end the war in Ukraine now while dismantling the Russia-China alliance. No other GOP candidate has touched this with a 10-foot pole,” Ramaswamy summed up.
Nikki Haley
Nikki Haley, the former United States ambassador to the United Nations, has taken a stance which is the polar opposite: “This is bigger than Ukraine,” she stated during the CNN town hall on June 4. “This is a war about freedom and it’s one we have to win.”
Haley said if Russia is allowed to achieve its stated goals of demilitarization and de-Nazifying of Ukraine, a world war would be round the corner:
“China says Taiwan’s next, we better believe them. Russia said Poland and the Baltics are next, if that happens, we are looking at a world war. This is about preventing war.”
The former UN ambassador fell short of specifying the sources behind her claims of Moscow and Beijing’s plans of “invading” Poland, the three Baltic nations and the island which the People’s Republic of China has always considered its inalienable part.
Mike Pence
Former US Vice President Mike Pence’s stance on Ukraine aligns him with his fellow party member, Nikki Haley. Still, instead of predicting a world war in case Russia wins, Pence has suggested that Washington is fighting for “freedom” in Ukraine. The ex-veep has also subjected Trump and DeSantis to criticism over their attitude to the Ukraine conflict.
Having filed the paperwork to run on June 5, he expressed willingness to support the Kiev regime during Wednesday’s CNN town hall in Iowa:
“I know the difference between a genius and a war criminal, and I know who needs to win the war in Ukraine,” Pence said. “And it’s the people fighting for their freedom and fighting to restore their national sovereignty in Ukraine. And America – it’s not our war, but freedom is our fight. And we need to give the people of Ukraine the ability to fight and defend their freedom.”
Tim Scott
US Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina has signaled strong support for arming Kiev since the beginning of the Russo-Ukraine conflict. According to Scott, Biden has done “a terrible job” articulating to the Americans “what is America’s vital, national interest in Ukraine”, which, according to the presidential candidate, is “degrading the Russian military.” Judging from Scott’s words, he expects Russia to attack the US one day.
“The more we degrade the Russian military, the less likely there is to be an attack on our sovereign territory,” Scott told NBC News on May 22. “And it protects our NATO partners. I think that we should be in Ukraine. I believe that the truth is simple, that degrading the Russian military is in America’s best interest. And the more we do that, the faster we get it done, the better off the entire world is.”
Chris Christie
Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie launched his presidential nomination campaign with a June 6 town hall in Manchester, New Hampshire. Prior to that, Christie called Trump a “coward” and “a puppet of Putin,” over the former president’s stance on the Ukraine conflict.
Speaking to GZERO World with Ian Bremmer on May 11, Christie claimed that Washington should have done more to support the Kiev regime from day one of the conflict and insisted that the US should remain a global leader in providing weapons to Ukraine.
“In the end, we are in a proxy war right now with China, whether we like it or not, and their support of Russia in Ukraine is proof of that,” claimed the former New Jersey governor. “We have to make sure we send a very clear message, not only to the Chinese, but to our own allies that America’s not going to be a cut and run country.”
Doug Burgum
North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum is another Republican presidential contender advocating support for Kiev. When the Russo-Ukrainian conflict erupted, he expressed solidarity with the Kiev regime, stating that “the United States and its allies must stand together in support of Ukraine and hold Russia accountable for its unprovoked attacks.”
Still, Burgum views the conflict as a chance for the US to step up energy production in the first place (which is quite understandable given that North Dakota is one of the top oil-producing states in the US):
“This international crisis underscores the importance of US energy security and increasing American production so we can sell energy to our friends and allies versus buying it from our enemies,” he stated on February 24, 2022.
He reiterated his stance on Wednesday while announcing his 2024 bid: “[Russian President Vladimir] Putin only dared to invade Ukraine because our allies in Western Europe are all dependent on Russian energy,” Burgum claimed.
Who’s Commanding Most Support?
Biden has gotten the most backing among Democratic and Democratic leaning voters with a staggering 60%; while 20% support Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and 8% would vote for author Marianne Williamson, according to SSRS Political and Election Polling, released on May 25. However, pollsters warn about a decline in Biden’s nationwide approval over the past six months from 42% in December 2022 to 35% on May 25, 2023.
To date, former President Donald Trump has commanded the largest support in the Republican 2024 primary polls, as per Project FiveThiryEight survey aggregator. The national average support as of June 8 indicates that Trump got 53.8%; DeSantis (21.3%); Mike Pence (5.4%); Nikki Haley (4.5%); Ramaswamy (3.5%); Сhris Christie (less than 3%); Tim Scott (2.2%); and Doug Burgum (1%).
Bipartisan opposition to US government spying grows – poll
RT | June 8, 2023
For the first time in over a decade, less than half of Americans – 48% – believe it is sometimes necessary to relinquish freedom to the government in exchange for protection from terrorism, according to an AP-NORC poll published on Thursday.
Half of the poll’s 1,081 respondents countered that sacrificing one’s rights was never necessary for security. When the pollster asked the same questions in 2011, nearly two thirds (64%) had accepted the possibility they might have to jettison their liberty to fight terrorism, with one third disagreeing.
Declining trust in US intelligence agencies and their leadership appeared to play a significant role in the shift. Just 18% of poll respondents said they had “a great deal of confidence” in the leaders of the intelligence community, and while 49% had “some” confidence, nearly a third (31%) had hardly any.
The sharpest decline was among Republicans, only 44% of whom supported sacrificing liberty for security – in comparison with 55% of Democrats and 42% of independents. In 2011, 69% of Republicans had prioritized protection over freedom.
Accompanying the decline in trust has been a growing awareness that Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), while explicitly intended to spy on foreign targets, is also used to surveil millions of Americans. The infamous loophole makes any American contacted by a foreign target fair game for warrantless wiretapping by US intelligence. This deeply unpopular scheme has united even some Republicans and some Democrats in Congress against it.
That FISA warrants illegally obtained by the FBI were used to spy on former president Donald Trump during his 2016 campaign has only strengthened some Republicans’ rejection of that system.
Asked about different types of warrantless wiretapping, poll respondents found eavesdropping on domestic phone calls to be the most objectionable tactic, with 67% of respondents opposing it. While 62% found reading domestic emails equally beyond the pale, three out of five responses opposed monitoring domestic text messages as well.
A plurality even opposed government eavesdropping in situations involving reading emails of foreign origin and listening to phone calls from outside the US, with just 28% thinking warrantless wiretapping was acceptable in either case. Monitoring internet searches for “suspicious activity” attracted more approval, with 30% favoring it, and more disapproval, with 48% being against it at the same time.
The Biden administration has urged Congress to renew Section 702, which will otherwise expire at the end of the year. Claiming it is critical to fighting terrorism overseas, intelligence officials nevertheless declined to share specifics on how they use the controversial program earlier this year, instead merely informing lawmakers that every court that has examined the FISA provision has “found it to be constitutional.”
Billionaire Biden Donor Bankrolled 2020 Election Social Media Censorship Effort
BY LEE FANG | JUNE 8, 2023
The Department of Homeland Security’s controversial social media censorship effort during the 2020 election was propped up by a partisan billionaire.
Newly obtained documents, acquired through a public records request, confirm that Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire founder of eBay, financed a specialized portal maintained by the Center for Internet Security (CIS). This portal was used to facilitate the swift removal of predominantly conservative messages on Twitter and Facebook during the previous presidential election.
Omidyar, previously identified as one of the largest donors to campaign groups supporting Joe Biden’s presidential bid, donated $45 million to the “Sixteen Thirty Fund” in 2020. This dark money group mobilized Democratic voters and financed pro-Biden Super PACs. However, Omidyar’s direct involvement in the DHS partnership, which is now facing increased scrutiny, remained undisclosed until now.
The funding provided by Omidyar to CIS was used to establish a Misinformation Reporting Portal (MiRP). A team from CIS continuously monitored this portal 24/7 from September 28 to November 6, 2020, as revealed in a post-election report, “Election Infrastructure Misinformation Reporting.” The Democracy Fund, Omidyar’s foundation, supported the creation of the MiRP through a direct grant, according to the report.
The misinformation reporting portal served to rapidly identify and remove instances of alleged misinformation. CIS’s report acknowledged that the flagged content ranged from “intentional misinformation to honest mistakes.” Of the content reported by CIS, 61% “resulted in positive action,” which the group defined as content takedowns or labeling.
This MiRP system was used by a coalition of liberal-leaning research groups and overseen by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA), a sub-agency of the DHS that has led the government’s push to censor social media. Despite government backing for the project, the effort was partisan – the Democratic National Committee was part of the consortium, but not the Republican National Committee, indicating a partisan bias.
“In addition to sharing all reports with CISA, some reports were shared with the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” the CIS report noted. The effort focused on “election narratives” deemed conspiratorial or inaccurate.
Tax records appear to confirm the Omidyar funding. The Democracy Fund’s 990 disclosure shows that it donated $130,000 to CIS in 2020. The grant, however, is listed as support for “election security best practices,” a vague description that belied the true function of the MiRP portal.
CIS did not respond to a request for comment. The Omidyar Network discussed this inquiry with me but stopped responding before publication.
Evidence of this MiRP system first emerged in emails I obtained from a visit to Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters in December. In an email thread dated October 1, 2020, Twitter attorney Stacia Cardille mentioned receiving outreach from DHS, forwarding a censorship demand from CISA, CIS official Aaron Wilson, and a representative from the Election Integrity Partnership, a coalition monitoring misinformation.
The alleged misinformation mentioned in the October 1 thread revolved around conservative warnings regarding potential risks associated with mail-in voting—a concern voiced by partisans from both sides. Twitter, however, took action against conservative accounts but did not similarly act against Democrats who warned against mail-in ballots, as I’ve previously reported. For instance, former D.N.C. chairman Howard Dean tweeted during the election: “Do not vote by mail. Ok to vote now early and drop your ballot off in person at the proper office. Too late to trust trumps postmaster thug.”
The Dean tweet was noted by Twitter’s content moderation team but no action was taken, while similar messages warning against mail-in voting from conservative accounts were censored.
The CIS report provides a comprehensive explanation of the public-private apparatus employed to influence content on social media. In doing so, the report also debunks recent myths. In April, MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan made a false claim that journalist Matt Taibbi deliberately misrepresented his case under oath during his congressional testimony on CISA’s role in shaping social media decisions. Hasan suggested that Taibbi had willfully conflated CISA with CIS during his testimony. This claim led Representative Stacey Plaskett (D-V.I) to accuse Taibbi of perjury in a letter.
The CIS report I obtained contradicts Hasan and Plaskett, clarifying that “CIS and CISA worked together to ensure the reports were sent to the social media platform within an hour of their receipt.” CIS also played a pivotal role in triaging the material while maintaining the government partnership with disinformation research think tanks.
In essence, CIS and CISA worked in close collaboration to exert pressure on platforms like Twitter, aiming to remove conservative political expression deemed untrustworthy. The project was a public-private venture, overseen by government agencies, and supported by a system financed entirely by a Democratic donor.
The report makes recommendations for future elections. It notes that misinformation reporting may require dedicated government funding, with a “transition to the operational side of CIS” under the CISA umbrella, as well as better operational support from social media platforms.
The CIS report is part of a batch of documents recently received from Kate Starbird, an advisory board member of CISA at the University of Washington, via a records request. As I reported on Tuesday, the Justice Department intervened last year to impede the release of records from Starbird’s team. Starbird has also accused journalists seeking these records of “harassment,” likening it to a cyber attack.
Nevertheless, these inquiries are part of a broader public examination of government-backed censorship. As previously reported, Starbird’s advisory panel advocated for an expanded role for CISA, calling for an extension of its monitoring to include various platforms such as social media, mainstream media, cable news, hyper-partisan media, talk radio, and other online resources.
To support their argument for such a broad mandate, CISA advisors highlighted the detrimental effects of alleged misinformation on key democratic institutions like the courts, as well as other sectors such as the financial system and public health measures, suggesting that virtually any major public interest concern may be used as justification for broad censorship.
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Oil and the Israel Lobby
Reknowned economist M. Shahid Alam offers this excellent critique of Noam Chomsky’s defective analysis of the relative influence of Oil versus the Israel lobby over US foreign policy: … continue
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- Testimonies about Gaza’s civilian death toll expose Israel’s atrocities – Daily Update
- How Israel Conquered the Latin American Right
- Agents search Rep. Omar’s Washington home in criminal probe as she vows she won’t ‘be silenced’
- “The Rule Was: ‘Shoot Everyone You See'”
- Israel goes ballistic over Nobel Laureate Navi Pillay
- No Tricks Zone
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
- Green Energy Debacle: German Expert Professor Fritz Vahrenholt Warns Of Severe Economic And Social Consequences
- Two More Paleo Reconstructions Affirm Meters-Higher Sea Levels Across Ireland, Brazil 7000-6000 Years Ago
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
