covid-19 – Radio Free

Anatomy of a Wrap-Up Smear

Robert Malone — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 14:24:44 +0000

Article in Wired magazine by “Beth Mole”

Speaking at an anti-vaccine rally in 2022, Malone spread dangerous falsehoods about mRNA Covid-19 vaccines: “These genetic vaccines can damage your children. They may damage their brains, their heart, their immune system and their ability to have children in the future. Many of these damages cannot be repaired.”

By the way, besides being a pro-pharma propaganda rag, Wired magazine appears to have ties with, shall we say, “the intelligence community”

Hold on to your horses there, “Beth Mole”, Tech Bro.

What do you think myocarditis is? What do you think blood clots do? What do you think the damage to the pituitary/hypothalamac/gonadal axis is? What do you think that passing a decidual clot in a pre-menopausal girl is? Do you think these are not damaging? And you got your training in Pathology and Medicine where?

This is just one of many examples currently being pushed by dead media to delegitimize the current Secretary of Health and Human Services and build the false narrative that both RFK jr and his appointees are wild-eyed crazies.

NBC news, for example, just invents quotes that I did not write concerning Measles and Measles vaccines. Measles vaccines are 60 – 80 % effective, depending on the study and context. That means that, on average, if you expose 100 people to an infectious dose of measles, 20 – 40 of them will get infected. Technically, that is what is called in the business a leaky vaccine. Measles vaccines are live attenuated, and at a low frequency will genetically revert and can cause measles, and others can be infected when this happens. The recent West Texas outbreak happened in a Mennonite community. Mennonites historically, for decades, do not generally vaccinated their children. This has nothing to do with RFK jr. It is a historic fact. An immigrant family introduced wild-type measles into that Mennonite community, and it spread like wildfire – measles virus is extremely infectious but rarely lethal. Some in the surrounding region who thought they were protected became infected. See above statistics. Two young girls died. Their medical records demonstrated that their immediate cause of death were 1) inadequately treated mycoplasma pneumonia, and 2) inadequately treated hospital acquired E coli pneumonia. Not measles.

Another example, from the “Associated Press”, states that “Malone, who runs a wellness institute and a popular blog, rose to prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic as he relayed conspiracy theories around the outbreak and the vaccines that followed.” Apparently the Associated Press is confused about the difference between myself and Dr. Peter McCullough. I do not run a “wellness institute”, whereas Peter is the CSO for The Wellness Company. The capabilities of these reporters and their editors to even factcheck their own work product appears to be…. limited.

I have previously written about the roll up smear in our book PsyWar, Enforcing the New World Order, and here is a relatively mild example of that strategy being deployed by the generally more centrist “News Nation”.

The wrap-up Smear is a deflection tactic whereby a smear is made-up and leaked to the press. The press then amplifies the smear and publishes it, which conveys legitimacy. Then another organization or author can use the press coverage of the smear as a validation to write a summary story which is the wrap-up smear.

The teaser prelude to the piece (before the break) was to frame me as one of the “Nation’s leading vaccine skeptics”. Then the opening cuts to headlines attacking the Secretary of HHS and his legitimacy. Then it transitions to the Wired magazine smear piece, and then comes the wrap-up.

Key context for this includes the following:

HHS/CDC communications leadership has asked me to not engage in interviews concerning the ACIP, and to refer interview requests to designated CDC personnel.
I have a booker, paid for by Skyhorse publishing, that sets up interviews to promote sales of the “PsyWar” book. News Nation went through her to book me, but did not disclose that the intention was to discuss the ACIP situation rather than the book.
I get a notice from the booker yesterday that she has lined me up for a News Nation interview last night (9:30 PM). Nothing shared about the topic, which I presume is the book. I log on and am told that the interview will be all about the ACIP. An ambush wrap-up smear. At that point I have two options – tough it out and then inform the CDC press people that this happened, or cancel at the last minute. I decide to go ahead, but start by refuting the lede that I am one of the Nation’s leading vaccine skeptics, and then do what I can to defend the Secretary and the current CDC/ACIP.

I admit that this exchange was pretty unsettling, and I had a very restless night. It did not help that we left the front door cracked open and one of the dogs got sprayed by a skunk, and then came into the bedroom to lie down.

In the AM, I wrote the notifications to the CDC press personnel so that they would not be surprised. In the afternoon I received a very supportive call from a senior white house official, along with a gentle suggestion to not do any more interviews at least until next week’s ACIP meeting was over, a conclusion already reached between myself, the publisher and the booker.

Never a dull moment. Now I have to sign off because our senior Stallion (Jade) just broke out of his paddock and is busy trying to convince the mares that it is time for making whoopee, and he has to be caught and put back in against his will.

Until later, be careful out there!

The post Anatomy of a Wrap-Up Smear first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Malone.

Anatomy of a Wrap-Up Smear

Robert Malone — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 14:24:44 +0000

Article in Wired magazine by “Beth Mole”

By the way, besides being a pro-pharma propaganda rag, Wired magazine appears to have ties with, shall we say, “the intelligence community”

Hold on to your horses there, “Beth Mole”, Tech Bro.

Key context for this includes the following:

HHS/CDC communications leadership has asked me to not engage in interviews concerning the ACIP, and to refer interview requests to designated CDC personnel.
I have a booker, paid for by Skyhorse publishing, that sets up interviews to promote sales of the “PsyWar” book. News Nation went through her to book me, but did not disclose that the intention was to discuss the ACIP situation rather than the book.
I get a notice from the booker yesterday that she has lined me up for a News Nation interview last night (9:30 PM). Nothing shared about the topic, which I presume is the book. I log on and am told that the interview will be all about the ACIP. An ambush wrap-up smear. At that point I have two options – tough it out and then inform the CDC press people that this happened, or cancel at the last minute. I decide to go ahead, but start by refuting the lede that I am one of the Nation’s leading vaccine skeptics, and then do what I can to defend the Secretary and the current CDC/ACIP.

Until later, be careful out there!

The post Anatomy of a Wrap-Up Smear first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Malone.

Why the All the Promotions for COVID Spokespeople?

Allen Forrest — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 14:40:09 +0000

The post Why the All the Promotions for COVID Spokespeople? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Vindication for the Unvaccinated?

David Marks — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 15:00:08 +0000

Salvador Dali — Geopoliticus Child Watching The Birth Of The New Man

At a recent family gathering, I sat at the dinner table with a group of loved ones for the first time since the COVID-19 fiasco. Most of the cheerful discussion focused on the spectacular event of the week; my mother’s 100th birthday.

I was the only person at the table who hadn’t had any form of flu for many years, while all of the guests had been ill to one degree or another. Almost everyone had tested positive for COVID at least once over the last few years with accompanying flu symptoms. Although no one in my family was hospitalized or died during the so-called pandemic, they all had been vaccinated repeatedly. As far as I know, my wife and I were the only ones in our families who didn’t get any COVID shot and I haven’t been inoculated for anything in the last seventy years.

On this happy occasion, the fear, masks, lockdowns, and accusations of the recent past had been mostly forgotten. It was not because the signs and symptoms of the disease had ended, nor that the call for vaccination or testing had been silenced. No one understood why they were still occasionally feeling unwell, with some continuing to report they’d been diagnosed with COVID.

My view of healthcare has always been outside of the box, having practiced Traditional Chinese Medicine for many decades. I’d worked closely with medical doctors in treating some of their patients and also served as the chief medical officer of a volunteer fire department, appreciating life-saving emergency procedures of modern biomedicine. Through a range of experiences, I gained some knowledge of the causes and cures for suffering and illness.

Before the COVID fiasco, my alternative approach to illness had been respected; I’d shared my knowledge with whoever might ask. My medical perspective was no secret from friends and family. When my daughters were young, they weren’t vaccinated as there were no threats of deadly or debilitating diseases. This was in a place and time when vaccination for infants could be considered and refused; not done by rote. There was reasonable dialogue about the topic — and non-compliance certainly did not elicit threats of excommunication.

As the specter of a pandemic arose, my opinion about vaccination became dangerous and irrelevant.

From the outset, it was apparent that the claimed benefits of the new vaccines did not outweigh their risks. I openly said and wrote that the technology remained untested — though never advised anyone to refrain from inoculation — only counseling those who listened to remain fully informed.

It wasn’t complicated. Using genetic-based technology in developing a new drug that attempted to manipulate the magnificent complexity of the human immune system was at a minimum, a gamble. As easily demonstrated, this new technology embraced the bold assumption that human design was flawed and could be improved. It was premature to declare that this experimental treatment was safe and effective. We still don’t know the actual long-term effects — particularly over generations.

This simple and logical evaluation was considered preposterous by those who responded to the seemingly new disease with unbridled fear. The danger of the COVID flu was deemed sufficient to quell all reasonable responses about the risks of the vaccines. Suddenly, there was an eclipse of medical autonomy, and debate was scorned. The actions and motives of corrupted government agencies and their profit-oriented allies in Big Pharma were blessed by devious leaders, who deemed them altruistic and unquestionable.

This atmosphere, developed and enforced in a haze of authoritarian dictates, created an unprecedented climate of hostility that infected all relationships. Because of my views and unvaccinated status, I rapidly became a pariah to my family.

Early on, when the fear tactics were in high gear, my cousin, who is an attorney involved in healthcare issues, sent a blistering email, condemning one of my first articles skewering the pandemic response. He left no room for dialogue and writing, it is the height of irresponsibility to add to the disinformation that is everywhere about the COVID Vaccine. He concluded…

I am really upset that you have chosen to use your talents and thoughtful manner to give credence to the kind of wrongheaded rhetoric and conspiracy theories that feed the mass hysteria over accepting the reality that if we are to beat this pandemic, we need to not just take the vaccine if we want to, but take it on a societal level whether certain individuals want to or not. Your call for “transparency” just further feeds a certain, huge segment of the populations’ belief that they know better than the experts on this issue. They do not. You do not. I do not. But every reputable researcher and medical professional who has reviewed this data agree – it is safe, it is effective, and it is critical.

The venom exuded in response to my unwillingness to join in the mass delusion supporting vaccination was palpable. My crime was unforgivable.

Although we had been very close, all contact ended. However, it was not his unconscious, misdirected anger that troubled me, rather that he shared his views and wrath with my daughters, supporting their inclination to distance themselves from me because of my independent views. This wound with my cousin may never heal.

My mother, who had cordially disagreed with me on vaccination, balanced his bias with sound advice to her granddaughters. She urged them not to be harsh; suggesting that whatever differences they see, these were not worthy of destroying their relationship with their father. Thanks to her wise counsel, the love my daughters and I share has survived.

This and similar events had been left smoldering. In the Spring of 2025 at this happy gathering celebrating my mom’s longevity, to my surprise, the topic turned to COVID. (My cousin was not there). Conversation comprised mostly of personal accounts of suffering and confessions of a lack of understanding of why the virus persisted.

My sister said she’d attended a lecture at a local college on the history of the social response to mass infection. She described the common human responses and behaviors to past epidemics and pandemics, including how scapegoating was a dominant and destructive response.

Managing to remain quiet until all had acknowledged these horrors of the past, I spoke up, voicing a simple question; Did the recent COVID pandemic fit this pattern?

Of course, was the answer.

I innocently replied, And what group was reproached and attacked for causing the COVID pandemic?

There was a considered pause, and then everyone agreed, it was the Chinese.

With certainty I said, There were questions about whether an animal market or a lab leak was the initiating cause, but the Chinese as a culture or a nation were never blamed. Wasn’t there another group who became the scapegoats?

No one seemed to be willing to consider this inquiry, and I was pressed to say who I believed was targeted.

The vast majority of health professionals, public figures, including actors and business leaders, government medical agencies and the entire administration stood behind the President of the United States who openly declared that this was a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The press echoed this vicious attack. A majority of Americans did not object to this belligerent contrivance, but there was never any evidence that the unvaccinated had caused or exacerbated the pandemic. Wasn’t this overt and classic scapegoating?

There was dead silence at the table. I expected some defense of my assessment, but there was none. Then suddenly my brother (who had been vaccinated and had been ill a few times) spoke up loudly and emotionally, almost in tears, saying, I don’t want to hear any more about COVID — it has caused enough pain and suffering — and we should stop talking about it.

As he was trembling with emotion, I gently suggested that he leave the table and he did. His explosive declaration ended any conversation about the topic —there was no further response to my contention; I didn’t push it further.

My brother soon returned and unnecessarily apologized for his outburst. Though seemingly irrational, it was a direct response to my assertion — he had processed it as best he could. No one else had responded to my suggestion that they had participated in scapegoating the unvaccinated; he failed to recognize his ethical transgression, though at least had expressed some emotion.

It became apparent that historical atrocities are much easier to recognize than more recent iniquities. Few have admitted that ignorance, anger, and the demeaning of innocent people in response to COVID was an egregious, unfounded violation of human rights.

Those who sat with me at this table — and millions of others — have not considered the eclipse of their compassion and rationality. Few people can confess to having been manipulated into indefensible, loathsome conduct. They would have to see their similarity with those in past pandemics, who had projected blame and abused innocents for the suffering they were feeling. It takes a brave soul to admit that their emptiness and desperation caused them to display venom, disdain, and violence.

Because of the unwillingness to face the truth, the unrecognized pain and tears of those who questioned or refused mass vaccination remain unhealed, continuing a climate where repressive tactics and regimes are tolerated.

No matter how much information about the abuses of powerful forces during the pandemic, no matter how much data supports the dangers of the COVID response, no matter how much is learned about the deviant behavior of leadership and government agencies; the unvaccinated have yet to be vindicated.

Self-serving, unconscious attitudes continue to dominate; confirming human nature has not evolved since the plagues of the Dark Ages. In times of difficulty and stress — it remains more convenient and simpler to find others at fault — rather than perceive our failures.

The post Vindication for the Unvaccinated? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by David Marks.

Daniel Ortega is No Nayib Bukele

Jill Clark-Gollub — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 14:17:05 +0000

Left Photo: Inmate in Nicaragua receives diploma (19 Digital). Right Photo: Inmates dehumanized in El Salvador (El Salvador Presidency handout/Anadolu/Getty Images)

Ortega and Bukele are polar opposites: one invests in dignity and democracy, the other in mass incarceration and imperial alliances.

Opposition media from both Nicaragua and El Salvador, along with the Washington Post, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch, all vilify Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega by equating him with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. Although Ortega and Bukele are both serving consecutive terms, and a Central American polling firm reports that they enjoy high popularity among their respective populations, the two presidents actually offer a study in contrasts.

Crime and punishment

Bukele is praised for drastically reducing violence in El Salvador, but his political career is actually based on perpetuating it. First, some history. The country’s gang problem originated in the bloody US-supported war of the 1980s, including US and Israeli funding and training of death squads, that forced thousands of young men to escape forced military recruitment by fleeing to the United States. As an underclass of undocumented immigrants, and without the support of their families, many of these young men wound up in gangs on the streets of Los Angeles or in its prisons. In the mid-1990s, thousands of these gang members were deported to El Salvador, bringing violence back to a country that had just lost 75,000 lives in a brutal conflict. As Hillary Goodfriend writes, “the devastated neoliberal economic landscape proved fertile terrain for the US gang culture imported by Salvadoran youth deported from Los Angeles in the mid-1990s.” The right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) governments of the postwar years responded to the gang problem with an iron fist.

Then from 2009-2019, while the former guerrillas (Frente Farabundo Martí de Liberación Nacional—FMLN) were in office, a preventive approach was attempted. Structural problems were addressed with “unprecedented increases in social spending, including critical education, health care, land, infrastructure and agricultural investment.” But these efforts were frustrated by a majority opposition legislature that limited spending on such programs, and USAID funding for a private sector approach that favored the opposition. The FMLN also made its own mistakes, including secret negotiations (along with the Catholic Church) for a gang truce, which was initially successful but politically costly once it fell apart. Still, progress was made as Salvadoran youth found more alternatives.

Nayib Bukele arrived on the national scene as the FMLN candidate for mayor of San Salvador in 2014. There has been suspicion that his political rise was based on secret deals with the gangs, and an increasing number of international media are giving details on how that worked. He is alleged to have bribed the gangs for their loyalty in that mayoral race, outbidding the ARENA candidate by a two to one margin. Bukele soon broke with the FMLN and ran against the party in the 2019 presidential election. MS-13 gang leaders are alleged to have negotiated with him prior to the vote, demanding an end to extraditions to the US, shortened sentences, and control of territory. In return they reduced the homicide rate by hiding their crimes. After Bukele’s election, the official murder rate fell, but disappearances went up. This gang also helped him get out the vote for his legislative supermajority in 2021, sometimes violently. While he colludes with the gangs in secret, the public face of Bukele’s crime policy is a return to the repression of the ARENA years.

In March 2022, Bukele instituted a state of exception which persists to this day and has led to the imprisonment of an additional 85,000 people, giving El Salvador the highest incarceration rate in the world. Several social movement leaders are among those detained without trial. Meanwhile, many Salvadorans enjoy comparative safety in the country’s streets since the gang violence is less visible and small businesses no longer have to make extortion payments. This, along with savvy manipulation of social media, has made the president extremely popular among a segment of the population, particularly voters living in the diaspora. Now Bukele has gleefully agreed to serve as an offshore jailer for Donald Trump, and seems to delight in images of dehumanized inmates in crowded cells, indicating that they will never leave. Conditions are torturous and rehabilitation is non-existent. As Alan MacLeod reports , “cruelty is the point.” And violence persists.

The photos at the top of this article show the stark contrast in attitude towards prisoners in Nicaragua vs. El Salvador. While Bukele serves cruelty and humiliation, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega focuses on human dignity and rehabilitation—particularly through education. A recent article tells of some 8,400 inmates enrolled in university studies, vocational programs, and completing primary and secondary schooling. Inmates are also allowed to work, if they so choose, and their earnings are sent to their families. Sentences are frequently reduced for good behavior. Reconciliation is a hallmark of the Sandinista movement, which abolished the death penalty in 1979. Corporate media stories about “political prisoners” are part of a US-funded propaganda campaign and should be viewed skeptically. This article gives information about the heinous crimes committed by those US media heroes.

In Nicaragua there is minimal gang activity, drug trafficking, and drug abuse. At 6 per 100,000 inhabitants, the country’s homicide rate has been declining since 2007 and is currently just below that of the US. This decrease is thanks to successful implementation of the kinds of social programs the FMLN attempted in El Salvador, which have engaged the youth and greatly reduced poverty. It has been a steady, long-term process that prioritizes the formerly impoverished majority; not an illusion for social media. People are empowered by creative programs that help farmers feed their families and communities, support entrepreneurs in starting a business, promote women’s health and safety, reinstate rights to Afro-descendant and Indigenous peoples, and allow Nicaraguans of all ages to get an education. These are not changes that can easily be turned back, and are the reason that Daniel Ortega keeps getting a larger and larger percentage of the vote in each election.

NGOs

The Washington Post and Amnesty International inaccurately equate El Salvador’s new Foreign Agents Law with Nicaragua’s non-profits law. The Nicaraguan law requires organizations to report payments coming from outside the country and tell how such money is spent, prohibiting the use of foreign monies for political activity. It is meant to curtail foreign interference like the 2018 coup attempt that subjected the Nicaraguan population to three months of politically-motivated terror. This article provides detailed documentation of the extensive flow of USAID regime-change money to Nicaraguan opposition and media outlets before 2022. In a shameless admission that they are still dependent on US funding, the Nicaraguan opposition took to social media at the start of the second Trump administration to decry the crisis they had fallen into because their US funding was cut . Contrary to what the Post and Amnesty would have us believe, media outlets dependent on US government funding are not “independent.” Unfortunately, USAID/NED funding for Nicaraguan opposition media operating outside the country has already been reinstated.

El Salvador has also been targeted by USAID in the past for political purposes, including during the FMLN administrations. US meddling is less likely to target Bukele, given his close alignment with the Trump administration. Criticism of the new law’s provision to charge Salvadoran charities a 30% tax on international donations does seem valid. In Nicaragua, most charitable organizations pay a 1% administrative fee on international donations, while the wealthiest charities pay up to 3%—a far cry from Bukele’s 30% tax.

Treatment of Migrants

Ortega never participated in the schemes the Trump and Biden administrations negotiated with Nicaragua’s northern neighbors to inhibit the flow of migrants; nor did he impose a ‘special fee’ on migrants in transit from Africa , as Bukele did. Nicaragua accepted direct flights from Haiti and Cuba as a humanitarian gesture to ease the crises that US intervention created in those countries. For a period, Nicaragua was a transit country for migrants looking for an inexpensive and safer route to the US that avoided the dangerous Darien Gap. It was rewarded with baseless accusations of “human trafficking” by the US Congress.

Meanwhile, Bukele zealously collaborates with Trump’s mass deportation/incarceration plan for migrants, even refusing to release a wrongfully deported Salvadoran man. Daniel Ortega has adamantly denounced this , demanded the return of the kidnapped Venezuelans held in El Salvador, and pleaded for respect for all migrants. Nicaraguan migrants who are deported home from the US are welcomed with free health check-ups, a meal, transportation to their home communities, and a small stipend to get re-settled.

Handling of the COVID-19 pandemic

El Salvador had one of the most authoritarian responses to the pandemic. The Bukele government shut down the economy, used military repression to enforce a nationwide quarantine, declared a state of exception, and forced people into COVID detention centers, where many were infected and some died. Bukele tweeted sadistic photos of gang members crowded together like sardines in prisons—bragging about his repressive response with no regard for the danger of spreading the virus.

President Ortega did the exact opposite: the economy and schools remained open, while children continued to receive their daily lunches. The government deployed a massive public health campaign with house-to-house information visits, prepared public hospitals to treat COVID, established a hotline for contact tracing and monitoring of patients, and released some prisoners. No one was jailed or went hungry due to the pandemic; the government did not incur excessive debt; and Nicaragua achieved the highest vaccination rate in Central America.

Nicaragua had one of the lowest excess death rates from the pandemic in the world (292 per 100,000 inhabitants). UNICEF congratulated Nicaragua on its pandemic response because unlike children who faced lockdowns, Nicaraguan youngsters did not experience more health risks, poorer nutrition, decreased vaccination rates, or diminished education outcomes due to the pandemic.

Salvadoran children, unfortunately, faced all the detrimental effects of an extreme lockdown. The country’s democracy suffered, the economy shrank severely, and the government incurred tremendous debt. The excess death rate in El Salvador due to the pandemic was 364 per 100,000 inhabitants.

Israel and Palestine

Historically, Zionist collaboration with right-wing repression in Central America has included the selling of napalm to ARENA governments to use on the Salvadoran people, and aid for Nicaragua’s Somoza dictatorship and contra terrorists. Now, despite Bukele’s Palestinian heritage, he has clearly allied with Israel. His imports of Israeli weapons and surveillance technology are growing at an alarming rate, and El Salvador is one of the most extensive users of Israel’s Pegasus spyware, reportedly deployed against dozens of Bukele’s critics.

In contrast, Sandinista Nicaragua has a long history of solidarity with the Palestinian people . Since October 7, 2023, Ortega has resolutely supported the Palestinian people’s right to peace and self-determination and the end of Israeli aggression. His was the first nation to join the South Africa suit at the International Court of Justice over Israel’s violations of the Genocide Convention. Nicaragua then filed its own suit against Germany for aiding and abetting genocide, which succeeded in reducing weapons sales to Israel and reinstating German funding to UNRWA. Nicaragua does this despite threats of increased sanctions from the US Congress and Israel.

Government social spending

Since Bukele became president, classic neoliberal policies have cut education, healthcare, and poverty reduction programs introduced by the FMLN governments before him. Schools are being closed and healthcare is increasingly unaffordable. Meanwhile, there are constant increases in spending on the military, policing, and prisons.

Social spending has been a priority for Nicaragua since President Ortega took office in 2007 and now constitutes 60% of the national budget. There have been vast improvements in health, education, nutrition, housing, drinking water, roads, and electricity. The country’s Human Development Index has surpassed El Salvador’s—remarkable since Nicaragua’s per capita GDP (an important component of that score) is half that of El Salvador. And Nicaragua ranks third lowest in the western hemisphere for military spending, even behind Costa Rica which supposedly has no army.

The many differences between the two presidents are best summarized by looking at them in historical perspective. Despite the hype, the young Bukele offers nothing new. He is perpetuating the cycle of physical and structural violence in his country, in collusion with the US government. The elder statesman Ortega, however, is helping his country break free from imperialist violence. That is something new.

First published at BAR.

The post Daniel Ortega is No Nayib Bukele first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jill Clark-Gollub.

No One Is Safe Until Everyone Is: Humanity’s Missing Project

David Andersson — Thu, 29 May 2025 15:00:14 +0000

Fragmented by nationalism and distracted by power games, humanity stands at a turning point. We face global crises that threaten our survival, yet we remain without a common purpose rooted in solidarity and mutual care. This—our failure to recognize our shared fate—is the true crisis of our time.

Every nation clings to its sovereign right to act in its interest: to strike deals, close borders, and extract value from the global system. This is not new, but it is increasingly dangerous. The Global South strives to reclaim agency from centuries of domination. Africa seeks to shape its future free of outside interference. Asia is lifting millions from poverty through rapid development. Meanwhile, Western powers continue to exert dominance through sanctions, militarization, and economic coercion. Under the banner of a “multipolar world,” the global political order is recycling the same hegemonic logic, just under new names. Both sides of the political divide seem to believe that militarization and bullying are legitimate means to consolidate this fragmentation, all in the name of “security.”

But the realities of our time demand something radically different.

COVID-19 swept across the planet, ignoring borders, languages, and religions. Climate catastrophe looms ever closer. Unchecked corporate power fuels inequality and environmental destruction. These crises do not discriminate, and they cannot be resolved by individual nations alone.

Everything humanity has developed—language, technology, religion, agriculture—has brought us to this moment. We are now confronted with the inescapable truth of our interdependence. We exist together on this Earth. We survive together—or not at all. We have a moral obligation to transform that oneness into a living reality.

The tragedy is that we have no unifying project. No shared aim worthy of our human potential. Despite our vast knowledge and powerful tools, we have failed to answer the simplest question: Why are we here? This is where we must direct our energy.

Instead, we remain trapped in short-term self-interest, both personal and national. We protect our own at the expense of others. But if we want to survive as a species—and not just as competing nations—we must reverse course. We must stop mistaking sovereignty for strength. True strength lies in solidarity.

So what are we here for, as human beings? What could we create together if we aligned our energy with our conscience? What if the measure of sovereignty were not how fiercely we protect our borders, but how deeply we protect human dignity—everywhere?

We possess knowledge, technology, and science beyond anything our ancestors could have imagined. To move forward, we must transcend our “ego-ism,” both personal and national, and begin to imagine another future—one where solidarity, not sovereignty, leads the way.

If we want to survive as a species—and not just as nations—we must urgently ask the only question that matters:

What can we build together?

First published in Pressenza and available in: Spanish

The post No One Is Safe Until Everyone Is: Humanity’s Missing Project first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by David Andersson.

The Origins of SARS-CoV-2

Allen Forrest — Mon, 12 May 2025 15:00:31 +0000

China’s government released its white paper on tracing the origins of SARS-CoV-2, wherein it stated:

The US should cease from shifting blame and evading responsibility, stop finding external excuses for its internal malaise, and genuinely reflect on and overhaul its public health policies. The US cannot continue to turn a deaf ear to the numerous questions over its conduct. It must promptly respond to the legitimate concerns of the international community, proactively share with the WHO data on its early suspected cases, disclose information about Fort Detrick, its global network of biological laboratories, and the so-called research conducted therein, and provide a responsible account to the global public.

The post The Origins of SARS-CoV-2 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

COVID Kindergarten

Allen Forrest — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 14:40:15 +0000

Findings In this systematic review of 36 studies from 11 countries, school closures and social lockdown during the first COVID-19 wave were associated with adverse mental health symptoms (such as distress and anxiety) and health behaviors (such as higher screen time and lower physical activity) among children and adolescents.

— Russell Viner, Simon Russell, Rosella Saulle, et al. “School Closures During Social Lockdown and Mental Health, Health Behaviors, and Well-being Among Children and Adolescents During the First COVID-19 Wave: A Systematic Review, JAMA Pediatr. 2022;176(4):400-409. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2021.5840, 18 January 2022,

The post COVID Kindergarten first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Story Time

Allen Forrest — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 17:30:22 +0000

The post Story Time first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

No Wonder

Allen Forrest — Sat, 19 Apr 2025 15:18:39 +0000

We found all-cause death risks to be even higher for those vaccinated with one and two doses compared to the unvaccinated and that the booster doses were ineffective. We also found a slight but statistically significant loss of life expectancy for those vaccinated with 2 or 3/4 doses.

— Cited from conclusion in Alessandria, M., Malatesta, G. M., Berrino, F., & Donzelli, A. (2024). A Critical Analysis of All-Cause Deaths during COVID-19 Vaccination in an Italian Province. Microorganisms, 12(7), 1343. https://doi.org/10.3390/microorganisms12071343

The post No Wonder first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Life-Saving or Life-Taking Vaccines?

Allen Forrest — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 14:08:34 +0000

Denis G. Rancourt, PhD, and Joseph Hickey, PhD, “Quantitative evaluation of whether the Nobel-Prize-winning COVID-19 vaccine actually saved millions of lives,” 08 October 2023.

Fantastic statements that the Nobel-Prize-winning COVID-19 vaccines saved millions (and tens of millions) of lives are based on the theoretical scenarios of Watson et al. (2022), published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. Watson et al. (2022) theoretically inferred massive mortality reductions distributed globally, occurring solely during vaccine rollouts. We calculated the quantitative consequences of Watson et al. (2022)’s low-value (14.4 million lives saved) theoretical scenario on all-cause mortality by time (by week or by month, 2020-2022) in 95 countries. Our calculations provide graphical proof that the theoretical proposals of Watson et al. (2022) are untenable, compared to measured all-cause mortality. Therefore, the characteristics of the COVID-19 vaccines (efficacies in preventing infection or serious illness, duration of protection, waning, etc.) and of COVID-19 spread input by Watson et al. (2022) must be invalid.

Denis G. Rancourt, PhD; Marine Baudin, PhD; Jérémie Mercier, PhD, “Probable causal association between Australia’s new regime of high all-cause mortality and its COVID-19 vaccine rollout,” 20 December 2022.

Australia experienced a significant and sustained increase in all-cause mortality, starting with its COVID-19 vaccine rollout aimed at high-risk residents in mid-April 2021, whereas it saw no detectable excess all-cause mortality up to that point during 13 months of a pandemic that was declared by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 March 2020.

The post Life-Saving or Life-Taking Vaccines? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Covid-19 Report Examined | Shane Smith Has Questions | Vice News

VICE News — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 17:00:36 +0000

This content originally appeared on VICE News and was authored by VICE News.

Stories of Resistance: How Indigenous peoples in Brazil fought COVID-19

Michael Fox — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 20:43:04 +0000

Back to the Earth

In the early days of COVID, when the disease spreads like wildfire

And ICU units overflow capacity

There are few places as bad as Brazil

And the Amazon is ground zero

A sign of just how scary it can get

And what awaits everyone else

Mass graves in Manaus

Hospitals at capacity

Oxygen running out

Cases spiking

The death count rising

Particularly among Indigenous populations

And president Jair Bolsonaro laughs off the virus

He tells cameras it was just a little cold

That he is strong and won’t catch it (even though he does)

He fights with governors

And attacks lockdowns

And refuses to wear masks

And pushes unproven drugs

And his government turns its back on Indigenous communities

Bolsonaro’s administration pulls officials working to protect native lands

And health workers who cared for their peoples

And left Indigenous territories stranded, like islands in a sea of unknown and fear

But the country’s Indigenous peoples are used to having backs turned against them.

And they take action.

They set up roadblocks in the entrances into their territories.

They test temperatures

And spray alcohol

And distribute masks

And block unwanted visitors

And stand tall against the disease

Which they know can ravage their peoples

And when COVID does spread to their lands

Like it does everywhere

They turn to their ancestral medicine

Their native plants

They share their knowledge with other neighboring tribes.

That’s what Indigenous leader Almerinda Ramos de Lima saw

in the farthest reaches of Brazil.

in the Upper Rio Negro,

near the Colombian Border.

“They didn’t wait for exams. They didn’t wait for doctors to arrive,” she says.

“Each community organized

and shared the traditional medicines that they were preparing.”

“Where we have forests,

where we have plants,

we have traditional medicine,” she says.

“We have our cure inside the forest.”

Historic Indigenous leaders still fell.

Chief Aritana Yawalapiti, who led his Xingu people for five decades.

Paulinho Paiakan, of the Kayapó.

Artist and healer Vovó Bernaldina… from the Macuxi tribe in the Raposa Serra do Sol territory.

Reservoirs of knowledge and wisdom. Heartbreaking losses.

But their people sang.

And danced their tribal dances.

And honored their loved ones and their elders.

And new leaders have risen.

Fighting to protect their lands, their communities and their way of life.

Now and forever.

Hi folks. thanks for listening. This is the fourth episode of Stories of Resistance. This is a new project co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. I’m your host, writer, and producer, Michael Fox. I’m a longtime journalist based in Latin America. Each week, I’ll bring you stories of resistance and hope like this. Inspiration for dark times. If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment or leave a review.

I’ve also just launched a Kickstarter to help get this podcast series off the ground and up and running. I’ll add a link in the show notes.

As always, thanks for listening. I hope you like the stories.

This is the fourth episode of Stories of Resistance.

Stories of Resistance is a new project, co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review.

We’ve recently launched a Kickstarter to help get the series off the ground. You can support it by clicking here: Stories of Resistance: Inspiration for Dark Times Kickstarter

Written and produced by Michael Fox.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Michael Fox.

5th anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic | Radio Free Asia (RFA)

Radio Free Asia — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 01:32:15 +0000

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.

5th anniversary of COVID-19: Lessons from a global crisis | Radio Free Asia (RFA)

Radio Free Asia — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 22:13:33 +0000

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.

It’s been 5 years since Covid-19 changed our lives forever

Human Rights Watch — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 08:52:29 +0000

This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.

WHO calls on China to release all data on COVID-19 origins

Luisetta Mudie — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 17:26:32 +0000

The World Health Organization has called on China to fully release crucial data surrounding the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan in 2020, although the call was dismissed by Beijing.

Five years ago, on Dec. 31, 2019, WHO’s Country Office in China picked up a media statement by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission on cases of “viral pneumonia” in Wuhan, China, the World Health Organization, or WHO, said in a statement commemorating the start of the pandemic.

“In the weeks, months and years that unfolded after that, COVID-19 came to shape our lives and our world,” the United Nations health body said. “We continue to call on China to share data and access so we can understand the origins of COVID-19. This is a moral and scientific imperative.”

The statement came after the World Health Organization (WHO) urged China to release key COVID-19 origin data from Wuhan.

It added: “Let’s take a moment to honor the lives changed and lost, recognize those who are suffering from COVID-19 and long COVID, express gratitude to the health workers who sacrificed so much to care for us.”

China on Tuesday dismissed calls on its government to release more data from the emergence of the pandemic, which has killed at least 7 million people worldwide, and defended its record on international collaboration.

Peter Daszak, a member of the World Health Organization team investigating the origins of COVID-19, takes a swab sample on the balcony of a hotel in Wuhan, China, Feb. 6, 2021.

(Hector Retamal/AFP)

“After the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago, China immediately shared epidemic information and virus gene sequences with the World Health Organization and the international community,” foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told a regular news briefing in Beijing on Tuesday.

“On the issue of COVID-19 origin tracing, China has always adhered to the spirit of science, openness and transparency, actively supported and participated in global scientific tracing, and resolutely opposed any form of political manipulation,” Mao said, quoting WHO experts as saying that they were satisfied with the access granted during their February 2021 visit.

Early days of COVID-19 pandemic

When reports first began to emerge of a “mystery virus” causing pneumonia in patients in Wuhan, China said it definitely wasn’t SARS, but later said it was a SARS-like virus.

Officials initially denied that the disease was being transmitted between people.

Ho Pak-leung, head of the University of Hong Kong’s Centre for Infection, warned in early January 2020 that that it was highly possible that the disease was spreading from human to human, given the sheer number of cases that appeared in a short period of time.

Human-to-human transmission was confirmed by the WHO on Jan. 19, 2020.

Pandemic citizen journalist evicted from newly leased home in Wuhan

Whistleblowing pandemic journalist Zhang Zhan back in detention

Officials also denied that the virus spread through the air.

The WHO also continued to advise that the disease was spread through “respiratory droplets and contact” rather than traveling through the air like smoke. This led governments and health services around the world to emphasize hand-washing and social distancing over other preventive measures.

The body eventually published a report in April 2024 admitting that the virus was transmitted “through the air.”

Experts lacked full picture

But a WHO team sent to Wuhan to investigate the origins of the coronavirus pandemic in February 2021 sent out mixed signals regarding the transparency of the probe. Investigators said China refused to hand over raw patient data on early COVID-19 cases, making it harder to figure out how the outbreak began.

Whistleblowing doctors like Li Wenliang died of COVID-19 in the early phase of the pandemic, while those who survived were later silenced by intense political pressure.

Citizen journalists who went to Wuhan to document the early weeks of the outbreak and the citywide lockdown that followed were eventually caught, detained and sentenced to lengthy jail terms. Even after their release, some continue to face restriction and harassment.

Medical workers attend to COVID-19 patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital in Wuhan, China, Feb. 6, 2020.

(China Daily via Reuters)

Rights groups said many Chinese people who spoke out against the government’s handling of the initial outbreak that eventually spread around the world had been prevented from getting anywhere near the team.

Competing theories of origin

Experts hired by the global health body to carry out a politically sensitive investigation of the origins of the pandemic had initially said that a leak from the lab was “extremely unlikely.” But WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus later said the lab leak theory warranted further investigation, as experts from 13 countries criticized a lack of transparency from China.

The U.S. intelligence community remains divided over whether COVID-19 originated from a lab in Wuhan or from natural exposure to an infected animal, and is only sure it wasn’t a deliberate bioweapon, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told the Senate in March 2023.

China has continued to insist that the virus originated from outside its borders, a claim reiterated by Mao on Tuesday.

“The international scientific community has more and more clues pointing to the global origin of the virus,” she said. “Origin tracing should also be based on a global perspective and carried out in multiple countries and regions.”

Better public health response still needed

Nearly five years since the first SARS-CoV-2 infections were reported, most countries have lifted public health and social measures and have moved to end their national COVID-19 emergencies, the WHO said on its official website.

The bio-containment level 4 laboratory, called P4 (left), is seen on the campus of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, Dec. 21, 2024.

(Hector Retamal/AFP)

“COVID-19 continues to circulate widely, however, presenting significant challenges to health systems worldwide,” it said, adding that “tens of thousands” of people are infected or re-infected with SARS-CoV-2 each week around the world.

It called on governments to “sustain the public health response to COVID-19 amid ongoing illness and death and the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants.”

According to the National Institutes of Health’s LitCovid website, which compiles COVID-19 research from around the world, Long COVID and sequelae — new health problems like neurological and cardiovascular disease that are caused by the virus — are among the most heavily researched and trending topics among scientists.

Papers on the virus' links to neurodegeneration, chronic fatigue and mitochondrial damage topped the list of trending topics out of more than 440,000 articles from 8,000 scientific journals on the website on Dec. 31, 2024.

Edited by Roseanne Gerin.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Luisetta Mudie.

China says it has always been open about COVID-19 | Radio Free Asia (RFA)

Radio Free Asia — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 20:01:40 +0000

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.

China says it has always been open about COVID-19 | Radio Free Asia (RFA)

Radio Free Asia — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 19:40:26 +0000

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.

NZ govt plans to make ‘heavy handed’ change to free speech rules for universities

APR editor — Sat, 21 Dec 2024 07:19:05 +0000

By John Gerritsen, RNZ News education correspondent

The New Zealand government coalition is tweaking university regulations to curb what it says is an increasingly “risk-averse approach” to free speech.

The proposed changes will set clear expectations on how universities should approach freedom of speech issues.

Each university will then have to adopt a “freedom of speech statement” consistent with the central government’s expectations.

READ MORE: Other academic freedom reports

The changes will also prohibit tertiary institutions from adopting positions on issues that do not relate to their core functions.

Associate Education Minister David Seymour said fostering students’ ability to debate ideas is an essential part of universities’ educational mission.

“Despite being required by the Education Act and the Bill of Rights Act to uphold academic freedom and freedom of expression, there is a growing trend of universities deplatforming speakers and cancelling events where they might be perceived as controversial or offensive,” he said.

“That’s why the National/ACT coalition agreement committed to introduce protections for academic freedom and freedom of speech to ensure universities perform their role as the critic and conscience of society.”

Minister for Tertiary Education and Skills Penny Simmonds said freedom of speech was fundamental to the concept of academic freedom.

“Universities should promote diversity of opinion and encourage students to explore new ideas and perspectives. This includes enabling them to hear from invited speakers with a range of viewpoints.”

It is expected the changes will take effect by the end of next year, after which universities will have six months to develop a statement and get it approved.

Aside from the fact that the free speech legislation for universities is a waste of time (and seemingly ideologically inconsistent with the anti-regulation stance of the government), this line from the RNZ article is both hilarious and worrying pic.twitter.com/aOoPa0ZPc5

— Quintin Jane (@RealQuintinJane) December 19, 2024

Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington said the important issue of free speech had been a dominant topic throughout the year.

It believed a policy it had come up with would align with the intent of the criteria laid out by the government today.

However, the Greens are among critics, saying the government’s changes will add fuel to the political fires of disinformation, and put teachers and students in the firing line.

Labour says universities should be left to make decisions on free speech themselves.

‘A heavy-handed approach’
The Tertiary Education Union (TEU) said proposed rules could do more harm than good.

They have been been welcomed by the Free Speech Union, which said academic freedom was “under threat”, but the TEU said there was no problem to solve.

TEU president Sandra Grey said the move seemed to be aimed at ensuring people could spread disinformation on university campuses.

“I think one of the major concerns is that you might get universities opening up the space that is for academic and rigorous debate and saying it’s okay we can have climate deniers, we can have people who believe in creationism coming into our campuses and speaking about it as though it were scientific, as though it was rigorously defendable when in fact we know some of these questions . . . have been settled,” she said.

Grey said academics who expressed views on campus could expect them to be debated, but that was part and parcel of working at a university and not an attack on their freedom of speech.

“There isn’t actually a problem. I do think universities, all the staff who work there, the students, understand that they’re covered by all of their requirements for freedom of speech that other citizens are.

“So it feels like we’ve got a heavy-handed approach from a government that apparently is anti-regulation but is now going to put in place the whole lot of requirements on a community that just doesn’t need it.”

Some topics ‘suppressed’

Free Speech Union chief executive Jonathan Ayling . . . some academics are afraid to express their views and there is also a problem with “compelled speech”. Image: VNP/Phil Smith/RNZ News

Free Speech Union chief executive Jonathan Ayling said freedom of speech was under threat in universities.

“We’ve supported academics . . . where they feel that they have been unfairly disadvantaged simply for holding a different opinion to some of their peers. Of course, that is also an addition to the explicit calls for people to be cancelled, to be unemployed,” he said.

Ayling said some academics were afraid to express their views and there was also a problem with “compelled speech”.

“Forcing certain references on particularly ideological issues. There’s questions around race, gender, international conflicts, covid-19, these are all questions that we’ve found have been suppressed and also there’s the aspect of self-censorship,” he said.

“As we have and alongside partners looked into this more and more, it seems that many people in the academy exist in a culture of fear.”

University committed to differing viewpoints
Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington is committed to hearing a range of different viewpoints on its campuses, vice-chancellor Professor Nic Smith says.

Free speech had been an important issue during 2024, and the university had arrived at a policy that covered both freedom of speech and academic freedom.

By consulting widely, there was now a shared understanding of “foundational principles”, and its policy would be in place early in the new year.

“We believe this policy aligns with the intent of the criteria [from the government] as we understand them. It recognises the strength of our diverse university community and affirms that this diversity makes us stronger,” Professor Smith said.

“At the same time, it acknowledges that within any diverse community, individuals will inevitably encounter ideas they disagree with-sometimes strongly.

“Finding value in these disagreements is something universities are very good at: listening to different points of view in the spirit of advancing understanding and learning that can ultimately help us live and work better together.”

The university believed in hearing a range of views from staff, rather than adopting a single institutional position.

“The only exception to this principle is on matters that directly affect our core functions as a university.”

‘Stoking fear and division’

The Green Party’s spokesperson for Tertiary Education, Francisco Hernadez . . . this new policy has nothing to do with free speech. Image: VNP/Phil Smith/RNZ News

Green Party’s spokesperson for Tertiary Education, Francisco Hernadez, said the new policy had nothing to do with free speech.

“This is about polluting our public discourse for political gain.”

Universities played a critical role, providing a platform for informed and reasoned debate.

“Our universities should be able to decide who is given a platform on their campuses, not David Seymour. These changes risk turning our universities into hostile environments unsafe for marginalised communities.

“Misinformation, disinformation, and rhetoric that inflames hatred towards certain groups has no place in our society, let alone our universities. Freedom of speech is fundamental, but it is not a licence to harm.”

Hernandez said universities should be trusted to ensure the balance was struck between academic freedom and a duty of care.

“Today’s announcement has also come with a high dose of unintended irony.

“David Seymour is speaking out of both sides of his mouth by on the one hand claiming to support freedom of speech, but on the other looking to limit the ability universities have to take stances on issues, like the war in Gaza for example.

“This is an Orwellian attempt to limit discourse to the confines of the government’s agenda. This is about stoking fear and division for political gain.”

Labour’s Associate Education (Tertiary) spokesperson Deborah Russell responded: “One of the core legislated functions of universities in this country is to be a critic and conscience of society. That means continuing to speak truth to power, even if those in power don’t like it.”

“Nowhere should be a platform for hate speech. I am certain universities can make these decisions themselves.”

‘Expectations clarified’ – university
The University of Auckland said in a statement the announcement of planned legislation changes would help “to clarify government expectations in this area”.

“The university has a longstanding commitment to maintaining freedom of expression and academic freedom on our campuses, and in recent years has worked closely with [the university’s] senate and council to review, revise and consult on an updated Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom Policy.

“This is expected to return to senate and council for further discussion in early 2025 and will take into account the proposed new legislation.”

The university described the nature of the work as “complex”.

“While New Zealand universities have obligations under law to protect freedom of expression, academic freedom and their role as ‘critic and conscience of society’, as the proposed legislation appreciates, this is balanced against other important policies and codes.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Death Wish

Allen Forrest — Sat, 14 Dec 2024 22:19:33 +0000

“RETRACTED: The Safety of COVID-19 Vaccinations—We Should Rethink the Policy“

The post Death Wish first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Kia kaha Lebanon: NZ media only tell half your story of struggle

APR editor — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 23:45:31 +0000

The United States has vetoed a UN Security Council ceasefire resolution — for the fourth time — in Israel’s war on Gaza, while Hezbollah demands a complete ceasefire and “protection of Lebanon’s sovereignty” in any deal with Israel. Amid the death and devastation, Joe Hendren reflects on his time in Lebanon and examines what the crisis means for a small country with a population size similar to Aotearoa New Zealand.

SPECIAL REPORT: By Joe Hendren

Since the Israeli invasion of Lebanon I can’t help but think of a friend I met in Beirut.

He worked at the Regis Hotel, where I stayed in February 2015.

At one point, he offered to make me a Syrian dish popular in his hometown of Aleppo. I have long remembered his kindness; I only wish I remembered his name.

At the time, his home city was being destroyed. A flashpoint of the Syrian Civil War, the Battle of Aleppo lasted four long years. He didn’t mention this of course.

I was lucky to visit Lebanon when I did. So much has happened since then.

Economic crisis and a tragic port explosion
Mass protests took over Lebanese streets in October 2019 in response to government plans to tax WhatsApp calls. The scope of the protests soon widened, as Lebanese people voiced their frustrations with ongoing economic turmoil and corruption.

A few months later, the covid-19 pandemic arrived, deepening the economic crisis and claiming 10,000 lives.

On 4 August 2020, the centre of Beirut was rocked by one of the largest non nuclear explosions in history when a large amount of ammonium nitrate stored at the Port of Beirut detonated. The explosion killed 218 people and left an estimated 300,000 homeless. The government of Hassin Diab resigned but continued in a “caretaker” capacity.

Tens of thousands of protesters returned to the streets demanding accountability and the downfall of Lebanon’s political ruling class. While some protesters threw stones and other projectiles, an Al Jazeera investigation found that security forces violated international standards on the use of force. The political elite were protected.

In 2021, The World Bank summarised the situation:

“The Lebanon financial and economic crisis is likely to rank in the top 10, possibly top three, most severe crises episodes globally since the mid-nineteenth century. This is a conclusion of the Spring 2021 Lebanon Economic Monitor (LEM) in which the Lebanon crisis is contrasted with the most severe global crises episodes as observed by Reinhart and Rogoff (2014) over the 1857–2013 period.

“In fact, Lebanon’s GDP plummeted from close to US$ 55 billion in 2018 to an estimated US$ 33 billion in 2020, with US$ GDP/capita falling by around 40 percent. Such a brutal and rapid contraction is usually associated with conflicts or wars.”

The Lebanon Poverty and Equity Assessment, produced by the World Bank in 2024, found the share of individuals in Lebanon living under the poverty line more than tripled, rising from 12 percent to 44 percent. The depth and severity of poverty also increased over the decade between 2012 and 2022.

To make matters worse, the port explosion destroyed Lebanon’s strategic wheat reserves at a time when the war in Ukraine drove significant increases in global food prices. Annual food inflation in Lebanon skyrocketed from 7.67 percent in January 2019 to a whopping 483.15 percent for the year ending in January 2022. While food inflation has since declined, it remains high, sitting just below 20 percent for the year ending September 2024. The World Bank said:

“The sharp deterioration of the Lebanese pound, which lost 98 percent of its pre-crisis value by December 2023, propelled inflation to new heights. With imports constituting about 60 percent of the consumption basket (World Bank, 2022), the plunging currency led to triple-digit inflation which rose steeply from an annual average of 3 percent between 2011 and 2018, to 85 percent in 2019, 155 percent in 2020, and 221 percent in 2023 . . .

“Faced with falling foreign exchange reserves, the government withdrew subsidies on medication, fuel, and wheat further fuelling rising costs of healthcare and transport (Figure 1.2). Rapid inflation acted effectively as a highly regressive tax, striking hardest at the poor and those with fixed, lira-denominated incomes.”

The ongoing crisis of the Lebanese economy has amplified the power of Hezbollah, a paramilitary group formed in 1982 in response to Israel’s invasion and occupation of Lebanon.

“Hezbollah is famous for entrenching its power in an elaborate social infrastructure of Islamic welfare. The social grip of those structures and services is increased by the ongoing crisis of the Lebanese economy. When the medical service fails, desperate families turn to the Hezbollah-run health service,” says Adam Tooze

As banks imposed capital controls, many Lebanese lost confidence in the financial system. The financial arm of Hezbollah, the al-Quad al-Hassan Association (AQAH), experienced a significant increase in clients, despite being subject to US Treasury sanctions since 2007.

The US accuses Hezbollah of using AQAH as a front to manage its financial activities. When a 28-year-old engineer, Hassan Shoumar, was locked out of his dollar accounts in late 2019, he redirected his money into his account at AQAH: “What I care about is that when I want my money, I can get it.”

While Hezbollah portrays itself as “the resistance”, as a member of the governing coalition in Lebanon, it also forms an influential part of the political elite. Adam Tooze gives an example of how the political elite is still looking after itself:

“[T]he Lebanese Parliament in a grotesque act of self-dealing in January 2024 passed a budget that promised to close the budget deficit of 12.8 of GDP by raising regressive value-added tax while decreasing the progressive taxes levied on capital gains, real estate and investments.

“For lack of reforms, the IMF [International Monetary Fund] is refusing to disburse any of the $3bn package that are allocated to Lebanon.”

While the protest movement called for a “technocratic” government in Lebanon, the experiences of Greece and other countries facing financial difficulties suggest such governments can pose their own risks, especially when they involve unelected “experts” in prominent positions.

One example is the political reaction to the counterproductive austerity programme imposed on Greece by the European Commission, European Central Bank and IMF in the aftermath of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. This demonstrates how the demands of international investors can conflict with the needs of the local population.

Lebanon carries more than its fair share of refugees
Lebanon currently hosts the largest number of refugees per capita in the world, despite its scarce resources. This began as an overflow from the Syrian conflict in 2011, with nearly 1.2 million ‘displaced’ Syrians in Lebanon registered with UNHCR by May 2015.

When I visited Lebanon in 2015, I tried to grasp the scale of the refugee issue. In terms of population, Lebanon is comparable to New Zealand, with both countries having just over 5 million people.

I imagined what New Zealand would be like if it attempted to host a million refugees in addition to its general population. Yet in terms of land area Lebanon is only 10,400 square kilometres — about the size of New Zealand’s Marlborough region at the top of the South Island.

Now, imagine accommodating a population of over 5 million in such a small space, with more than a fifth of them being refugees.

While it was encouraging to see New Zealand increase its refugee quota to 1500 places in July 2020, we could afford to do much more in the current situation. This includes creating additional visa pathways for those fleeing Gaza and Lebanon.

#BREAKING
United States VETOES Security Council draft resolution that would have demanded an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, and the release of all hostages

RESULT
In Favor: 14
Against: 1 (US)
Abstain: 0 pic.twitter.com/BpUj5xhJHE

— UN News (@UN_News_Centre) November 20, 2024

On top of all that – Israeli attacks and illegal booby traps
Since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and the ongoing Israeli invasion of Gaza, Israel and Hezbollah have exchanged fire across Lebanon’s southern border.

Israel makes much of the threat of rocket attacks on Israel from Hezbollah. However, data from US based non-profit organisation Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) shows Israel carried out 81 percent of the 10,214 attacks between between the two parties from October 7, 2023, and September 20, 2024.

These attacks resulted in 752 deaths in Lebanon, including 50 children. In contrast, Hezbollah’s attacks, largely centred on military targets, killed at least 33 Israelis.

Hezbollah continues to offer an immediate ceasefire, so long as a ceasefire also applies to Gaza, but Israel has refused these terms.

While the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) disputed these figures as an “oversimplification”, the IDF do not appear to dispute the reported number of Lebanese casualties. Hezbollah continues to offer an immediate ceasefire, so long as a ceasefire also applies to Gaza, but Israel has refused these terms.

In a further escalation, thousands of handheld pagers and walkie-talkies used in both civilian and military contexts in Lebanon and Syria suddenly exploded on September 17 and 18.

Israel attempted to deny responsibility, with Israeli President Isaac Herzog claiming he “rejects out of hand any connection” to the attack. However, 12 defence and intelligence officials, briefed on the attack, anonymously confirmed to The New York Times that Israel was behind the operation.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later boasted during a cabinet meeting that he had personally approved the pager attack. The New York Times described the aftermath:

“Powered by just a few ounces of an explosive compound concealed within the devices, the blasts sent grown men flying off motorcycles and slamming into walls, according to witnesses and video footage. People out shopping fell to the ground, writhing in agony, smoke snaking from their pockets.”

The exploding devices killed 42 people and injured more than 3500, with many victims losing one or both of their hands or eyes. At least four of the dead were children.

Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikatri called the explosions “a serious violation of Lebanese sovereignty and a crime by all standards”.

While around eight Hezbollah fighters were among the dead, most of those killed worked in administration roles and did not take part in hostilities. Under international humanitarian law targeting non-combatants is illegal.

Additionally, the UN Protocol on Mines, Booby-Traps and Other Devices also prohibits the use of “booby-traps or other devices in the form of apparently harmless portable objects which are specifically designed and constructed to contain explosive material”. Israel is a signatory to this UN Protocol.

Israel’s decision to turn ordinary consumer devices into illegal booby traps could backfire. While Israel frequently stresses the importance of its technology sector to its economy, who is going to buy technology associated with Israel now that the IDF have demonstrated its ability to indiscriminately weaponise consumer devices at any time?

International industry buyers will source elsewhere. Such a “silent boycott” could give greater momentum to the call from Palestinian civil society for boycotts, divestments and economic sanctions against Israel.

The booby trap pagers are also likely to affect the decisions of foreign airlines to service Israel on the grounds of safety. Since the war began in October 2023, the number of foreign airlines calling on Ben Gurion Airport in Israel has fallen significantly. Consequently, the cost of a round-trip ticket from the United States to Tel Aviv has risen sharply, from approximately $900 to $2500.

Israel targets civilian infrastructure in Lebanon
Israel has also targeted civilian organisations linked to Hezbollah, such emergency services, hospitals and medical centres operated by the Islamic Health Society (IHS). Israel claims Hezbollah is “using the IHS as a cover for terrorist activities”. This apparently includes digging people out of buildings, as search and rescue teams have also been targeted and killed.

Israel accuses the microloan charity AQAH of funding “Hezbollah’s terror activities”, including purchasing weapons and making payments to Hezbollah fighters. On October 20, Israel attacked 30 branches of AQAH across Lebanon, drawing condemnation from both Amnesty International and the United Nations.

Ben Saul, UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-terrorism maintains AQAH is not a lawful military target: “International humanitarian law does not permit attacks on the economic or financial infrastructure of an adversary, even if they indirectly sustain its military activities.”

Where the author ate his Za’atar man’ousheh – Pigeon’s Rock, Corniche, Beiruit. Image: Joe Hendren

On top of all that — an Israeli invasion
In 1982, Israel attempted to use war to alter the political situation in Lebanon, with counterproductive results, including the creation of Hezbollah. In 2006, Hezbollah used the hilly terrain of southern Lebanon to beat Israel to a stalemate. Israel risks similar counterproductive outcomes again, at the cost of many more lives.

Yet on 1 October 2024, Israel launched a ground invasion of Lebanon, alongside strikes on Beirut, Sidon and border villages. The IDF confirmed the action on Twitter/X, promising a “limited, localised and targeted” operation against “Hezbollah terrorist targets” in southern Lebanon. One US official noted that Israel had framed its 1982 invasion as a limited incursion, which eventually turned into an 18-year occupation.

Israeli strikes have since expanded all over the country. According to figures provided by the Lebanese Ministry of Public Heath on November 13, Israel is responsible for the deaths of at least 3365 people in Lebanon, including 216 children and 192 health workers. More than 14,000 people have been wounded, and more than one million have been displaced from their homes.

Since September 30, 47 Israeli troops have been killed in combat in Southern Lebanon. Around 45 civilians in northern Israel have died due to rocket fire from Lebanon.

So, on top of an economic crisis, runaway inflation, unaffordable food, increasing poverty, the port explosion and covid-19, the Lebanese people now face a war that shows little signs of stopping.

Analysts suggest there is little chance of a ceasefire while Israel retains its “maximalist” demands, which include a full surrender of Hezbollah and allowing Israel to continue to attack targets in southern Lebanon.

A senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, Mohanad Hage Ali, believes Israel is feigning diplomacy to push the blame on Hezbollah. The best chance may come alongside a ceasefire in Gaza, but Israel shows little signs of negotiating meaningfully on that front either.

On September 26, the Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah BouHabib summarised the mood of the country in the wake of the pager attack:

“[N]obody expected the war to be taken in that direction. We Lebanese—we’ve had enough war. We’ve had fifteen years of war. . . .We’d like to live without war—happily, as a tourist country, a beautiful country, good food—and we are not able to do it. And so there is a lot of depression, especially with the latest escalation.”

In Aotearoa New Zealand, the Māori phrase “Kia kaha” means “stand strong”. If I could send a message from halfway across the world, it would be: “Kia kaha Lebanon. I look forward to the day I can visit you again, and munch on a yummy Za’atar man’ousheh while admiring the view from the beautiful Corniche Beirut.”

Joe Hendren holds a PhD in international business from the University of Auckland. He has more than 20 years of experience as a researcher, including work in the New Zealand Parliament, for trade unions and on various research projects. This is his first article for Asia Pacific Report. His blog can be found at http://joehendren.substack.com

Where I ate my Za’atar man’ousheh – Pigeon’s Rock, Corniche Beiruit

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

What Kind of Pandemic?

Allen Forrest — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 15:02:34 +0000

The post What Kind of Pandemic? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

On the Frontlines with Healthcare Workers Fighting COVID-19

VICE News — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 16:00:41 +0000

This content originally appeared on VICE News and was authored by VICE News.

When You Suffer for Your Sanity and Struggle to Get Free

Vijay Prashad — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 14:47:09 +0000

Vincent van Gogh (Netherlands), The Starry Night, 1889.

In 1930, Clément Fraisse (1901–1980), a shepherd from France’s Lozère region, was confined in a nearby psychiatric hospital after he tried to burn down his parents’ farmhouse. For two years, he was held in a dark, narrow cell. Using a spoon, and later the handle of his chamber pot, Fraisse carved symmetrical images into the rough, wooden walls that surrounded him. Despite the inhumane conditions in these psychiatric hospitals, Fraisse made beautiful art in the darkness of his cell. Not far from Lozère is the monastery of Saint Paul de Mausole in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where Vincent van Gogh had been confined four decades earlier (1889–1890) and where he completed around 150 paintings, including several important works (among them The Starry Night, 1889).

Ex OPG, Naples (Italy), 2024.

I was thinking about both Fraisse and Van Gogh when I visited the old Ospedale Psichiatrico Giudiziario (OPG) in Naples (Italy) in September for a festival that took place in this former criminal asylum, which once held those who had committed serious offences and were deemed to be insane. The vast building, which sits in the heart of Naples on the Monte di Sant’Eframo, was first a monastery (1573–1859), then a military barrack for the Savoy regime during Italy’s unification in 1861, and then a prison set up by the fascist regime in the 1920s. The prison was closed in 2008, and then, in 2015, occupied by a group of people who would later form the political organisation Potere al Popolo! (Power to the People!). They renamed the building Ex OPG – Je so’ pazzo, ‘ex’ meaning that the building is no longer an asylum, and Je so’ pazzo referring to the favourite song of the beloved local singer Pino Daniele (1955–2015), who died around the time the building was occupied:

I’m crazy. I’m crazy.
The people are waiting for me.
….
I want to live at least one day as a lion.
Je so’pazzo, je so’ pazzo.
C’ho il popolo che mi aspetta.
….
Nella vita voglio vivere almeno un giorno da leone.

Today, the Ex OPG is home to legal and medical clinics, a gym, a theatre, and a bar. It is a place of reflection, a people’s centre that is designed to build community and confront the loneliness and precarity of capitalism. It is a rare kind of institution in our world, one in which an exhausted society is increasingly isolated and individuals, encaged in a prison house of frustrated aspirations, nonetheless hope to use their meagre tools (a spoon, the handle of a chamber pot) to carve out their dreams and to reach for the starry sky.

Anita Rée (Germany), Self-Portrait, 1930.
Rée (1885–1933) killed herself after the Nazis declared her work to be ‘degenerate’.

Even the World Health Organisation (WHO) does not have sufficient data on mental health, largely because the poorer nations are unable to maintain an accurate account of their populations’ immense psychological struggles. As a result, the focus is often limited to the more affluent countries, where such data is collected by governments and where there is greater access to psychiatric care and medications. A recent survey of thirty-one countries (mostly in Europe and North America, but also including some poorer nations such as Brazil, India, and South Africa) shows a shifting attitude and increased concern about mental health. The survey found that 45% of those polled selected mental health as ‘the biggest health problems facing people in [their] country today’, a significant increase from the previous poll, conducted in 2018, in which the figure was 27%. Third in the list of health challenges is stress, with 31% selecting it as the leading cause of concern. There is a significant gender gap in attitudes towards mental health amongst young people, with 55% of young women selecting it as one of their primary health concerns, compared to 37% of young men (reflecting the fact that women are disproportionately impacted by mental health issues).

While it is true that the COVID-19 pandemic heightened mental health problems across the world, this crisis predated the coronavirus. Information from the Global Health Data Exchange shows that in 2019 – before the pandemic – one in eight, or 970 million, people from around the world had a mental disorder, with 301 million struggling with anxiety and 280 million with depression. These numbers should be seen as an estimate, a minimum picture of the severe crisis of unhappiness and maladjustment to the current social order.

There are range of ailments that go under the name of ‘mental disorder’, from schizophrenia to forms of depression that can result in suicidal ideation. According to the WHO’s 2022 report, one in 200 adults struggle with schizophrenia, which on average results in a ten- to twenty-year reduction in life expectancy. Meanwhile, suicide, the leading cause of death amongst young people globally, is responsible for one in every 100 deaths (bear in mind that only one in every twenty attempts results in a death). We can make new tables, revise our calculations, and write longer reports, but none of this can assuage the profound social neglect that pervades our world.

Adolf Wölfli (Switzerland), General View of the Island Neveranger, 1911.
Wölfli (1864–1930) was abused as a child, sold as an indentured labourer, and then interned in the Waldau Clinic in Bern, where he painted for the rest of his life.

Neglect is not even the correct word. The prevailing attitude to mental disorders is to treat them as biological problems that merely require individualised pharmaceutical care. Even if we were to accept this limited conceptual framework, it still requires governments to support the training of psychiatrists, make medications affordable and accessible for the population, and incorporate mental health treatment into the wider health care system. However, in 2022, the WHO found that, on average, countries spend only 2% of their health care budgets on mental health. The organisation also found that half of the world’s population – mostly in the poorer nations – lives in circumstances where there is one psychiatrist to serve 200,000 or more people. This is the state of affairs as we witness a general decline of health care budgets and of public education about the need for a generous attitude toward mental health problems. The most recent WHO data (December 2023), which covers the spike in pandemic-related health spending, shows that, in 2021, health care spending in most countries was less than 5% of Gross Domestic Product. Meanwhile, in its 2024 report A World of Debt, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) shows that almost a hundred countries spent more to service their debts than on healthcare. Though these are foreboding statistics, they do not get at the heart of the problem.

Over the course of the past century, the response to mental health disorders has been overwhelmingly individualised, with treatments ranging from various forms of therapy to the prescription of different medications. Part of the failure to deal with the range of mental health crises – from depression to schizophrenia – has been the refusal to accept that these problems are not only influenced by biological factors but can be – and often are – created and exacerbated by social structures. Dr. Joanna Moncrieff, one of the founders of the Critical Psychiatry Network, writes that ‘none of the situations we call mental disorders have been convincingly shown to arise from a biological disease’, or more precisely, ‘from a specific dysfunction of physiological or biochemical processes’. This is not to say that biology does not play a role, but simply that it is not the only factor that should shape our understanding of such disorders.

In his widely read classic The Sane Society (1955), Erich Fromm (1900–1980) built on the insights of Karl Marx to develop a precise reading of the psychological landscape in a capitalist system. His insights are worth re-considering (forgive Fromm’s use of the masculine use of the word ‘man’ and of the pronoun ‘his’ to refer to all of humanity):

Whether or not the individual is healthy is primarily not an individual matter, but depends on the structure of his society. A healthy society furthers man’s capacity to love his fellow men, to work creatively, to develop his reason and objectivity, to have a sense of self which is based on the experience of his own productive powers. An unhealthy society is one which creates mutual hostility, distrust, which transforms man into an instrument of use and exploitation for others, which deprives him of a sense of self, except inasmuch as he submits to others or becomes an automaton. Society can have both functions; it can further man’s healthy development, and it can hinder it; in fact, most societies do both, and the question is only to what degree and in what directions their positive and negative influence is exercised.

Kawanabe Kyōsai (Japan), Famous Mirrors: The Spirit of Japan, 1874.
Kyōsai (1831–1889) was shocked, at the age of nine, when he picked up a corpse and its head fell off. This marked his consciousness and his later break with ukiyo-e traditional painting to inaugurate what is now known as manga.

The antidote to many of our mental health crises must come from re-building society and forming a culture of community rather than a culture of antagonism and toxicity. Imagine if we built cities with more community centres, more places such as Ex OPG – Je so’ pazzo in Naples, more places for young people to gather and build social connections and their personalities and confidence. Imagine if we spent more of our resources to teach people to play music and to organise sports games, to read and write poetry, and to organise socially productive activities in our neighbourhoods. These community centres could house medical clinics, youth programmes, social workers, and therapists. Imagine the festivals that such centres could produce, the music and joy, the dynamism of events such Red Books Day. Imagine the activities – the painting of murals, neighbourhood clean-ups, and planting of gardens – that could emerge as these centres incubate conversations about what kind of world people want to build. In fact, we do not need to imagine any of this: it is already with us in small gestures, whether in Naples or in Delhi, in Johannesburg or in Santiago.

‘Depression is boring, I think’, wrote the poet Anne Sexton (1928–1974). ‘I would do better to make some soup and light up the cave’. So let’s make soup in a community centre, pick up guitars and drumsticks, and dance and dance and dance till that great feeling comes upon everyone to join in healing our broken humanity.

The post When You Suffer for Your Sanity and Struggle to Get Free first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

When You Suffer for Your Sanity and Struggle to Get Free

Vijay Prashad — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 14:47:09 +0000

Vincent van Gogh (Netherlands), The Starry Night, 1889.

Ex OPG, Naples (Italy), 2024.

Anita Rée (Germany), Self-Portrait, 1930.
Rée (1885–1933) killed herself after the Nazis declared her work to be ‘degenerate’.

Whether or not the individual is healthy is primarily not an individual matter, but depends on the structure of his society. A healthy society furthers man’s capacity to love his fellow men, to work creatively, to develop his reason and objectivity, to have a sense of self which is based on the experience of his own productive powers. An unhealthy society is one which creates mutual hostility, distrust, which transforms man into an instrument of use and exploitation for others, which deprives him of a sense of self, except inasmuch as he submits to others or becomes an automaton. Society can have both functions; it can further man’s healthy development, and it can hinder it; in fact, most societies do both, and the question is only to what degree and in what directions their positive and negative influence is exercised.

The post When You Suffer for Your Sanity and Struggle to Get Free first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

When You Suffer for Your Sanity and Struggle to Get Free

Vijay Prashad — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 14:47:09 +0000

Vincent van Gogh (Netherlands), The Starry Night, 1889.

Ex OPG, Naples (Italy), 2024.

Anita Rée (Germany), Self-Portrait, 1930.
Rée (1885–1933) killed herself after the Nazis declared her work to be ‘degenerate’.

Whether or not the individual is healthy is primarily not an individual matter, but depends on the structure of his society. A healthy society furthers man’s capacity to love his fellow men, to work creatively, to develop his reason and objectivity, to have a sense of self which is based on the experience of his own productive powers. An unhealthy society is one which creates mutual hostility, distrust, which transforms man into an instrument of use and exploitation for others, which deprives him of a sense of self, except inasmuch as he submits to others or becomes an automaton. Society can have both functions; it can further man’s healthy development, and it can hinder it; in fact, most societies do both, and the question is only to what degree and in what directions their positive and negative influence is exercised.

The post When You Suffer for Your Sanity and Struggle to Get Free first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

Food, Clothes, Men, Gas, and other Problems

Martha Rosenberg — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 14:08:36 +0000

How Covid Increased Housing Rage

Covid may have reduced road rage and cut gas and transportation bills but it has increased housing rage. Many in apartment or condo buildings have had their fill of the following irritants after more than a year of seclusion (not to mention their fill of family or roommates). Here are some of the issues of contention that have increased since Covid.

Mail Room

Why do businesses keep attaching door hangers for home improvements or cut-rate auto tune-ups? Don’t they know we are as broke as they are?

Why do companies send several copies of the same piece of junk mail? If we didn’t want one of the fliers—why would we want three? Why do neighbors drop the junk mail on the floor? Don’t they live here too?

Why are the mail compartments in the building five inches by two inches so packages don’t fit and you only get an Attempt-To-Deliver notice of a package or worse—the package left on the floor for anyone to steal?

Why has a phone book covered with spider webs sat in the corner for a year?

Laundry Room

Why are the washers and driers either in use or holding hot masses of “done” clothes that you don’t want to touch?

Why do the settings either boil your delicate clothes or barely heat?

Why has drier Number 3 not had heat for a year?

What is the blue glue-like substance on the top of washer Number 2 that apparently doesn’t wash off? Can you avoid washer 2?

Who owns the clothing in the “lost and found” box that is so big or strange that it seems like a joke for Halloween? Are there really neighbors who wear those articles?

Neighbors

Is there an apartment rule that one neighbor must cook cabbage, Brussels sprouts or cauliflower every day of the week so there is always a sulfur smell?

Are the daily pot smokers really “medical users”? Has anyone ever seen them?

Why do the techno music lovers begin, not end, playing their music at 10 PM?<

Why doesn’t the couple in Unit 12 just get a divorce?

Do the people in Unit 22 really move furniture every night? Or are they jumping up and down with ten friends for our edification?

Amazon

We get it that anything brick and mortar stores can do, Amazon can do quicker. We get it that people like to shop online at all hours and that driving for Amazon is one of the few viable jobs today. Still, why must the building entrance be filled all day every day with so many Amazon deliveries you could fall getting around them?

Family

Covid caused many Millennials to move home with their families and many white collar workers to “work from home.” We predict that many extended families will skip celebrating holidays this winter with their family, if they can—having had enough exposure to them. We also predict that no one for the next ten years will say they are leaving a job to “spend more time with my family.

The post Food, Clothes, Men, Gas, and other Problems first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Martha Rosenberg.

Technofascism: The Government Pressured Tech Companies to Censor Users

John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 01:32:26 +0000

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, has finally admitted what we knew all along: Facebook conspired with the government to censor individuals expressing “disapproved” views about the COVID-19 pandemic.

Zuckerberg’s confession comes in the wake of a series of court rulings that turn a blind eye to the government’s technofascism.

In a 2-1 decision in Children’s Health Defense v. Meta, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed a lawsuit brought by Children’s Health Defense against Meta Platforms for restricting CHD’s posts, fundraising, and advertising on Facebook following communications between Meta and federal government officials.

In a unanimous decision in the combined cases of NetChoice v. Paxton and Moody v. NetChoice, the U.S. Supreme Court avoided ruling on whether the states could pass laws to prohibit censorship by Big Tech companies on social media platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube.

And in a 6-3 ruling in Murthy v. Missouri , the Supreme Court sidestepped a challenge to the federal government’s efforts to coerce social media companies into censoring users’ First Amendment expression.

Welcome to the age of technocensorship.

On paper—under the First Amendment, at least—we are technically free to speak.

In reality, however, we are now only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow.

Case in point: internal documents released by the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government confirmed what we have long suspected: that the government has been working in tandem with social media companies to censor speech.

By “censor,” we’re referring to concerted efforts by the government to muzzle, silence and altogether eradicate any speech that runs afoul of the government’s own approved narrative.

This is political correctness taken to its most chilling and oppressive extreme.

The revelations that Facebook worked in concert with the Biden administration to censor content related to COVID-19, including humorous jokes, credible information and so-called disinformation, followed on the heels of a ruling by a federal court in Louisiana that prohibits executive branch officials from communicating with social media companies about controversial content in their online forums.

Likening the government’s heavy-handed attempts to pressure social media companies to suppress content critical of COVID vaccines or the election to “an almost dystopian scenario,” Judge Terry Doughty warned that “the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”

This is the very definition of technofascism.

Clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness, technofascism is powered by technological behemoths (both corporate and governmental) working in tandem to achieve a common goal.

The government is not protecting us from “dangerous” disinformation campaigns. It is laying the groundwork to insulate us from “dangerous” ideas that might cause us to think for ourselves and, in so doing, challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.

Thus far, the tech giants have been able to sidestep the First Amendment by virtue of their non-governmental status, but it’s a dubious distinction at best when they are marching in lockstep with the government’s dictates.

As Philip Hamburger and Jenin Younes write for The Wall Street Journal: “The First Amendment prohibits the government from ‘abridging the freedom of speech.’ Supreme Court doctrine makes clear that government can’t constitutionally evade the amendment by working through private companies.”

Nothing good can come from allowing the government to sidestep the Constitution.

The steady, pervasive censorship creep that is being inflicted on us by corporate tech giants with the blessing of the powers-that-be threatens to bring about a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.

Orwell intended 1984 as a warning. Instead, it is being used as a dystopian instruction manual for socially engineering a populace that is compliant, conformist and obedient to Big Brother.

In a world increasingly automated and filtered through the lens of artificial intelligence, we are finding ourselves at the mercy of inflexible algorithms that dictate the boundaries of our liberties.

Once artificial intelligence becomes a fully integrated part of the government bureaucracy, there will be little recourse: we will all be subject to the intransigent judgments of techno-rulers.

This is how it starts.

First, the censors went after so-called extremists spouting so-called “hate speech.”

Then they went after so-called extremists spouting so-called “disinformation” about stolen elections, the Holocaust, and Hunter Biden.

By the time so-called extremists found themselves in the crosshairs for spouting so-called “misinformation” about the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines, the censors had developed a system and strategy for silencing the nonconformists.

Eventually, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes “extremism, “we the people” might all be considered guilty of some thought crime or other.

Whatever we tolerate now—whatever we turn a blind eye to—whatever we rationalize when it is inflicted on others, whether in the name of securing racial justice or defending democracy or combatting fascism, will eventually come back to imprison us, one and all.

Watch and learn.

We should all be alarmed when any individual or group—prominent or not—is censored, silenced and made to disappear from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram for voicing ideas that are deemed politically incorrect, hateful, dangerous or conspiratorial.

Given what we know about the government’s tendency to define its own reality and attach its own labels to behavior and speech that challenges its authority, this should be cause for alarm across the entire political spectrum.

Here’s the point: you don’t have to like or agree with anyone who has been muzzled or made to disappear online because of their views, but to ignore the long-term ramifications of such censorship is dangerously naïve, because whatever powers you allow the government and its corporate operatives to claim now will eventually be used against you by tyrants of your own making.

Eventually, as Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.

If the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s happening already.

The post Technofascism: The Government Pressured Tech Companies to Censor Users first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

Jeffrey Sachs: US Biotech Cartel behind Covid Origins and Cover-up

The Grayzone — Sat, 10 Aug 2024 18:03:40 +0000

Jeffrey Sachs joins The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté to discuss the investigation into the origins of Covid-19. As chair of the Lancet COVID-19 commission, Sachs alleges that SARS-CoV2 originated from dangerous gain of function experiments sponsored and conducted by US biotech institutions. He alleges a vast cover-up of Covid origins, including by former members of his commission, and details the personal attacks he has incurred for speaking out.

The post Jeffrey Sachs: US Biotech Cartel behind Covid Origins and Cover-up first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by The Grayzone.

The Jab

Allen Forrest — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 14:27:39 +0000

The post The Jab first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

President Joe Biden is returning home to Delaware to self-isolate after being diagnosed with COVID-19 – July 17, 2024

KPFA — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 18:00:00 +0000

Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.

The post President Joe Biden is returning home to Delaware to self-isolate after being diagnosed with COVID-19 – July 17, 2024 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

From Rio to the Amazon: Brazil’s COVID-19 Crisis

VICE News — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 16:00:48 +0000

This content originally appeared on VICE News and was authored by VICE News.

Years of Living Deniably

T.P. Wilkinson — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 19:40:04 +0000

The summer of discontent is upon us. Whether we will find ourselves witness to direct exchange of fire or targets of another global counter-insurgency sweep is anyone’s guess. This time in 2020 the most massive abrogation of human and civil rights (temporary privileges granted to selective populations at different levels) in recorded history was accelerating on the highway to Hell, paved by the psychopathic oligarchy and the pharmaments industry. In the first half of 2024, distorted, partial, and self-serving disclosures and omissions have animated what remains of critical faculty in the West.

Predictably, at least for those few who learned no later than 2001 to trust nothing governments and corporations say or do, the schedule of lies—both by commission and omission—has been released for public assessment. Almost without exception, the assertions made by those who opposed both the state of siege and the subsequent mass poisoning of approximately a billion people have been verified in fragmentary form. The arbitrary nature and futility of the measures even for their ostensible purpose have been admitted. The genetic engineering origins of the alleged pathogen have also been licensed for public chatter. A recent report attributed to Establishment mouthpiece, Reuters, claims that covert US military operations included an Internet campaign to discredit China’s Sinovac injections, presumably to protect Pfizer market share. An “anti-vax” attack on the Philippine government was supposedly launched to discourage Filipinos from taking the Chinese prophylaxis. Such an “anti-vax” operation in the former US colony persisted while in the rest of the West those critical of the de facto mandatory injections were actively suppressed. Perhaps one should not rush to attribute so much value to this revelation.

The concern about the competition in the injection market, also known as vaccines or biologics (a term used to evade certain legacy regulatory conditions that survived the gutting of public institutions for assuring safe food and drugs) belies a confidence in the underlying official myth upon which the so-called COVID-19 pandemic is based. Hence one can see how these disclosures trigger gossip habits among critics, diverting their attention from the core issues.

Starting with the basic deception at the end of November 2019, there were early analysts like Larry Romanoff in Shanghai (aka Moon of Alabama I believe) who provided a clear breakdown of the alleged spread of whatever pathogen(s) were attributed to the first December days in Wuhan, Hubei province. Numerous other, meanwhile forgotten or ignored observers pointed to the coincidence of the World Military Games and a strangely ill US contingent. The suppression of reports by a medical practitioner in Washington State, early in the run-up to the all out war, has also been forgotten for all intents and purposes. Other observers pointed to the peculiar and not entirely explained role of a US agent, ostensibly on behalf of the paramilitary Centers for Disease Control, who had been seconded to China until shortly after the alleged outbreak when she suddenly returned to the US. Here it should be noted that the general ignorance of the standard literature on covert action became apparent. Aside from a few early commentators, there were hardly any reactions to these reports. All focus turned to pseudo-medical debates about transmissibility of animal viruses to humans and security conditions in biological experimentation laboratories. The obvious signals of covert action were scrupulously ignored or merely overlooked. David Martin remained one of the diligent open source researchers who refused to ignore the accumulated twenty years of overt-covert action. None of the mainstream and much of the conformist alternative media perpetuated the navel contemplation by which every event in the world is measured.

For example, while attention was focussed on the Japanese cruise ship in quarantine almost no questions were raised as to how a Wuhan “infection” became lethal for several high-ranking Iranian officials. Despite the well-known assassination campaign by the settler-colonial regime in Palestine and its principal patron on the Potomac, virtually no one discussed the possibility of a complex synchronisation of belligerence. The repeated occurrence of extraordinary livestock infections in China have yet to reach common consciousness in the overall story. Meanwhile the role of the Italian NATO Gladio squads in bombing the Bologna railway station (2 August 1980, killing 85 and wounding over 200) is public record. Aside from the fact that the OSS/CIA and Italian organised crime (aka the Mafia) have been running Italian politics since 1944, one needs no imagination to contemplate a scheme by which the Bergamo “covid” deaths in old-age facilities could have been perpetrated. The COVID-19 “pandemic” is entirely consistent with the NATO “strategy of tension” executed by Gladio units throughout Europe in the 1970s and early 1980s.

In short, before launching a dilettante debate about healthcare policy and pandemic preparedness, the facts on the ground already discredit any such starting point. On the contrary, while there continues to be speculation about “lab leaks” and “blow back”, there is little consistent discussion about the actual events in sequence and their political context.

What can be called the COVID counter-insurgency is really a sequel to the 2001 Global War on Terror triggered by relatively minor state terrorism using US military grade anthrax and followed by the highly profitable demolition of the World Trade Center towers in New York City. As has been argued elsewhere, we are in the midst of a world war, and it is against us. The euphemism “hybrid warfare” actually designates the systems approach to global counter-insurgency. The so-called “Great Reset” is better named “Phoenix 8.0”—the “infrastructure” to be neutralized is the bulk of humanity itself. While the weblogs surge with daily fear reports and reminders of what our psychopathic 1% “could do” little attention is directed to what they have done and are doing.

Admittedly there has to be some reason to wake every morning and not reach for some means of self-destruction. Yet in the midst of a crusade, the “infidels” have to know that they are dealing with religion and religious fanaticism and not misguided or mistaken neighbours whose only vice is too much money or power. That said, the ultimately political nature of the present struggle should not be forgotten. A political struggle is always collective even if not uniform. The hybrid quality of the offensive can be seen in the way overt military action, e.g. the war in Ukraine (as well as a hundred others with no exposure) and the mass murder of indigenous inhabitants in the reservations established by European settler-colonialists in Palestine are part of the same action that was launched in 2020—although demonstrably in the active planning and rehearsal phase since 2001!

Whether or not there was a novel virus and whether or not it leaked (deliberately) or was deployed ought not to be ignored but relegated to the details bin. “The virus” did not do anything—people did. More attention ought to be given to some hundred biological weapons laboratories operated by the US under contract in every country bordering Russia or China where foothold can be obtained. Jeffrey Sachs can be taken at his word when he confirms publicly what the record has long shown– that NIH (and CDC) are the cover for the massive US pharmaments industry, developing weapons against enemies both foreign and domestic. Global health threats are just the next stage in the jargon of hybrid warfare that started in 1913. The purpose of hybrid warfare or counter-insurgency is population control. Territorial control follows naturally. Population control means the exercise of force, physical, psychological, personal and environmental to manipulate the target humans at whatever scale is deemed necessary to achieve strategic objectives, e.g. power over natural resources, space, energy, “elimination of useless eaters”, etc. The crucial innovative success of the past four years has been enhanced scalability. Moreover through years of highly selective hyper-indoctrination, the COVID counter-insurgency could be launched without B-52 bombing strikes. However assassinations were and remain an essential part of mission tactics.

A series of articles posted in Dissident Voice and Global Research in 2020, 2021 and 2022 describe these operations in conceptual detail. Repeating them here would add only length.

The principal barrier to political analysis and after-action deliberation lies in the trauma of mass deaths. That is also part of the overall strategy. The oligarchy that waged saturation bombing against Germany, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, just to name the most egregious cases, learned that this does not break civilian morale. Instead they adopted the lesson of concentration camp management, namely that senseless death from disease, malnutrition, and other quasi-natural phenomena, even though induced by an aggressive external force, is far more traumatic. The trauma is compounded by the psychological torture of incarceration itself, especially irrational and arbitrary discipline imposed in prison-type conditions.

Failure to understand the degree to which the healthcare system has been integrated into the military-industrial (pharmaments) complex over the course of a century, i.e., Rockefeller control over medical education and certification finally established by the end of WW2 (when the WHO was established to internationalise it), prevents many serious critics from distinguishing between healthcare and state-ordered euthanasia. Trust in the Marcus Welby, Ben Casey, or Doctor House versions of in and out patient medicine has sustained a Disneyland view of the hospital and the virtually extinct GP. Here Lars von Trier’s 1994/1997 mini-series The Kingdom would be a far more instructive story.

Morticians and whistleblowing staff along with less naive medical experts repeatedly pointed to systematic malpractice perpetrated by hospital administrations for pay. Physicians in private practice have long been discouraged from practicing proper diagnosis and preventive care by state and private health insurers who only pay for treatments and expensive technology. The amount of money – bribery – paid throughout the North American and European hospital and outpatient “healthcare” apparatus to sustain the illusion of a pandemic—which was only so defined by a deliberate alteration of the international health regulations to accommodate the scheme—has yet to be measured. Add to this the amounts of bribery paid to obtain exclusive, mandatory deployment of the definite biological weapon: the genetic engineering injection euphemistically called a “covid vaccine”.

So far what we have is the fundamental collapse of anything resembling a popularly accountable government at any level and its entire appropriation by financial interests (hedge funds, private equity, banks etc.) armed to the teeth with the world’s most powerful propaganda apparatus and legions of brainwashed terrorists.

This war is far from over. One of the few Germans conspicuous for his attempts to integrate all these levels of hybrid warfare, eschewing distractions but collecting all details that might help explain the incoherent and contradictory aspects of this war, Reiner Füllmich, has been held in German maximum security prison for the past six months after he was kidnapped in Mexico by secret police assets. Having established in open court (Göttingen regional court) that the charges of embezzlement and dereliction of fiduciary duty upon which he has been held were not only fraudulent but baseless on their face, the presiding judge simply amended the charges and insisted that he would be found guilty of something else. Documents disclosed establish that Füllmich was kidnapped, charged and incarcerated by conspiracy of the German secret police. Others have already been silenced, bankrupted or driven into exile. During the active phase of the counter-insurgency fatal “accidents” neutralized several of the more prominent opposition, just in Germany. There has been no tally of the political assassinations in other countries. However, it is reasonable to say that large numbers of those in hospital did not die from a “virus” but from institutional violence, to paraphrase Johan Galtung.

The most well-trained response to the above is to deny that there is sufficient proof. Denial is also derived from the apparent absence of some “plan” that could have produced this result. Was it all just for money? Could these folks really have planned to cull a billion or so people from the herd? Not everybody was injured or died from the injections. It was an unprecedented emergency, hence mistakes could be expected. Certainly all these well-meaning medical professionals did not go to work to kill the old and infirm isolated in their factories. Some of our best friends are doctors.

These objections miss the point of counter-insurgency, covert warfare and hybrid operations. The psychological control which is the ultimate aim of hybrid/ counter-insurgency operations derives from what must be called a “conversion”. Conversion is different from conquest. Conquest seizes the land but leaves the people. Conversion seizes the people, the land follows. Conversion is accomplished through trauma, destruction of the knowledge base of the target, and injection of a new structure to replace the knowledge base destroyed. That is the technology of Christendom, Christian mission.

Moreover the trauma not only destroys the knowledge base it undermines the target’s capacity to distinguish internal and external phenomena. No deception is ever perfect. Therefore it is necessary to create and maintain sufficient doubt and uncertainty in the target so that he or she is unable to stabilise any explanation for events and circumstances to which he or she has been subjected. This is what torture aims to do. Helplessness, although also an illusion, is a powerful means of self-control. Conviction replaces empirical experience and all facts become deniable. William Colby, while Director of Central Intelligence, explained to the US Congress the meaning of plausible deniability. Then he was only referring to the actions of the Agency. Since 2020, Western society has been restructured entirely along those lines. So began the years of living deniably.

The post Years of Living Deniably first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by T.P. Wilkinson.

Reuters Reveals Secret U.S. Government Anti-China Operation to Increase Covid-19 Deaths in East Asia and Pacific

Eric Zuesse — Sun, 16 Jun 2024 19:06:15 +0000

On June 14, Reuters headlined: “Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic: The U.S. military launched a clandestine program amid the COVID crisis to discredit China’s Sinovac inoculation – payback for Beijing’s efforts to blame Washington for the pandemic. One target: the Filipino public. Health experts say the gambit was indefensible and put innocent lives at risk.”

A June 15 Google-search of the headline “Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic” produced virtually no publication of that Reuters news-report anywhere within the U.S. empire — U.S., Canada, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Philippines, etc. The news-report was not published, for example, in the New York Times, Washington Post, London Times, Guardian, Telegraph, and Daily Mail, nor CNN, NBC, CBS, BBC, NPR, PBS, Deutsche Welle, etc. That headline did briefly run on the websites of USA Today and Fox News, but never the news-report itself on that given site, and the link to the story no longer works at either USA Today or Fox News. There had been a link to that headlined story, but that news-report had not been published on either site. The only mainstream site in the U.S. empire that posted not only the headline but that also at their site the actual news-report, was Australian Broadcasting Corporation, on June 15. A Google-search of that headline four hours later on June 15 showed no better results. So, this extraordinarily important news-report remains as being news even the day after Reuters had published it on their news-feed. Suppression of a major news-story from a U.S. empire news-agency such as Reuters is highly extraordinary.

That suppressed news-report — which should immediately have been splashed everywhere, because it was among the biggest news-stories anywhere on June 14 — opened:

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus.

The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.

Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched descriptions shared by former U.S. military officials familiar with the Philippines operation. Almost all were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus – Tagalog for China is the virus.

This post, identified by Reuters, matched the messaging, timeframe and design of the U.S. military’s anti-vax propaganda campaign in the Philippines, former and current military officials say. Social media platform X also identified the account as fake and removed it.

TRANSLATION FROM TAGALOG

#ChinaIsTheVirus

Do you want that? COVID came from China and vaccines came from China

(Beneath the message is a picture of then-Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte saying: “China! Prioritize us first please. I’ll give you more islands, POGO and black sand.” POGO refers to Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators, online gambling companies that boomed during Duterte’s administration. Black sand refers to a type of mining.)

“COVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don’t trust China!” one typical tweet from July 2020 read in Tagalog. The words were next to a photo of a syringe beside a Chinese flag and a soaring chart of infections. Another post read: “From China – PPE, Face Mask, Vaccine: FAKE. But the Coronavirus is real.”

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Podcast: Pentagon’s anti-vax campaign

After Reuters asked X about the accounts, the social media company removed the profiles, determining they were part of a coordinated bot campaign based on activity patterns and internal data.

The U.S. military’s anti-vax effort began in the spring of 2020 and expanded beyond Southeast Asia before it was terminated in mid-2021, Reuters determined. Tailoring the propaganda campaign to local audiences across Central Asia and the Middle East, the Pentagon used a combination of fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to spread fear of China’s vaccines among Muslims at a time when the virus was killing tens of thousands of people each day. A key part of the strategy: amplify the disputed contention that, because vaccines sometimes contain pork gelatin, China’s shots could be considered forbidden under Islamic law.

The military program started under former President Donald Trump and continued months into Joe Biden’s presidency, Reuters found – even after alarmed social media executives warned the new administration that the Pentagon had been trafficking in COVID misinformation. The Biden White House issued an edict in spring 2021 banning the anti-vax effort, which also disparaged vaccines produced by other rivals, and the Pentagon initiated an internal review, Reuters found.

“I don’t think it’s defensible. I’m extremely dismayed, disappointed and disillusioned to hear that the U.S. government would do that.”

Daniel Lucey, infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine.

The news-report also said:

Then-Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte pleaded with citizens to get the COVID vaccine. “You choose, vaccine or I will have you jailed,” a masked Duterte said in this televised address in June 2021.

When he addressed the vaccination issue, the Philippines had among the worst inoculation rates in Southeast Asia. Only 2.1 million of its 114 million citizens were fully vaccinated – far short of the government’s target of 70 million. By the time Duterte spoke, COVID cases exceeded 1.3 million, and almost 24,000 Filipinos had died from the virus. The difficulty in vaccinating the population contributed to the worst death rate in the region.

COVID-19 deaths in the Philippines

The pandemic hit the Philippines especially hard, and by November 2021, COVID had claimed the lives of 48,361 people there. …

To implement the anti-vax campaign, the Defense Department overrode strong objections from top U.S. diplomats in Southeast Asia at the time, Reuters found. Sources involved in its planning and execution say the Pentagon, which ran the program through the military’s psychological operations center in Tampa, Florida, disregarded the collateral impact that such propaganda may have on innocent Filipinos.

“We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective,” said a senior military officer involved in the program. “We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.” …

In 2019, before COVID surfaced in full force, then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper signed a secret order that later paved the way for the launch of the U.S. military propaganda campaign. The order elevated the Pentagon’s competition with China and Russia to the priority of active combat, enabling commanders to sidestep the State Department when conducting psyops against those adversaries. The Pentagon spending bill passed by Congress that year also explicitly authorized the military to conduct clandestine influence operations against other countries, even “outside of areas of active hostilities.”

Esper, through a spokesperson, declined to comment. A State Department spokesperson referred questions to the Pentagon.

The statement — “We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective,” said a senior military officer involved in the program. “We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.” — means that the U.S. Government was placing a higher priority upon “dragging China through the mud” than on keeping covid-19 deaths down in the Assia-Pacific region. Especially in the Phillipines, which under Duarte’s Presidency was neutralist in the conflict between the U.S. Government and the Chinese Government, adding to the death-rate there was not a practical concern for the U.S. Government. In other words: the U.S. Government treats neutralist nations as-if they’re instead among its enemy-nations, to such an extent that even civilian deaths there that are caused by the U.S. Government, are of no practical (much less of ethical) concern. This operation by the U.S. Government was expected to increase deaths in that region (because the U.S. Government believed that vaccinations would reduce covid-19 deaths in its own and allied territories), but they were not concerned about that. They were interested only in “how we could drag China through the mud.” The possibily that deaths would increase deaths in and around Asia as a result of what they were doing, was of no concern to them. The extent to which the post-1945 U.S. Government is significantly different than was Hitler’s Government in Germany, is therefore an appropriate matter for public debate, though it’s not being debated anywhere in today’s U.S. empire. The major importance of this news-report from Reuters is that it importantly contributes to that debate; and, now, the further fact of its virtually complete black-out within the U.S. empire, displays the extent to which the U.S. empire will not tolerate the existence of any such public debate. Perhaps this fact is even more important than that extraordinary report from Reuters itself was.

A reasonable conclusion from all of this is that America’s Government treats neutral countries as-if they are enemy countries. An associated aspect of this fact is that starting on June 11th the U.S. Government increased its secondary sanctions against Russia — the sanctions against businesses that trade with Russia — so as to punish them for that and thereby to limit such firms’ choices as to which countries they will be allowed by the U.S. Government to have commerce with. Secondary sanctions present non-U.S. targets (neutral countries and firms) with a choice: do business with the United States or with the sanctioned target, but not both. This is erecting a new “iron curtain,” of a specifically economic type, between the American empire — “The West” — and “The East.”

The U.S. Government is, in effect, betting that to force neutrals to choose between “The West” and “the East,” “The West” will expand, instead of reduce, its empire. Whether, or the extent to which, the reverse might happen, was so much as even considered by “The West,” is not, as-of yet, publicly known.

However, specifically as regards what was the topic in that Reuters news-report: to be concerned not at all about how the death-rates in the east-Asian region would be affected, but ONLY about “how we could drag China through the mud,” was — given the fact that the U.S. Government thought that to increase the vaccination-rates in that region would reduce the death-rates there — for the U.S. Government to intend to increase covid-19 deaths in the East-Asia & Pacific region. It was their intent, regardless of whether, or the extent to which, it was the result of what the U.S. Government did there.

The post Reuters Reveals Secret U.S. Government Anti-China Operation to Increase Covid-19 Deaths in East Asia and Pacific first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

Iran’s Response to COVID-19

VICE News — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 16:00:05 +0000

This content originally appeared on VICE News and was authored by VICE News.

The Untold History of the Cold War, CIA Coups Around the World, and COVID’s Origin

Tucker Carlson — Wed, 29 May 2024 13:40:11 +0000

Professor Jeffrey Sachs is the President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He is the author of many best selling books, including The End of Poverty and The Ages of Globalization. Here he is with probably the smartest and most accurate assessment of the Ukraine war, and American foreign policy more broadly, ever caught on tape.

The post The Untold History of the Cold War, CIA Coups Around the World, and COVID’s Origin first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Tucker Carlson.

Zhang Zhan, the Chinese activist jailed for reporting on the Covid-19 lockdown, finally freed

Human Rights Watch — Mon, 27 May 2024 10:04:42 +0000

This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.

Surviving COVID-19 Without a Safety Net

VICE News — Thu, 23 May 2024 19:00:17 +0000

This content originally appeared on VICE News and was authored by VICE News.

From COVID-19 to Campus Protests: How the Police State Muzzles Free Speech

John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead — Wed, 22 May 2024 20:57:27 +0000

The police state does not want citizens who know their rights.

Nor does the police state want citizens prepared to exercise those rights.

This year’s graduates are a prime example of this master class in compliance. Their time in college has been set against a backdrop of crackdowns, lockdowns and permacrises ranging from the government’s authoritarian COVID-19 tactics to its more recent militant response to campus protests.

Born in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, these young people have been raised without any expectation of privacy in a technologically-driven, mass surveillance state; educated in schools that teach conformity and compliance; saddled with a debt-ridden economy on the brink of implosion; made vulnerable by the blowback from a military empire constantly waging war against shadowy enemies; policed by government agents armed to the teeth ready and able to lock down the country at a moment’s notice; and forced to march in lockstep with a government that no longer exists to serve the people but which demands they be obedient slaves or suffer the consequences.

And now, when they should be empowered to take their rightful place in society as citizens who fully understand and exercise their right to speak truth to power, they are being censored, silenced and shut down.

Consider what happened recently in Charlottesville, Va., when riot police were called in to shut down campus protests at the University of Virginia staged by students and members of the community to express their opposition to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Palestine.

As the local newspaper reported, “State police sporting tactical gear and riot shields moved in on the demonstrators, using pepper spray and sheer force to disperse the group and arrest the roughly 15 or so at the camp, where for days students, faculty and community members had sang songs, read poetry and painted signs in protest of Israel’s ongoing war in the Palestinian territory of Gaza.”

What a sad turn-about for an institution which was founded as an experiment in cultivating an informed citizenry by Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, champion of the Bill of Rights, and the nation’s third president.

Unfortunately, the University of Virginia is not unique in its heavy-handed response to what have been largely peaceful anti-war protests. According to the Washington Post, more than 2300 people have been arrested for taking part in similar campus protests across the country.

These lessons in compliance, while expected, are what comes of challenging the police state.

Free speech can certainly not be considered “free” when expressive activities across the nation are being increasingly limited, restricted to so-called free speech zones, or altogether blocked.

Remember, the First Amendment gives every American the right to “petition his government for a redress of grievances.”

Along with the constitutional right to peacefully (and that means non-violently) assemble, the right to free speech allows us to challenge the government through protests and demonstrations and to attempt to change the world around us—for the better or the worse—through protests and counterprotests.

If citizens cannot stand out in the open and voice their disapproval of their government, its representatives and its policies without fearing prosecution, then the First Amendment with all its robust protections for free speech, assembly and the right to petition one’s government for a redress of grievances is little more than window-dressing on a store window—pretty to look at but serving little real purpose.

After all, living in a representative republic means that each person has the right to take a stand for what they think is right, whether that means marching outside the halls of government, wearing clothing with provocative statements, or simply holding up a sign.

That’s what the First Amendment is supposed to be about: it assures the citizenry of the right to express their concerns about their government to their government, in a time, place and manner best suited to ensuring that those concerns are heard.

Unfortunately, through a series of carefully crafted legislative steps and politically expedient court rulings, government officials have managed to disembowel this fundamental freedom, rendering it with little more meaning than the right to file a lawsuit against government officials.

In more and more cases, the government is declaring war on what should be protected political speech whenever it challenges the government’s power, reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.

Indeed, there is a long and growing list of the kinds of speech that the government considers dangerous enough to red flag and subject to censorship, surveillance, investigation and prosecution: hate speech, conspiratorial speech, treasonous speech, threatening speech, inflammatory speech, radical speech, anti-government speech, extremist speech, etc.

Clearly, the government has no interest in hearing what “we the people” have to say.

Yet if Americans are not able to peacefully assemble for expressive activity outside of the halls of government or on public roads on which government officials must pass, or on college campuses, the First Amendment has lost all meaning.

If we cannot stand peacefully outside of the Supreme Court or the Capitol or the White House, our ability to hold the government accountable for its actions is threatened, and so are the rights and liberties that we cherish as Americans.

And if we cannot proclaim our feelings about the government, no matter how controversial, on our clothing, or to passersby, or to the users of the world wide web, then the First Amendment really has become an exercise in futility.

The source of the protest shouldn’t matter. The politics of the protesters are immaterial.

To play politics with the First Amendment encourages a double standard that will see us all muzzled in the end.

The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is the final link in the police state chain.

If ever there were a time for us to stand up for the right to speak freely, even if it’s freedom for speech we hate, the time is now.

The post From COVID-19 to Campus Protests: How the Police State Muzzles Free Speech first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

Donald Trump’s Actual Record on COVID-19

Bill Lueders — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 21:49:51 +0000

A look back at how the former President botched the defining challenge of his presidency.

This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Bill Lueders.

An Important Admission

Allen Forrest — Fri, 29 Mar 2024 14:17:08 +0000

The post An Important Admission first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Mistakes Were Made

C.J. Hopkins — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 21:00:37 +0000

Make fun of the Germans all you want, and I’ve certainly done that a bit during these past few years, but, if there’s one thing they’re exceptionally good at, it’s taking responsibility for their mistakes. Seriously, when it comes to acknowledging one’s mistakes, and not rationalizing, or minimizing, or attempting to deny them, and any discomfort they may have allegedly caused, no one does it quite like the Germans.

Take this Covid mess, for example. Just last week, the German authorities confessed that they made a few minor mistakes during their management of the “Covid pandemic.” According to Karl Lauterbach, the Minister of Health, “we were sometimes too strict with the children and probably started easing the restrictions a little too late.” Horst Seehofer, the former Interior Minister, admitted that he would no longer agree to some of the Covid restrictions today, for example, nationwide nighttime curfews. “One must be very careful with calls for compulsory vaccination,” he added. Helge Braun, Head of the Chancellery and Minister for Special Affairs under Merkel, agreed that there had been “misjudgments,” for example, “overestimating the effectiveness of the vaccines.”

This display of the German authorities’ unwavering commitment to transparency and honesty, and the principle of personal honor that guides the German authorities in all their affairs, and that is deeply ingrained in the German character, was published in a piece called “The Divisive Virus” in Der Spiegel, and immediately widely disseminated by the rest of the German state and corporate media in a totally organic manner which did not in any way resemble one enormous Goebbelsian keyboard instrument pumping out official propaganda in perfect synchronization, or anything creepy and fascistic like that.

Germany, after all, is “an extremely democratic state,” with freedom of speech and the press and all that, not some kind of totalitarian country where the masses are inundated with official propaganda and critics of the government are dragged into criminal court and prosecuted on trumped-up “hate crime” charges.

OK, sure, in a non-democratic totalitarian system, such public “admissions of mistakes” — and the synchronized dissemination thereof by the media — would just be a part of the process of whitewashing the authorities’ fascistic behavior during some particularly totalitarian phase of transforming society into whatever totalitarian dystopia they were trying to transform it into (for example, a three-year-long “state of emergency,” which they declared to keep the masses terrorized and cooperative while they stripped them of their democratic rights; i.e., the ones they hadn’t already stripped them of, and conditioned them to mindlessly follow orders, and robotically repeat nonsensical official slogans, and vent their impotent hatred and fear at the new “Untermenschen” or “counter-revolutionaries”), but that is obviously not the case here.

No, this is definitely not the German authorities staging a public “accountability” spectacle in order to memory-hole what happened during 2020-2023 and enshrine the official narrative in history. There’s going to be a formal “Inquiry Commission” — conducted by the same German authorities that managed the “crisis” — which will get to the bottom of all the regrettable but completely understandable “mistakes” that were made in the heat of the heroic battle against The Divisive Virus!

OK, calm down, all you “conspiracy theorists,” “Covid deniers,” and “anti-vaxxers.” This isn’t going to be like the Nuremberg Trials. No one is going to get taken out and hanged. It’s about identifying and acknowledging mistakes, and learning from them, so that the authorities can manage everything better during the next “pandemic,” or “climate emergency,” or “terrorist attack,” or “insurrection,” or whatever.

For example, the Inquiry Commission will want to look into how the government accidentally declared a Nationwide State of Pandemic Emergency and revised the Infection Protection Act, suspending the German constitution and granting the government the power to rule by decree, on account of a respiratory virus that clearly posed no threat to society at large, and then unleashed police goon squads on the thousands of people who gathered outside the Reichstag to protest the revocation of their constitutional rights.

Once they do, I’m sure they’ll find that that “mistake” bears absolutely no resemblance to the Enabling Act of 1933, which suspended the German constitution and granted the government the power to rule by decree, after the Nazis declared a nationwide “state of emergency.”

Another thing the Commission will probably want to look into is how the German authorities accidentally banned any further demonstrations against their arbitrary decrees, and ordered the police to brutalize anyone participating in such “illegal demonstrations.”

And, while the Commission is inquiring into the possibly slightly inappropriate behavior of their law enforcement officials, they might want to also take a look at the behavior of their unofficial goon squads, like Antifa, which they accidentally encouraged to attack the “anti-vaxxers,” the “Covid deniers,” and anyone brandishing a copy of the German constitution.

Come to think of it, the Inquiry Commission might also want to look into how the German authorities, and the overwhelming majority of the state and corporate media, accidentally systematically fomented mass hatred of anyone who dared to question the government’s arbitrary and nonsensical decrees or who refused to submit to “vaccination,” and publicly demonized us as “Corona deniers,” “conspiracy theorists,” “anti-vaxxers,” “far-right anti-Semites,” etc., to the point where mainstream German celebrities like Sarah Bosetti were literally describing us as the inessential “appendix” in the body of the nation, quoting an infamous Nazi almost verbatim.

And then there’s the whole “vaccination” business. The Commission will certainly want to inquire into that. They will probably want to start their inquiry with Karl Lauterbach, and determine exactly how he accidentally lied to the public, over and over, and over again …

And whipped people up into a mass hysteria over “KILLER VARIANTS” …

And “LONG COVID BRAIN ATTACKS” …

And how “THE UNVACCINATED ARE HOLDING THE WHOLE COUNTRY HOSTAGE, SO WE NEED TO FORCIBLY VACCINATE EVERYONE!”

And so on. I could go on with this all day, but it will be much easier to just refer you, and the Commission, to this documentary film by Aya Velázquez. Non-German readers may want to skip to the second half, unless they’re interested in the German “Corona Expert Council” …

Look, the point is, everybody makes “mistakes,” especially during a “state of emergency,” or a war, or some other type of global “crisis.” At least we can always count on the Germans to step up and take responsibility for theirs, and not claim that they didn’t know what was happening, or that they were “just following orders,” or that “the science changed.”

Plus, all this Covid stuff is ancient history, and, as Olaf, an editor at Der Spiegel, reminds us, it’s time to put the “The Divisive Pandemic” behind us …

… and click heels, and heil the New Normal Democracy!

The post Mistakes Were Made first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by C.J. Hopkins.

Better immunisation coverage needed to prevent Pacific measles, says WHO

APR editor — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 00:44:10 +0000

By Caleb Fotheringham, RNZ Pacific journalist

Surveillance and better vaccine coverage is needed to prevent another measles outbreak in the Pacific, says the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) Western Pacific regional director.

Dr Saia Ma’u Piukala said many children missed out on routine vaccinations — including measles and rubella — during the covid-19 pandemic.

According to WHO, measles cases jumped by 225 percent — from just over 1400 cases in 2022 to more than 5000 last year — in the Western Pacific region.

LISTEN TO RNZ PACIFIC WAVES: Immunisation coverage has dropped in almost all the regions” – WHO’s Dr Saia Ma’u Piukala

A statement from WHO said the recent increase has been caused by gaps in vaccination coverage and disease surveillance, and people travelling from countries with outbreaks.

“I think the health workforce were concentrating on covid-19 vaccinations and forgot about routine vaccinations, not only for measles, but other routine immunisation schedule,” Piukala told RNZ Pacific.

“People are going back to fill the gaps.”

From 2022 to 2023, 11 countries in the Western Pacific, including Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau and Papua New Guinea, conducted nationwide measles and rubella vaccination campaigns.

Catch-up successful
Piukala said the catch-up campaigns had been successful.

“That will definitely reduce the risk,” he said.

“No child should get sick or die of measles.”

In 2019, Samoa had an outbreak that killed 83 people off the back of an outbreak in Auckland.

WHO Regional Director for the Western Pacific Dr Saia Ma’u Piukala . . . “No child should get sick or die of measles.” Image: Pierre Albouy/WHO

Piukala said the deaths made people understand the importance of measles and rubella vaccinations for their children.

Fiji, Guam, French Polynesia and New Caledonia are the only countries or territories that have local testing capacity for measles, with most nations sending samples to Melbourne for testing.

Piukala said WHO plans for Samoa, the Cook Islands, and the Solomon Islands to have testing capacity by 2025.

“The PCR machines that were made available in Pacific Island countries during the covid pandemic can also be used to detect other respiratory viruses, including the flu, LSV, and measles and rubella.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

China’s COVID-19 vaccine victims petition Chinese political elites

By Yitong Wu and Chingman for RFA Cantonese — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 05:30:00 +0000

Luo Zhehan, a primary school student in China’s Jiangsu province, was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia after being vaccinated with a domestically-produced COVID-19 vaccine and passed away a month afterwards. But his family rather faced significant challenges in seeking justice, recounting threats of imprisonment from the government during their pursuit.

Luo is not alone. Victims of China’s home-made COVID-19 vaccine have issued a petition calling on the authorities to take responsibility, as representatives vowed to take their grievances to Beijing during the “two sessions” meetings that will open next Tuesday. Like Luo’s family, however, they face an uncertain and challenging path ahead.

Qian Dalong, the victims’ representative in Beijing told Radio Free Asia that the authorities have blocked the petition on the internet after it spread online rapidly, while many human rights representatives have been monitored by the police or placed under house arrest.

The two sessions are the state’s most important annual political meetings – the concurrent meetings of the National People’s Congress (NPC), top legislature, and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the political advisory body to the Chinese Communist Party.

But he said the group has mailed the petition to delegates of the two sessions, hoping to draw their attention to their plight.

“[The authorities have] set up layers of obstacles to prevent people from speaking. We have already mailed [the petition] to them. Whether the delegates have a conscience, or dare to take up the issue? We don’t know.”

Qian Dalong says he is currently being surveilled. (Photo provided by Qian Dalong)

Qian said he suddenly became paralyzed after taking the third dose of the Chinese vaccine, Sinovac. He revealed the side effects of the vaccine on Chinese social media last July, which led to a month of detention and the blockade of his Weibo account. Attempts to contact the authorities via the government to take responsibility failed.

“There should be more than 3,000 victims, as some don’t even realize that it’s because of the vaccine.”

Most of the nearly 3,000 victims who signed the petition have contracted leukemia (2,973 cases) and type 1 diabetes, according to a post by the Chinese blog Weiquanwang, which translates into Rights Protection Network, on Feb. 22.

The victims and their families last called out to the Chinese government to investigate and take responsibility in February last year.

In an open letter, they called on the National Health Commission to investigate all cases of major health problems occurring after vaccination, and to call in independent and scientific investigators to probe their claims, as well as pay the medical expenses of those left sick or disabled by vaccines, and offer them appropriate levels of care.

Systemic problem

An expert involved in handling public health incidents and did not want to be named for fear of reprisal believes that China’s public health incidents are systemic problems.

“In the history of China’s public health, similar incidents have emerged one after another. The most terrifying thing about this country is not the technical problem,” said the expert. “The Chinese government and vaccine companies are bound by interests. There has never been transparent data and credible information. The system is shady, so what defenders are facing is not just a company, but the entire government.”

The expert called on the health ministry to act as a coordinator for the drug company to fork out the money for a third agency to establish a fund that the victims can supervise. The fund will be used for the immediate treatment of victims and for their long-term well-being.

“But I don’t have any hope,” the expert added.

According to China’s “Vaccine Administration Law,” the state implements a compensation system for abnormal vaccination reactions. But the government has brought forth official experts to refute victims’ claims.

One was the Chinese Academy of Sciences fellow, Wang Fusheng who slammed the victims and rights advocates’ claims as “irresponsible,” reiterating that research has shown the vaccine does not cause leukemia and diabetes.

The National Health Commission and the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention did not respond to requests for comment.

Translated with additional reporting by RFA Staff. Edited by Taejun Kang and Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Yitong Wu and Chingman for RFA Cantonese.

Government Gag Rules Keep Vital Info From the Public

FAIR — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 21:49:58 +0000

Reporting on the government institution charged with saving us from the Covid pandemic was restricted enough to leave real holes in what we knew.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—like many other organizations these days, public and private—prohibits its employees from speaking freely to reporters. At many entities, the rules mean staff members cannot have any unauthorized contact with reporters, with media inquiries often redirected to a public information office (PIO).

The forced notification of the higher-ups is quite enough to silence many employees about anything that would displease the bosses. But beyond that, reporters’ requests to speak to someone are often not granted at all.

Unreported gaps in defenses

Washington Post (7/4/20)

Why are those controls not an outrage? Certainly, some CDC shortcomings that led to ill-controlled Covid spread could have been revealed earlier—maybe well before the pandemic—if people were talking to reporters normally. That would include confidential conversations, if that were the agreement between staff member and reporter.

The Covid Crisis Group, in its investigative report last year, pointed out (among many other shortcomings) that neither the CDC nor anyone in government had a well-developed design for screening people at international air gateways. Nor had CDC or any other agency “tried to build a rapid-action, interdisciplinary, systematic biomedical surveillance network.” In July 2020, months after the agency’s mistakes with the Covid test hampered the early response, the Washington Post (7/4/20) revealed CDC had made the same mistakes with the Zika virus test four years before.

One could look at each such gap in the nation’s pandemic defenses and think: “There were agency staff who understood the problem—possibly couldn’t sleep at night because of it—and they were banned from speaking freely about it to reporters.”

Quite possibly either a general-interest outlet or a specialized trade newsletter would have been tipped off, if they had normal contact with such people.

Gradually, over several decades, with almost no public discussion, these gag rules have come to many corners of society, including public and private entities, businesses, federal, state and local governments, organizations covered by science reporters, schools of all levels, and police departments. The censorship mechanism is taught in at least some communications classes.

Journalists’ responsibility to fight such restrictions, not just get stories, is indicated by regular reports about bad situations that might have been changed earlier: information on generic drug production problems that took author Katherine Eban 10 years to pull out of the system; plans by the Trump administration to separate children from parents; young CDC scientists who knew in early 2020 that Covid could be spread by people who did not seem ill; or the many law enforcement organizations all over the country that stifle reporting on themselves.

Blockages politically driven

Quill (9/22/22)

Former CDC media relations head Glen Nowak (Quill, 9/22/22) has said the agency’s controls grew tighter with each presidential administration, beginning with President Ronald Reagan. Each new administration looked back at what the previous one had done, and saw there had been no adverse political impact from tightening the restrictions. Nowak said the blockages were often politically driven, and frequently effective in controlling information.

When a reporter contacts the PIO for permission to talk to someone at the CDC, the request is sent up through the political layers of government, at least to the Department of Health and Human Services secretary of public affairs, and often all the way to the White House. Behind closed doors, officials decide who may speak to whom, and what may be discussed.

Nowak said:

Administrations, typically, their priority is trying to remain elected. And they’re often looking at policies through: how will this help or not help when it comes to running for election…. A serious health threat can be underplayed or ignored if it doesn’t align with political ideology of the party in power, or a party is trying to get power.

For over 15 years, a number of journalism organizations have been fighting these controls. Letters signed by 25 to 60 organizations have gone to the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations, as well as to Congress, calling for an end to the constraints in federal entities.

News outlets have researched or editorialized against the practice. Last year, the Lexington Courier Journal (6/15/23) found that of 35 Kentucky agencies, 70% restrict or prohibit employees from talking to journalists. The Pittsburgh Post Gazette editorial board (9/4/23) said that “governments and other agencies have tightly constricted access to the people who actually make the decisions and know, first-hand, key information.”

Testing the restrictions

There’s been another important step in the last few months. Two journalists filed separate suits against public agencies for having these policies. Some people, including attorneys, have said in the past that journalists could not sue agencies in such instances. A plaintiff, they said, would have to be an insider, a “willing speaker.”

However, Brittany Hailer, director of the Pittsburgh Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, sued the Allegheny County Jail last August for allegedly prohibiting employees and contractors from speaking to journalists without prior approval of the warden. Her complaint says that the jail, which houses on average 1,553 people, has had a death rate “reportedly nearly twice the national average among local jails of similar size.”

Hailer is represented by the Yale Law School Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

In addition, the publishers of the Catskills, NY–based Reporter sued the Delaware County (New York) Board of Supervisors. The board had pulled the county’s legal advertising from the paper, allegedly in retaliation for news coverage the board didn’t like, and then prohibited county employees from speaking to the paper about “pressing matters of public concern.” The board mandated, the complaint said, that all communications with the Reporter be funneled through the county attorney’s office.

The Reporter’s publishers are represented by the Cornell Law School First Amendment Clinic and Michael J. Grygiel.

Both cases are currently pending before the courts.

Foundational thinking for the cases was provided by a 2019 report by prominent First Amendment attorney Frank LoMonte, who was then head of the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information, and is now counsel at CNN. In a summary report, LoMonte said of the constraints:

Media plaintiffs should be able to establish that their interests have been injured, whether directly or indirectly, to sustain a First Amendment challenge to government restraints on employees’ speech to the media. The only question is whether the restraint will be treated as a presumptively unconstitutional prior restraint, or whether a less rigorous level of scrutiny will apply.

Is this authoritarianism?

Is this trend a kind of authoritarianism that is growing out of our public relations culture?

Many types of media—national, local or specialized—publish, with little or no skepticism, information handed out from government agencies. Nor do journalists warn audiences that the staff members who know other parts of the story are walled off from reporters.

Why does the press assume that any human organization will maintain competence or integrity when it is blocking or manipulating information about itself?

Even as climate disruption poses an ever-greater threat, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy have these don’t-talk policies, as do most federal agencies.

Last year, the Department of Commerce, with its prominent role in regulating artificial intelligence, put out a policy saying that requests for official press interviews should go through the public affairs officials, and further

should be submitted by email with details to include story angle, background, requested attribution, Q&A, suggested talking points and reporter’s deadline. Please do not agree to attribution terms prior to OPA [Office of Public Affairs] clearance. If possible, please allow a 24-hour turnaround for print interviews. Please allow a 48-hour turnaround for television interviews, due to the extended White House clearance process.

But, again, even with the hazards inherent in such restraints on journalism, the press doesn’t often tell the public about the controls.

At the local level, stories emerge about abuses by law enforcement, like the murder of George Floyd and systemic abuse by sheriffs’ departments. Still, most of the press doesn’t explain that many police departments impose rules that can hide such violations.

The gag rules, or “censorship by PIO,” have become a cultural norm, and millions of people in the United States are now banned from speaking, or speaking freely, to journalists. Even though free speech is necessary for democracy and public welfare, journalists have in large part acquiesced to making routine, permission-to-speak requests through PIOs or others.

A right to control the message?

Police1 (7/27/20)

I’ve heard reporters from prominent outlets gripe about the process, and the time it takes to be allowed to talk to someone. But there seems to be no recognition that the public needs to know when none of the thousands of people in an agency are allowed to speak to journalists without that oversight, and most can’t speak to them at all. Nor is there discussion that someone in the agency, in a high or low position, could blow the journalists’ story out of the water, even after publication, or blow their minds about something they are oblivious to.

This may have originated with the long-held journalism convention that news outlets do not complain to the public about the trials they go through when people in power try to block their newsgathering. We may fear that if we admit we’ve been blocked, we discredit our news product.

On the other side, some public relations people or agency leaders try to rebut the idea they are censors, saying they are trying to help the press, or increase transparency, or they want to coordinate the story from different parts of their organization. That, of course, doesn’t address the fact they could serve these functions without banning all unfettered contacts.

Other PR officials are quite straightforward about why employees are silenced: People leading an organization, they say, have a right to set the message.

There is no doubt that agencies and offices have real challenges in this communications era. Carefully crafted, honest messages can be blown apart by careless statements. Employees can be ill-informed, or they can be promoting their own agenda. Statements can come across as coming from the organization itself when they are not—due to what the staffer says, what the news outlet says or how the audience interprets it. Journalists are often time-pressured, and can be sensation-seeking or less than careful.

Those are serious problems that can cause real harm. They need to be continuously addressed by both agencies and journalists, with both sides listening carefully to the other. However, they are not a reason to degrade ourselves to what is one of the most repressive and deadly things in history: people in power controlling information.

There is no reason news outlets can’t fight this. If they stand together, they can fight against these policies, and work to ensure the press and others have normal access to staff. They can work within their associations or build coalitions. They can agree to tell the public routinely when employees are gagged, treating the situation like the corruption it is.

The press has led similar fights for decades, pushing for access to documents with freedom of information laws, and access to official meetings under the open meetings laws. Fighting for normal communication with human beings should not be different.

Why is the press doing this?

Popular Resistance (2/5/24)

Jay Rosen, journalism professor at New York University, says (Popular Resistance, 2/5/24): “The news system is not designed for human understanding. Even at the top providers, it’s designed to produce a flow of new content today—and every day.”

Media, at their best, do seriously excellent content. In this era of information tsunamis, a lot of stuff is still pushed at the press. There are also masses of information in the public arena that just take work to pull together. By reading the Federal Register or other public documents, a reporter can find something intriguing that’s getting little attention. And reporters also get material that isn’t public.

The unfortunate side of all this legitimate supply is that it keeps outlets from worrying too much about how people in power are manipulating us away from overall understanding, and from some of the most critical information.

Journalists often respond to questions about these censorship systems with something like, “Good reporters get the story anyway.” It’s possible that we can use our skills to dig out stories that audiences are interested in, and hopefully our news outlet survives. That doesn’t mean that we are doing good enough coverage of the institutions that impact the public—not with nearly everyone in the organization silenced.

The newsgathering controls began to grow well before today’s alarming decline in numbers of journalists and news outlets, or the emergence of other threats to democracy. One can imagine that vicious cycles among those factors will worsen as journalists grow even more dependent “on inexpensive official sources as the credible news source,” as press critic Victor Pickard (Editor & Publisher, 11/15/21) has called them.

It’s up to journalists to fight for the right to talk to people with vital information normally, fluidly, without authorities’ involvement.

Featured image: Creative Commons photo by Carolyn Langton.

The post Government Gag Rules Keep Vital Info From the Public appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by FAIR.

Chinese director Chen Pinlin arrested over White Paper protest documentary

Committee to Protect Journalists — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 17:17:22 +0000

Taipei, February 22, 2024—Chinese authorities must immediately release documentary director Chen Pinlin, drop all legal proceedings, and allow journalists to document demonstrations, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Thursday.

On February 18, Chinese authorities charged Chen, who published a documentary on anti-COVID restriction protests in late 2023, with “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” according to Chinese human rights news websites Minsheng Guancha and Weiquanwang. On January 5, Shanghai police arrested Chen, who published work under the pseudonym Plato, and detained the filmmaker at the Baoshan Detention Center.

“The arrest of Chen demonstrates China’s fear of genuine reporting on its authoritarian practices,” said Iris Hsu, CPJ’s China representative. “Chinese authorities should immediately release and drop all charges against Chen and stop detaining journalists and documentarians who are merely doing their job to cover issues of public concern.”

The protests, also known as the “White Paper Movement,” started when a deadly apartment fire in the northwest region of Xinjiang killed at least 10 people in November 2022, and questions were raised about whether the government’s stringent lockdown measures prevented the victims from escaping.

Chen posted the documentary “Not the Foreign Force” on the first anniversary of the White Paper Movement on YouTube and X, formerly Twitter, in late November 2023, according to those reports. The documentary compiled extensive protest footage, translated social media posts demanding freedom of expression, and reported that some protesters remained detained. Chen’s X account and YouTube channel were deleted within that week.

An officer at the Baoshan Detention Center told CPJ that he could not disclose information about the detainees and redirected CPJ to the public security bureau. CPJ called the Shanghai Public Security Bureau Baoshan Branch for comment, but no one answered.

China was the world’s worst jailer of journalists, according to CPJ’s latest annual prison census, with at least 44 behind bars on December 1, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

COVID-19 Tested Our Commitment to Freedom

John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 16:44:47 +0000

The remedy is worse than the disease.

— Francis Bacon, “Of Seditions and Trouble” in Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall

The government never cedes power willingly.

Neither should we.

If the COVID-19 debacle taught us one thing it is that, as Justice Neil Gorsuch acknowledged, “Rule by indefinite emergency edict risks leaving all of us with a shell of a democracy and civil liberties just as hollow.”

Unfortunately, we still haven’t learned.

We’re still allowing ourselves to be fully distracted by circus politics and a constant barrage of bad news screaming for attention.

Three years after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which gave world governments (including our own) a convenient excuse for expanding their powers, abusing their authority, and further oppressing their constituents, there’s something being concocted in the dens of power.

The danger of martial law persists.

Any government so willing to weaponize one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers and justify all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security will not hesitate to override the Constitution and lockdown the nation again.

You’d better get ready, because that so-called crisis could be anything: civil unrest, national emergencies, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”

COVID-19 was a test to see how quickly the populace would march in lockstep with the government’s dictates, no questions asked, and how little resistance the citizenry would offer up to the government’s power grabs when made in the name of national security.

“We the people” failed that test spectacularly.

Characterized by Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch as “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country,” the government’s COVID-19 response to the COVID-19 pandemic constituted a massively intrusive, coercive and authoritarian assault on the right of individual sovereignty over one’s life, self and private property.

In a statement attached to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Arizona v. Mayorkas, a case that challenged whether the government could continue to use it pandemic powers even after declaring the public health emergency over, Gorsuch provided a catalog of the many ways in which the government used COVID-19 to massively overreach its authority and suppress civil liberties:

“Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale. Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to remain in their homes. They shuttered businesses and schools, public and private. They closed churches even as they allowed casinos and other favored businesses to carry on. They threatened violators not just with civil penalties but with criminal sanctions too. They surveilled church parking lots, recorded license plates, and issued notices warning that attendance at even outdoor services satisfying all state social-distancing and hygiene requirements could amount to criminal conduct. They divided cities and neighborhoods into color-coded zones, forced individuals to fight for their freedoms in court on emergency timetables, and then changed their color-coded schemes when defeat in court seemed imminent.”

Truly, the government’s (federal and state) handling of the COVID-19 pandemic delivered a knockout blow to our civil liberties, empowering the police state to flex its powers by way of a bevy of lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc.

What started off as an experiment in social distancing in order to flatten the curve of an unknown virus (and not overwhelm the nation’s hospitals or expose the most vulnerable to unavoidable loss of life scenarios) quickly became strongly worded suggestions for citizens to voluntarily stay at home and strong-armed house arrest orders with penalties in place for non-compliance.

Every day brought a drastic new set of restrictions by government bodies (most have been delivered by way of executive orders) at the local, state and federal level that were eager to flex their muscles for the so-called “good” of the populace.

There was talk of mass testing for COVID-19 antibodies, screening checkpoints, mass surveillance in order to carry out contact tracing, immunity passports to allow those who have recovered from the virus to move around more freely, snitch tip lines for reporting “rule breakers” to the authorities, and heavy fines and jail time for those who dared to venture out without a mask, congregate in worship without the government’s blessing, or re-open their businesses without the government’s say-so.

It was even suggested that government officials should mandate mass vaccinations and “ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere.”

Those tactics were already being used abroad.

In Italy, the unvaccinated were banned from restaurants, bars and public transportation, and faced suspensions from work and monthly fines. Similarly, France banned the unvaccinated from most public venues.

In Austria, anyone who had not complied with the vaccine mandate faced fines up to $4100. Police were to be authorized to carry out routine checks and demand proof of vaccination, with penalties of as much as $685 for failure to do so.

In China, which adopted a zero tolerance, “zero COVID” strategy, whole cities—some with populations in the tens of millions—were forced into home lockdowns for weeks on end, resulting in mass shortages of food and household supplies. Reports surfaced of residents “trading cigarettes for cabbage, dishwashing liquid for apples and sanitary pads for a small pile of vegetables. One resident traded a Nintendo Switch console for a packet of instant noodles and two steamed buns.”

For those unfortunate enough to contract COVID-19, China constructed “quarantine camps” throughout the country: massive complexes boasting thousands of small, metal boxes containing little more than a bed and a toilet. Detainees—including children, pregnant women and the elderly— were reportedly ordered to leave their homes in the middle of the night, transported to the quarantine camps in buses and held in isolation.

If this last scenario sounds chillingly familiar, it should.

Eighty years ago, another authoritarian regime established more than 44,000 quarantine camps for those perceived as “enemies of the state”: racially inferior, politically unacceptable or simply noncompliant.

While the majority of those imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camps, forced labor camps, incarceration sites and ghettos were Jews, there were also Polish nationals, gypsies, Russians, political dissidents, resistance fighters, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals.

Culturally, we have become so fixated on the mass murders of Jewish prisoners by the Nazis that we overlook the fact that the purpose of these concentration camps were initially intended to “incarcerate and intimidate the leaders of political, social, and cultural movements that the Nazis perceived to be a threat to the survival of the regime.”

How do you get from there to here, from Auschwitz concentration camps to COVID quarantine centers?

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to connect the dots.

You just have to recognize the truth in the warning: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

This is about what happens when good, generally decent people—distracted by manufactured crises, polarizing politics, and fighting that divides the populace into warring “us vs. them” camps—fail to take note of the looming danger that threatens to wipe freedom from the map and place us all in chains.

It’s about what happens when any government is empowered to adopt a comply-or-suffer-the-consequences mindset that is enforced through mandates, lockdowns, penalties, detention centers, martial law, and a disregard for the rights of the individual.

This is the slippery slope: a government empowered to restrict movements, limit individual liberty, and isolate “undesirables” to prevent the spread of a disease is a government that has the power to lockdown a country, label whole segments of the population a danger to national security, and force those undesirables—a.k.a. extremists, dissidents, troublemakers, etc.—into isolation so they don’t contaminate the rest of the populace.

The slippery slope begins with propaganda campaigns about the public good being more important than individual liberty, and it ends with lockdowns and concentration camps.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the danger signs are everywhere.

COVID-19 was merely one crisis in a long series of crises that the government has shamelessly exploited in order to justify its power grabs and acclimate the citizenry to a state of martial law disguised as emergency powers.

Everything I have warned about for years—government overreach, invasive surveillance, martial law, abuse of powers, militarized police, weaponized technology used to track and control the citizenry, and so on—has become part of the government’s arsenal of terrifying lockdown powers should the need arise.

What we should be bracing for is: what comes next?

The post COVID-19 Tested Our Commitment to Freedom first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

Australian student journos explore Fiji media landscape with USP team

Wansolwara — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 23:50:59 +0000

Wansolwara News

The University of the South Pacific journalism programme is hosting a cohort student journalists from Australia’s Queensland University of Technology this week.

Led by Professor Angela Romano, the 12 students are covering news assignments in Fiji as part of their working trip.

The visitors were given a briefing by USP journalism teaching staff — Associate Professor in Pacific journalism and programme head Dr Shailendra Singh, and student training newspaper supervising editor-in-chief Monika Singh.

READ MORE: The Pacific Media Conference at USP

PACIFIC MEDIA CONFERENCE 4-6 JULY 2024

The students held lively discussions about the form and state of the media in Fiji and the Pacific, the historic influence of Australian and Western news media and its pros and cons, and the impact of the emergence of China on the Pacific media scene.

Dr Singh said the small and micro-Pacific media systems were “still reeling” from revenue loss due to digital disruption and the covid-19 pandemic.

As elsewhere in the world, the “rivers of gold” (classified advertising revenue) had virtually dried up and media in the Pacific were apparently struggling like never before.

Dr Singh said that this was evident from the reduced size of some newspapers in the Pacific, in both classified and display advertising, which had migrated to social media platforms.

Repeal of draconian law
He praised Fiji’s coalition government for repealing the country’s draconian Media Industry Development Act last year, and reviving media self-regulation under the revamped Fiji Media Council.

However, Dr Singh added that there was still some way to go to further improve the media landscape, including focus on training and development and working conditions.

“There are major, longstanding challenges in small and micro-Pacific media systems due to small audiences, and marginal profits,” he said. “This makes capital investment and staff development difficult to achieve.”

The QUT students are in Suva this month on a working trip in which students will engage in meetings, interviews and production of journalism. They will meet non-government organisations that have a strong focus on women/gender in development, democracy or peace work.

The students will also visit different media organisations based in Suva and talk to their female journalists on their experiences and their stories.

The USP journalism programme started in Suva in 1988 and it has produced more than 200 graduates serving the Pacific and beyond in various media and communication roles.

The programme has forged partnerships with leading media players in the Pacific and our graduates are shining examples in the fields of journalism, public relations and government/NGO communication.

Asia Pacific Report publishes in partnership with The University of the South Pacific’s newspaper and online Wansolwara News.

The university is hosting a Pacific Media Conference in partnership with the Pacific Islands News Association (PINA) and the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN) in Suva on 4-6 July 2024.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Wansolwara.

Are the COVID Protestors Crazy?

Allen Forrest — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 15:01:40 +0000

The post Are the COVID Protestors Crazy? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Darién Gaps and Injun Country

T.P. Wilkinson — Mon, 05 Feb 2024 16:40:52 +0000

by T.P. Wilkinson

A recent X post from Tucker Carlson featured biologist and podcaster Bret Weinstein (DarkHorse) to talk about the US immigration crisis after a visit to the Darién Gap. The gap is a jungle in the Panamanian isthmus where the Pan American Highway is interrupted on its way to South America. There, at the incitement of weblogger and US Special Forces officer Michael Yon, Weinstein went to see the immigration camps and learn how people from all over the world are trekking to the Rio Bravo border to enter the US.

His detailed description was rational and cautious, yet it raised a specter which was clearly alarming. Weinstein described the conditions and the character of two camps that he saw. One fit the description of a classic refugee camp. It was visibly managed by a number of NGOs as well as US government agencies. The other appeared to be full of Chinese. He was able to talk to numerous migrants in the first camp but was unable to enter the one which appeared to be Chinese.

The “Chinese” camp seemed to be full of military age young men who when addressed outside the camp were reluctant to talk.

After discussing the discrepancies, Carlson asked if he had any explanation. Weinstein was exceptionally cautious and only uttered hypotheses. However, the direction implied the possibility that China was sending men to the US behind the migrant screen.

Then Weinstein shifted to the possible relation between a Chinese contingent and Covid with the mRNA injections that the US government (along with nearly all Western governments) forced on much of the population. Although Weinstein was very explicit that his hypotheses were not facts and that he did not know if there was any relationship to verify, the discussion proceeded to cover possible motives and objectives of both policies supported by the US regime.

The speculation is provocative and not to be easily dismissed. Nonetheless, it also revealed how little many people seem to understand about how covert operations can work. Michael Yon can be recognized as a special operations professional. While popular imagination continues to portray these men as mere super soldiers, the reality is that Special Forces are the armed cadres of the CIA and other covert action (state terrorism) agencies. A quick look at Yon’s website shows him as a super-soldier or soldier of fortune who has been a dedicated operator in all the CIA managed wars of the past three decades. That alone ought to raise suspicions about his coverage and why he was so interested to show a biologist and popular podcaster the frontier of what are undoubtedly covert operations. Weinstein was taken into Yon’s confidence much like the journalist character in John Wayne’s notorious The Green Berets film, promoting the war against Vietnam.

Allowing that Weinstein reported what he honestly saw, the question remains whether he saw what he was supposed to see. That returns us to the question “why Chinese?” The ensuing discussion raised legitimate questions about connections between US immigration policy and the Covid War. However before considering them it is necessary to return to the first camp. Weinstein named several organisations supporting the migrant camp. He identified USG agencies and the UN agency IOM. What he either did not know or did not recognise is that the International Organization for Migration is run by the US national security bureaucrat Amy Pope.¹There is general confusion about how the UN and its specialized agencies are run. The WHO is essentially an arm of the Gates Foundation and the international pharmaceuticals (pharmaments) cartel. It would not be unreasonable to suppose Ms Pope assures that the IOM complies with the policies set by those who rule the US. Weinstein’s conclusion is that such policies as those articulated by the Biden administration reflect corruption on a global scale. However that does not answer the question who benefits from those policies and how?

To return to the compulsory mass injection, especially of the military and other health and safety services, Weinstein and Carlson both expressed their bewilderment and shock that the compulsion was so rigorous in what might be called the public services sector. Then more speculation returned to COVID and mRNA injections and what these were doing to people in the US. Consensus prevailed that this was biological weaponry deployed. While there is no reason to doubt that assertion, the next step was to repeat the half truth that China was the source of the raw material both for the pathogen and for the injections since the latter were based on the former. Neither Weinstein nor Carlson could recall that the actual origin was Eco-Health Alliance, a cutout for US bioweapons development and Ralph Baric at UNC-Chapel Hill, the principal investigator commissioned for the DoD gain of function (weapons) development. Weinstein is probably not savvy enough to understand how cut-outs work or the details of false flag operations. Carlson probably does know but rarely if ever discusses such details. The accuracy of the media depictions of COVID in China were accepted as debunked. Yet the sources of that “information” were not examined. Thus, Chinese authorship was implied.

While discussing the implications of the migration crisis + “Chinese”, the hypothesis was aired that both the managed “uncontrolled” migration and the covid/mRNA weapons aimed to weaken the US from within. This might serve the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) by mass infiltration of potentially militarized immigrants who would then create the conditions most favorable to alleged Chinese expansionism. This it was suggested might be due to China having essentially bought the US government. This hypothesis has been peppered by regular reports of bribes paid to inter alia the Biden family by Chinese interests.

Striking in the discussion is the absence of two considerations: a) the complex of US anti-China war propaganda which naturally compromises any reporting about China in the West as a whole and b) the interests of the Western oligarchy in redesigning the West as a neo-feudal regime. Leave that eyesore, the CIA-founded WEF, aside for a moment. There are purely national phenomena which provide a far more efficient explanation.

As a matter of record Mr Gates is now the largest private owner of farm land in the US. There is no indication that he has stopped buying. Since the 2008 mortgage crisis, the hedge funds like Black Rock have become the largest owners of rental property (residential and commercial). This feat was accomplished by the massive derivatives fraud that forced millions of mortgagees to forfeit their real property. The economic devastation continued this process. Sane economists, of which Michael Hudson is one of the few, have charted this conversion of home ownership to rental tenancy and its acceleration. The Anglo-American finance oligarchy is aggressively pursuing through the banking, tax and monetary system an unparalleled expropriation of rank and file Americans.

During the mass incarceration, I wrote several times that COVID was political-economic warfare using biological agents and financial terror. My argument, then and now, was that this is atomic grade social engineering. In the worst case — for the oligarchy — this neutralization of the country’s majority was a clearing of the decks for open world war. Masses who might, under pressure of extermination — especially in the military and armed citizenry — actually rebel and mutiny leading to an October scenario. However, there is another scenario compatible with the history of North American conquest. In the 19th century, the tiny oligarchy was incapable of fulfilling its manifest destiny by stealing the whole continent. So bonded labor and massive immigration were used to take and hold everything between the Allegheny and the Pacific. Poor immigrants were granted the freedom to fight and die in battle against the indigenous population. Afterwards the land won was handed to railroads, finance, miners and ranchers. Successive economic crises bankrupted smallholders regularly. They abandoned their homes and moved westward. “Indians” and Chinese-bonded labor kept those settlers busy while the usual suspects seized all the land and loot, selling it back to successive suckers. Forced displacement was fundamental to the business model that “won the West”. Even to this day, the oligarchy represented in Washington understates the use of biological agents to eradicate the indigenous peoples. Few 19th century immigrants admit how they were used to enrich East Coast elites. Perhaps that is the policy followed today, the one at home which bears examination. The immigrants are driven by plane and on foot from the South. Meanwhile, mRNA injections provided the same comfort as smallpox-treated blankets.

ENDNOTE

It is after all just a hypothesis, but with tradition.

The post Darién Gaps and Injun Country first appeared on Dissident Voice.

1 IOM mission statement
Harnessing the Power of Migration

Comprehensive solutions to the world’s biggest challenges – from poverty and inequality to climate change, and conflict – are all inextricably linked to migration. IOM knows that migration has the power to transform the lives of individuals, their families, their communities and societies for the better. It is clear that the Sustainable Development Goals cannot be reached without safe, orderly and regular migration. For this reason, our vision is: to deliver on the promise of migration, while supporting the world’s most vulnerable.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by T.P. Wilkinson.

What If They Never Wake up?

Allen Forrest — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 16:58:42 +0000

The post What If They Never Wake up? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Four years on, Wuhan remembers the first COVID-19 lockdown

By Gu Ting for RFA Mandarin — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 19:39:59 +0000

For many people in 2020, the news that the central Chinese city of Wuhan had been placed under lockdown was the first indication that something was profoundly amiss, and that the emerging pandemic could have a global impact.

On Jan. 23, 2020, the provincial authorities imposed a travel ban on some 18 million people in Wuhan and surrounding areas, prompting a mass rush to leave the city, three days after admitting that the newly emerging coronavirus was transmissible between people, something experts elsewhere had suspected for weeks.

Four years on, there has been no official mention of the anniversary, although the authorities appeared to be taking steps to ensure nobody uses the date to cause trouble for the ruling party.

Staff members check the temperatures of passengers arriving on a train from Wuhan to Hangzhou, China, Jan. 23, 2020. (AFP)

Wuhan police took at least one activist out of town ahead of the politically sensitive fourth anniversary of the citywide lockdown – the first of the COVID-19 pandemic, RFA has learned.

The person, who requested anonymity for fear of further reprisals, said state security police had forced him to leave town with them on a "day trip" on Tuesday, which marked the anniversary of the start of Wuhan's lockdown on Jan. 23, 2020.

"They took me out for a day trip yesterday because it was the anniversary of the [Wuhan] lockdown," the person said. "I was confused yesterday, and I didn't realize why I was being dragged out for the day."

"I only saw later what my friends were posting on WeChat Moments, that it was the fourth anniversary," he said.

"The authorities were having a 'stability maintenance' day," the activist said, in a reference to a nationwide system of controls and restrictions that targets potential activists before they take action.

State media silent

There was no mention of the anniversary in state media, although some people commemorated the date on overseas social media platforms, posting the official announcement from four years ago.

"Today, Hubei province has launched its top-level response to a major public health emergency," the announcement said.

"From Jan. 23, 2020, all bus, subway, ferry and long-distance passenger transportation in and out of the city will be suspended."

"No residents will be permitted to leave Wuhan without a special reason," it said.

Patients infected with COVID-19 rest at a temporary hospital in the Wuhan Sports Center, Feb. 17, 2020. (Xiao Yijiu/Xinhua via AP)

The notice was to plunge the city into a whirlwind of compulsory daily testing, enforced quarantine in rapidly constructed mass facilities, and a desperate struggle to seek medical treatment as hospitals in the city were overwhelmed.

As political heads rolled, the government tried to claw back control of the narrative by suppressing whistleblowing doctors like Li Wenliang and Ai Fen, as police started rounding up frontline bloggers, archivists, diarists, YouTubers, livestreamers and other citizen journalists.

Meanwhile, seriously ill people were left scrambling for medical attention, as crematoriums started operating around the clock.

A recent documentary made from footage filmed at the time and smuggled out of the country for editing overseas remains blocked to viewers behind China's Great Firewall, including the 11 million people who call Wuhan home.

"The level of control they had over people [back then] was like something out of a novel, with scenes straight out of [George Orwell's dystopian novel] 1984 becoming part of our daily lives," one of the film's producers, who declined to be named for fear of reprisals, told RFA. "It was very scary."

"What's even more scary now, looking back on it, is that people have already forgotten that this kind of thing was happening all around us," they said. "It could come back at any time."

Poverty spreads

Several Wuhan residents told RFA that most people have more pressing concerns in the current economic downturn.

"The trauma fades as time goes by, but I definitely won't forget it, because the pain of that time was unforgettable," a resident who gave only the surname Wang for fear of reprisals told RFA.

"Some people have no jobs, and nothing to eat, and the sequelae [of the zero-COVID era] aren't going to be resolved any time soon," he said.

A Jianghan district resident who gave only the surname Song agreed, saying that poverty appears much more widespread in Wuhan these days.

"Who could forget the beginning of lockdown on Jan. 23, 2020?" she said. "It had a huge impact on people's lives."

"A lot of people were made unemployed ... and a lot of the shops are closed ... for example on Hongqiqu Road in Jianghan district," she said. "Many people are worried about their livelihood – things are really tough."

A passenger arrives at the nearly deserted Wuhan train station, usually full of passengers ahead of the Lunar New Year, on Jan. 23, 2020. (Hector Retamal/AFP)

Others took to social media to comment on the date, or to say that the past four years were something of a blur. Others complained that they were far worse off, economically, than four years ago.

For many who lived through that time, the full story remains untold, although possibly guessed at.

Even by the end of Wuhan's 76-day lockdown, which was to set the pattern for ruling Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping's nationwide zero-COVID restrictions over the three years that followed, residents were calling into question the official death toll as the virus ripped through an unprepared and as-yet-unvaccinated community.

Widespread doubts remain that China's reported COVID-19 death toll – a 2021 study published in British medical journal The Lancet estimated excess deaths outside China at 18 million -- could be an accurate reflection of reality.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gu Ting for RFA Mandarin.

Skepticism Guards against Gullibility

Allen Forrest — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 14:43:33 +0000

As the WEF and WHO drum up fear of “Disease X” there is a new set of narrative gatekeepers assembling a phony Dream Team of ‘covid dissidents.’ The trouble is most of them supported all the mandates!
Phony COVID Dissidents: Beware the Dream Team Narrative Police

The post Skepticism Guards against Gullibility first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Some of Us Tried to Warn Others

Allen Forrest — Tue, 16 Jan 2024 16:00:27 +0000

The post Some of Us Tried to Warn Others first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Some of Us Tried to Warn Others

Allen Forrest — Tue, 16 Jan 2024 16:00:27 +0000

The post Some of Us Tried to Warn Others first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

The Distortion of Science

Robert Malone — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 18:20:36 +0000

Starting in the mid-20th century, companies began distorting and manpulating science to favor specific commercial interests.

Big tobacco is both the developer and the poster child of this strategy. When strong evidence that smoking caused lung cancer emerged in the 1950s, the tobacco industry began a campaign to obscure this fact.

The Unmaking of Science

The tobacco industry scientific disinformation campaign sought to disrupt and delay further studies, as well as to cast scientific doubt on the link between cigarette smoking and harms. This campaign lasted for almost 50 years, and was extremely successful… until it wasn’t. This tobacco industry’s strategic brilliance lay in the use of a marketing and advertising campaign (otherwise known as propaganda) to create scientific uncertainty and sow doubts in the minds of the general public. This, combined with legislative “lobbying” and strategic campaign “donations” undermined public health efforts and regulatory interventions to inform the public about the harms of smoking and the regulation of tobacco products.

Disrupting normative science has become a de rigueur component of the pharmaceutical industry business model. A new pharmaceutical product is not based on need, it is based on market size and profitability. When new data threatens the market of a pharmaceutical product, then that pharma company will try to sprout the seeds of scientific uncertainty and lack of proof. For instance, clinical trials can be easily coopted to meet specified end-points positive for the drug products. Other ways to manipulate a clinical trial include manipulating the dosing schedule and amounts. As these practices have been exposed, people no longer trust the science. Fast forward to the present, and the entire industry of evidence-based (and academic) medicine is now suspect due to the malfeasance of certain pharma players. In the case of COVID-19, Pharma propaganda and cooptation practices have now compromised the regulatory bodies controlling the pharma product licensing and deeply damaged global public confidence in those agencies.

We all know what climate change is. The truth is that the UN, most globalists and a wide range of world leaders” blame human activities for climate change. Whether or not climate change is real or that human activities are enhancing climate change is not important to this discussion. That is a subject for another day.

Most climate change scientists receive funding from the government. So they must comply with the government edict and policy position that human activity-caused climate change is an existential threat to both humankind and global ecosystems. When these “scientists” publish studies supporting the thesis that human activities cause climate change, they are more likely to receive more grant monies and therefore more publications- and therefore to be academically promoted (or at least to survive in the dog-eat-dog world of modern academe). Those who produce a counter narrative from the government approved one soon find themselves without funding, tenure, without jobs, unable to publish and unable to procure additional grants and contracts. It is a dead-end career wise. The system has been rigged.

And by the way, this is nothing new. Back in the day, during the “war on drugs, if a researcher who had funding by the NIH’s NIDA (National Institute of Drug Addiction) published an article or wrote an annual NIH grant report showing benefits to using recreational drugs, that would be a career ending move, as funding would not be renewed and new funding would never materialize. Remember, the NIH peer review system only triages grants, it does not actually chose who receives grant money. The administrative state at NIH does that! And anything that went against the war on drugs was considered a war on the government. Funding denied. This little truthbomb was conveyed to me – word of mouth- many years ago by a researcher and Professor who specialized in drug addiction research. Nothing printed, all heresy. Because that is how the system works. A whisper campaign. A whiff of a message on the wind.

The ends justify the means.

The new wrinkle in what has now happened with corrupted climate change activism/propaganda/”science” is that the manipulation of research is crossing disciplines. No longer satisfied with oppressing climate change scientists, climate change narrative enforcers have moved into the nutritional sciences. This trend of crossing disciplines portends death for the overall independence of any scientific endeavors. A creeping corruption into adjacent disciplines. Because climate change activists, world leaders, research institutions, universities and governments are distorting another branch of science outside of climate science. They are using the bio-sciences, specifically nutrition science, to support the climate change agenda. It is another whole-of-government response to the crisis, just like with COVID-19.

Just like with the tobacco industry’s scientific disinformation campaign, they are distorting health research to make the case that eating meat is dangerous to humans. Normal standards for publication have been set aside. The propaganda is thick and easily spotted.

As the NIH is now funding researchers to find associations between climate change and health, it is pretty clear that those whose research is set-up to find such associations will be funded. Hence, once again, the system is rigged to support the climate change narrative.

The standard approach for nutritional research is based on a food-frequency and portion questionnaire – usually kept as a diary. The nutrient intake from this observational data set is then associated with disease incidence. Randomized interventional clinical trials are not done due to expense and bioethical considerations.

The problem is that the confounding variables in such studies are hard to control. Do obese people eat more, so would their intake of meat be more or less in proportion to dietary calories? What do they eat in combination? What about culture norms, combined with genetic drivers of disease? Age? Geo-considerations? The list of confounding variables is almost never ending. Garbage in, garbage out.

We have all witnessed how these studies get used to promulgate one point of view or another.

It’s not just within the context of red meat. The same thing happens over and over. We get dietary recommendations put together by expert committees and the data are reviewed. But when subsequent, so-called systematic reviews of specific recommendations take place, the data don’t meet reliability standards…

Yes, available information is mostly based on studies of association rather than causation, using methods that fall short of proving chronic disease effects, especially in view of the crucial dietary measurement issues. The whole gestalt produces reports that seem very uncertain in terms of the standards that are applied elsewhere in the scientific community for reliable evidence. (Dr. Ross Prentice, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center)

Some recent “peer reviewed” academic publications on climate change and diet:

Enter climate change regulations, laws and goals – such as those found in UN Agenda 2030. Enter globalists determined to buy up farm-land to control prices, agriculture and eating trends. Enter politics into our food supplies and even the science of nutrition What a mess.

Below are some of the more outlandish claims being made in the name of climate science and nutrition. The United Nations’s World Food Program writes:

The climate crisis is one of the leading causes of the steep rise in global hunger. Climate shocks destroy lives, crops and livelihoods, and undermine people’s ability to feed themselves. Hunger will spiral out of control if the world fails to take immediate climate action.

Note that “Climate shocks” have always existed and will always exist. The existence of readily observed (and easily propagandized) human tragedies associated with hurricanes, fires and droughts are embedded throughout the entire archaeological record of human existence. This is nothing new in either written human history or prehistory. This does not equate to a pressing existential human crisis.

In fact, reviewing the evidence of calories and protein available reveals a very different trend. Over time, per capita caloric and protein supplies have increased almost across the board.

The prevalence of undernourishment is the leading indicator of food availability. The chart below shows that the world still has a significant issue with poverty and food stability, but it is not increasing. If anything, people are better nourished in countries with extreme poverty than they were 20 years ago.

*Note the COVIDcrisis has most likely exacerbated extreme poverty and undernourishment, but those results for the 2021-2023 years are not (yet?) available.

Despite clear and compelling evidence that climate change is not impacting on food availability or undernutrition, websites, news stories and research literature all make tenuous assertions about how the climate change “crisis” is causing starvation.

These are from the front search page on google for “climate change starvation”:

But the actual data documents something different.

This is not to say that that the poorest nations in the world don’t have issues with famine, they do. It is an issue, but not a climate change issue. It is a gross distortion of available data and any objective scientific analysis of those data to assert otherwise.

The best way to stop famine is to ensure that countries have adequate energy and resources to grow their own food supply, and have a domestic manufacturing base. That means independent energy sources.

If the United Nations and the wealthy globalists at the WEF truly want to help nations with high poverty and famine rates , they would help them secure stable energy sources. They would help them develop their natural gas and other hydrocarbon projects. Then they could truly feed themselves. They could attain independence.

Famine is not a climate change issue, it is an energy issue. Apples and oranges. This is not “scientific”. Rather, it is yet more weaponized fearporn being used as a Trojan horse to advance hidden political and economic objectives and agendas of political movements, large corporations and non-governmental organizations.

Facts matter.

The post The Distortion of Science first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Malone.

Wuhan residents can’t view documentary about COVID-19 lockdown trauma

By Gu Ting for RFA Mandarin — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 15:19:04 +0000

Wuhan was Ground Zero in the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the first city in the world to undergo a total lockdown in early 2020.

Yet like citizens across China, residents of the city have been unable to see a new documentary about their experiences during that crisis without risking punishment to circumvent the Great Firewall of government censorship.

Using footage smuggled out of China by citizen journalist Lu Yuyu, who fled to Canada after serving a four-year jail term for building a database of public protests, “Wuhan Lockdown” also compiles frontline reporting from the early days of the pandemic by citizen journalists, many of whom are now behind bars, held incommunicado or in exile.

While the project was conceived by the film's executive producer and former 1989 student leader Wang Dan, it was financed, shot, researched, compiled and edited by a huge team of writers, businesspeople, photographers, music producers and other volunteers, who wrote their own anti-censorship software to get around the Great Firewall.

"There were two different anti-censorship systems overseas at the time, which would automatically collect relevant reports from various media and form a very detailed picture, from which we learned a lot of information," a producer who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals told RFA in a recent interview.

"We also conducted research and verification, then collected videos, pictures and text from citizens’ protests, and investigated the number of deaths from Wuhan pneumonia," they said, using an early term for COVID-19 that was current in China at the start of the pandemic.

The “Wuhan Lockdown” project was conceived by Wang Dan, the film's executive producer and former 1989 student leader. He is shown during a press conference in Tokyo, Dec. 1, 2022.

"Lu Yuyu played a big role in that process," the producer said. "Our documentary was very long starting out ... but we had to condense it, so we could only touch on the role played by some characters."

A resident of Wuhan who gave only the surname Li for fear of reprisals said he would love to watch "Wuhan Lockdown" but would have to use illegal circumvention software to "climb the Great Firewall" to see it from China.

Don’t forget

Wang Dan said he started to coordinate the project a year ago to remind people of that traumatic part of China's recent history.

"It has been more than a year since the three-year zero-COVID restrictions, and production began more than a year ago," said Wang, who writes commentaries for RFA Mandarin.

"We were worried that people would start to forget about this human tragedy, so we wanted to revisit it after some time had elapsed."

The film sees the early days of the pandemic in Wuhan and its impact on the city's 10 million residents through the eyes of people whose voices cut through attempts by local Communist Party officials to cover up the nature of the airborne, highly transmissible disease as it ripped through an unprepared and unvaccinated population.

Citizen journalist Lu Yuyu smuggled the “Wuhan Lockdown” footage out of China and fled to Canada. (Lu Yuyyu)

The film starts with attempts by whistleblowing Wuhan doctors Li Wenliang and Ai Fen to warn people about the wave of mysterious infections sweeping the city's hospitals that appeared to be remarkably similar to the SARS outbreak of 2003.

It showcases the work of now-jailed citizen reporters like Fang Bin, Zhang Zhan and Fang Bin, as well as exiled journalist Kcriss Li, who checked into hotel rooms in the city to report from its streets, hospitals and rapidly built quarantine centers while evading attempts by state security police to catch up with them.

Yet much of the material was collected before the idea for a film took off.

"We started collecting evidence of the Wuhan authorities' censorship of speech [about the outbreak] on social media," the production team member said. "We hadn't thought of making it into a documentary at first, but then we started seeing very detailed videos after the Wuhan lockdown ended, with very rich content about civil resistance, censorship and so on."

"It was like something out of the novel 1984," they said, referencing George Orwell's dystopian work about life under the totalitarian surveillance of the fictional Big Brother. "That's why Wang Dan's team decided to make a documentary out of it."

Escape from China

Lu made an initial edit of the film while he was still in China, before fleeing China via the mountainous border areas of the southwestern region of Guangxi where he crossed into neighboring Laos and, eventually, Thailand.

He was granted political asylum by the Canadian government in September 2023, and brought his film with him.

Most of the production team have now left China due to fears for their personal safety and those of their loved ones, the team member said.

The film also touches on official attempts to cover up the initial death toll as the novel coronavirus infected the people of Wuhan.

Authorities claimed that only 2,531 people died, but nobody believes that number. Estimates at the time based on the number of cremations carried out by the city’s seven crematoria suggested that tens of thousands died.

Chinese students and their supporters hold a memorial for Dr Li Wenliang, who was the whistleblower on the coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, China, and caused the doctor’s death, outside the UCLA campus in Westwood, California, on Feb. 15, 2020. (Mark Ralston/AFP)

A Wuhan resident who gave only the surname Zhou for fear of reprisals said she visited the Huanan Seafood Market on Dec. 31, 2019, in a bid to find out more about the mystery disease.

"The people there selling seafood told me that it was a rumor, that there was no such thing," Zhou said. "They said the rumors had ruined business."

She said her family has been ruined by the pandemic and the subsequent three-year zero-COVID restrictions, which were lifted in December 2022 following nationwide protests.

"I've been so sad over the past four years," she said. "The pandemic has wiped out all of our family's money."

"Wages haven't increased, while prices have skyrocketed," Zhou said. "It makes it very hard for ordinary people to get by."

Fellow Wuhan resident Li said people are still getting infected with mutated strains of COVID-19, and that he just wants it all to stop.

"They are still playing announcements for people to wear masks on the bus," Li said. "People are still wearing masks on the streets."

"Wuhan Lockdown" premiered globally on Dec. 30, with screenings in democratic Taiwan, the Hague, Toronto, Los Angeles and New York, as well as Japan and Germany, according to its publicity trailer on YouTube.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gu Ting for RFA Mandarin.

Letter from India: Stop World Health Organization’s “Pandemic Preparedness” Tyranny

Colin Todhunter — Sun, 17 Dec 2023 16:54:18 +0000

The global pandemic preparedness accord (‘pandemic treaty’) currently being put in place by the World Health Organization (WHO) will pave the way for “a fascist approach to societal management.” The beneficiaries will be unscrupulous corporations and investors whom the COVID‐19 response served well. This will result in the loss of human rights and individual freedom.

So says Dr David Bell, a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and former WHO scientific and medical officer. The treaty represents a terrifying power grab that, if successful, will give the WHO a central directing role and monopoly power in global health governance.

As currently drafted, the treaty will hand the WHO the authority to order measures, including significant financial contributions by individual states, lockdowns, travel restrictions, forced medical examinations and mandatory vaccinations during a public health emergency of its own declaring.

The WHO will have sole and extensive power to declare Public Health Emergencies of International Concern (PHEIC) for any potential or real threat for extended areas, whether these threats are biological, climate or environment related. And it will do so without proper proof and solely decide measures and medical substances to be imposed on the public without informed consent.

Its powers will also include the official censorship of information, including free speech — views opposing the official narrative put out by the WHO — and it will be accountable to no national parliament or be limited by any constitutional safeguards.

A group of prominent lawyers, doctors and concerned citizens have written to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Minister of Health and Family Welfare Shri Mansukh L Mandaviya urging them to reject the WHO’s global pandemic treaty. The signatories are listed at the end of this article, and the 10-page letter can be accessed in full with all relevant links and references on the Awaken India website: WHO Pandemic Treaty Ultra Vires of the Constitution).

The WHO released a Zero Draft of the WHO CA+ (this ‘pandemic treaty’ is now officially known as an ‘accord’) with 38 Articles on 1 February 2023 and, subsequently, another draft with 41 Articles on 2 June 2023. The accord marks a fundamental change in how the WHO will function. It seeks secretively, behind closed doors, sweeping powers under its director general.

The signatories make clear that, under the proposed accord, the WHO can, at will, call a pandemic, declare a PHEIC and then take over the authority of national governments to detain citizens, restrict their travel, require them to have vaccine passports (forced testing and vaccination) and increase social media censorship. The accord would also operate as a ‘framework convention’ that’s on-going, year after year, indefinitely. It facilitates a dictatorship role for the WHO as it moves to acquire unfettered power.

Two instruments, the accord itself and amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) 2005, are designed to operate in parallel to give draconian powers to the WHO. Both texts irremediably entail the transfer to the WHO of the power to threaten health freedom, thereby representing a fundamental threat to national, medical and bodily autonomy.

In their letter, the authors state that the WHO is an external, unelected body, which may not and cannot be appointed to such a dictatorship position. During the COVID-19 event, the WHO’s role in facilitating medical tyranny was clear to see.

It advocated enforced lockdowns, which destroyed the livelihoods of millions in India and across the world and created a surge in mental health problems. It shut down schools, putting back the education of a generation. It promoted incompletely tested and unapproved vaccines under EUA (Emergency Use Authorisation) that despite the claims of ‘safe and effective’ where nothing of the sort and caused a sharp rise in spike protein-induced heart and brain disease.

If adopted at the 77th World Health Assembly in May 2024 by a simple majority vote, the ‘pandemic treaty’ will come into force within 12 months for all countries, unless a country proactively files rejections or reservations within a 10-month period.

The letter to the prime minister and the health minister states that the accord and those pushing it are:

Manifestly violative of Fundamental Rights of the citizens of India and, therefore, Ultra Vires of the Indian Constitution. In their very intent, they cancel the fundamental right to bodily autonomy and integrity, through mandating medical procedures, coercion and further grossly illegal acts.

The letter adds:

This is a breathtaking and terrifying onslaught on fundamental civil liberties. It must be understood as fundamental, that the negation of bodily integrity of any human being means the loss of all human rights.

In making its point, the letter refers to the Nuremberg Code (1947) by stating:

The consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights resumed this ban against unintentional experimentation in its 1966 text, which states: no one may be subjected without his consent to medical or scientific experiment.

It also references the Geneva statement for doctors (1948):

I will respect the autonomy and dignity of my patient. I will not use my medical knowledge to infringe human rights and civil liberties, even under force. I will keep absolute respect for human life, from conception. I will consider my patient’s health as my first concern.

The signatories note that there is little alternative but to jettison the WHO from national life and implore the prime minister and the health minister to act to uphold the sovereignty of India and the rights of every citizen.

They add that unelected, unaccountable and largely unknown delegates from 194 countries meet in Geneva during World Health Assembly meetings, as they did in 2022 when they adopted amendments to the IHR. The process is fraught with secrecy, autocracy and impending tyranny, blatantly devoid of any transparent, democratic process.

These country delegates are unelected and do not represent the people of their country. The signatories ask:

How can they negotiate on behalf of nations, let alone an international/global health regulation binding on 194 countries?

If the ‘global pandemic treaty’ is forced through, we could see perpetual lockdowns. At the same time, corporate interests will dominate. Pandemics will become self-sustaining by creating a bureaucracy whose existence will depend on them.

People will be at the mercy of the police and bureaucrats who will be immune to any penalty for any acts carried out in ‘good faith’. These acts could take the form of mandatory medical procedures, forced entry into premises, forced isolation and quarantine.

It was bad enough in 2020 with the full force of the state lined up against the public, especially those who did not agree with COVID policies, but imagine the abuse of power that could occur if the WHO acquires the powers it seeks.

The seeds of totalitarianism were clear to see with Anthony Fauci saying that he is ‘the science’, former New Zealand PM Jacinda Arden declaring the government as the ‘single source of truth’ and social media companies working hand in glove with the deep state to censor and deplatform prominent figures and world-renowned scientists who questioned the official narrative.

We saw the suspension of fundamental civil liberties with the threat of state violence on hand, often resulting in citizens being abused by de facto paramilitary police forces for breaching ‘pandemic rules’ that had no scientific basis.

Governments declared that they were ‘following the science’, but what we saw were inflated death numbers, manipulated data and the fraudulent use of RT-PCR tests to help create the perception of a deadly pandemic in the minds of the public. Readers can consult the online article Stay Home, Save Lives: Uncovering the COVID Deception, which provides insight into the various deceptions that helped instill fear into the global population in 2020.

The WHO also provided a wrong projection of mortality. The exaggeration caused panic in the population — part of a carefully orchestrated ‘fear pandemic’ — and paved the way for lockdowns and the mass uptake of vaccines sold to the public based on false claims. The synthetic spike protein of the vaccines has resulted in clotting, bleeding, heart problems and brain blood clotting as well as neurodegenerative problems. And what we are seeing across so many countries since the vaccine rollout is significant excess mortality, which the media is silent about.

Moreover, the WHO operates within a biopharmaceutical complex, a complicated syndicate that has formed over time, which instructs world health policies. This complex involves the health agencies of national governments, including India, the US and the UK, the World Economic Forum, the Gates Foundation, the Welcome Group and major pharmaceutical companies. Revolving door arrangements between these organisations have resulted in regulatory capture.

Researcher and campaigner Yohan Tengra of the Awaken India Movement conducted a two-year investigation into how this works in India. Through his research, he exposed the billionaire cartel that controlled India’s COVID-19 Task Force. Tengra listed not just the names of those who sat on this task force, but he also detailed how they are financially connected to the pharmaceutical-vaccine industry.

The task force was responsible for the aggressive push to lockdown, mandatory mask requirements, forced testing of asymptomatic people, dropping ivermectin from the national protocol, suppressing vaccine adverse events and much more.

Tengra also exposed how India’s prominent public health personalities, who regularly appeared in the media and on TV, are connected to the Gates Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Welcome Trust, USAID, the World Bank and other aspects of the global deep state.

We have every right to be concerned about a ‘pandemic treaty’ shaped by powerful interests with stakes in closing down economies (see the online article Systemic Collapse and Pandemic Simulation by Fabio Vighi), mandatory vaccination programmes and digital surveillance who are all too willing to strip away our fundamental rights for their own gain.

The letter to India’s prime minister and the minister of health makes clear that the WHO’s massive conflict of interest should disqualify it from any role in world health.

Signatories:

Dr. Jacob Puliyel, Delhi, MD, MRCP, MPhil, Paediatrician and Visiting Faculty International

Prashant Bhushan, New Delhi, Senior Advocate, Supreme Court of India

Colin Gonsalves, New Delhi, Senior Advocate, Supreme Court of India

Nilesh Ojha, Mumbai, President – Indian Bar Association, Advocate Bombay High Court and Supreme Court of India, Human Rights Activist

Author Dr. Amitav Banerjee, Pune, MD, Formerly Epidemiologist, Indian Armed Forces

Dr Aseem Malhotra, London (Overseas Citizen of India), MBChB, MRCP. Consultant Cardiologist

Aruna Rodrigues, Mhow, Lead Petitioner: GMO PIL in the Supreme Court and Member Iridescent Blue Fish (IBF)

Dr. Donthi Narasimha Reddy, Hyderabad, Public Policy Expert and Campaigner

Dr. Megha Consul, Gurugram, Paediatrics, Senior Consultant, Neonatologist

Dr. Pravin Chordia, Pune, MD Surgeon

Dr. Lalitkumar Anande, Mumbai, MBBS, PG Diploma in Clinical Research

Dr. Vijay Raghava, Bangalore, MBBS Dr. Veena Raghava, Bangalore, MBBS, DA

Dr. Kuldeep Kumar, Haridwar, MBBS MS (GENERAL SURGERY) Dr. Praveen Saxena, Hyderabad, Radiologist & Clinical metal toxicologist, MBBS, DMRD Osmania

Dr. Biswaroop Roy Chowdhury, Faridabad, Ph.D (Diabetes)

Dr. Gautam Das, Kolkata, MBBS, General Physician

Saraswati Kavula, Hyderabad, Documentary Filmmaker & Freelance Journalist, Awaken India Movement

Bhaskaran Raman, Mumbai, Professor, Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering. Indian Institute of Technology Bombay Advocate

Ishwarlal S. Agarwal, Mumbai Advocate

Tanveer Nizam, Mumbai

Dr. Susan Raj, Chattisgrah, BSc Nurse, MSW(M&P), Doctorate Humanities, Behavior Specialist

Jagannath Chaterjee, Bhubhaneshwar, Social Activist

Dr. Abhay Chedda, Mumbai, BHMS, CCAH, FCAH

Dr. Gayatri Panditrao, Pune, Homeopathic Physician, BHMS, PGDEMS

Dr. Rashmi Menon, Mumbai, BHMS, ChT

Rossamma Thomas, Pala, Kottayam, Kerala, Freelance Journalist

Ambar Koiri, Mumbai, Awaken India Movement

Dr. G Prema, Tamil Nadu, Classical Homeopath, Aasil Health Care

Dr. S. G. Vombatkere, Mysuru, Human Rights Activist Advocate

Anand Singh Bahrawat, Indore, High Court of Indore Advocate

Vijay Kurle, Mumbai

Advocate L Shunondo Chandiramani, Indore, High Court of Indore

The post Letter from India: Stop World Health Organization’s “Pandemic Preparedness” Tyranny first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Colin Todhunter.

China restarts COVID-19 testing in hospitals, airports

By Gu Ting for RFA Mandarin — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 18:36:02 +0000

Authorities in China have started testing people for COVID-19 again in hospitals and transportation hubs as a wave of respiratory disease tears through the country, according to local residents and government directives.

As parents and children continued to flock to pediatric clinics and emergency rooms in Beijing with severe respiratory disease, hospitals are once more performing COVID-19 tests on patients, although there has been little on the news regarding a resurgence of the virus, new variants of which are emerging globally.

Chinese health officials have acknowledged the spike in pneumonia and other respiratory cases, blaming a cocktail of pathogens including mycoplasma pneumonia, respiratory syncytial virus, seasonal influenza and COVID-19.

Now, government documents are starting to warn about a new wave of coronavirus infections in particular, with the State Council ordering local authorities to resume testing and disease monitoring at ports and airports, in schools, care homes and other institutions.

"All localities should strengthen prevention and control in elderly care, childcare, schools, social welfare and other institutions as well as confined spaces, and urge daily protection and health monitoring," a Nov. 24 State Council directive warned.

At least 2 million people are estimated to have died when the first wave of Omicron infections swept the country after the lifting of restrictions under ruling Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping's “zero-COVID” policy.

Hated tracker app

Unconfirmed reports have been swirling on social media that local governments are starting to reactivate the hated "Health Code" COVID-19 tracker app, which was once used to confine people to their homes or to mass quarantine camps.

"I took my child to hospital to get a nucleic acid test [for COVID-19]," a Beijing resident who gave only the surname Yu for fear of reprisals told RFA Mandarin on Wednesday. "My daughter had been for emergency treatment at the People's Liberation Army General Hospital pediatric department, and after triage ... she was told to get a nucleic acid test."

"It seems that a mutated strain of COVID is back, but the virus isn't being mentioned on the news," Yu said. "I can't figure out what's happening."

A health worker waits for people to take swab samples to test for COVID-19 in Shanghai on Dec. 19, 2022. Chinese government documents are starting to warn about a new wave of COVID-19 infections. (Hector Retamal/AFP)

A Beijing resident who gave only the surname Wu for fear of reprisals said some places in the city are offering free COVID-19 tests.

"I heard that they're not charging now because they want people to cooperate," Wu said. "They're testing at the bigger railway stations and international airports and at some conference venues."

A directive from the Ministry of Education dated Dec. 4 called on schools around the country to take steps to mitigate the wave of "winter disease," specifically naming COVID-19, which isn't seasonal.

"According to the judgment of the health and disease control departments, the global COVID-19 pandemic is still under way, and the COVID-19 virus is still mutating," the directive said.

"This winter and next spring, we may face superimposed epidemics of multiple respiratory diseases," it warned, citing a State Council ruling on "preventing and controlling new COVID-19 infections."

Fearing a resurgence

Health officials have been telling people to wear masks, wash their hands and ventilate indoor spaces to prevent the spread of disease.

A Beijing resident who gave only the surname Zhao said the government seems to fear a resurgence of the coronavirus, adding that many of the cases of "pneumonia" and other respiratory diseases have symptoms that are basically indistinguishable from COVID without a test.

"The propaganda is saying that these cases are caused by mycoplasma pneumonia, yet I also heard that the [SARS-CoV2] virus has mutated," Zhao said. "I'm not a doctor, so I don't know exactly which disease it is."

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control is currently tracking a number of "variants of concern," including Omicron BA.2.75 that was first detected in India and Omicron XBB.1.5-like (a) that was first detected in the United States.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is monitoring a larger number of COVID-19 variants but hasn't designated any variants of concern.

People queue to buy antigen test kits at a pharmacy amid the Covid-19 pandemic in Xian, in China's northern Shaanxi province on Dec. 20, 2022. A Beijing resident says some places there are offering free COVID-19 tests to encourage people to get tested. (AFP)

Social media posts showed documents from the 2023 China Textile Industry Federation Science and Technology Awards Conference, which is scheduled for Dec. 6 in Beijing, requiring all participants to present a certificate certifying a negative COVID test dated the day before.

"For a conference starting on Dec. 6, they want a test dated Dec. 5, and they're not letting anyone in without a health clearance certificate," Beijing resident Wu said.

Wu said he knows a lot of people who are currently sick, with "a very bad flu."

"They suspect that maybe it's COVID, but officials are saying it's the flu," he said.

Kids infected

Repeated calls to the People's Liberation Army General Hospital pediatric clinic, Beijing's Chaoyang Hospital and several other hospitals rang unanswered during office hours on Wednesday.

A kindergarten principal in the central city of Shaoyang who gave only the surname Shao for fear of reprisals said most of the children are sick with "fever."

"A lot of kids are infected," Shao said. "In one class, only three kids turned up for school, and the rest were off sick."

A resident of Hunan's provincial capital Changsha who gave only the surname Chen said authorities there are also getting ready to start COVID-19 testing again.

"We're going to start nucleic acid testing again," Chen said. "Right now, our hospitals are full of kids."

"The directive has already come through – people in the government are saying that it's better to rely on just testing [as opposed to other restrictive measures]," he said.

Chen said he has no wish to return to the days of zero-COVID, which ended in December 2022 amid nationwide protests.

"The thing I fear most is another lockdown," he said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gu Ting for RFA Mandarin.

Former broadcast minister defends NZ journalism fund, state-funded media independence

APR editor — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 20:04:53 +0000

RNZ News

Former broadcasting minister Willie Jackson has defended Aotearoa New Zealand’s public interest journalism fund that his government started during the covid-19 pandemic, after the new deputy prime minister characterised it as “bribery”.

Speaking to media on Monday after his swearing in, Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters accused state-funded media organisations of a lack of independence from the previous Labour government.

Peters was asked how quickly he expected government departments to take action on removing te reo Māori from their names.

“Well, we’ll see the speed at which TVNZ and RNZ — which are taxpayer owned — understand this new message. We’ll see whether these people, both the media and journalists — are they independent?,” he said.

“Well, isn’t that fascinating, I’ve never seen evidence of that in the last three years.” he said.

He then laughed, and said “you can’t defend $55 million of bribery, cannot defend $55 million of bribery. Get it very clear”.

That last remark was a reference to the Public Interest Journalism Fund, a three-year $55m contestable fund for journalists initially set up to shore up public interest media during the covid-19 pandemic, which was wound up in July.

Media jobs, development funded
This included funding for 219 jobs and 22 industry development projects. Political coverage was exempted from eligibility to benefit from it. The fund was administered by NZ On Air.

Jackson, who became broadcasting minister in the Labour government two years after the fund was set up, said it was for media around the country, not just state-funded organisations.

“It was introduced during covid because it was a disastrous time in terms of media and we were pressured by good people out there to say, ‘hey, you support financial institutions so how about supporting local media that’s struggling’.”

It was aimed at supporting New Zealand media to keep producing public interest stories, he said and was “not just for RNZ and for TVNZ”.

“What you saw was a great investment in support of media outlets, Māori, Pasifika, regional [outlets] … Gisborne Herald, Otago Daily Times, Asburton Guardian, they got support and an opportunity to rebuild, reset.

“I’m very proud of what we did.”

Influence denied
He denied the then Labour government had any influence over the media as a result.

“The rules are very clear, we can’t interfere, we can’t intervene . . . You guys have to have your own independence.”

RNZ’s charter requires the broadcaster to be independent, including providing “reliable, independent, and freely accessible news and information”.

While the organisation is funded by the government, by law no ministers of the Crown or person acting on their behalf may give direction to RNZ relating to programming, newsgathering or presentation, or standards, and cannot have staff removed.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

A Future Laugh

Allen Forrest — Thu, 23 Nov 2023 15:30:45 +0000

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Superstitions

Allen Forrest — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 16:00:44 +0000

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Dear K: A Letter across the Covid Divide

Robert Sean Lewis — Mon, 13 Nov 2023 15:45:35 +0000

In order to sustain a friendship, there must be grounds for complicity. To know what these grounds might be, it is necessary to see the other as clearly as possible. Nonetheless, you seem to be interested not in finding out who I am but in making declarations about my character. Perhaps you want rebuttals. Maybe you want me to say, “Oh, no. I’m not right-wing. I’m not a kook. Here, I have proof.” The burden of proof does not lie with me but with you. And you have offered none.

So what kind of a response am I left with? Would you like me to proceed with declarations about your character, which you would then feel compelled to rebut, the waters getting muddier with each exchange, the gulf between us growing wider as you drag political binaries into the discussion of Covid, where they don’t belong, even as you profess to oppose the state’s divide-and-conquer strategies? No, I’m not taking that bait either.

So what is left? You suggest that we compare science, but that is the domain of peer review, and everything that I have ever published about Covid (or about anything else, for that matter, including 9/11) is supported by peer review. So what is there to compare? To take the simplest aspect of Covid (the masks), both the peer-reviewed studies and common sense (the pores of a mask being macroscopic and the virus being microscopic) tell us that the mask mandates were useless and did more harm than good. See, for instance, the March 2023 issue of Druthers, published in Alberta, which you may deem to be a right-wing province, but I assure you that science, when done and reported properly, is right-left blind.

Every part of the official Covid narrative is in fact false, from the masks to the PCR tests to the death rates to the safety and effectiveness of the “vaccines,” but since it is not my place to convince you of that, I will not burden you with web links in support of the point. Rather, I will lay out a comparison of two perceptions of reality, and you can tell me whether there are any grounds for complicity between us across this divide.

Official reality

Maskers protected themselves and others.

No existing remedies could treat Covid, so society needed to shut down until there was a “vaccine.”

Vaxxers protected themselves and others by helping to halt the spread of the virus.

Anti-vaxxers are selfish, irresponsible, and anti-science.

Unofficial reality

Maskers were duped into helping the state create an atmosphere of mass obedience, necessary for vaccine compliance.

Proven remedies for Covid were slandered to permit emergency use of the “vaccines.”

Vaxxers helped to create a false sense that the “vaccines” were safe and effective, paving the way for genocide.

Anti-vaxxers are courageous and clear-sighted, as demonstrated by the fact that the “vaccines” have led to horrible injuries, miscarriages, and infertility, along with a staggering increase in mortality – a genocide – among healthy, working-age people over the past two years.

By your account, I am a right-wing kook for embracing the unofficial reality. By my account, you are a do-gooder without a clue for embracing the official one. I don’t blame you for not having a clue. You have been subjected to relentless propaganda for more than three years. I have written elsewhere on the phenomenon of trance and how it can be triggered by fear, so I know what you’ve been up against.

But the question remains of whether there can be any grounds for complicity between us when we are not living in the same world. Should we agree to disagree? Should we live and let live? Aren’t the stakes too high? What about the next “crisis”? The next false flag, the next plandemic? Will we have to go through this gut-wrenching dance again, friendships and families wrecked? Will we have learned nothing? I think that depends on you.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Sean Lewis.

Dear K: A Letter across the Covid Divide

Robert Sean Lewis — Mon, 13 Nov 2023 15:45:35 +0000

Official reality

Maskers protected themselves and others.

No existing remedies could treat Covid, so society needed to shut down until there was a “vaccine.”

Vaxxers protected themselves and others by helping to halt the spread of the virus.

Anti-vaxxers are selfish, irresponsible, and anti-science.

Unofficial reality

Maskers were duped into helping the state create an atmosphere of mass obedience, necessary for vaccine compliance.

Proven remedies for Covid were slandered to permit emergency use of the “vaccines.”

Vaxxers helped to create a false sense that the “vaccines” were safe and effective, paving the way for genocide.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Sean Lewis.

Authoritarians Drunk on Power

John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 20:01:04 +0000

There is something terribly wrong with this country, isn’t there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who’s to blame?

— V for Vendetta

We have arrived at the dystopian future depicted in the 2005 film V for Vendetta, which is no future at all.

Set in the year 2020, V for Vendetta (written and produced by the Wachowskis) provides an eerie glimpse into a parallel universe in which a government-engineered virus wreaks havoc on the world. Capitalizing on the people’s fear, a totalitarian government comes to power that knows all, sees all, controls everything and promises safety and security above all.

Concentration camps (jails, private prisons and detention facilities) have been established to house political prisoners and others deemed to be enemies of the state. Executions of undesirables (extremists, troublemakers and the like) are common, while other enemies of the state are made to “disappear.” Populist uprisings and protests are met with extreme force. The television networks are controlled by the government with the purpose of perpetuating the regime. And most of the population is hooked into an entertainment mode and are clueless.

With Vendetta, whose imagery borrows heavily from Nazi Germany’s Third Reich and George Orwell’s 1984, we come full circle. The corporate state in V conducts mass surveillance on its citizens, helped along by closed-circuit televisions. Also, London is under yellow-coded curfew alerts, similar to the American government’s color-coded Homeland Security Advisory System.

Sounds painfully familiar, doesn’t it?

As director James McTeighe observed about the tyrannical regime in V for Vendetta, “It really showed what can happen when society is ruled by government, rather than the government being run as a voice of the people. I don’t think it’s such a big leap to say things like that can happen when leaders stop listening to the people.”

Clearly, those we appointed to represent our interests have stopped following the Constitution and listening to the American people.

What will it take for the government to start listening to the people again?

In V for Vendetta, as in my novel The Erik Blair Diaries, the subtext is that authoritarian regimes—through a vicious cycle of manipulation, oppression and fear-mongering—foment violence, manufacture crises, and breed terrorists, thereby giving rise to a recurring cycle of blowback and violence.

Only when the government itself becomes synonymous with the terrorism wreaking havoc in their lives do the people to finally mobilize and stand up to the government’s tyranny.

V, a bold, charismatic freedom fighter, urges the British people to rise up and resist the government. In Vendetta, V the film’s masked crusader blows up the seat of government on November 5, Guy Fawkes Day, while in Erik Blair, freedom fighters plot to unmask the Deep State.

Acts of desperation and outright anarchy are what happens when a parasitical government muzzles the citizenry, fences them in, herds them, brands them, whips them into submission, forces them to ante up the sweat of their brows while giving them little in return, and then provides them with little to no outlet for voicing their discontent: people get desperate, citizens lose hope, and lawful, nonviolent resistance gives way to unlawful, violent resistance.

This way lies madness.

Then again, madness may be unavoidable unless we can wrest back control over our runaway government starting at the local level.

It is time to recalibrate the government.

For years now, we have suffered the injustices, cruelties, corruption and abuse of an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution or the rights of the citizenry.

By “government,” I’m not referring to the farce that is the highly partisan, two-party, bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

We are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs.

We have lingered too long in this strange twilight zone where ego trumps justice, propaganda perverts truth, and imperial presidents—empowered to indulge their authoritarian tendencies by legalistic courts, corrupt legislatures and a disinterested, distracted populace—rule by fiat rather than by the rule of law.

The COVID-19 pandemic provided the government with the perfect excuse to lay claim to a long laundry list of terrifying lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level) that override the Constitution: the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die, and impose health mandates on large segments of the population.

Crises tend to bring out the authoritarian tendencies in government.

That’s no surprise: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Where we find ourselves now is in the unenviable position of needing to rein in all three branches of government—the Executive, the Judicial, and the Legislative—that have exceeded their authority and grown drunk on power.

This is exactly the kind of concentrated, absolute power the founders attempted to guard against by establishing a system of checks of balances that separate and shares power between three co-equal branches: the executive, the legislative and the judiciary.

“The system of checks and balances that the Framers envisioned now lacks effective checks and is no longer in balance,” concludes law professor William P. Marshall. “The implications of this are serious. The Framers designed a system of separation of powers to combat government excess and abuse and to curb incompetence. They also believed that, in the absence of an effective separation-of-powers structure, such ills would inevitably follow. Unfortunately, however, power once taken is not easily surrendered.”

Unadulterated power in any branch of government is a menace to freedom.

There’s no point debating which political party would be more dangerous with these powers.

The fact that any individual—or branch of government—of any political persuasion is empowered to act like a dictator is danger enough.

So, what we can do to wrest back control over a runaway government and an imperial presidency?

It won’t be easy.

We are the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority.

This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government: from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often than not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations.

We are ruled by an elite class of individuals who are completely out of touch with the travails of the average American.

We are viewed as relatively expendable in the eyes of government: faceless numbers of individuals who serve one purpose, which is to keep the government machine running through our labor and our tax dollars. Those in power aren’t losing any sleep over the indignities we are being made to suffer or the possible risks to our health. All they seem to care about are power and control.

We are being made to suffer countless abuses at the government’s hands.

We have little protection against standing armies (domestic and military), invasive surveillance, marauding SWAT teams, an overwhelming government arsenal of assault vehicles and firepower, and a barrage of laws that criminalize everything from vegetable gardens to lemonade stands.

In the name of national security, we’re being subjected to government agencies such as the NSA, FBI and others listening in on our phone calls, reading our mail, monitoring our emails, and carrying out warrantless “black bag” searches of our homes. Adding to the abuse, we have to deal with surveillance cameras mounted on street corners and in traffic lights, weather satellites co-opted for use as spy cameras from space, and thermal sensory imaging devices that can detect heat and movement through the walls of our homes.

That doesn’t even begin to touch on the many ways in which our Fourth Amendment rights are trampled upon by militarized police and SWAT teams empowered to act as laws unto themselves.

In other words, freedom—or what’s left of it—is threatened from every direction.

The predators of the police state are wreaking havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives. The government doesn’t listen to the citizenry, it refuses to abide by the Constitution, which is our rule of law, and it treats the citizenry as a source of funding and little else. Police officers are shooting unarmed citizens and their household pets. Government agents—including local police—are being armed to the teeth and encouraged to act like soldiers on a battlefield. Bloated government agencies are fleecing taxpayers. Government technicians are spying on our emails and phone calls. Government contractors are making a killing by waging endless wars abroad.

In other words, the American police state is alive and well and flourishing.

Nothing has changed, and nothing will change unless we insist on it.

How to do this? It’s not rocket science.

There is no 10-step plan. If there were a 10-step plan, however, the first step would be as follows: turn off the televisions, tune out the politicians, and do your part to stand up for freedom principles in your own communities.

Stand up for your own rights, of course, but more importantly, stand up for the rights of those with whom you might disagree. Defend freedom at all costs. Defend justice at all costs. Make no exceptions based on race, religion, creed, politics, immigration status, sexual orientation, etc. Vote like Americans, for a change, not Republicans or Democrats.

Most of all, use your power—and there is power in our numbers—to nullify anything and everything the government does that undermines the freedom principles on which this nation was founded.

Don’t play semantics. Don’t justify. Don’t politicize it. If it carries even a whiff of tyranny, oppose it. Demand that your representatives in government cut you a better deal, one that abides by the Constitution and doesn’t just attempt to sidestep it.

That’s their job: make them do it.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, all freedoms hang together. They fall together, as well.

The police state does not discriminate. Eventually, we will all suffer the same fate.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

Virtue Signalling

Allen Forrest — Sat, 21 Oct 2023 14:51:03 +0000

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

A Message to Donald Rumsfeld’s Ghost About My Known Knowns

Edward Curtin — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 00:45:07 +0000

On February 12, 2002 at a Pentagon news conference, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked by Jim Miklaszewski, the NBC Pentagon correspondent, if he had any evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was supplying them to terrorists. Rumsfeld delivered a famous non-answer answer and said:

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

When he was pressed by Jamie McIntyre, CNN’s Pentagon correspondent, to answer the question about evidence, he continued to talk gobbledygook, saying, “I could have said that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or vice versa.”

He never said he had evidence, because he didn’t.

Rumsfeld, who enjoyed his verbal games, was the quintessential bullshitter and liar for the warfare state. This encounter took place when Rumsfeld and his coconspirators were promoting lie after lie about the attacks of September 11, 2001 and conflating false stories about an alliance between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in order to build a case to wage another war against Iraq, in order to supplement the one in Afghanistan and the war on “terror” that they launched post September 11 and the subsequently linked anthrax attacks.

A year later on February 5, 2003, U. S. Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the U. N. Security Council and in a command performance assured the world that the U.S. had solid evidence that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction,” repeating that phrase seventeen times as he held up a stage prop vial of anthrax to make his point. He said, “My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources — solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.” He was lying, but to this very day his defenders falsely claim he was the victim of an “intelligence failure,” a typical deceitful excuse along with “it was a mistake.” Of course, Iraq did not have “weapons of mass destruction” and the savage war waged on Iraq was not a mistake.

Scott Ritter, the former Marine U.N. weapons inspector, made it very clear back then that there was no evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but his expertise was dismissed, just as his current analysis of the war in Ukraine is. See his recent tweet about Senator Diane Feinstein in this regard:

Thirteen months after Rumsfeld’s exchange in the news conference, the United States invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003, knowing it had no justification. It was a war of aggression. Millions died as a result. And none of the killers have been prosecuted for their massive war crimes. The war was not launched on mistaken evidence; it was premeditated and based on lies easy to see. Very, very easy to see.

On January 28, 2003, eleven days before Powell performance, I, an independent writer, wrote a newspaper Op Ed, “The War Hoax,” saying:

The Bush administration has a problem: How to start a war without having a justifiable reason for one. No doubt they are working hard to solve this urgent problem. If they can’t find a justification, they may have to create one. Or perhaps they will find what they have already created. . . . Yet once again, the American people are being played for fools, by the government and the media. The open secret, the insider’s fact, is that the United States plans to attack Iraq in the near future. The administration knows this, the media knows it, but the Bush scenario, written many months ago, is to act as if it weren’t so, to act as if a peaceful solution were being seriously considered. . . . Don’t buy it.

Only one very small regional Massachusetts newspaper, the North Adams Transcript, was willing to publish the piece.

I mention this because I think it has been very obvious for a very long time that the evidence for United States’ crimes of all sorts has been available to anyone who wished to face the truth. It does not take great expertise, just an eye for the obvious and the willingness to do a little homework. Despite this, I have noticed that journalists and writers on the left have continued to admit that they were beguiled by people such as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joseph Biden, con men all. I do not mean writers for the mainstream press, but those considered oppositional. Many have, for reasons only they can answer, put hope in these obvious charlatans, and some prominent ones have refused to analyze such matters as the JFK assassination, September 11th, or Covid-19, to name a few issues. Was it because they considered these politicians and matters known unknowns, even when the writing was on the wall?

Those on the right have rolled with Reagan, the Bushes, and Trump in a similar manner, albeit for different reasons. It causes me to shake my head in amazement. When will people learn? How long does it take to realize that all these people are part of a vast criminal enterprise that has been continuously waging wars and lying while raking in vast spoils for the military-industrial complex. There is one party in the U.S. – the War Party.

If you have lived long enough, as have I, you reach a point when you have, through study and the accumulation of evidence, arrived at a long list of known knowns. So with a backhand slap to Donald Rumsfeld, that long serving servant of the U.S. war machine, I will list a very partial number of my known knowns in chronological order. Each could be greatly expanded. There is an abundance of easily available evidence for all of them – nothing secret – but one needs to have the will for truth and do one’s homework. All of these known knowns are the result of U.S. deep state conspiracies and lies, aided and abetted by the lies of mass corporate media.

My Known Knowns:

The U.S. national security state led by the CIA assassinated President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. This is The foundational event for everything that has followed. It set the tone and sent the message that deep state forces will do anything to wage their wars at home and abroad. They killed JFK because he was ending the war against Vietnam, the Cold War, and the nuclear arms race.

Those same forces assassinated Malcolm X fourteen months later on February 21, 1965 because he too had become a champion of peace, human rights, and racial justice with his budding alliance with Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Such an alliance of these two black leaders posed too great a threat to the racist warfare state. This conspiracy was carried out by the Nation of Islam, the New York Police Department, and U.S. intelligence agencies.

The Indonesian government’s slaughter of more than one million mainly poor rice farmers in 1965-6 was the result of a scheme planned by ex-CIA Director Allen Dulles, whom JFK had fired. It was connected to Dulles’s role in the assassination of JFK, the CIA-engineered coup against Indonesian President Sukarno, his replacement by the dictator Suharto, and his mass slaughter ten years later, starting in December 1975. The American-installed Indonesian dictator Suharto, after meeting with Henry Kissinger and President Ford and receiving their approval, would slaughter hundreds of thousands East-Timorese with American-supplied weapons in a repeat of the slaughter of more than a million Indonesians in 1965.

In June of 1967, Israel, a purported ally of the U.S., attacked and destroyed the Egyptian and Syrian armies, claiming falsely that Egypt was about to attack Israel. This was a lie that was later admitted by former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in a speech he gave in 1982 in Washington, D.C. Israel annexed the West Bank and Gaza and still occupies the Golan Heights as well. In June 1967, Israel also attacked and tried to sink the U.S. intelligence gathering ship the U.S. Liberty, killing 34 U.S. sailors and wounding 170 others. Washington covered up these intentional murders to protect Israel.

On April 4, 1968, these same intelligence forces led by the FBI, assassinated Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee. He was not shot by James Earl Ray, the officially alleged assassin, but by a hit man who was part of another intricate government conspiracy. King was killed because of his work for racial and human rights and justice, his opposition to the Vietnam War, and his push for economic justice with the Poor People’s Campaign.

Two months later, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, on his way to the presidency, was also assassinated by deep state intelligence forces in another vastly intricate conspiracy. He was not killed by Sirhan Sirhan, who was a hypnotized patsy standing in front of RFK. He was assassinated by a CIA hit man who was standing behind him and shot him from close range. RFK, also, was assassinated because he was intent on ending the war against Vietnam, bringing racial and economic justice to the country, and pursuing the assassins of his brother John.

The escalation of the war against Vietnam by Pres. Lyndon Johnson was based on the Tonkin Gulf lies. Its savage waging by Richard Nixon for eight years was based on endless lies. These men were war criminals of the highest order. Nixon’s 1968 election was facilitated by the “October Surprise” when South Vietnam withdrew from peace negotiations to end the war. This was secretly arranged by Nixon and his intermediaries.

The well-known Watergate scandal story, as told by Woodward and Bernstein of The Washington Post, that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, is an entertaining fiction concealing intelligence operations.

Another October Surprise was arranged for the 1980 presidential election. It was linked to the subsequent Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration, led by future CIA Director under Reagan, William Casey, and former CIA Director and Vice-President under Reagan, George H. W. Bush. As in 1968, a secret deal was made to secure the Republican’s election by making a deal with Iran to withhold releasing the American hostages they held until after the election. They were released minutes after Reagan was sworn in on January 20, 1981. American presidential elections have been fraught with scandals, as in 2000 when George W. Bush and team stole the election from Democrat Al Gore, and Russia-gate was conjured up by the Democrats in 2016 to try to prevent Trump’s election.

The Reagan administration, together with the CIA, armed the so-called “Contras” to wage war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua that had overthrown the vicious U.S. supported dictator Anastasio Somoza. The Contras were Somoza supporters and part of a long line of terrorists that the U.S. had used throughout Latin America where they supported dictators and death squads to squelch democratic movements. Such state terrorism was of a piece with the September 11, 1973 U.S. engineered coup against the democratic government of President Salvatore Allende in Chile and his replacement with the dictator Augusto Pinochet.

The Persian Gulf War waged by George H.W. Bush in 1991 – the first made for TV war – was based on lie upon lie promoted by the administration and their public relations firm. It was a war of aggression celebrated by CNN and other media as a joyous July 4th fireworks display.

Then the neoliberal phony William Clinton spent eight years bombing Iraq, dismantling the social safety net, deregulating the banks, attacking and dismantling Yugoslavia, savagely bombing Serbia, etc. In a span of four months in 1999 he bombed four countries: Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, and Yugoslavia. He maintained the U.S. sanctions placed on Iraq following the Gulf War that resulted in the death of 500,00 Iraqi children. When his Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked by Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes if the price was worth it, Albright said, “We think the price is worth it.”

The attacks of September 11, 2001, referred to as 9/11 in an act of linguistic mind control in order to create an ongoing sense of national emergency, and the anthrax attacks that followed, were a joint inside operation – a false flag – carried out by elements within the U.S. deep state. Together with the CIA assassination of JFK, these acts of state terrorism mark a second fundamental turning point in efforts to extinguish any sense of democratic control in the United States. Thus The Patriot Act, government spying, censorship, and ongoing attacks on individual rights.

The George W. Bush-led U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. and its “war on terror” were efforts to terrorize and control the Middle East, Southwest Asia, as well as the people of the U.S. The aforementioned Mr. Rumsfeld, along with his partner in crime Dick Cheney, carried out Bush’s known known war crimes justified by the crimes of Sept 11 as they simultaneously created a vast Homeland Security spying network while eliminating Americans basic freedoms.

Barack Obama was one of the most effective imperialist presidents in U.S. history. Although this is factually true, he was able to provide a smiling veneer to his work at institutionalizing the permanent warfare state. When first entering office, he finished George W. Bush’s unfinished task of bailing out the finance capitalist class of Wall St. Having hoodwinked liberals of his bona fides, he then spent eight years presiding over extrajudicial murders, drone attacks, the destruction of Libya, a coup in Ukraine bringing neo-Nazis to power, etc. In 2016 alone he bombed seven countries Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, and Iraq. He expanded U.S. military bases throughout the world and sent special forces throughout Africa and Latin America. He supported the new Cold War with sanctions on Russia. He was a fitting successor to Bush junior.

Donald Trump, a New York City reality TV star and real estate tycoon, the surprise winner of the 2016 U.S. presidential election despite the Democratic Party’s false Russia-gate propaganda, attacked Syria from sea and air in the first two years of his presidency, claiming falsely that these strikes were for Syria’s use of chemical weapons at Douma and for producing chemical weapons. In doing so, he warned Russia not to be associated with Syrian President Assad, a “mass murderer of men, women, and children.” He did not criticize Israel that to the present day continues to bomb Syria, but he recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. He ordered the assassination by drone of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani near Baghdad International Airport while on a visit to meet with Iraq’s prime minister. As an insider contrary to all portrayals, he presided over Operation Warp Speed Covid vaccination development and deployment, which was a military-pharmaceutical-CIA program, whose key player was Robert Kadlec (former colleague of Donal Rumsfeld with deep ties to spy agencies), Trump’s Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services for Preparedness and Response and an ally of Dr. Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates. On December 8, 2020 Trump joyously declared: “Before Operation Warp Speed, the typical time-frame for development and approval [for vaccines], as you know, could be infinity. And we were very, very happy that we were able to get things done at a level that nobody has ever seen before. The gold standard vaccine has been done in less than nine months.” And he announced they he will quickly distribute such a “verifiably safe and effective vaccine” as soon as the FDA approved it because “We are the most exceptional nation in the history of the world. Today, we’re on the verge of another American medical miracle.” The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was approves three days later. Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine received FDA emergency use authorization a week later.

This Covid-19 medical miracle was a con-job from the start. The official Covid operation launched in March 11, 2020 with worldwide lockdowns that destroyed economies while enriching the super-rich and devastating regular people, was a propaganda achievement carried out by intelligence and military apparatuses in conjunction with Big Pharma, the WHO, the World Economic Forum, etc. and promulgated by a vast around-the-clock corporate media disinformation campaign. It was the third fundamental turning point – following the JFK assassination and the attacks of September 11, 2001 and anthrax – in destabilizing the economic, social and political life of all nations while undermining their sovereignty. It was based on false science in the interests of further establishing a biosecurity state. The intelligence agency planners who had conducted many germ war game simulations leading up to Covid -19 referred to a future arising out of such “attacks,” as the “New Normal.” A close study of these precedents, game-planning, and players makes this evident. The aim was to militarize medicine and produce a centralized authoritarian state. Its use of the PCR “test” to detect the virus was a lie from the start. The Nobel Award winning scientist who developed the test, Kary Mullis, made it clear that “the PCR is a process. It does not tell you that you are sick.” It is a process “to make a whole lot of something out of nothing,” but it can not detect a specific virus. That it was used to detect all these Covid “cases” is all one needs to know about the fraud.

Joseph Biden, who was Obama’s point man for Ukraine while vice-president and the U.S. engineered the 2014 coup d’état in Ukraine, came into office intent on promoting the New Cold War with Russia and refused all Russian efforts to peacefully settle the Ukrainian crisis. He pushed NATO to further provoke Russia by moving farther to the east, surrounding Russia’s borders. He supported the neo-Nazi Ukrainian elements and its government’s continuous attacks on the Russian speaking Donbass region in eastern Ukraine. In doing so, he clearly provoked Russian into sending troops into Ukraine on 24 February 2022. He has fueled this war relentlessly and has pushed the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation. He supported the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. He currently presides over an aggressive provocation of China. And like his predecessor Trump, he promotes the Covid disinformation campaign and the use of “vaccines,” urging people to get their jabs.

Throughout all these decades and the matters touched upon here – some of my known knowns – there is another dominant theme that recurs again and again. It is the support for Israel and its evil apartheid regime’s repeated slaughters and persecution of the Palestinian people after having dispossessed them of their ancestral land. This has been a constant fact throughout all U.S. administrations since the JFK assassination and Israel’s subsequent acquisition of nuclear weapons that Kennedy opposed. It is been aided and abetted by the rise of the neocon elements within the U.S. government and the 1997 formation of The Project for the New American Century, founded by William Kristol and Donald Kagan, whose signees included Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, et al., and their claim for the need “for a new Pearl Harbor.” Many of these people, who held dual U.S. and Israeli citizenship, became members of the Bush administration. Once the attacks of September 11th occurred and a summer of moviegoers watching the new film Pearl Harbor had passed, George W. Bush and the corporate media immediately and repeatedly proclaimed the attacks a new Pearl Harbor. Once again, the Palestinian’s and Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel that is widely and falsely reported as unprovoked, as is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has been referred to as “a Pearl Harbor Moment.” By today, Monday 9 Oct. 2023, President Biden has already given full U.S. support to Israel as it savagely attacks Gaza and has said that additional assistance for the Israeli Defense Forces is now on its way to Israel with more to follow over the coming days. Rather than acting as an instrument for peace, the U.S. government continues its support for Israel’s crimes as if it were the same country. The Israel Lobby and the government of Israel has for decades exerted a powerful control over U.S. Middle East policies and much more as well. The Mossad has often worked closely under the aegis of the CIA together with Britain’s M16 to assassinate opponents and provoke war after war.

Donald Rumsfeld, as a key long time insider to U.S. deep state operations, was surely aware of my list of known knowns. He was just one of many such slick talkers involved in demonic U.S. operations that have always been justified, denied, or kept secret by him and his ilk.

One does not have to be a criminologist to realize these things. It is easy to imagine that Rumsfeld’s forlorn ghost is wandering since he went to his grave with his false “unknown unknowns” tucked away.

When he said, “I could have said that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or vice-versa,” he did say it, of course. Despite double-talkers like him, evidence of decades of U.S. propaganda is easy to see through if one is compelled by the will-to-truth.

“Ancestral voices prophesying war; ancestral spirits in the danse macabre or war dance; Valhalla, ghostly warriors who kill each other and are reborn to fight again. All warfare is ghostly, every army an exercitus feralis (army of ghosts), every soldier a living corpse.” – Norman O. Brown

Note: If you think I too have no evidence, look at this for many of them.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.

The Greeks Haul out a Horse for the Trojan Masses

Allen Forrest — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 14:05:49 +0000

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Who Were the Kooks?

Allen Forrest — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 11:55:25 +0000

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Anchorage City Commissioner Charged With Fraudulently Obtaining $1.6 Million in COVID-19 Relief Funds for Her Charity

by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 18:15:00 +0000

by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Anchorage Daily News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

An Anchorage city commissioner and her husband have been charged with fraudulently obtaining $1.6 million in COVID-19 recovery money for their charity. Charges filed in federal court in Anchorage accuse the couple of buying cryptocurrency and making personal use of money intended to help people find homes and addiction treatment.

A federal grand jury on Sept. 19 indicted Rosalina Mavaega, 41, and Esau Fualema Jr., 44, on five felony charges including major fraud, wire fraud and money laundering. The charges come after the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica first reported in May that the Anchorage Assembly gave the couple one of the city’s largest awards under the American Rescue Plan Act despite prior fraud allegations.

Mavaega was arrested Wednesday, court records show. The U.S. Attorney’s Office publicly announced the charges that afternoon.

As of Thursday morning, the city website still listed Mavaega as a member of the Anchorage Equal Rights Commission, which is tasked with investigating allegations of discrimination, as well as the city housing and homelessness committee.

Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson appointed Mavaega to the commissions in 2022. The executive director of the Equal Rights Commission said Thursday morning that Mavaega remains a commissioner. Spokespersons for Bronson and the housing and homelessness commission did not immediately respond to questions. Bronson’s spokesperson previously said the mayor “doesn’t have the unilateral ability to remove members from commissions.”

Mavaega and Fualema were in custody as of Thursday morning and could not immediately be reached for comment. When a reporter visited Mavaega’s office on May 18, an employee said she was not available but was scheduled to talk with investigators that afternoon. She did not respond to subsequent emails and phone calls seeking comment.

Fualema also did not respond to emails, phone messages or an interview request delivered to his home at the time.

First image: Rosalina Mavaega. Second image: Esau Fualema Jr. (LinkedIn)

The Anchorage Assembly in May 2021 awarded Mavaega and Fualema’s charity, House of Transformations, $1.6 million even though the state permanently barred the couple from serving as Medicaid providers in 2015.

The state Division of Senior and Disability Services gave four reasons for the ban: violating background check requirements, submitting billing claims without adequate documentation, offering a rebate for Medicaid referrals and submitting claims without supporting documentation.

As a result, Maveaga’s business can no longer bill any federal health care program, including Medicare, Medicaid and Denali KidCare, for its services. Mavaega appealed the ban in 2016, arguing the penalty was too severe and relied on hearsay evidence, but a state Superior Court judge upheld the punishment.

The charges relate to how they obtained the 2021 grant, how they used the money and alleged efforts to subsequently acquire additional grants from the city.

They are accused of lying to federal, state and city officials in order to claim they met legal requirements to receive an ARPA grant from the city. The charges say the couple directed a grant writer to submit proposals that “falsely described the operating expenses and officers and directors” of their various charities.

The charges say the couple transferred $297,250 of the grant to their personal checking account, using the money as collateral to obtain a personal loan. The loan money was used, in turn, to buy $191,000 in cryptocurrency and to pay taxes owed by one of their businesses.

An additional $402,000 in grant money was used to finance a for-profit beauty salon, according to the charges. The charges say that as part of their grant agreement, they promised to use about $500,000 to make down payment on two Anchorage properties that could be used for housing services. They did not do so, the charges say, and failed to disclose that Fualema already owned 50% of one of the properties.

House of Transformations and various limited liability companies that use the same office address and same name, or similar names, are among a constellation of nonprofits and businesses the couple created in recent years.

House of Transformations was one of the biggest recipients in the first round of ARPA grant awards from the city. It received more than city agencies such as the fire and police departments, and it received the 13th overall largest grant out of the 64 awarded.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News.

Planet of Morons

Allen Forrest — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 15:11:23 +0000

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

New Caledonia’s Backès resigns from French govt after losing Senate vote

APR editor — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 05:07:17 +0000

ANALYSIS: By Patrick Decloitre, RNZ French Pacific correspondent

A prominent pro-France leader in New Caledonia, Sonia Backès, has resigned from the French government after a resounding defeat at France’s Senatorial elections four days ago.

In July 2022, Backès, a member of French President Macron’s Renaissance party, had been appointed Assistant Minister for Citizenship in French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne’s government.

She is also President of New Caledonia’s affluent Southern Province and a leading figure within New Caledonia’s pro-France camp.

At the Senatorial poll on Sunday, she was vying for one of the two seats reserved for New Caledonia, but lost to Robert Xowie, a pro-independence indigenous Kanak leader from the FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front) who is also the Mayor of Lifou in New Caledonia’s Loyalty Islands group.

Xowie is the first ever pro-independence leader to be elected to the French Senate.

Backès’ setback had since fuelled speculation that she would have to resign.

Her appointment to a ministerial position had raised eyebrows from New Caledonia’s pro-independence movement on a possible conflict of interest and the necessary partiality of the French government in view of future talks about the French Pacific entity’s political future.

On Wednesday in Paris, she is reported to have tendered her resignation to the French President, who is understood to have accepted it, according to French media report.

Double blow to pro-French camp
The French Senate elections last weekend were a double blow for the pro-French camp in New Caledonia: for the other contested seat, another pro-French candidate, Georges Naturel, Mayor of the small town of Dumbéa near Noumea took the seat in spite of his candidacy was not endorsed by his own political party, Les Républicains (LR).

Incumbent Pierre Frogier, 72, a veteran politician in New Caledonia, who was bidding for another mandate, also lost.

He has since publicly announced this defeat marked “the end of (his) public life” which spanned half a century.

Frogier is one of the few remaining politicians in New Caledonia who had signed both the Matignon-Oudinot Accord in 1988 (marking the end of half a decade of a bloody civil war) and the Nouméa Accord 10 years later in 1998, setting the roadmap for a gradual process of enlarged autonomy and a transfer of powers from France to New Caledonia.

But 25 years after its signing, the Nouméa Accord is coming to an end and the three referendums it prescribed have been held over the past 5 years.

Holding those three referendums was a key provision of the Nouméa Accord and the majority of voters responded “no” to the question “Do you want New Caledonia to access full sovereignty and become independent?”

Since then, Paris regards this outcome as an unequivocal indication that New Caledonia wants to remain French.

The first two referendums’ results were no (56.67 percent, November 4, 2018) and no (53.26 percent, October 4, 2020).

However, the FLNKS is contesting the validity of the third referendum’s results (96.50 percent for no, December 12, 2021). However, less than half — 43.87 percent — of the registered voters turned out for this referendum due to the Kanak boycott of the poll after the covid pandemic ravaged the community.

The Kanak ensign flies alongside the French tricolour as has been the custom since the 1998 Noumea Accord preparing the region for greater self-government. Image: RNZ Pacific/123rf

‘A response to neo-colonial attitude’
Sunday, September 24 was not only Senatorial election day in France.

In New Caledonia, ironically, it was the “Citizenship Festival”, a new way to mark this year — the 170th anniversary of what used to be called the “Day of Taking Possession”, a direct reference to the first French landing, September 24, 1853, when French Commodore Febvrier-Despointes “took possession” of the islands on behalf of Napoleon III and planted the French tricolour flag in the small coastal village of Balade.

The electoral setback is also perceived as a strong message sent from the pro-independence camp to the Paris, as parties have last month resumed talks on New Caledonia’s political future.

“[The victory] is a response to President Macron’s neo-colonial attitude which persists in ignoring that our country is engaged in an irreversible decolonisation process,” the FLNKS wrote in a media release earlier this week.

“It is also a stinging response to [France’s] unacceptable ‘martyr’ document,” the release adds in a direct reference to a draft document outlining suggestions for future changes to New Caledonia’s institutions, citizenship and self-determination modus operandi.

For instance, under the French suggestions, there would no longer be a deadline for any future referendum for New Caledonia, no more “yes” or “no” options, but the matter would be considered if a “project” was submitted to approval after bipartisan talks.

Other suggestions relate to the notion of a New Caledonian citizenship, which would co-exist with a French citizenship and would be detailed in a scheduled Constitutional amendment that President Macron would like to have voted by the French Congress (a gathering of both Houses of the French Parliament, the National Assembly and the Senate) sometime early 2024.

The document has been dubbed “martyr” by France’s Home Affairs and Overseas minister Gérald Darmanin during talks early September in Paris because it was destined to be discussed and largely debated by all sides of New Caledonia’s political spectrum.

Another round of talks is scheduled to take place in October in Nouméa with Darmanin.

Backès’ rebuff and subsequent resignation are said not to have any impact on the October schedule.

Fractured political landscape
But the new situation leaves a largely fractured political landscape in New Caledonia.

On the pro-independence side last week, one of the main and largest components of FLNKS, the Union Calédonienne (UC), back-tracked on its earlier commitment to attend the Nouméa talks.

Its spokesperson, Gilbert Tyuienon, said the “martyr” draft was “unacceptable” and “not serious” because it cast doubt on New Caledonia’s self-determination process.

Other components of the pro-independence umbrella, the PALIKA (Parti de Libération Kanak) and the UPM (Union Progressiste Mélanésienne), however, said they remained committed to further talks with Darmanin.

On the pro-France side, Backès’ senatorial setback and subsequent resignation also leaves a deeply divided terrain, some of its leaders admitting their recent skirmishes had largely contributed to the defeat and deprived them of a voice within the French Senate and more generally on the French National political scene.

It has since transpired that both Xowie and Naturel’s victory resulted from a secret exchange of votes agreement struck between the two, on a bipartisan basis.

This triggered furious reactions from the pro-France side, which have since labelled Naturel a “traitor”.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

A Return to Masking?

Allen Forrest — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 13:02:57 +0000

It looks like the Trudeau government in Canada is preparing to mandate masking again, despite the science, in randomized control trials, revealing no prophylaxis effect of masking compared to non-masking against respiratory viruses.

Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, is setting up a return to enforced masking of Canadians.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

What Was Obedience to the COVID-19 Mandates?

Allen Forrest — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 12:38:42 +0000

Self-incarceration

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

9/11: The Onslaught of an Endless War on Humanity

Peter Koenig — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 21:53:44 +0000

Monday, September 11, 2023 marked the 22nd Anniversary of the NYC 9/11, a day of global mourning, the beginning, or activation, of a crime of biblical proportions like never before in history remembered. Activation stands for onslaught of a colossal War on Humanity. What the small supremacist elite calls War on Terror is nothing less than an endless war on mankind. A war waged by a death cult. The preparation for the war started decades or probably hundred-plus years before.

Two planes hitting the twin towers of the NYC World Trade Center (WTC) on September 11, 2001 – probably remote-controlled – because most pilots admit this kind of close-curved maneuver necessary to hit the towers was impossible to carry out by a pilot.

The world was told the perpetrators were a group of some 12 Saudi terrorists. An outright lie. One of the first ones – to be followed by countless others – all in the name of instilling fear to control mankind, to eventually upgrade the war to a killing machine – leading onto the infamous UN Agenda 2030, alias the Great Reset, and the all-digitizing, QR-code -crowned Fourth Industrial Revolution, what Klaus Schwab, WEF’s founder and CEO proudly claims as his brainchild.

Who else could come up with a new world order based on linearism, digitalized transhumanism, 180-degrees opposite of what life, the universe is – an infinite multitude of dynamism – life in multiple dimensions, evolving naturally as a cog in the universe’s endless wheel?

Right there on NYC’s 9/11, more than 3000 people were killed. Thousands more followed in the immediate aftermath.

The third building that collapsed a day later – seemingly out of the blue – was apparently ripe with documented evidence of the crime. Almost silence by the media.

And to this day, nobody knows what happened to the people on the plane that apparently crashed into an open field in Pennsylvania. No debris and no people were ever found. Here too, no media coverage, no investigation – just destined to be forgotten.

What happened to the dozens of policemen and firefighters who were near the WTC towers and in their basements, reporting on hearing explosions underground and in the lower strata of the extremely solid constructions just before they collapsed in the well-known style of purposeful city demolition techniques? Most of them were never seen again. “Victims” of the accident?

Overall, since the NYC-9/11 millions of people were killed in the aftermath of the trigger to the so-called war on terror, which, in fact, was meant to be — and is — a war on humanity.

The onslaught of wars began. The US invasion of Afghanistan, barely a month after the suspected auto-coup of the 9/11 Twin Towers implosion. The pretext was Osama Bin Laden, an Al Qaeda CIA recruit, who, the George W. Bush Administration lied, having orchestrated the 9/11 attack from Afghanistan, had to be eliminated by invading the mountainous and resources-rich Afghanistan landlocked in the center of Asia.

Al Qaeda was a CIA creation of the late 1980’s, already then as an instrument to justify the coming war on terror.

True reasons for invading Afghanistan were several: The Turkmenistan–Afghanistan–Pakistan–India Gas Pipeline, also known as Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline, or TAPI Pipeline, was to bring natural gas from the world’s second largest gas fields in Galkynysh, Turkmenistan, discharging 33 billion cubic meters of gas per year to the Gulf of India. Washington wanted control over this largest gas transit, potentially disrupting US petrol giants market dominance.

The ever-closer relations between Afghanistan and China were a thorn in the eyes for US political supremacy, and finally the extreme mineral riches especially rare earths, vital for production of electronics and chips used for military equipment as well as for multiple civilian uses.

Afghanistan was the first “leg” on the endless “War on Terror”.

The Afghanistan invasion was followed by the May 2003 Iraq invasion, one of the hydrocarbon richest countries in the Middle East, with a leader, Saddam Hussein, who was at the point of defying OPEC rules of trading hydrocarbons in US-dollars only. Saddam wanted to trade Iraq’s hydrocarbons in Euros. Iraq was also labeled an al Qaeda terrorist country.

A “Shock and Awe” attack should eliminate the country’s leader and bring Iraq to her knees before the almighty US of A. By now we know that it did not exactly happen that way. It was probably also planned as an endless war.

Iraq – another “War on Terror” – emanating from the 9/11 auto-attack.

Syria. From 2011 forward Washington’s secret service created a “civil war” applying the principle of divide to conquer. In September 2014 the conflict culminated in the US intervening, siding with the [US-created] Syrian rebels, fighting the Islamic State, the so-called “Operation Inherent Resolve” in what was labeled international war against the Islamic State.

In truth, Washington wanted to get rid of the highly popular and democratically elected Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad. Again, the interest was control over the large Syrian oil and mineral resources.

Also, under the flag of “War on Terror”.

Coincidentally – though, there are no coincidences – the Ukraine war also started in [February] 2014, by the US instigated coup against the democratically elected Viktor Yanukovych. Remember Victoria Nuland’s recorded phone conversation with the US Ambassador in Kiev – “f**k Europe”? And the recent admission by NATO boss, Jens Stoltenberg, that the Ukraine War started already in 2014?

Other US-initiated wars and conflicts followed. In Sudan in 2006 / 2007 after the broken Darfur Peace Agreement; in Pakistan in 2011 under the pretext and on the heels of several targeted killings in Karachi, leaving hundreds of people dead. US presence never left the country, as Pakistan was attempting establishing closer relations with China.

To the “war on terror” may also be counted the October 2011 US / French / NATO lynching of Libyan President, Muammar Gaddafi, leaving the country as of this day in a state of constant civil strife and mafia-like killings and enslavement of refugees. Gaddafi was about to introduce the Gold Dinar as a unified currency for Africa to liberate Africa from French and US/K currency exploitation.

The NYC 9/11 was — and is — a war instrument that until this day has not been fully recognized as what it was supposed to be – a precursor to possibly the planned final phase for civilization as we know it, the UN Agenda 2030, alias The Great Reset, leading to the full digitization of humanity into transhumanism and simply a One World Order (OWO), run by full control via digitization of everything, complemented with Artificial Intelligence (AI).

It is the plan. A scary plan, a plan with the purpose of instilling fear. Thus, it is hoped, making the population defenseless against a tyrannical take-over.

This plan will not materialize.

Lest we forget, it is important to point out that there was another 9/11 “event” 50 years back that took place in Chile. It also killed instantly hundreds of people, and over the following 16 years, until General Pinochet’s demise in March 1990, tens of thousands of people disappeared and were killed.

The purpose of the US-instigated and Henry Kissinger executed military coup in Chile was to get rid of the “uncomfortable” democratically elected, socialist-leaning, President Salvador Allende so that the United States could implement and test a “Chicago Boys” designed neoliberal economic system to run an entire country. Later to be repeated throughout Latin America, a remedy to make sure Latin America would keep their US “Backyard” status, for a long time to come.

The “Chicago Boys” were a group of Chilean and international economists, most of whom were educated in the 1970s and 1980s by arch-conservative Milton Friedman at the Department of Economics of the University of Chicago.

Also, not to forget, the major coup planner and instigator, was the then Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, under Richard Nixon’s presidency. Kissinger later received the Nobel Peace Prize for his alleged peace efforts in the Vietnam war which he also “directed”, and following his ordered bombing of Cambodia and Laos to bloody rubble with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of deaths. Remember the infamous “Killing Fields” in Cambodia? Well, that was also Henry Kissinger, arguably the most notorious war criminal still alive.

Earlier this year, Henry Kissinger turned 100. This could be natural old age, or it could be old age enhanced by adrenochrome.

Is it sheer coincidence that the Santiago Chile and the NYC Nine-Eleven massacres are exactly 50 years apart? A half a century.

There are no coincidences. Just connecting the dots.

As a reminder 911 is the emergency-call number in the United States. That is hardly a coincidence.

Kissinger is a close buddy, ally and advisor of Klaus Schwab, CEO of the controversial World Economic Forum (WEF). As of this day, Kissinger’s advice is sought by leaders around the world.

In July 2023, Kissinger was received by China’s President Xi Jinping, who apparently greeted Kissinger with a comment, “old friends” like him will never be forgotten. The irony is subtle. The US-initiated meeting was apparently meant to mend frayed ties between Washington and Beijing.

A tremendous attribute for President Xi. He is always open for initiatives potentially leading to improved relations, harmony, and peace.

Back to NYC-9/11

What we, especially the western world’s humanity, currently are living is a colossal crime never seen and recorded before in known history.

After 9/11 for many, and for a long time for most, flying has become a nightmare and a huge business for a few. The long security lines, the manual checking – often more reminiscent of groping – of passengers, who often for some medical reasons, have a hard time passing through the control machines without the red-light flashing.

The first US Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge and associates, became insanely rich by launching the manufacturing of the airport security machines that were imposed worldwide, and which are being constantly upgraded.

Backtracking

9/11 sparked “wars on terror” – alias on humanity — that may have had several phases of activation.

The Club of Rome, first unofficially meeting in 1956 in Rome, was formally created in 1968 as an initiative of David Rockefeller with Aurelio Peccei, Alexander King and Dr. Mamphela Ramphele, founder and President of Africa’s Agang party, and others.

The Club of Rome issued in 1972 the infamous report “Limits to Growth” (LTG), arguing against continued economic and population growth, setting the first marks for a massive eugenist agenda, a population reduction down to about 500 million people from today’s 8 billion-plus, a reduction of about 95%.

Dennis Meadows, one of the main authors of the Club of Rome’s “The Limits of Growth”, is a member of the World Economic Forum. He propagates as of this day massive population reduction. See this.

This eugenist plan is as of this day the blueprint for what we are living. It is the core for UN Agenda 2030, the Great Reset and All-digitization.

From it was born covid, the worldwide coercive vaxx mandate, possibly more lab-made “viruses” to come, as well as the climate change hoax, justifying geoengineering of weather, causing droughts, floods, never-seen-before hurricanes and tornadoes, Directed Energy Weapons (DEW) caused forest and other fires, like the destruction of Lahaina on Maui, and others – all bringing about poverty, famine, misery, and death.

Closing the circle with NYC’s 9/11 setting the stage 22 years ago.

There is no waiting. We must resist with heart and soul and peaceful spirits. We shall never forget 9/11 and what it triggered, and we shall overcome.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Peter Koenig.

9/11: The Onslaught of an Endless War on Humanity

Peter Koenig — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 21:53:44 +0000

Right there on NYC’s 9/11, more than 3000 people were killed. Thousands more followed in the immediate aftermath.

The third building that collapsed a day later – seemingly out of the blue – was apparently ripe with documented evidence of the crime. Almost silence by the media.

Overall, since the NYC-9/11 millions of people were killed in the aftermath of the trigger to the so-called war on terror, which, in fact, was meant to be — and is — a war on humanity.

Al Qaeda was a CIA creation of the late 1980’s, already then as an instrument to justify the coming war on terror.

Afghanistan was the first “leg” on the endless “War on Terror”.

Iraq – another “War on Terror” – emanating from the 9/11 auto-attack.

Also, under the flag of “War on Terror”.

It is the plan. A scary plan, a plan with the purpose of instilling fear. Thus, it is hoped, making the population defenseless against a tyrannical take-over.

This plan will not materialize.

Earlier this year, Henry Kissinger turned 100. This could be natural old age, or it could be old age enhanced by adrenochrome.

Is it sheer coincidence that the Santiago Chile and the NYC Nine-Eleven massacres are exactly 50 years apart? A half a century.

There are no coincidences. Just connecting the dots.

As a reminder 911 is the emergency-call number in the United States. That is hardly a coincidence.

Kissinger is a close buddy, ally and advisor of Klaus Schwab, CEO of the controversial World Economic Forum (WEF). As of this day, Kissinger’s advice is sought by leaders around the world.

A tremendous attribute for President Xi. He is always open for initiatives potentially leading to improved relations, harmony, and peace.

Back to NYC-9/11

What we, especially the western world’s humanity, currently are living is a colossal crime never seen and recorded before in known history.

Backtracking

9/11 sparked “wars on terror” – alias on humanity — that may have had several phases of activation.

This eugenist plan is as of this day the blueprint for what we are living. It is the core for UN Agenda 2030, the Great Reset and All-digitization.

Closing the circle with NYC’s 9/11 setting the stage 22 years ago.

There is no waiting. We must resist with heart and soul and peaceful spirits. We shall never forget 9/11 and what it triggered, and we shall overcome.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Peter Koenig.

The Sheep behind the Masks

Allen Forrest — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 12:25:30 +0000

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

NZ election 2023: Raucous Northland debate crowd rails at covid, te reo Māori mentions

APR editor — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 09:17:31 +0000

By Peter de Graaf, RNZ News

Northland MP Willow-Jean Prime walked into the lion’s den when she took part in an election debate in Kerikeri last night.

The traditionally blue seat is currently held by Labour — the election of 2020 was the first time it had been won by the left since 1938 — but polls suggest that won’t last much longer.

Five candidates took part in the live-streamed debate at the Homestead Tavern organised by right-wing lobby group the Taxpayers’ Union.

With a partisan audience and The Daily Blog editor/publisher Martyn “Bomber” Bradbury and libertarian Damien Grant as MCs — political commentators from opposite ends of the political spectrum — it was a rollicking, raucous ride, sometimes rude but never dull.

For Prime it was a foray into hostile territory with the Labour MP all but drowned out by shouts and jeers.

She had little chance to defend her party’s record or set out her priorities above the din.

The loudest reaction came after mention of the C word — that’s covid, of course.

Covid response ‘saved lives’
Prime defended the government’s response, saying it was one of the best in the world and had saved lives, but acknowledged some in the room did not agree with her.

The crowd at Kerikeri’s Homestead Tavern raises a toast to the upcoming election. Image: RNZ/Peter de Graaf

There were angry shouts from some in the near-capacity crowd anytime she used a word in te reo Māori, such as Aotearoa or puku [belly].

The other candidates received a warmer reception, with Matt King — the former Northland MP who quit National and set up DemocracyNZ in protest at the party’s covid policy — having the loudest supporters.

New Zealand First candidate Shane Jones continued his campaign theme of describing himself as the politician who delivered for Northland when he held the purse strings for the Provincial Growth Fund.

He also said it was time Northlanders broke their habit of electing lions, only to find they turned into lambs as soon as they took their place in Parliament.

Jones promised a “laser-like focus” on Northland’s infrastructure deficit, especially when it came to roads, rail and shipping.

Northland election debate MC Damien Grant grills candidates (from left) Shane Jones (New Zealand First), Grant McCallum (National), Willow-Jean Prime (Labour), Mark Cameron (Act) and Matt King (DemocracyNZ). Image: RNZ/Peter de Graaf

‘Squeezed middle’
National candidate Grant McCallum, a Maungaturoto farmer who won the party’s selection process to replace King, also promised a laser-like focus — but in his case it would be on costs and the “squeezed middle”.

He said middle New Zealanders had been hard hit by rising prices and interest rates.

King was initially denied a place in the debate, raising the prospect of a protest outside the venue by his supporters, with the Taxpayers’ Union saying he did not meet the criteria.

Those criteria included being a sitting MP or polling at least 5 percent in the electorate.

King was told on Monday he could join the debate after all because the weekend’s Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll put his support in Northland at 5 percent, once undecided voters were excluded.

King promised to “fight back for farmers” against what he called a “climate change catastrophist narrative”.

ACT list MP Mark Cameron, meanwhile, just wanted less government, saying New Zealanders should be left alone to do what they did best.

Gun register dismissed
He was questioned by MC Martyn Bradbury about ACT’s plans to reverse a ban on high-calibre semi-automatic weapons, which Cameron did not address — but he did say bringing in a gun register had not worked overseas and would not work in New Zealand.

Between the serious politicking there was also plenty of humour.

When New Zealand First was accused of being less interested in real issues than in culture-war talking points such as the use of public toilets by transgender women, MC Damien Grant asked — with some trepidation — how Jones defined a woman.

“Matua Shane Jones has 19 mokopuna [grandchildren],” Jones replied.

“And he has his beautiful wife sitting right in front. Bro, that’s a woman.”

The last word went to Prime, who warned the crowd a change of government would lead to cuts in basic services.

It is not clear, however, if anyone heard her above the jeers.

‘Lot at stake in election’
“There is a lot at stake in this election, and I implore you all, to ask the questions and do the research,” Prime said.

Earlier in the evening, the organisers released the results of a Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll conducted in the Northland electorate the previous weekend.

The poll showed McCallum had 43 percent of the electorate vote, followed by Prime on 18 percent and Jones on 13 percent.

Both King and the Greens’ Reina Tuai Penney, who did not take part in the debate, had 4 percent support with Cameron trailing on 2 percent.

However, the poll had a relatively small sample size of 400 and a margin of error of almost 5 percent.

The proportion of respondents who had not made up their minds was 11 percent. If they were excluded, McCallum’s share of the vote jumped to 49 percent.

The poll showed broadly similar trends when it came to the party vote, although personal support for Jones (13 percent) was much higher than support for his party overall in Northland (3 percent).

Situation reversed
The situation was reversed for Cameron who had just 2 percent support as a candidate while his party, ACT, polled 12 percent.

Cameron has, however, been campaigning for the party vote only and suggesting his supporters give their electorate votes to McCallum.

Respondents were asked what they believed was the most important issue facing Northland.

Unsurprisingly, given the state of the region’s transport network, 36 percent opted for roads, followed by the cost of living on 15 percent, health on 14 percent and law and order on 8 percent.