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Five months after taking over the federal agency responsible for the health of all Americans, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to overhaul an obscure but vital program that underpins the nation’s childhood immunization system.

Depending on what he does, the results could be catastrophic.

In his crosshairs is the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, a system designed to provide fair and quick payouts for people who suffer rare but serious side effects from shots — without having to prove that drugmakers were negligent. Congress created the program in the 1980s when lawsuits drove vaccine makers from the market. A special tax on immunizations funds the awards, and manufacturers benefit from legal protections that make it harder to win big-money verdicts against them in civil courts.

Kennedy, who founded an anti-vaccination group and previously accused the pharmaceutical industry of inflicting “unnecessary and risky vaccines” on children for profits, has long argued that the program removes any incentive for the industry to make safe products.

In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Kennedy condemned what he called corruption in the program and said he had assigned a team to overhaul it and expand who could seek compensation. He didn’t detail his plans but did repeat the long-debunked claim that vaccines cause autism and suggested, without citing any evidence, that shots could also be responsible for a litany of chronic ailments, from diabetes to narcolepsy.

There are a number of ways he could blow up the program and prompt vaccine makers to stop selling shots in the U.S., like they did in the 1980s. The trust fund that pays awards, for instance, could run out of money if the government made it easy for Kennedy’s laundry list of common health problems to qualify for payments from the fund.

Or he could pick away at the program one shot at a time. Right now, immunizations routinely recommended for children or pregnant women are covered by the program. Kennedy has the power to drop vaccines from the list, a move that would open up their manufacturers to the kinds of lawsuits that made them flee years ago.

Dr. Eddy Bresnitz, who served as New Jersey’s state epidemiologist and then spent a dozen years as a vaccine executive at Merck, is among those worried.

“If his unstated goal is to basically destroy the vaccine industry, that could do it,” said Bresnitz, who retired from Merck and has consulted for vaccine manufacturers. “I still believe, having worked in the industry, that they care about protecting American health, but they are also for-profit companies with shareholders, and anything that detracts from the bottom line that can be avoided, they will avoid.”

A spokesperson for PhRMA, a U.S. trade group for pharmaceutical companies, told ProPublica in a written statement that upending the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program “would threaten continued patient access to FDA approved vaccines.”

The spokesperson, Andrew Powaleny, said the program “has compensated thousands of claims while helping ensure the continued availability of a safe and effective vaccine supply. It remains a vital safeguard for public health and importantly doesn’t shield manufacturers from liability.”

Since its inception, the compensation fund has paid about $4.8 billion in awards for harm from serious side effects, such as life-threatening allergic reactions and Guillain-Barré syndrome, an autoimmune condition that can cause paralysis. The federal agency that oversees the program found that for every 1 million doses of vaccine distributed between 2006 and 2023, about one person was compensated for an injury.

Since becoming Health and Human Services secretary, Kennedy has turned the staid world of immunizations on its ear. He reneged on the U.S. government’s pledge to fund vaccinations for the world’s poorest kids. He fired every member of the federal advisory group that recommends which shots Americans get, and his new slate vowed to scrutinize the U.S. childhood immunization schedule. Measles, a vaccine-preventable disease eliminated here in 2000, roared back and hit a grim record — more cases than the U.S. has seen in 33 years, including three deaths. When a U.S. senator asked Kennedy if he recommended measles shots, Kennedy answered, “Senator, if I advised you to swim in a lake that I knew there to be alligators in, wouldn’t you want me to tell you there were alligators in it?”

Fed up, the American Academy of Pediatrics and other medical societies sued Kennedy last week, accusing him of dismantling “the longstanding, Congressionally-authorized, science- and evidence-based vaccine infrastructure that has prevented the deaths of untold millions of Americans.” (The federal government has yet to respond to the suit.)

Just about all drugs have side effects. What’s unusual about vaccines is that they’re given to healthy people — even newborns on their first day of life. And many shots protect not just the individuals receiving them but also the broader community by making it harder for deadly scourges to spread. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that routine childhood immunizations have prevented more than 1.1 million deaths and 32 million hospitalizations among the generation of Americans born between 1994 and 2023.

To most people, the nation’s vaccine system feels like a solid, reliable fact of life, doling out shots to children like clockwork. But in reality it is surprisingly fragile.

There are only a handful of companies that make nearly all of the shots children receive. Only one manufacturer makes chickenpox vaccines. And just two or three make the shots that protect against more than a dozen diseases, including polio and measles. If any were to drop out, the country could find itself in the same crisis that led President Ronald Reagan to sign the law creating the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program in 1986.

Back then, pharmaceutical companies faced hundreds of lawsuits alleging that the vaccine protecting kids from whooping cough, diphtheria and tetanus caused unrelenting seizures that led to severe disabilities. (Today’s version of this shot is different.) One vaccine maker after another left the U.S. market.

At one point, pediatricians could only buy whooping cough vaccines from a single company. Shortages were so bad that the CDC recommended doctors stop giving booster shots to preserve supplies for the most vulnerable babies.

While Congress debated what to do, public health clinics’ cost per dose jumped 5,000% in five years.

“We were really concerned that we would lose all vaccines, and we would get major resurgences of vaccine-preventable diseases,” recalled Dr. Walter Orenstein, a vaccine expert who worked in the CDC’s immunization division at the time.

A Forbes headline captured the anxiety of parents, pediatricians and public health workers: “Scared Shotless.” So a bipartisan group in Congress hammered out the no-fault system.

Today, the program covers vaccines routinely recommended for children or pregnant women once Congress approves the special tax that funds awards. (COVID-19 shots are part of a separate, often-maligned system for handling claims of harm, though Kennedy has said he’s looking at ways to add them to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.)

Under program rules, people who say they are harmed by covered vaccines can’t head straight to civil court to sue manufacturers. First, they have to go through the no-fault system. The law established a table of injuries and the time frame for when those conditions must have appeared in order to be considered for quicker payouts. A tax on those vaccines — now 75 cents for every disease that a shot protects against — flows into a trust fund that pays those approved for awards. Win or lose, the program, for the most part, pays attorney fees and forbids lawyers from taking a cut of the money paid to the injured.

The law set up a dedicated vaccine court where government officials known as special masters, who operate like judges, rule on cases without juries. People can ask for compensation for health problems not listed on the injury table, and they don’t have to prove that the vaccine maker was negligent or failed to warn them about the medical condition they wound up with. At the same time, they can’t claim punitive damages, which drive up payouts in civil courts, and pain and suffering payments are capped at $250,000.

Plaintiffs who aren’t satisfied with the outcome or whose cases drag on too long can exit the program and file their cases in traditional civil courts. There they can pursue punitive damages, contingency-fee agreements with lawyers and the usual evidence gathering that plaintiffs use to hold companies accountable for wrongdoing.

But a Supreme Court ruling, interpreting the law that created the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, limited the kinds of claims that can prevail in civil court. So while the program isn’t a full liability shield for vaccine makers, its very existence significantly narrows the cases trial lawyers can file.

Kennedy has been involved in such civil litigation. In his federal disclosures, he revealed that he referred plaintiffs to a law firm filing cases against Merck over its HPV shot in exchange for a 10% cut of the fees if they win. After a heated exchange with Sen. Elizabeth Warren during his confirmation proceedings, Kennedy said his share of any money from those cases would instead go to one of his adult sons, who he later said is a lawyer in California. His son Conor works as an attorney at the Los Angeles law firm benefiting from his referrals. When ProPublica asked about this arrangement, Conor Kennedy wrote, “I don’t work on those cases and I’m not receiving any money from them.”

In March, a North Carolina federal judge overseeing hundreds of cases that alleged Merck failed to warn patients about serious side effects from its HPV vaccine ruled in favor of Merck; an appeal is pending.

The Vaccine Injury Compensation Program succeeded in stabilizing the business of childhood vaccines, with many more shots developed and approved in the decades since it was established. But even ardent supporters acknowledge there are problems. The program’s staff levels haven’t kept up with the caseload. The law capped the number of special masters at eight, and congressional bills to increase that have failed. An influx of adult claims swamped the system after adverse reactions to flu shots became eligible for compensation in 2005 and serious shoulder problems were added to the injury table in 2017.

The quick and smooth system of payouts originally envisioned has evolved into a more adversarial one with lawyers for the Department of Justice duking it out with plaintiffs’ attorneys, which Kennedy says runs counter to the program’s intent. Many cases drag on for years.

In his recent interview with Carlson, he described “the lawyers of the Department of Justice, the leaders of it” working on the cases as corrupt. “They saw their job as protecting the trust fund rather than taking care of people who made this national sacrifice, and we’re going to change all that,” he said. “And I’ve brought in a team this week that is starting to work on that.”

The system is “supposed to be generous and fast and gives a tie to the runner,” he told Carlson. “In other words, if there’s doubts about, you know, whether somebody’s injury came from a vaccine or not, you’re going to assume they got it and compensate them.”

Kennedy didn’t identify who is on the team reviewing the program. At one point in the interview, he said, “We just brought a guy in this week who’s going to be revolutionizing the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.”

The HHS employee directory now lists Andrew Downing as a counselor working in Kennedy’s office. Downing for many years has filed claims with the program and suits in civil courts on behalf of clients alleging harm from shots. Last month, HHS awarded a contract for “Vaccine Injury Compensation Program expertise” to Downing’s firm, as NOTUS has reported.

Downing did not respond to a voicemail left at his law office. HHS didn’t reply to a request to make him and Kennedy available for an interview and declined to answer detailed questions about its plans for the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. In the past, an HHS spokesperson has said that Kennedy is “not anti-vaccine — he is pro-safety.”

While it’s not clear what changes Downing and Kennedy have in mind, Kennedy’s interview with Carlson offered some insights. Kennedy said he was working to expand the program’s three-year statute of limitations so that more people can be compensated. Downing has complained that patients who have certain autoimmune disorders don’t realize their ailments were caused by a vaccine until it’s too late to file. Congress would have to change the law to allow this, experts said.

A key issue is whether Kennedy will try to add new ailments to the list of injuries that qualify for quicker awards.

In the Carlson interview, Kennedy dismissed the many studies and scientific consensus that shots don’t cause autism as nothing more than statistical trickery. “We’re going to do real science,” Kennedy said.

The vaccine court spent years in the 2000s trying cases that alleged autism was caused by the vaccine ingredient thimerosal and the shot that protects people from measles, mumps and rubella. Facing more than 5,000 claims, the court asked a committee of attorneys representing children with autism to pick test cases that represented themes common in the broader group. In the cases that went to trial, the special masters considered more than 900 medical articles and heard testimony from dozens of experts. In each of those cases, the special masters found that the shots didn’t cause autism.

In at least two subsequent cases, children with autism were granted compensation because they met the criteria listed in the program’s injury table, according to a vaccine court decision. That table, for instance, lists certain forms of encephalopathy — a type of brain dysfunction — as a rare side effect of shots that protect people from whooping cough, measles, mumps and rubella. In a 2016 vaccine court ruling, Special Master George L. Hastings Jr. explained, “The compensation of these two cases, thus does not afford any support to the notion that vaccinations can contribute to the causation of autism.”

Hastings noted that when Congress set up the injury table, the lawmakers acknowledged that people would get compensated for “some injuries that were not, in fact, truly vaccine-caused.”

Many disabling neurological disorders in children become apparent around the time kids get their shots. Figuring out whether the timing was coincidental or an indication that the vaccines caused the problem has been a huge challenge.

Devastating seizures in young children were the impetus for the compensation program. But in the mid-1990s, after a yearslong review of the evidence, HHS removed seizure disorder from the injury table and narrowed the type of encephalopathy that would automatically qualify for compensation. Scientists subsequently have discovered genetic mutations that cause some of the most severe forms of epilepsy.

What’s different now, though, is that Kennedy, as HHS secretary, has the power to add autism or other disorders to that injury table. Experts say he’d have to go through the federal government’s cumbersome rulemaking process to do so. He could also lean on federal employees to green-light more claims.

In addition, Kennedy has made it clear he’s thinking about illnesses beyond autism. “We have now this epidemic of immune dysregulation in our country, and there’s no way to rule out vaccines as one of the key culprits,” he told Carlson. Kennedy mentioned diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, seizure disorders, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, tics, Tourette syndrome, narcolepsy, peanut allergies and eczema.

President Donald Trump’s budget estimated that the value of the investments in the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program trust fund could reach $4.8 billion this year. While that’s a lot of money, a life-care plan for a child with severe autism can cost tens of millions of dollars, and the CDC reported in April that 1 in 31 children is diagnosed with autism by their 8th birthday. The other illnesses Kennedy mentioned also affect a wide swath of the U.S. population.

Dr. Paul Offit, a co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, for years has sparred with Kennedy over vaccines. Offit fears that Kennedy will use flawed studies to justify adding autism and other common medical problems to the injury table, no matter how much they conflict with robust scientific research.

“You can do that, and you will bankrupt the program,” he said. “These are ways to end vaccine manufacturing in this country.”

If the trust fund were to run out of money, Congress would have to act, said Dorit Reiss, a law professor at University of California Law San Francisco who has studied the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Congress could increase the excise tax on vaccines, she said, or pass a law limiting what’s on the injury table. Or Congress could abolish the program, and the vaccine makers would find themselves back in the situation they faced in the 1980s.

“That’s not unrealistic,” Reiss said.

Rep. Paul Gosar, an Arizona Republican, last year proposed the End the Vaccine Carveout Act, which would have allowed people to bypass the no-fault system and head straight to civil court. His press release for the bill — written in September, before Kennedy’s ascension to HHS secretary — quoted Kennedy saying, “If we want safe and effective vaccines, we need to end the liability shield.”

The legislation never came up for a vote. A spokesperson for the congressman said he expects to introduce it again “in the very near future.”

Renée Gentry, director of the George Washington University Law School’s Vaccine Injury Litigation Clinic, thinks it’s unlikely Congress will blow up the no-fault program. But Gentry, who represents people filing claims for injuries, said it’s hard to predict what Congress, faced with a doomsday scenario, would do.

“Normally Democrats are friends of plaintiffs’ lawyers,” she said. “But talking about vaccines on the Hill is like walking on a razor blade that’s on fire.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Patricia Callahan.

The Trump administration is intensifying its campaign against vaccinations, with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. withdrawing U.S. funding for the world’s preeminent international vaccine organization. The group — known as Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance — is the world’s largest funder of life-saving vaccinations and says it has helped vaccinate more than 1.1 billion children in 78 lower-income countries, preventing nearly 19 million future deaths. Kennedy also recently stacked an important vaccine advisory panel with unqualified appointees, many of them holding anti-vaccine views.

“Anti-vaccine activists have been shouting from the sidelines for decades. Now they’re making policy,” says Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. says that HHS and the US Food and Drug Administration will phase out the use of petroleum-based food dyes over the next two years to “Make America Healthy Again.”

The post A Hill to Dye On? RFK, Jr’s Food Coloring Policies appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Thomas Knapp.

“These were otherwise healthy school-age children who didn’t have to die.” We speak to the world-renowned pediatrician, virologist and vaccine expert, Dr. Peter Hotez, about the dangerous anti-vaccine agenda of Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Amid a growing number of measles cases in the United States, RFK Jr. has promoted skepticism of the efficacy of the MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps and rubella. At least two unvaccinated children have died from measles, a highly contagious disease that had been effectively eliminated in the U.S. in the past few decades. Hotez, the father of a child on the autism spectrum, also debunks RFK Jr.’s claims that vaccines are linked to autism, and criticizes his “deeply offensive” statements about people living with autism. Evoking eugenic beliefs, the HHS secretary, who now holds the power to determine healthcare policy in the United States, “shows this consistent lack of intellectual curiosity, this kind of simplistic way of thinking and talking about autism,” says Hotez.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Janine Jackson interviewed the Vaccine Education Center’s Paul Offit about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and measles for the April 4, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

AP (2/26/25)

Janine Jackson: Trump-appointed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy is colorful, which is a problem when someone is a public hazard. Because now that Kennedy is in a position of power, we need journalists to move past anecdote to ideas—ideas that are informing actions that shape not just his reputation, but all of our lives.

Our guest suggests we could begin with a core false notion that lies in back of much of Kennedy’s program.

Paul Offit is director of the Vaccine Education Center, and professor of pediatrics in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He joins us now by phone from Philly. Welcome to CounterSpin, Paul Offit.

Paul Offit: Thank you.

JJ: The context for our conversation is the first measles death in the US in a decade, in Texas, where we understand they have reported, and this news is fresh, some 400 cases of measles, just between January and March, while the national number for 2024 was 285. This is a tragedy, and a tragically predictable one, due to surges of misinformation around vaccines, around disease and, frankly, around science that have been at work for years, but are turning some kind of corner with the elevation of RFK Jr.

Beyond the Noise (2/11/25)

You identified a keystone belief in Kennedy’s book on Fauci that explains a lot. I would like to ask you to give us some history on that notion, where it falls in terms of the advance of science, and what the implications of such a belief can be.

PO: Sure. So in the mid-1800s, people weren’t really sure about what caused diseases. There were two camps. On the one hand, there were the miasma theory believers. So miasma is just a sort of general notion that there are environmental toxins, initially that were released from garbage rotting on the streets, that caused this bad air, or miasma— kind of a poison, toxin. And so therefore diseases weren’t contagious. You either were exposed to these toxins or you weren’t.

And then, on the other hand, people like Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur were the germ theory believers, that believed that specific germs—as we now know, viruses and bacteria—can cause specific diseases, and that the prevention or treatment of those germs would save your life.

Washington Post (4/7/25)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. does not believe in the germ theory. I know this sounds fantastic, but if you read his book, The Real Anthony Fauci, on pages 285 to 288, you will see that he does not believe in the germ theory, and everything he says and does now, supports that. His modern-day miasmas are things like vaccines, glyphosate—pesticides—food additives, preservatives: Those are his modern-day miasmas.

So he is a virulent anti-vaccine activist. He thinks that vaccines are poisoning our children. He thinks no vaccine is beneficial. And so everything he says and does comports with that, even with this outbreak now in Texas, it’s spread to 20 states in jurisdictions, he doesn’t really promote the vaccine. Rather, he promotes vitamin A, because he believes that if you’re in a good nutritional state that you will not suffer serious disease. And he still says that, even though that first child death in 20 years, that occurred in West Texas, was in a perfectly healthy child.

JJ: And again, one element of the fallout of this is that he is not just saying, don’t get vaccinated, but saying cod liver oil and vitamin A. And so Texas Public Radio, for one, is reporting kids are now showing up to hospitals with toxic vitamin A levels. So his answer is instead of a vaccine… the response is sending kids to the hospital.

PO: Right. And if you’re a parent, you can see what the seduction is, because here you’re given a choice. He presents it in many ways as a binary choice. You can get a vaccine, which means you’ll be injected, or you’ll inject your child, with three weakened live viruses, or you can take a vitamin. Not surprisingly, people take vitamins, and they take more vitamins and more vitamins, as he sends just shipments of cod liver oil into the area. And so now hospitals are seeing children who have blurred vision, dizziness and liver damage caused by too much vitamin A.

CBS (3/11/25)

JJ: And also, CBS News is having to get hospital officials to contradict just straight-up false comments. The fallout is everywhere. Kennedy is saying, “Oh, the majority of the hospitalized cases in Texas were for quarantine purposes.” And so this person has to say, “Actually, no, no, we’re not hospitalizing people for quarantine. It’s because they need treatment.”

PO: The last place we should quarantine someone, by the way, with measles, is in the hospital. You don’t want measles in the hospital. It’s a highly contagious disease, the most contagious infectious disease.

Also, just one other point is when we say, for example, that the CDC currently states that there are 483 cases in 20 states or jurisdictions, that’s confirmed cases, meaning confirmed by doing antibody testing, or confirmed by PCR analysis, that is the tip of a much bigger iceberg. People who are looking at this, and looking at the doubling time of this particular outbreak throughout the United States, estimate that it’s probably at least 2,000 cases, and maybe more. And the fear is that, given the current doubling times, given that we’re going to be dealing with this virus for at least six more weeks, the fear is that there’ll be another child death or more.

APA (7/1/24)

JJ: You cited a piece in the book where Kennedy says:

Fauci says that vaccines have already saved millions and millions of lives. Most Americans accept the claim as dogma. It will therefore come as a surprise to learn that it is simply untrue.

I think the idea of resisting “dogma” is very appealing to people, because we have seen propaganda efforts, we have seen lies that are en masse, in a way. But I also think that so many folks have, for so long, trafficked in the forms of rational argument without the content, without agreed upon standards of proof, that people are just less able to recognize fallacies, to see when something is anecdotal—not untrue, but anecdotal—and that this impedes our understanding of what public health even is. Misinformation is at the center of this in so many ways.

PO: That’s a really good point. I think we haven’t done a very good job of explaining how science works. I mean, you learn as you go. The Covid pandemic is a perfect example. We were building the plane while it was in the air. There were definitely things that we said and did that were not right over time, but you learn as you go.

And that’s the way science works. I mean, the beauty of science is it’s always self-correcting. It’s introspective, and you’re willing to throw a textbook over your shoulder without a backward glance as you learn new things.

I was a resident training in pediatrics in the late 1970s, the Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh. I was taught things that were wrong. That’s OK. That didn’t mean the people, the senior pediatricians who taught me, were idiots. It just meant that we got more information over time.

And I think people, at some level, don’t accept that. When you say something that ends up being wrong, “See? You can’t trust them.” And so they throw the whole thing out, to their detriment.

New York Times (3/25/25)

JJ: I mean, yes, it points to a kind of preexisting, if not failure, weakness in media and public conversation about science that makes us poorly set up to engage this kind of thing. But I also think there’s something going on with, you know, Marion Nestle telling the New York Times that she was so excited when Trump used the words “industrial food complex.” She said, “RFK sounds just like me.”

RFK has benefited from a position of a little guy fighting Big Corporate Food, fighting Big Pharma. And I think a lot of folks identify with that. There are things, though, that you’ve talked about that complicate that depiction of him as a little guy going up against well-moneyed interests.

PO: Just the term “Big Pharma” is pejorative. Have pharmaceutical companies acted aggressively or illegally or unethically? Of course they have. I think the opioid epidemic is a perfect example of that. But that doesn’t mean that everything they do is wrong.

For example, I would argue that if pharmaceutical companies were interested in lying about a vaccine, and I’m on the FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee, if they submitted data for licensure or authorization of a vaccine where they lied or misrepresented data or omitted data, they’re going to be found out, because once vaccines are out there, there’s things like the Vaccine Safety Datalink, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. There is no hiding, because we give vaccines to healthy children, and so we hold them to a high standard of safety. So there is no hiding.

And I want RFK Jr. to point to one example where “Big Pharma” has lied to us about a vaccine that’s caused us to suffer harm. Where is that example? But it’s so easy to make that case.

JJ: When it’s presented in this binary way, as though you can be for corporate medicine or corporate food, or you can be against it, and it sort of absents the idea of, “Well, let’s parse what is being said. Let’s talk about these ideas. Let’s talk about standards of proof,” news media that are more interested to present things as “controversial” shut down that more nuanced conversation.

NBC (3/20/25)

PO: Right. I think probably the most depressing email that I got over the past few weeks was from a nurse in Canada, who said that she was seeing parents of a child who was one month old, and she was giving those parents anticipatory guidance about what vaccines that child would get now a month in, it was a two-month-old. And the father said, and I quote, “I’m not anti-vaccine, but I want to wait to see which vaccines RFK Jr. recommends before I get any of them.”

Which tells you how bad this has gotten. I mean that here they want to trust, basically, a personal injury lawyer to determine which vaccines we should get, as compared to the people who sit around the table at the advisory committees at the FDA or CDC.

JJ: NBC News’ Brandy Zadrozny did have a thoughtful piece about employment by anti-vaccine influencers of that horrific death of the 6-year-old in Texas, and how it’s being used to say, “No, we were actually right, because the other children didn’t die.” But there was an immunologist cited in the story who said, “It’s just harder to tell our story, because the story of ‘child does not get disease’ just doesn’t have the media pickup.”

And so it is difficult for journalists to tell a different story about public health when they are so focused on individual cases and that sort of thing. And so there is a problem there in trying to get reporters to tell public health from a different perspective, and make that as compelling as it should be.

Paul Offit: “We’ve eliminated the memory of measles. I think people don’t remember how sick that virus can make you.”

PO: No, you’re right. I think when vaccines work, what happens? Nothing.

But I’m a child of the 1950s. I had measles, and at the time I had measles, there were roughly 48,000 hospitalizations from measles, from severe pneumonia or dehydration or encephalitis, which is infection of the brain. And of those children who got encephalitis, about a quarter would end up blind or deaf, and there were about 500 deaths a year from measles, mostly in healthy children.

But again, not only have we largely eliminated measles from this country, which we did completely, really, by the year 2000, and it’s come back to some extent, because a critical percentage of parents are choosing not to vaccinate their children. But we’ve eliminated the memory of measles. I think people don’t remember how sick that virus can make you. Unfortunately, I think they’re learning now.

JJ: I’ll just ask you, finally, there’s a reason you call your Substack Beyond the Noise. What’s the noise, and what do you hope is beyond it?

PO: The noise is just this torrent of misinformation and disinformation on the internet. I mean, most people get their information from social media, and it’s just like trying to fight against the fire hose of information. And all you can do is the best you can do.

But I think in the end, I think the great educator, sadly, is going to be these viruses or these bacteria, which, if we continue along the path that we’re doing, which is not trusting public health and not trusting that vaccines are safe and effective, and believing a lot of the misinformation online, we’re just going to see more and more of these outbreaks, especially with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of HHS.

MedPage Today (3/14/25)

Look at what’s happened in West Texas. You had this massive outbreak in West Texas. So he then goes on national television and says things like: The measles vaccine kills people every year. The measles vaccine causes blindness and deafness. The measles vaccine causes the same symptoms as measles. Natural measles can protect you against cancer. All of that is wrong.

But the mother of this 6-year-old girl, that perfectly healthy 6-year-old girl who died, said one of the reasons that she didn’t vaccinate was that she thought that the natural infection would protect against cancer, which is something RFK Jr. said that was wrong. So basically, misinformation kills, and I think that until we understand where the best information is, we’re going to continue to suffer this.

JJ: We’ll end it there for now. We’ve been speaking with Paul Offit, who’s director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. His Substack is called Beyond the Noise. Thank you so much, Paul Offit, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

PO: Thank you.

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

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

New York Times (11/14/24)

This week on CounterSpin: If “some people believe it” were the criterion, our daily news would be full of respectful consideration of the Earth’s flatness, the relationship of intelligence to the bumps on your head, and how stepping on a crack might break your mother’s back. News media don’t, in fact, use “some people think it’s true” as the threshold for whether a notion gets talked about seriously, gets “balanced” alongside what “data suggest.” It’s about power.

Look no further than Robert Kennedy Jr. When he was just a famously named man about town, we heard about how he dumped a bear carcass in Central Park for fun, believes that children’s gender is shaped by chemicals in the water, and asserts that Covid-19 was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,” while leaving “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese” immune.

But once you become RFK Jr., secretary of health and human services in a White House whose anger must not be drawn, those previously unacceptable ideas become, as a recent New York Times piece has it, “unorthodox.”

Kennedy’s unorthodox ideas may get us all killed while media whistle. We hear from Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, about that.

Free Press (3/18/25)

Also on the show: For many years, social justice advocates rather discounted the Federal Communications Commission. Unlike the Federal Trade Commission or the Food and Drug Administration, whose actions had visible impacts on your life, the FCC didn’t seem like a player.

That changed over recent years, as we’ve seen the role the federal government plays in regulating the power of media corporations to control the flow of information. As the late, great media scholar Bob McChesney explained, “When the government grants free monopoly rights to TV spectrum…it is not setting the terms of competition; it is picking the winner.”

We’ll talk about the FCC under Trump with Jessica González, co-CEO of the group McChesney co-founded, Free Press.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Photograph Source: Gage Skidmore – CC BY-SA 2.0

Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who oversees the health of more than 340 million Americans, says vitamin A can prevent the worst effects of measles rather than urging more people to get vaccinated.

The post RFK Jr Says Vitamin A Protects You From Deadly Measles, But Here’s What the Study He Cites Actually Says appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Evangeline Mantzioris.

Janine Jackson interviewed Dartmouth-based Anne Sosin about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and rural health for the February 7, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

The Hill (1/13/25)

Janine Jackson: A Senate panel voted narrowly this week to advance the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has been emphatically opposed by a range of public health experts for reasons including, but not limited to, his stated belief that vaccines have “poisoned an entire generation of American children.” Yes, his children are vaccinated, but he wishes he “could go back in time” and undo that.

Also, that Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people, while Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese are most immune; that the HPV vaccine causes a higher death risk than the cancer it prevents; that fluoride causes IQ loss; that Vitamin A and chicken soup are cures for measles; that AIDS is not caused by HIV; and that we had almost no school shootings until the introduction of Prozac.

Nevertheless, Kennedy may soon be overseeing Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, coordinating the public health response to epidemics, as well as the approval process for pharmaceuticals, vaccines and supplies.

Our guest says RFK Jr is absolutely a threat to public health, but nixing his nomination is not the same thing as meaningfully engaging the problems that lead people to support him.

Anne Sosin is a public health researcher and practitioner based at Dartmouth College. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Anne Sosin.

Anne Sosin: Thank you so much for having me on the show.

FAIR.org (12/5/24)

JJ: There are a number of people, in lots of places, who have centered their lives perforce on concerns around food and health and medicine. And they see a guy who seems to be challenging Big Pharma, who’s saying food additives are problematic, who’s questioning government agencies. There are a lot of people who are so skeptical of the US healthcare and drug system that a disruptor, even if it’s somebody who says a worm ate his brain—that sounds better than business as usual. And so that’s leading some people to think, well, maybe we can pick out some good ideas here, maybe. But you think that is the wrong approach to RFK Jr.

AS: I think that that’s misguided. Certainly, there are some people who see RFK as a vehicle for championing their causes. And there are other people who think that we should seek common ground with RFK, that we should acquiesce, perhaps, on certain issues, and then work together to advance some other causes.

And I think that that’s misguided. I think we need to recognize what’s given rise to RFK and other extreme figures right now, but we need to make common cause with the communities that he’s exploiting in advancing his own personal and political goals.

JJ: And in particular, you’re thinking about rural communities, which have played a role here, right? What’s going on there?

AS: Yes. My work is centered in rural communities right now, and I think we need to understand the political economy that’s given rise to RFK and other figures—the social, economic, cultural and political changes that have given him a wide landing strip in rural places, as well as some of the institutional vacuums that RFK and other very extreme and polarizing figures are filling.

JJ: Expand on that, please, a little.

Anne Sosin: “Resistance to public health measures often, in my view, reflects unmet need.”

AS: So we’re seeing growing resistance in some places, including rural communities, to public health and interventions that have long been in place, including vaccination and fluoridation. And resistance to public health measures often, in my view, reflects unmet need.

Sometimes those needs are material. We see that people resist or don’t follow public health programs or guidance because they don’t have their material needs met. And those material needs might be housing, paid leave or other supports that they need. But the unmet need might also be emotional or affective, that some people may resist out of a sense of economic or social dislocation, a feeling of invisibility, or something else. And those feelings get expressed as resistance to public health measures that are in place.

And so understanding and recognizing what those unmet needs are is really important. And then thinking about how do we address those needs in ways that are productive, and don’t undermine public health and healthcare, is really important.

JJ: Vaccinations are obviously a big concern here, particularly as we may be going into another big public health concern with bird flu. So the idea that vaccines cause disease is difficult to grapple with, from a public health perspective. Vaccines can’t be a “choose your own adventure” if they’re going to work societally. And it almost seems like, around vaccination, we’re losing the concept of what public health means, and how it’s not about whether or not you decide to eat cheese, you know? There’s kind of a public understanding issue here.

AS: I think you’re correct. I think we’ve seen, just in the US, an increasing DIYification of public health, a loss of the recognition that public health means all of us. Public health is the things that we do together to advance our collective health. And the increased focus on individual decision-making really threatens all of us.

NPR (5/12/21)

And we look for it around vaccination: We have seen very well-funded initiatives to undermine public confidence in vaccination over the last several years. There has been a lot of money spent to dismantle public support and public confidence in vaccination and other lifesaving measures. And it really poses a grave threat, as we think about not only novel threats like H5N1, but also things that have long been under control.

JJ: Finally, I took a quick look at major national media and rural healthcare, and there wasn’t nothing. I saw a piece from the Dayton Daily News about heart disease in the rural South, and how public health researchers are running a medical trailer around the area to test heart and lung function. I saw a piece from the Elko Daily Free Press in Nevada about how Elko County and others are reliant on nonprofits to fill gaps in access to care, and that’s partly due to poor communication between state agencies and local providers.

And I really appreciate local reporting; local reporting is life. But some healthcare issues, and certainly some of those that would be impacted by the head of HHS, are broader, and they require a broad understanding of the impact of policy on lots of communities. And I just wonder, is there something you would like to see news media do more of that they’re missing? Is there something you’d like them to see less of, as they try to engage these issues, as they will, in days going forward?

AS: Certainly local coverage is essential, and I’m really pleased when I see local coverage of the heroic work that many rural healthcare providers and community leaders are delivering. We see very creative and innovative work happening in our rural region, in our research, in our community engagement. And so it’s very encouraging when I see that covered.

But all of the efforts on the ground are shaped by a larger policy landscape and a larger media landscape, larger political landscape. And what we see, often, is efforts to undermine the policies that are critical to preserving our rural healthcare infrastructure. We see well-funded media efforts to erode social cohesion, to undermine our community institutions, to sow mistrust in measures such as vaccination. We see other work to harden the divisions between urban and rural America, and within rural places.

And so I hope that media will pay attention to the larger forces that are shaping the landscape of rural life, and not just see the outcome. It’s easy to take note of the disparities between urban and rural places, but it’s much harder to do the deep and complex work of understanding the forces that generate those uneven outcomes across geographic differences.

JJ: All right, well, we’ll end on that important point.

We’ve been speaking with Anne Sosin, public health researcher and practitioner based at Dartmouth College. Anne Sosin, thank you so much for joining us today on CounterSpin.

AS: Thank you for the invitation.

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

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

(CC photo: Ted Eytan)

This week on CounterSpin: We know that once corporate news label something “controversial,” we’re in for reporting with a static “some say/others differ” frame—even if one “side” of the “controversy” is a relatively small group of people who don’t believe in science or human rights or democracy. So as the Trump White House comes out fast and furious against transgender people, their weird hatefulness lands in a public arena that generally rejects discrimination, but also in an elite media climate in which the very lives of transgender people have long been deemed “subject to debate.” We’ll hear about the current state of things from civil rights attorney Ezra Young.

New York Times (5/8/24)

Also on the show: When the New York Times reported Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s revelation that parasites have eaten part of his brain, Kennedy, running for president at the time, offered to “eat five more brain worms and still beat President Trump and President Biden in a debate.” We’re reminded of such “jokes” now, as Kennedy looks likely to be head of Health and Human Services, along with his claims that vaccines cause autism and chicken soup cures measles. But to resist Kennedy, we need to understand what fuels those who, even if they don’t like him, believe he might be a force for good in their lives. Anne Sosin is a public health researcher and practitioner based at Dartmouth College, who encourages looking around RFK Jr. to the communities that imagine he’s speaking for them.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

The chair of a World Health Organisation (WHO) advisory group is urging world leaders to denounce misinformation around health.

Sir Collin Tukuitonga is reacting to comments made by US Senator Robert F Kennedy, who claimed that measles was not the cause of 83 deaths in Samoa during a measles outbreak there in 2019.

Samoa’s Head of Health Dr Alec Ekeroma rejected Kennedy’s claim, calling it a “complete lie”.

• READ MORE: Better immunisation coverage needed to prevent Pacific measles, says WHO
• The deadly consequences of disinformation in the Pacific
• Other Samoa measles reports

Speaking to RNZ Pacific Waves, Sir Collin said leaders had a duty to protect people from inaccurate public health statements.

He said he was “absolutely horrified” that the person who “is the most influential individual in the US health system” could “tell lies and keep a straight face”.

“But [I am] not surprised because Kennedy has a history of subscribing to fringe, incorrect knowledge, conspiracy theories, and odd things of that type.”

He said Dr Ekeroma was very clear and direct in his condemnation of the lies from Kennedy and the group.

‘Call it for what it is’
“I encourage all of our people who are in a position to call these people for what it is.”

Sir Collin is the chair of the WHO’s Strategic and Technical Advisory Group on the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases.

He said Kennedy’s comments and attitude toward vaccination will feed the anti-vaxxers and and discourage parents who might be uncertain about vaccines.

“So, [it is] potentially going to have a negative impact on immunisation programmes the world over. The United States has a significant influence on global health policy.

“These kinds of proclamations and attitudes and ideologies will have disastrous consequences.”

He believes that the scientific community should speak up, adding that political and business leaders in the region should also condemn such behaviour.

Withdrawal of US from WHO
Sir Collin described President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the WHO as “dangerous”.

He said Washington is a major contributor to the money needed by WHO, which works to protect world health, especially vulnerable communities in developing countries.

“I understand they contribute about a fifth of the WHO budget,” he said.

“The United States is a world leader in the technical, scientific expertise in a number of areas, that may not be as available to the rest of the world.

“Research and development of new medicines and new treatments, a large chunk of which originates in the United States.

“The United States falling out of the chain of surveillance and reporting of global outbreaks, like Covid-19, puts the whole world at risk.”

He added there were ‘a good number of reasons” why the move by the US was “shameful and irresponsible”.

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.

The second day of confirmation hearings for Trump’s secretary of health and human services nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. again focused on his long record of vaccine skepticism, his shifting position on abortion and his professional inexperience in public health. Kennedy was questioned about his role in a deadly measles outbreak in Samoa in 2019. Dr. Alec Ekeroma, the director general of Samoa’s Health Ministry, says Kennedy promoted anti-vaccine misinformation in the country, leading to the deaths of 83 people, the majority of whom were young children. “He is the preeminent anti-vax campaigner in the world,” adds investigative journalist Brian Deer, who has been following the anti-vaccine movement for years. Kennedy has “no medical or scientific qualifications at all.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, was questioned by lawmakers Tuesday in his confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee, which largely focused on his decades of anti-vaccine activism, as well as his views on abortion and other healthcare issues. We play excerpts from the contentious hearing and speak with the ranking Democrat on the committee, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, who says Democrats successfully highlighted his controversial views, potentially putting his confirmation at risk despite the Republican majority in the Senate. “This is one of the most important positions in the world as it relates to healthcare,” says Wyden. “He cannot be trusted, … and he’s unprepared.” Kennedy faces a second day of questioning today before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Five stories up, in a sunny event space tucked away in New York City’s Little Italy earlier this month, chefs had been busy preparing chicken lo mein noodles, empanadas, and shawarma. But the poultry that went into these dishes hadn’t come from a farm — it was grown from animal cells in a lab. Local restaurateurs and chefs mingling around the room had been invited to sample the dishes by Upside Foods, a leading brand in the lab-grown meat business. This was essentially a big pitch meeting: Upside Foods is working on launching a new product called “shreds” — similar to boneless, skinless, shredded chicken meat — and hoping to convince restaurants to buy it once it hits the market. 

A few attendees, according to Upside Foods Chief Operating Officer Amy Chen, confessed they were nervous to try the lab-grown chicken, which is genetically identical to regular chicken but grown in a bioreactor. “I think for consumers, the idea of cultivated meat is quite different,” Chen said, using another term for lab-grown protein. “And it takes a minute for you to wrap your head around it. But I came from the food world, and I know that tasting is believing.”

And what tasting Upside Foods’ chicken will have you believe is that it is honest-to-god chicken. The chicken shawarma I tried was juicy and tender, with a taste and texture that were basically indistinguishable from the real thing. This could cut both ways: The breaded chicken strips atop the lo mein noodles tasted like, well, regular chicken tenders — totally average.

Upside Foods hopes its products will be the future of eating meat. But for all the company’s bullish messaging, an inconvenient detail hung over the showcase: Upside Foods has not yet received federal approval to sell its shredded chicken. And because President Donald Trump has nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a vocal critic of lab-grown meat — to lead the agency that oversees the Food and Drug Administration, no one knows what will happen to that clearance process now. 

Kennedy has openly questioned the safety of lab-grown meat on X, formerly Twitter, calling it “ultra-processed.” Although he has not been confirmed to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, his nomination has been worrying for the U.S. lab-grown meat industry, which has yet to sell its goods in American supermarkets. 

But experts say there may be a number of opportunities for lab-grown meat under a second Trump administration. Industry leaders argue that cultivated meat is good for business, consumers, and even national security — and certain high-profile Republicans agree.  

The promise of lab-grown meat is that it would reduce our reliance on growing animals in factory-farming conditions, which pollute the air and waterways on top of emitting lots of greenhouse gases. Agriculture, by some estimates, accounts for up to a third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Within the agriculture category, livestock is the leading source of emissions. Scientists say it will be impossible to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) without reducing the emissions — particularly methane — that stem from industrial animal agriculture. 

The problem is that studies suggest that today’s methods of producing cultivated meat have a higher environmental impact than that of beef. Advocates of cultivated meat say that the industry simply needs more investment to scale up and become energy-efficient.

Lab-grown meat falls into the “alternative protein” category, which includes plant-based burgers that bleed like real beef and has gotten heaps of attention from investors, nonprofits, and policymakers in recent years. That attention hasn’t always been good. Pitting lab-grown meat against farmers and the beef industry, Florida and Alabama preemptively banned the sale of cultivated meat last year. (Upside Foods sued the state of Florida in response, arguing its measure is unconstitutional.) 

But industry leaders say they’re working on a feat of bioengineering that will put the United States ahead of other countries trying to grow their cultivated meat industries, such as Israel and Singapore. 

“That’s something that I spend a lot of time talking about now: the economic potential of cultivated meat. How many jobs can we create?” said Suzi Gerber, head of the Association for Meat, Poultry, and Seafood Innovation, a cultured meat trade group. She noted that growing meat under laboratory conditions pulls in resources and workers from other fields: It requires agricultural and manufacturing expertise, and it will employ engineers and rely on farmers. (The cells used to grow Upside Foods’ chicken, for example, come from fertilized chicken eggs, after all.) Investing in lab-grown meat ensures “that American ingenuity is the front, that the American economy keeps evolving, and that we don’t fall behind the rest of the world and their bio-economies,” Gerber said. 

These arguments have helped lab-grown meat attract supporters from areas not usually associated with vegan-friendly fares. Vivek Ramaswamy, the former Republican presidential candidate and Trump supporter, has come out in support of cultivated meat, saying it should ultimately be up to consumers to decide what they want to eat. Kimbal Musk, brother of Elon, is also an investor in Upside Foods. (He has called himself a centrist Democrat who occasionally votes Republican and made many posts on X about how he hates Trump — but he’s also been described as Elon’s “close confidante” and is on the board of Tesla.) 

Upside Foods went through the FDA’s pre-market consultation process for its original proof-of-concept product — a simple chicken filet — under Trump’s first term. (The process of making the chicken “shreds” is different enough that it requires additional clearance.) Upside Foods got clearance to sell its product from the FDA in 2022 as well as a thumbs-up from the Department of Agriculture in 2023. But the company has been very slow to bring the filets to market. For a time, the filets were only available at Bar Crenn, a fine-dining restaurant in the Bay Area, although that partnership ended recently. Still, going through that process taught the company valuable lessons, said Eric Schulze, a veteran of the cultivated meat space who led Upside Foods’ regulatory strategy then. 

“I worked with the first Trump administration and found it to be actually a very fruitful relationship,” said Schulze, who worked as an FDA regulator under the Obama administration for six years before coming to Upside. He left Upside in 2023 and now advises cultivated meat companies as an independent consultant. 

According to Schulze, a number of factors worked in Upside Foods’ favor — and could potentially help other cultivated meat companies, too. Schulze said that when Upside Foods was working with the FDA, his team emphasized the pro-business argument for fake meat. “If you have a better product, you know, may it beat us fairly on the playing field of capitalism,” he said.  

Schulze also noted that cultivated meat wasn’t necessarily as politicized under the last Trump administration as you might expect fake meat options to be. According to Schulze, both the Department of Agriculture and the FDA under Trump seemed to think that “food should be nonpartisan to the extent possible, and to the extent it couldn’t be nonpartisan, it should at least be bipartisan.” Two agency heads appointed by Trump — Scott Gottlieb, who led the FDA from 2017 to 2019, and Sonny Perdue, the former agricultural secretary — were behind the decision to jointly regulate cell-cultured food products. The move indicated a willingness to embrace innovation in the creation of alternative proteins, rather than avoid or ignore them. 

The question is whether a noted skeptic like Kennedy could come around to endorsing meat that’s been grown from cells, or if he might make it so hard for the companies to see approvals that their products never see the light of day. Chen described Upside Foods’ first review process with the FDA as “incredibly thorough,” adding “we have every reason to believe that that’s going to be the case in the future.”

Although the regulatory process ultimately determines which products can be sold in the U.S., cultivated meat companies can find support at the state level, and through certain federal grant programs. For example, tech startups can access funding through the federal Small Business Innovation Research program. Maille O’Donnell, a senior policy specialist at the Good Food Institute, a think tank that supports alternative proteins, said the federal program has been an invaluable resource for the companies she works with — and could be immune to partisan squabbles. “This administration has every incentive to continue the SBIR program to help bring down food prices, return manufacturing jobs to the United States, and create new opportunities for farmers,” said O’Donnell.

A handful of states have programs that support faux meat, such as Illinois, which launched its Alternative Protein Innovation Task Force last year. Massachusetts also allocated $10 million as part of a recent economic development bill to the state’s burgeoning alt protein sector. And in 2022, California supplied $5 billion to support research at three state universities, as part of its state budget. 

At the federal level, the Biden administration opened up a variety of funding streams for alternative protein companies through the Department of Energy, with the goal of decarbonizing the agricultural industry. And Schulze said the Department of Defense, which has a long history of supporting technological research and development, “absolutely” has interest in investing in alternative proteins. 

But the Pentagon has also faced blowback for engaging with the cultivated meat industry. In March 2023, the Defense Department gave more than $500 million in funding to BioMADE, a public-private partnership borne out of the department’s manufacturing technology arm, money that would go in part to “biomanufactured proteins.” Two months later, BioMADE put out a call for proposals that used technology, including cell cultivation, to make sustainable food rations for the military. The livestock industry seized on the announcement and chastised the Defense Department for trying to “feed our heroes like lab rats,” as the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association put it. After that, the Defense Department publicly denied funding the manufacture of cultivated meat. 

Still, there are signs of government interest in supporting innovations in alternative proteins. Last year, the Defense Department invested in a company working on using precision fermentation to make alt protein out of fungi. However, it’s too soon to gauge any one federal agency’s interest in supporting cultivated meat, according to Gerber, the head of the cultivated meat trade group. The future of the industry may get even more muddled after Trump attempted to put an end to federal grant programs this week.

Cultivated meat companies are bulking up their lobbying efforts and also exploring whether there’s any way the upcoming Farm Bill could include some money for them. But Republicans in Congress have vowed to fight against that this year.

If nothing else, how the second Trump administration responds to the growing pains of the cultivated meat industry will offer insight into an age-old question: Can someone change their mind about something as intimate and personal as what food they like? Chen, from Upside Foods, said the most common reaction she’s heard among people trying lab-grown chicken for the first time is something like, “It’s chicken!” She joked that it’s the most unremarkable piece of chicken you’ll ever eat in your life. 

Asked if Kennedy might be someday convinced by the science and data supporting the safety of such products, Schulze was optimistic. “I do believe that given RFK Jr.’s background and his training” from law school, said Schulze, “that he would at least be open to the evidence and the arguments.” 

But as for what Trump’s nominee to run the health department might do, Schulze was quick to add: “Unless you’re RFK Jr., you don’t know.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Lab-grown meat rebrands itself to woo Trump — and RFK Jr. on Jan 30, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Frida Garza.

As Senate confirmation hearings begin Wednesday for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, his cousin Caroline Kennedy has published a video slamming him as holding “dangerous and willfully misinformed” views on vaccines and other public health issues. Caroline Kennedy is the former U.S. ambassador to Japan and Australia and daughter of President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s uncle.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Public Citizen health experts issued the following statements:

“The United States has been a leader in the global fight to eradicate polio, which is poised to become only the second disease in history to be eliminated from the face of the earth after smallpox,” said Public Citizen Campaign Director for Global Vaccines Access Liza Barrie. “Undermining polio vaccination efforts now risks reversing decades of progress and unraveling one of the greatest public health achievements of all time.”

"Trump’s pick for FDA-head, Dr. Marty Makary, recently tried to dismiss RFK Jr.’s dangerous position on vaccines as a thing of the past.” said Public Citizen Senior Health Researcher Michael T. Abrams. “This reporting on the Trump transition strategy suggests that threat from RFK Jr.'s positions is clear and present.”

Public Citizen calls on the Senate to reject Kennedy’s confirmation and ensure that our federal health leadership is grounded in science and truly dedicated to protecting public health.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

• Trump hush money trial seats 12 jurors, six alternates to be selected next.
• President Biden picks up the endorsement of more than a dozen members of the Kennedy family, dismissing the RFK Jr. candidacy.
• Maine lawmakers pass tough new gun restriction six months after state’s worst mass shooting.
• Governor Newsom calls for stronger oversight of local government’s use of state homeless funds.
• Starbucks to lessen the amount of its plastic waste.

The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – April 18, 2024 President Biden picks up the endorsement of more than a dozen members of the Kennedy family, bypassing the RFK Jr. candidacy. appeared first on KPFA.

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

Photograph Source: All-Pro Reels – CC BY-SA 2.0

In a political campaign that, on one side, already features an adjudicated rapist, financial fraudster, and potential felon and, on the other, a candidate that walks and talks like a robot powered by artificial intelligence of the lesser kind, get ready for a third party that might well put forth a recovered drug addict and anti-vaxxer paired with a quarterback for the endlessly-hopeless New York Jets, on the off chance that all spectrums of craziness are not yet on the ballot.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Matthew Stevenson.

However, the most detailed explanation of what’s happening has been posted by the People’s Party, which is gearing up to assist the campaign of RFK Jr., and which had headlined on September 28, “Majority of Americans Support RFK Jr. Running as an Independent”. They reported there the results of an Ipsos poll of 1,000 Americans during September 15-18 which found that “If the 2024 presidential election was held today between these candidates, who would you vote for?” was answered 39% for Trump, 38% for Biden, and 17% for RFK Jr. if he runs as an independent. 17% is exceptionally strong for any candidate other than a current or former U.S. President at so early a time in the campaign-season. The People’s Party noted that “Polling at 17% would qualify him to participate in the general election debates if the major parties used the traditional 15% threshold.” Furthermore: if the 2024 final election will instead be only between Trump and Biden, then the result would be 45% Trump and 44% Biden; so, Trump was 1% ahead of Biden in each of those two hypothetical situations. The People’s Party also reported there that:

The Democratic Party is a dead end for Kennedy’s campaign. An incumbent president has never lost a party primary. In 2017, the DNC stated in court that its presidential primaries are a charade and that it picks the nominees. It stated that, as a private corporation, it is under no obligation to be impartial or follow its own rules. The court upheld this argument.

Furthermore, the DNC and the Biden campaign are essentially the same entity. Biden appointed DNC Chair Jamie Harrison, who is shutting down debates and rearranging the primary schedule according to Biden’s wishes. In February, the entire DNC unanimously endorsed Biden. The president’s campaign dictates the rules of the primary and can change them at will. At the convention, the party can even choose a nominee who didn’t run in the primary, as it did in 1968. This means that even if Biden dropped out, the DNC would still install someone like Gavin Newsom [i.e., a Biden-clone].

The Biden campaign is also the biggest donor to the DNC. Donations to the Biden Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee with the DNC, financially sustain the party. It brings in hundreds of millions of dollars from big donors that flow to the DNC, all fifty state party organizations, and their vast array of staff, consulting firms, and vendors. The entire party ecosystem and everyone who profits from it would collapse if the party nominated Kennedy. This is why the party rigged the election against Bernie twice and why it will never choose RFK Jr. The party would rather lose with an establishment candidate who keeps the corporate money flowing than win with a populist.

RFK Jr. is the only current or possible U.S. Presidential candidate who even conceivably could win the U.S. Presidency on the basis of his personal brand instead of on the basis of one of the two Parties’ brand.

Likely the biggest challenge that RFK Jr., will face will be obtaining ballot access in each of the 50 states for his name to be appearing as one of the options that will be presented to voters on the ballot’s Presidential line.

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

Photograph Source: Artaxerxes – CC BY-SA 4.0

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his candidacy for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination on April 19, the party and incumbent president Joe Biden mostly pretended to not even notice.

Aside from a few lazy (but not always meritless) hit pieces on his positions (especially where vaccines are concerned) and public gaffes (COVID-19 something something Jews something) it mostly came down in implementation to a false belief we most often attribute to small children: If you can’t see it, it can’t see you, so try very hard not to see it.

That policy extended even to denying Secret Service protection to RFK Jr. — whose uncle and father were both assassinated in the 1960s —  even after what looked an awful lot like an assassination attempt in mid-September.

Republicans mostly assumed his campaign would weaken Biden and the Democrats next November, at least to the extent that he could get any attention.

But things change, and they’re changing now. A PAC associated with RFK Jr.’s campaign is polling on his possible strength as an independent, the New York Times reports that he met with the chair of the Libertarian Party’s national committee in July, and the candidate himself has scheduled an event with an “historic announcement” for October 9 in Philadelphia.

Suddenly, his visibility registers with both “major party” establishments as an emergency. As an independent or third party candidate, he’s a potential “spoiler” who may “cost” either Joe Biden or Donald Trump the 2024 presidential election.

I’m unsympathetic to “spoiler” whining in general, for two reasons.

First, your vote belongs to you, not to Joe Biden or Donald Trump. It’s yours until you cast it for someone, and you owe it to no one.

Second, additional candidates making it harder on either or both of the “Big Two” is a feature, not a bug. When there are only two candidates, they each campaign to their respective “bases” while trying to swing a tiny sliver of “swing voters” who may not like either candidate very much but are constrained to pick one. A third option (or more) makes them work harder to EARN votes instead of just receiving them by default.

Both Democrats and Republicans are suddenly scared to death that RFK Jr. will knock down 5-10% of the vote in key states, upsetting the electoral vote apple cart. Good — they should be scared, and having them scared is better for all of us.

In my view, the Republicans should be more worried than the Democrats. RFK Jr.’s views on the COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates are closer to those of Trump’s “base” than Trump’s actions as president were, and a significant percentage of that “base” may be single-issue voters in 2024.

On the other hand, if there’s any way for Biden to lose support from Democratic voters, it’s for someone named “Kennedy” to get assassinated on the campaign trail after the administration leaves him unprotected by the Secret Service.

Either way, while I do not support RFK Jr.’s candidacy, I think it’s good for America.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Thomas Knapp.

The post As RFK Jr. Shifts His 2024 Strategy, He’s Bad News for Progressives appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeff Cohen - Norman Solomon.

21 February 2023: “Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia. Never. (Applause.)”

13 July 2023: “We will not waver … for as long as it takes”.

24 August 2023 “Our commitment to Ukraine’s independence is unwavering and enduring.”

21 September 2023 “Mr. President [Zelensky], we’re — we’re with you, and we’re staying with you.”

If Kamala Harris will become the Democratic Party’s nominee for the Presidency, then she will never be able to disassociate herself from having been his #2.

On the other hand: If RFK Jr. will be the Democratic Party’s nominee for the Presidency, then he will surely win the Presidency (unless he becomes assassinated) because he has been saying, all along, that Biden’s refusal for Ukraine to negotiate with Russia was serving only to increase the bloodshed in that war — which has been proven to have been correct. He not only criticized what Biden was doing but said that Biden’s saying that if Russia wins the war, then America loses the war, and that if America wins the war, then Russia loses the war, casts that war as being of existential importance to both countries, which is blatantly false because Ukraine has nothing to do with America’s national security. It’s thousands of miles away and poses no threat to America, but it is only 300 miles away from the Kremlin. It is, therefore, even closer to Russia’s central command than Cuba was to America’s central command in Washington DC in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. American missiles in Ukraine would pose an even bigger threat to Russia than Soviet missiles in Cuba would have posed to America. RFK Jr. has strongly opposed Biden’s Ukraine policy, which was Obama’s Ukraine policy — the policy aimed at conquering Russia — but Trump never did anything to reverse the Obama-Biden Ukraine policy. So, if America loses the war in Ukraine, then RFK Jr. would trounce Trump, but Trump would trounce Biden.

If Trump becomes the Republican nominee, then he would easily beat Biden as the opposite Party’s nominee but would lose to Kennedy as that Party’s nominee, because Trump, while he still was in office, did nothing to reverse the horror that Obama had done to Ukraine by grabbing it in his 2014 Maidan U.S. coup and installing there a rabidly anti-Russian government which produced the war in Ukraine, which started soon after that coup.

Biden was carrying out Obama’s Ukraine-policy against Russia, but Trump did nothing to reverse it and to end the war there that Obama had started by grabbing Ukraine.

Therefore, if Russia wins the war in Ukraine, then virtually any Republican would beat Biden as the Democratic nominee, but RFK Jr. would beat any Republican nominee. RFK Jr. has none of the taint of the Obama-Biden Ukraine policy, but Obama and Biden couldn’t have carried out that policy if it didn’t have virtually unanimous support from congressional Republicans. Whereas RFK Jr. can free the Democratic Party of the taint of the Obama-Biden Ukraine policy, there is no Republican who can free the Republican Party from the taint of that policy.

If Russia wins in Ukraine, then only RFK Jr. could beat any Republican nominee.

However, if America wins in Ukraine (which Russia won’t allow, because that would pose a severe existential threat to Russia’s national security; it would mean the end of Russia as an independent sovereign nation), then Biden (or another neoconservative Democrat) will (tragically for the entire world) win in 2024.

Of course: if Ukraine’s war drags on for as long as Biden is hoping it will, then the likelihood is high that he will win the nomination; and, then, he would stand a reasonably strong chance of again winning the Presidency. This is the reason why I’m expecting Russia to win the war on its terms and within the next few months (this year) — not allow it to drag on until the 2024 voting starts in America.

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

RJK Jr., Youtube screengrab.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son/nephew of a political dynasty and current candidate for president running in the Democratic Party primaries, is widely portrayed by the corporate press as a kooky conspiracy theorist. But he has scored as high as 20% in the polls. Is Bobby Jr. being accurately represented or a serious competitor to Joe Biden for the Democrats’ nomination, who is being maligned and misrepresented? To find out for myself, I attended a press conference/campaign rally for the presidential contender on August 3 at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills.

High Profile Political Journeys

The almost two-hour event focused on one topic: The so-called border crisis, which, if he’s elected president, Kennedy Jr. promised “will be one of my highest priorities.” The 874-seat Saban Theatre is only 4.4 miles from where the candidate’s father, RFK Sr., was shot at Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel 55 years ago, as Bob Jimenez, who introduced RFK Jr. referenced, identifying himself as an eyewitness of the assassination, plus as a 78-year-old Latino Vietnam War veteran and former NBC correspondent. (Rather despicably, Bobby Jr. himself has been denied Secret Service protection during his race for the presidency; members of the press were subjected to metal detectors and bag checks before gaining admittance into the Saban.) But before Kennedy Jr. addressed his enthusiastic supporters sitting in the front of the Saban with news media relegated to the theater’s rear, the 19-minute film Midnight at the Border was screened.

In this short the presidential aspirant seems to be (literally) following in the footsteps of his father, who made well-documented trips as a U.S. Senator. In February 1968, a month prior to tossing his hat into the ring, RFK Sr. made a two-day trip to one of America’s poorest pockets located in Eastern Kentucky, which had 20 of the nation’s 30 poorest counties.

Less than a month later, the youthful junior senator from New York made another excursion far from the Empire State that was extensively covered by the media. On March 10, Cesar Chavez ended his 25-day fast to draw attention to the grape boycott when the United Farm Workers leader accepted bread from RFK Sr. at Delano, CA. Less than a week later, Bobby Kennedy Sr. announced his candidacy for president on March 16, 1968 at the Senate Caucus Room, where his older brother, John F. Kennedy, had announced he was running for president in January 1960.

The media savvy Bobby Jr.’s Midnight at the Border shares much in common with his father’s travels. While I don’t believe that RFK Sr. commissioned filmmakers to shoot a campaign piece as RFK Jr. appears to have done with Midnight, his dad’s trips to Appalachia and Delano received lots of press coverage. But despite the similarities between the image conscious, frequent flyer father and son, there is a glaring difference. While Senator Kennedy’s forays expressed sympathy with the poor and downtrodden, Bobby Jr.’s trip to Yuma has resulted in his campaign promise to shut the southern border to economic migrants seeking a better life in the USA, as well as to most applicants for political asylum.

“Midnight” for Migrants

Co-made by documentarian Robert Campos, Midnight at the Border chronicles RFK Jr.’s trip last June to Yuma at the Arizona-Mexico border to take a firsthand look at the border situation. He starts in the dead of night, emerging in a pair of jeans out of a black SUV near the border where he’s met by Jonathan Lines, Arizona Supervisor District 2, a former chairman of the Arizona Republican Party. They drive to a stretch of the border wall, where most of the migrants appear to be from Africa and Asia, places like Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Bangladesh, Senegal – not primarily from Latin America. Bobby Jr. notes, “Of all these people only one said he is here for asylum. The rest said they are here for work, for better lives.”

RFK Jr. meets with Chris Clem, retired Chief Border Patrol Agent, who defends Trump’s “wall system” that included steel, sensors, etc., but laments it was put on hold when Biden became president, leaving gaps in the wall. Kennedy Jr. goes on to point out millions of dollars-worth of infrastructure, such as steel girders, that have languished since the advent of the Biden administration, which purchased steel fencing (that also seems to lie idle) that unlike the Trump material, doesn’t have underground foundations to prevent tunneling. Lines says the Trump- provided surveillance cameras are inactive. Onscreen figures claim Yuma border crossings rose from 68,269 in 2019 to 114,000 in 2021 and 310,000 in 2022.

Kennedy Jr. refers to “This dystopian nightmare of this uncontrolled flow of desperate humanity” and after visiting the border, the descendent of Irish immigrants concludes “the open border policy is just a way of funding a multi-billion-dollar drug and human trafficking operation for the Mexican drug cartels. When I’m president I’ll secure the borders… and I’ll build wide doors for those who wish to enter legally so the U.S. can remain a beacon to the world…”

“Those Immigrants Shouldn’t Be Allowed into the Country”

After the film ends, looking fit in a grey suit, white shirt and tie, Kennedy Jr. takes the Saban’s stage to elaborate on his immigration policy, assuring voters that he’s not trying to “stir up xenophobia” and he “comes to the issue with a perspective of compassion, humanitarianism and just common sense.”

Speaking confidently into a microphone with his trademark raspy voice, the 69-year-old states: “A country can’t exist if it can’t secure its borders… We need to close them… This assault on the local community. People told us they wouldn’t let their children out during the daytime… because they were afraid of these strangers running across their yard fleeing from the Border Patrol… The director of the local hospital told me that they had lost $27 million the previous year in unreimbursed expenses caring for migrants… [A local Yuma expectant mother] couldn’t get in because of 35 immigrant mothers who had filled up the maternity ward… This is now happening in communities across our country.”

Kennedy Jr. goes on to say that America has outsourced managing its borders to the Mexican cartels, who he accuses of child sex trafficking and selling fentanyl. Citing the New York Times, the candidate insists: “The tsunami of new immigrants, 90,000 people, were crushing the social service system in New York City… Bloomberg carried an article saying how officials in New York were… considering turning Central Park into an open migrant camp.”

Contending that there are up to 16 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. today, RFK Jr. stated that “there’s no way they can legally work in this country” and “will impact the price of labor and wages of labor for every other working American. They’re being paid $5, $6 per hour by unscrupulous employers.” Stressing how close his father and later he was to the UFW’s leader, Bobby Jr. says, “Cesar Chavez was… probably the lead champion for closed borders because he knew American farmworkers could not make any gains in terms of their wages and benefits… if there was an endless supply of new undocumented workers coming across the border who lacked the bargaining power” vis-à-vis employers, who could always turn them in to be deported.

Continuing his new stump speech, Kennedy Jr. says, “I was against Trump’s wall. I thought it was a crazy idea… I don’t think we do need a wall for 2,200 miles… but we need something. A lot of that technology was in place. We had towers… cameras, videos, lights, ground sensors, motion detectors. We can protect our borders, we have the technological capacity… We need the political will power and the personnel… We need to restore those [physical] barriers…” in urban areas along the border, and deploy the forementioned technology in rural regions.

“We need to be able to process legal asylum seekers. The one category that comes across the border undocumented [that is eligible for legal U.S. residency] are people who are fearing, who are fleeing political persecution… We have the methodology for processing those claims… We used to process them at the border. Only 15% of them are adjudicated as legitimate, the rest of them… [were] turned away.”

During the ensuing news conference in response to a question about “Afghans being denied at the border,” Kennedy Jr. adds: “We have a law in this country that says if you are being politically persecuted and you are fleeing political persecution abroad you are entitled to stay in the United States of America. That’s the law… As President, I will appoint immediately enough judges for those cases… to be fairly adjudicated at the border swiftly and let the people who are actually fleeing persecution into this country as soon as possible.”

Sounding tough on economic migrants, RFK Jr. asserts: “Only two families we saw that night said they were fleeing political persecution. The rest told us openly they were coming for money, for a better life. Those immigrants shouldn’t be allowed into the country. We should stop that at the border… We don’t have enough immigration judges… to process the claims… The people who do not have legitimate asylum claims should not be allowed in, allowed to cross.”

RFK Jr. asserted that he went south to the border to find out for himself about the situation there. However, his mission to Yuma as recorded onscreen is one-sided – while the self-proclaimed “Kennedy Democrat” interviews Republican and Border Patrol sources in Midnight, he never questions open borders advocates and pro-migrant activists for his commissioned campaign video that presenter Jimenez ballyhooed as “a magnificent masterpiece,” as if it’s Citizen Kane.

Meet the (Alternative) Press

After speaking for 20 minutes at the Saban, which was about two thirds full, the floor was opened for questions from reporters. In terms of news coverage, I didn’t notice any members of mainstream media present, nor did I see/hear/read any subsequent MSM reports (although I didn’t make an exhaustive search). Most of the press covering the event and who asked questions were alternative, independent journalists, of which the most prominent was probably Pacific Radio, in the form of KPFK’s “Rebel Alliance News.” (The day of the event, Breitbart.com posted Midnight at the Border and when the Kennedy Jr. campaign posted a video of the short and the candidate’s appearance at the Saban, the chat accompanying it included comments such as: “Need to go after Soros…”, “Trump was demonized.”)

Speaking into a microphone, I asked two questions. The first was whether the candidate had ever seen Winter Kills, a 1979 film starring Jeff Bridges that aired the previous night on Turner Classic Movies, and if so, what he thought about it? As Kennedy Jr. said he’d never seen the movie – which 12 years before Oliver Stone’s JFK, is a satire about the assassination of “President Kegan” and covert political intrigue, based on a novel by Richard Condon, who’d also written The Manchurian Candidate – I moved on to my main question:

“It seems… you’re making border issues and migration a cornerstone of your campaign which, in some ways, is similar to what Trump did in 2016. Rumors have been bandied about in media that you may end up running on a ticket with Donald Trump as his vice president. What is your response to those rumors? And do you definitively say you will never run on a ticket for the White House with Donald Trump?”

RFK Jr. responded: “I experience a lot of the stuff repeated in the mainstream news, the corporate news, as what I’d call ‘conspiracy theories.’” At this, the candidate’s supporters burst out laughing and applauded, given that Kennedy Jr. is widely derided by MSM as a fringe figure spouting controversial hypotheses about vaccines and more. He continued: “There’s an entire industry made up of conspiracy theorists and a direct answer to your question: No, I will not be Donald Trump’s vice president.” The contender did not go on to comment on the fact that at that precise moment, across the continent, the ex-prez was en route to a Washington, D.C. courthouse to be federally indicted for attempting to overturn the 2020 election.

After the next reporter’s inquiry at the press conference, Bobby Jr. returned to my query saying: “Let me… add an addendum to the previous question, the previous questioner started out with an observation that I – that the border was some sort of Trump issue… It should not be a partisan issue. [Applause.] …I went down to the border feeling that Trump made a mistake on the wall. But people need to be able to recalibrate their worldview when they’re confronted with evidence… When I’m president what I’m going to do is bring in Republicans and Democrats, get the best Republican ideas and the best Democratic ideas and put everything on the table… [more applause] and avoid the ideological pettiness that has been so damaging to our country. What we’re seeing on the border today is the outcome of that… and not branding Republican issue or Democrat issue, just say let’s deal with this, it’s an existential threat to our country…”

During the almost two-hour border-centered event Kennedy Jr. didn’t discuss the causes of immigration until prompted to by Craig “Pasta” Jardula, co-host of @theconvocouch, asking: “According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 87% of migrants… are still coming from Latin America. Why? Because U.S. foreign policy has over 80 bases in Latin America… funding death squads… Why is there so much attention paid to what’s happening at the border instead of looking at the cause of migration, which is U.S. foreign policy? …And the cartels are run by the CIA…”

RFK Jr. delivered a lengthy response: “Something I’ve been very outspoken about is we need to take responsibility… for a foreign policy that has supported death squads in Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua for many years and has supported military juntas… that has punished political leaders in those countries… when they tried to initiate land reforms, education reforms… that will empower the poor… We should be encouraging those policies; my uncle [JFK] understood that… changed support for those violent dictators to support instead for the Alliance for Progress and USAID program before it became a CIA front… You don’t need to put bases in their country to ensure their friendship… All it’s doing is bankrupting the middle class in this country.” During the press conference, RFK Jr. lamented the decline of the middle class and called for “ending the war economy, which is draining our country, the closure of these bases around the world and bring that money home.”

(At a 1961 OAS conference, Che Guevara “denounced the Alliance for Progress as a vehicle designed to separate the people of Cuba from the other peoples of Latin America, to sterilize the example of the Cuban Revolution, and then to subdue the other peoples according to imperialism’s instructions…” Guevara later wrote in an essay posthumously published in 1968, “the projects of the Alliance for Progress are nothing more than imperialist attempts to block the development of the revolutionary conditions of the people by sharing a small quantity of the profits with the native exploiting classes, thus making them into firm allies against the highly exploited classes.”)

After the press conference I spotted Dennis Kucinich, RFK Jr.’s campaign manager, and asked him if he’d care to comment on the federal indictments of Trump, happening that very afternoon. Kucinich, who had carefully cultivated an image as a fighting liberal, said “No,” and turned away. Genuinely surprised, I asked him why he wouldn’t comment, and he said, “Because that’s my answer.” But I shouldn’t have been surprised; Kucinich was a mayor, congressman, presidential candidate and is now managing the campaign of a White House hopeful. In other words, he’s a politician, now supporting a contender who is a scion of the ruling class, running on a curious mixture of right and left.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ed Rampell.

The post Why RFK Jr. Is Not An Ally appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Will Solomon.

Unlike many of his cousins, Kennedy doesn’t have political experience, and no one can identify who his political base might be. A recent poll (The Hill, 6/16/23) gave Kennedy the support of 15% of Democratic primary voters, with 21% of respondents having a positive view of him. CNN research (press release, 5/25/23) found that the biggest driver of support for RFK Jr. is the name “Kennedy.”

Rolling Stone (6/23/23): Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential bid ” is awash in support from Donald Trump’s allies in MAGA World, conservative media, and some of the Republican-donor elite.”

It’s a big deal to challenge an incumbent president in the primary—Kennedy’s other uncle, Sen. Ted Kennedy, tried and failed in 1980 against Jimmy Carter. But unlike his uncle, Robert lacks the progressive bona fides that gave Ted a reputation as a liberal lion.

Naomi Klein (Guardian, 6/14/23) documented that Robert Kennedy has turned against some of his own policies on fighting climate change, has embraced free-market solutions on the environment, and is enthusiastically supportive of the Israeli government. The founders of Heal the Divide, a new Kennedy Super PAC, “have a deeply pro–Donald Trump bent—including ties to arch-MAGA officials such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, George Santos and Herschel Walker” (Rolling Stone, 6/23/23).

That’s on top of the big business support behind RFK Jr. that betrays his populist facade. Former Twitter boss Jack Dorsey is backing Kennedy (The Hill, 6/5/23), while venture capitalists/podcasters David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya are planning to hold a Bay Area fundraiser for him (Axios, 6/8/23). CNBC (6/21/23) reported that Kennedy “has another wealthy backer in his corner: veteran Wall Street executive Omeed Malik.”

Musk, crypto and Reaganism

Accordingly, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is doing its best to keep Kennedy’s ambitions afloat. Despite their reputation for supporting Republicans, Murdoch’s outlets have also seen conservative Democrats in primaries as vehicles for pushing the general political center of gravity to the right (FAIR.org, 3/12/21, 7/16/21).

Robert Kennedy (New York Post, 6/22/23) says, “I am not and have never been anti-vaccine”—but he’s also said of vaccination (Science-Based Medicine, 6/12/23), “This is a holocaust, what this is doing to our country.”

For starters, Murdoch’s New York Post (6/22/23) featured a long interview with Kennedy that mostly acted as campaign public relations. It started off with a rejection of the label “anti-vaccine,” a common trick Kennedy uses that Klein debunks in her Guardian article. He claims that he is carrying on the liberal torch of his father and uncle, but everything he says sounds to the right of Richard Nixon.

“I like Elon Musk because he supports freedom of speech,” Kennedy said, playing to Musk’s right-wing following. The Post doesn’t challenge this statement with the fact that Twitter under Musk’s watch “has approved 83% of censorship requests by authoritarian governments” (El Pais, 5/24/23), or that Musk is also known for silencing and attempting to silence critics of Tesla (CNBC, 6/15/23; Yahoo! Finance, 6/22/23) and left-wing activists (Intercept, 11/29/23).

Kennedy also gave an approving nod to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency—a favored commodity among conservatives—and said his administration would sparingly regulate crypto, even though crypto mining has enormously detrimental environmental impacts.

Kennedy has been a more vocal advocate for the shady asset market elsewhere, as he “delivered a keynote address at the Bitcoin 2023 conference in Miami this year” (The Street, 5/26/23). He vowed to defend “the self-custody of Bitcoin,” and “said he would prevent Bitcoin from being regulated as a security.”

His broader economic message to the Post was pure Reaganism: “I will not raise the tax burden on Americans.” While that line sounds ecumenical, the subtext for a conservative media audience is that he will not address the chronic underpayment of taxes by the richest in order to fund services for the rest of us.

Crediting Trump

Kennedy told Fox (6/8/23) that Biden administration “policies were being dictated not because they made sense, but because they were antithetical to what Donald Trump had said.”

Fox News (6/8/23) said Kennedy

believes President Trump deserves some credit for his immigration policy platform… Kennedy also said the pattern of President Biden and top Democrats reversing one Trump policy after another may have reached the point of “pettiness” versus empirical benefit.

The Murdoch-owned network  (6/7/23, 6/7/23, 6/8/23) trumpeted Kennedy’s border visit, as he attacked Biden’s supposedly pro-immigration policies from the right: “It is not anti-immigrant bigotry to demand an immigration system that keeps out criminals.”

The network reached out to celebrities big and small, like Alicia Silverstone (6/8/23) and Aaron Rodgers (6/21/23), to prop up Kennedy’s legitimacy. Fox News host Geraldo Rivera (6/3/23) invoked his pedigree as impeachable: “The Kennedys are the epitome of American royalty. They have that casual elegance, that kind of preppy chic. They are so admirable in so many ways.”

The Wall Street Journal, Murdoch’s more respectable outlet, has offered more skepticism (6/22/23) of Kennedy than the Post or Fox, but still insists (5/30/23) that he’s a strong contender and that Biden must prepare for him. And the Journal tried to tone down his extremism, framing it as some sort of battle cry of the Little Guy, with Journal editorial board member Allysia Finley (6/25/23) blaming media favoritism toward “progressive beliefs” and “disparate treatment” of right-wing claims for his rising appeal. (Finley claimed preposterously that “most of his claims about vaccine dangers aren’t any kookier than those that he and his green allies have made about fossil fuels.”)

Happy vehicles

For the Washington Free Beacon (5/19/23), Kennedy getting “about 20% support” demonstrated his “surprising strength in the polls among Democrats.” Yet when 20% of Republican respondents picked Paul Ryan over Trump in a hypothetical 2020 primary challenge (The Hill, 11/20/18), that showed that “GOP voters would overwhelmingly support [Trump] against several intraparty rivals.”

But the Murdoch outlets carry a lot of weight in US politics. And these outlets—which have complained about a parade of wokeness, liberal district attorneys and socialist lawmakers—are clearly worried that the left flank of the Democratic Party has become too emboldened. At the same time, Murdoch’s empire wants to do anything it can to weaken Biden’s chances for reelection.

For Fox News and the New York Post, lifting up RFK Jr., who is buoyed by nothing more than the good luck of being born a Kennedy, challenges Biden from the right. Even if Biden wins the primary, and the general election, these outlets have done their part to keep the US political discourse moving toward market capitalism.

The post Boosting RFK Jr., Murdoch Pushes 2024 Rightward appeared first on FAIR.

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

The post Why the RFK Jr., Rogan, Musk Outrage Machine Doesn’t Bother Big Pharma appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.

Background

Jake Sullivan was born in November 1976.  He describes his formative years like this:

I was raised in Minnesota in the 1980s, a child of the later Cold War – of Rocky IV, the Miracle on Ice, and ‘Tear down this wall’. The 90s were my high school and college years. The Soviet Union collapsed. The Iron Curtain disappeared. Germany was reunified. An American-led alliance ended a genocide in Bosnia and prevented one in Kosovo. I went to graduate school in England and gave fiery speeches on the floor of the Oxford Union about how the United States was a force for good in the world.

Sullivan’s education includes Yale (BA), Oxford (MA) and Yale again (JD). He went quickly from academic studies and legal work to political campaigning and government.

Sullivan made important contacts during his college years at elite institutions. For example, he worked with former Deputy Secretary of State and future Brookings Institution president, Strobe Talbott. After a few years clerking for judges, Sullivan transitioned to a law firm in his hometown of Minneapolis. He soon became chief counsel to Senator Amy Klobuchar who connected him to the rising Senator Hillary Clinton.

Mentored by Hillary

Sullivan became a key adviser to Hillary Clinton in her campaign to be Democratic party nominee in 2008. At age 32, Jake Sullivan became deputy chief of staff and director of policy planning when she became secretary of state. He was her constant companion, travelling with her to 112 countries.

The Clinton/Sullivan foreign policy was soon evident. In Honduras, Clinton clashed with progressive Honduras President Manuel Zelaya over whether to re-admit Cuba to the OAS. Seven weeks later, on June 28, Honduran soldiers invaded the president’s home and kidnapped him out of the country, stopping en route at the US Air Base. The coup was so outrageous that even the US ambassador to Honduras denounced it. This was quickly over-ruled as the Clinton/Sullivan team played semantics games to say it was a coup but not a “military coup.” Thus the Honduran coup regime continued to receive US support. They quickly held a dubious election to make the restoration of President Zelaya “moot”. Clinton is proud of this success in her book “Hard Choices.”

Two years later the target was Libya. With Victoria Nuland as State Department spokesperson, the Clinton/Sullivan team promoted sensational claims of a pending massacre and urged intervention in Libya under the “responsibility to protect.”  When the UN Security Council passed a resolution authorizing a no-fly zone to protect civilians, the US, Qatar and other NATO members distorted that and started air attacks on Libyan government forces. Today, 12 years later, Libya is still in chaos and war. The sensational claims of 2011 were later found  to be false.

When the Libyan government was overthrown in Fall 2011, the Clinton/Sullivan State Department and CIA plotted to seize the Libyan weapons arsenal. Weapons were transferred to the Syrian opposition. US Ambassador Stevens and other Americans were killed in an internecine conflict over control of the weapons cache.

Undeterred, Clinton and Sullivan stepped up their attempts to overthrow the Syrian government. They formed a club of western nations and allies called the “Friends of Syria.” The “Friends” divided tasks who would do what in the campaign to topple the sovereign state.  Former policy planner at the Clinton/Sullivan State Department, Ann Marie Slaughter, called for “foreign military intervention.”  Sullivan knew they were arming violent sectarian fanatics to overthrow the Syrian government. In an email to Hillary released by Wikileaks, Sullivan noted “AQ is on our side in Syria.”

Biden’s adviser during the 2014 Ukraine Coup

After being Clinton’s policy planner, Sullivan  became President Obama’s director of policy planning (Feb 2011 to Feb 2013) then national security adviser to Vice President Biden (Feb 2013 to August 2014).

In his position with Biden, Sullivan had a close-up view of the February 2014 Ukraine coup. He was a key contact between Victoria Nuland, overseeing the coup, and Biden. In the secretly recorded conversation where Nuland and the US Ambassador to Ukraine discuss how to manage the coup, Nuland remarks that Jake Sullivan told her “you need Biden.” Biden gave the “attaboy” and the coup was “midwifed” following a massacre of  police AND protesters on the Maidan plaza.

Sullivan must have observed Biden’s use of the vice president’s position for personal family gain. He would have been aware of  Hunter Biden’s appointment to the board of the Burisima Ukrainian energy company, and the reason Joe Biden demanded that the Ukrainian special prosecutor who was investigating Burisima to be fired. Biden later bragged and joked about this.

In December 2013, at a conference hosted by Chevron Corporation, Victoria Nuland said the US has spent five BILLION dollars to bring “democracy” to Ukraine.

Sullivan helped create Russiagate

 Jake Sullivan was a leading member of the 2016 Hillary Clinton team which  promoted Russiagate.  The false claim that Trump was secretly contacting Russia was promoted initially to distract from negative news about Hillary Clinton and to smear Trump as a puppet of  Putin.  Both the Mueller and Durham investigations officially discredited the main claims of Russiagate. There was no collusion. The accusations were untrue, and the FBI gave them unjustified credence for political reasons.

Sullivan played a major role in the deception as shown by his “Statement from Jake Sullivan on New Report Exposing Trump’s Secret Line of Communication to Russia.”

 Sullivan’s misinformation

 Jake Sullivan is a good speaker, persuasive and with a dry sense of humor. At the same time, he can be disingenuous. Some of his statements are false. For example, in June 2017 Jake Sullivan was interviewed by Frontline television program about US foreign policy and especially US-Russia relations. Regarding NATO’s overthrow of the Libyan government, Sullivan says, “Putin came to believe that the United States had taken Russia for a ride in the UN Security Council that authorized the use of force in Libya…. He thought he was authorizing a purely defensive mission…. Now on the actual language of the resolution, it’s plain as day that Putin was wrong about that.”  Contrary to what Sullivan claims, the UN Security Council resolution clearly authorizes a no-fly zone for the protection of civilians, no more. It’s plain as day there was NOT authorization for NATO’s offensive attacks and “regime change.”

Planning the Nord Stream Pipeline destruction

The bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines, filled with 50 billion cubic meters of natural gas, was a monstrous environmental disaster. The destruction also caused huge economic damage to Germany and other European countries. It has been a boon for US liquefied natural gas exports which have surged to fill the gap, but at a high price. Many European factories dependent on cheap gas have closed down.  Tens of thousands of workers lost their jobs.

Seymour Hersh reported details of  How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline. He says, “Biden authorized Jake Sullivan to bring together an interagency group to come up with a plan.” A sabotage plan was prepared and officials in Norway and Denmark included in the plot. The day after the sabotage, Jake Sullivan tweeted

I spoke to my counterpart Jean-Charles Ellermann-Kingombe of Denmark about the apparent sabotage of Nord Stream pipelines. The U.S. is supporting efforts to investigate and we will continue our work to safeguard Europe’s energy security.

Ellerman-Kingombe may have been one of the Danes informed in advance of the bombing. He is close to the US military and NATO command.

Since then, the Swedish investigation of Nord Stream bombing has made little progress. Contrary to Sullivan’s promise in the tweet, the US has not supported other efforts to investigate. When Russia proposed an independent international investigation of the Nord Stream sabotage at the UN Security Council, the resolution failed due to lack of support from the US and US allies. Hungary’s foreign minister recently asked,

How on earth is it possible that someone blows up critical infrastructure on the territory of Europe and no one has a say, no one condemns, no one carries out an investigation?

 Economic Plans devoid of reality

 Ten weeks ago Jake Sullivan delivered a major speech on “Renewing American Economic Leadership” at the Brookings Institution. He explains how the Biden administration is pursuing a “modern industrial and innovation strategy.” They are trying to implement a “foreign policy for the middle class” which better integrates domestic and foreign policies. The substance of their plan is to increase investments in semiconductors, clean energy minerals and manufacturing. However the new strategy is very unlikely to achieve the stated goal to “lift up all of America’s people, communities, and industries.”  Sullivan’s speech completely ignores the elephant in the room: the costly US Empire including wars and 800 foreign military bases which consume about 60% of the total discretionary budget. Under Biden and Sullivan’s foreign policy, there is no intention to rein in the extremely costly military industrial complex. It is not even mentioned.

US exceptionalism 2.0

In December 2018 Jake Sullivan wrote an essay titled “American Exceptionalism, Reclaimed.” It shows his foundational beliefs and philosophy. He separates himself from the “arrogant brand of exceptionalism” demonstrated by Dick Cheney.  He also criticizes the “American first” policies of Donald Trump.  Sullivan advocates for “a new American exceptionalism” and “American leadership in the 21^st Century.”

Sullivan has a shallow Hollywood understanding of history: “The United States stopped Hitler’s Germany, saved Western Europe from economic ruin, stood firm against the Soviet Union, and supported the spread of democracy worldwide.”  He believes “The fact that the major powers have not returned to war with one another since 1945 is a remarkable achievement of American statecraft.”

Jake Sullivan is young in age but his ideas are old. The United States is no longer dominant economically or politically. It is certainly not “indispensable.” More and more countries are objecting to US bullying and defying Washington’s demands. Even key allies such as Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates are ignoring US requests.  The trend  toward a multipolar world is escalating. Jake Sullivan is trying to reverse the trend but reality and history are working against him.  Over the past four or five decades, the US has gone from being an investment, engineering and manufacturing powerhouse to a deficit spending consumer economy waging perpetual war with a bloated military industrial complex.

Instead of reforming and rebuilding the US, the national security state expends much of its energy and resources trying to destabilize countries deemed to be “adversaries”.

Conclusion

Previous national security advisers Henry Kissinger and Zbignew Brzezinski were very  influential.

Kissinger is famous for wooing China and dividing the communist bloc.  Jake Sullivan is now wooing India in hopes of dividing that country from China and the BRICS alliance (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa).

Brzezinski is famous for plotting the Afghanistan trap. By destabilizing Afghanistan with foreign terrorists beginning 1978, the US induced the Soviet Union to send troops to Afghanistan at the Afghan government’s request. The result was the collapse of the progressive Afghan government, the rise of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and 40 years of war and chaos.

On 28 February 2022, just four days after Russian troops entered Ukraine, Jake Sullivan’s mentor, Hillary Clinton, was explicit: “Afghanistan is the model.” It appears the US intentionally escalated the provocations in Ukraine to induce Russia to intervene. The goal is to “weaken Russia.” This explains why the US has spent over $100 billion sending weapons and other support to Ukraine. This explains why the US and UK undermined negotiations which could have ended the conflict early on.

The Americans who oversaw the 2014 coup in Kiev, are the same ones running US foreign policy today:  Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland and Jake Sullivan.  Prospects for ending the Ukraine war are very poor as long as they are in power.

The Democratic Party constantly emphasizes “democracy” yet there is no debate or discussion over US foreign policy. What kind of “democracy” is this where crucial matters of life and death are not discussed?

Robert F Kennedy Jr is now running in the Democratic Party primary. He has a well informed and critical perspective on US foreign policy including the never ending wars, the intelligence agencies and the conflict in Ukraine.

Jake Sullivan is a skilled debater. Why doesn’t he debate Democratic Party candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr over US foreign policy and national security?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Rick Sterling.

The post RFK, Jr.’s Chances appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jim Kavanagh.

+21% Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
+9% Elon Musk
+9% Tim Scott
+8% Vivek Ramaswamy
+5% Ron DeSantis
+4% Nikki Haley
-1% Bernie Sanders
-3% Donald Trump, Doug Bergum, Ted Cruz
-6% Maryanne Williamson
-7% Kevin McCarthy, Mike Pence, Asa Hutchinson
-8% Chuck Schumer
-10% Kamala Harris, Joe Manchin, Gavin Newsom
-11% Joe Biden
-12% Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
-16% Chris Christie
-17% Hillary Clinton
-24% Mitch McConnell

Kennedy is tied with Trump for “Favorable” at 45% for each, but whereas Trump has a 48% “Unfavorable” rating, Kennedy’s “Unfavorable” is only 25%; so, if Party-affiliation were not a factor (which was the intention of America’s Founders), then Kennedy would at the present time be the most preferred person to become President.

Musk ties with them on “Favorable” at 45%, and his “Unfavorable” is 36%; so, he’s currently the second-most-preferred next President.

DeSantis’s “Favorable” is 43%, while his “Unfavorable” is 37%; but the closest whole number reflecting the difference (his “Net Favorable”) is +5% not +6%.

Sanders’s “Favorable” is 42%, while his “Unfavorable” is 43%; so, his “Net Favorable” is -1%.

Though Scott is tied with Musk at +9% “Net Favorable,” Scott’s “Favorable” is 10% less than Musk’s, at 35% “Favorable.” Scott’s “Unfavorable” is 25%, as compared to Musk’s 36% “Unfavorable.” (Scott isn’t as well-known as is Musk.)

Ramaswamy’s “Favorable” is 27%, and his “Unfavorable” is 18%; so, he’s even less-well-known than is Scott.

The most-well-known possible candidates are Trump and Biden tied at 93% known. Clinton is 90% known. Harris is 88% known. Sanders is 85% known.

Kennedy is only 70% known. That’s 30% unknown; so, though he is currently by far the leading candidate, he also is the major prospective candidate who can fall the farthest.

By contrast, Clinton is deeply disliked, at 53% “Unfavorable.”

Biden too is deeply disliked, at 52% “Unfavorable.”

Harris and McConnell are tied as both at 49% “Unfavorable.”

The fifth-most disliked is Trump at 48% “Unfavorable.”

The most-detested person on the list is McConnell at 49% “Unfavorable” and 26% “Favorable.”

Since America’s Founders failed to avoid there being political Parties, here are the answers to the Party-primary questions:

“If the Democratic presidential primary for the 2024 election was held today, who would you vote for? (Dem Voters)”: Biden 62%, Kennedy 15%, Someone else 8%, Williamson 4%, Unsure 12%.

Trump gets 77% against Scott, and 67% against DeSantis.

“TRUMP WINS A HYPOTHETICAL HORSERACE AGAINST BIDEN BY SIX POINTS, AGAINST HARRIS BY SEVEN” (The polling organization failed to indicate whether RFK Jr. would today win against Trump, because the expectation is that he would but the megadonors who control U.S. “elections” are terrified of him and so the DNC can’t stand him. However, the pollster did publish that 69% of Democrats say they’d be disappointed if the two-Party contest ends up being Biden versus Trump. BY CONTRAST: The polling organization avoided asking a comparable question of Republicans; but, of the questions they did ask, Republicans seemed to be less-dissatisfied to have Trump be their nominee than Democrats clearly indicated that they would be if Biden turns out to be their nominee. Again: the pollster seems to have tried to avoid drawing favorable attention to RFK Jr. as possibly being the nominee.)

57% of voters think “JOE BIDEN TOOK A $5 MILLION BRIBE WHEN HE WAS VICE PRESIDENT.” (No Party-breakdown on that: Presumably, most of those 57% are Republican voters anyway.)

The pollsters avoided asking respondents’ race, probably because South Carolina was the earliest Democratic Party primary that Biden won, and he won by a huge margin, over two-to-one, against Sanders, especially among black voters, who dominate that state’s Democratic Party; so, the DNC has now made that the first primary in the 2024 contest, since Biden was enormously popular among that state’s Democratic Party voters. The expectation is that RFK Jr. will get crushed in the S.C. primary, the first primary, on 3 February 2024. Next up will be February 6 with both NH and NV — two states that Sanders had won. Then February 13 with Georgia (another SC) expected to go overwhelmingly for Biden; then February 27th with Michigan being a crucial wild card. Then a slew of southern states, because it was the black voters who made Biden become the Party’s nominee. So: Blacks will again end up choosing the Democratic Party’s nominee, and Whites will end up again determining the Republican Party’s nominee, and the billionaires won’t need to worry about anything, because the public will see themselves as racially divided, instead of as being class-divided (billionaires versus the public), and things will therefore go on as they have been.

By far the most-favorably-viewed “Institution” of the eleven that are listed is “U.S. Military.” “Police” are #2. “FBI” is #3. #11 is “MAGA Republicans.” #10 is “CNN.” Tied as #s 7, 8, & 9, are MSNBC, BLM, and Fox News. In the middle are the Justice Department and U.S. Supreme Court.

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

I was at a Chamber (local) meeting with 50 folk. Yesterday. Yeah, jolly jolly, out to a community college room, with pastries from the local bakery, and people there wondering really what the art world future of the little 2,100 populous Waldport has in store. Art? Crafts? This is delusion. Not real jobs, real community buttressing, real services, bringing in older people to live and survive in nice facilities, townhomes, what have you, with a thriving intergenerational community to aid those aging in place. What a dream, but not a Universal Right, no?

You see, a city or town predicated on a few restaurants and art galleries (sic), and trickles of tourism bucks, that is the question. At a community college building that has largely been left vacant, save for the past year of letting the teachers of the K12 schools use the facility (five rooms) for a pop-up day care.

Oh yeah, day care, a universal right, too. (chuckle-chuckle). Not in a social Darwin dog-eat-dog, survival of the richest (fittest).

There were big ideas coming from people who, for the most part, are not precarious in the sense that they only have one giant frayed safety net — social security payments (oh, a universal right, right, etched in stone . . . or is it out-of-the-universe pie in the sky dream?) income (fixed and felonious) and that’s that. Maybe one or two renters, really, and they own a home or two, and not to knock them, some are trying to make a go at, well, food-art-crafts-kayaking. The rest are doing okay, in the upper middle class category kind of doing okay way. Most, not all. And that is the elephant in the room — listening to bluster and PR, when there are proverbial elephants in the room after proverbial gorillas in the room, wherever you go!

In a small town with aging housing stock, threats of ocean tide rises, lots of 10-inches-in-three-days rain events, and, well, that Republican and Democrat Build Nothing Back Better smile, and the menu for the morning was arts and crafts, and eateries.

Oh, a few wringing of the hands about housing (there is none for rent, and those for sale, are match stick cabanas for half a million$). But the beat goes on, as a city manager was in attendance ($100K a year?) and the mayor (he said he failed to read the entire email for this breakfast invitation so he was an hour late, after ending up driving north, to the Newport college campus, which on so many levels is inane and bizarre, since this town is called Waldport and this town has a community college campus building a mile from where the guy lives but this dude thinks we’d all be driving 30 minutes north to another town with their own Chamber of Commerce?). You gotta give it to small towns, but they are really, just big towns, are they not since many come to the rural areas from big town jobs and lives?

Testament after testament on the level (low bar) of schooling people have gotten, and are giving. Amazing the mental density of the average American. Oh, the local schools have failed — so we have a few thousand kids in all 11 schools in Lincoln County, and, well, the graduation rate is in the tank, and, the Zoom Doom is dooming more of them, and the generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is out the roof with Fauci’s Felony Follies, and, well, teachers are dropping like flies, that is, they are not wanting the gig anymore. Leaving. Quitting. Washing their hands of Five Decades of Failure! Public Education!

Here, what follows, our local rag’s coverage of a meeting of the school representative of the union giving some results of a survey for Lincoln County teachers, just a few days ago:

Before launching into the results, Lohonyay foreshadowed them with a personal note. “In the last 96 hours, I’ve gotten phone calls, text messages and emails from six teachers asking, ‘How can I can resign?’” he said, adding that there had been a dozen more such communications since classes started.

He said that while teachers were overwhelmingly happy to have students back in the classroom and “grateful for some of the stuff that the school district’s brought to us,” 85 percent of 121 teachers surveyed said they have experienced more job-related stress during the first two months of this school year than in previous years, and 73 percent said they were experiencing more anxiety. (Source — Teachers say they are over scrutinized, burned out)

It is complicated, no, working with young people, when staffing is threadbare, when classroom disruptions are out the ceiling, when parents are stressed and stressing youth, and that state of the state is like a 1984 War Zone, all fitted with masks, social distancing and the jab-jab-jab? “We want to have time to have fun with our students,” Lohonyay said, something he added was acutely missing this year.

So, the teachers are getting way to much evaluation, too many professional development requirements and are up to their ears in strict pacing guides and assessment schedules. They also want more support from building administrators, better communication with leadership and compensation for time spent covering for staff shortages and quarantine preparation, according to the survey.

The district superintendent states she was shocked at being broadsided by this survey, by the complaints, and, well, she did bring up another pre/during Covid fact —

“I want people to have fun in school, too. But 50 percent of our kids can’t read at grade level, so where’s the fun in that? There isn’t any.” (Superintendent Karen Gray)

Again, a superintendent who should not be in the job. In fact, there should not be this top down “management,” and one overlord, we know that, really,  come on. Spread out the work of a single superintendent, spread out the signature power for other people, too;  spread out the perspectives and contexts and background. But one superintendent who is over her head, big time? That is the broken system of systems management in the USA, elsewhere.

It gets worse — so those youth with developmental, intellectual, learning disabilities/challenges/ realities, they are getting fewer hours of special education instruction on life skills, social skills, the 3 R’s, etc. Staffing shortages have dented the Lane Education Service District, representing 16 school districts including Eugene. They are cutting one day a week of Life Skills classes for students with cognitive disabilities.

It’s a teacher-counselor-paraeducator shortage, statewide — and that, my friends, is the Zoom plan, the at-home zooming crap that has created so much anxiety in the first place, yet, the consequences are dire on every Build Nothing Back Better level: Giving an unequal (less) amount of instruction time to students with disabilities is a violation of the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

“Civil rights don’t go away in the midst of a pandemic,” said committee member Sen. Sara Gelser Blouin, D-Corvallis. “It’s against the law, it’s outrageous and it’s immoral.” (School staffing issues in Oregon called ‘real, emergency situation’)

And so this all comes back to Waldport, to families, to people wanting to enroll in college, when in fact, there is no housing, and, this Highway 101 strip is for retirees and marine scientists, and builders and laborers and hotel staff. This is not a family-engaging place, on some levels, and with so many parents pre-during Covid shirking their responsibilities around engaging kids (their own, neighbors’ kids) and getting them to read and think, this place seems like a dead zone, Zombie Land, since Disneyfication of La-La Land has pretty much hijacked a majority of families into mind-numbing consumerism and endless TV and video games.

And this is just Oregon, this emergency!!

But that Build Back Nothing Better beat keeps on tapping — Oh, those Centers for Disease Control reports the United States hit over 100,000 drug overdose deaths over a 12-month period ending April 2021 — they say, nearly 30-percent increase over the previous year. CDC states it’s the first time annual U.S. overdose deaths reached six figures. Oh, these new dashboards we can put on our smartphones — Covid infections, Covid death, Overdose hospitalization, Overdose deaths! Get your hear rate, BP and number of steps while tracking Techno Hell! We get all sorts of causes for ODs, such as isolation and stress brought on by the pandemic led to higher rates of drug abuse. Opioids including Sackler Family stuff, and the powerful drug fentanyl accounted for about three-quarters of all overdose deaths. But they miss the point of capitalism as inflammatory DISEASE!

So what do I as a college teacher, who can’t get a class here on The Zombie Coast, but if I could what would I be able to teach if he/I were teaching critical reading and writing classes at the college level? In reality, Build Back Nothing Better is killing the education arena in higher education. Right now, after 10 years of lagging community college enrollments countrywide (but community college presidents get six figures and their henchmen and henchwomen get six figures and pretty landscaping and building construction continues and state legislatures continue to defund them), community colleges are struggling big time. They will go the way of the Dodo, that is, correspondence Zoom Doom, University of Phoenix Power Point and Webinar crap. That was in the plan, remote unlearning! Decades ago!

The technofascists have been working on this project for decades, way before DARPA and the virus, and this fear-fear-fear has been a project of the United Slaves of America for two centuries, or more, really, when that Smith Colony come in looking for wood, metals, gems, gold, and slaves, really. That dark-dark forest and those dark-dark men and women, they were the devil’s doing. Captain Smith, err, Captain Fear, The Village style.

In a hypothetical class, would I be able to look at the public record of say, Fauci, the highest paid government official, or would that be a fineable/fireable offense, or worse — myself being brought before a tribunal of cancel culture henchwomen and henchmen? Tattooed on my forehead, a  scarlet letter, “A,” “A” for Anti-Christ, Anarchist, Antithesis of Capitalism’s Soldiers? Fauci, and his record — something to chew on, a sadist’s story, really.

Flesh-eating flies on these animals (above image), for 90 days, while the sentient beings’ vocal chords were slashed without anesthesia so the mad scientists wouldn’t have to hear their screams as their faces were being eaten alive. NIH, Fauci style: New reports allege that Fauci’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) division greenlit tests in which experimenters drugged beagle puppies and locked their heads in cages filled with hungry, infected sandflies. The drug tests were apparently executed even though the Food and Drug Administration doesn’t require new drugs to be tested on dogs.

This, from Simon and Schuster’s website for Kennedy’s most recent book, see below. Would this book be allowed in a community college? Would fellow faculty (most being Covidians) allow students to course through some debates and critical thinking exercises using this book as one of several to explore the entire concept of Big Pharma? Do we get to look at Big Medicine? Big Mining? Big Oil? Big Media? Big Finance? Big Prison? Big Ag? Big Real Estate? Big Timber? Big Retail? Big Surveillance? Big AI? Big Fourth Industrial Revolution? Big New Green Lie? Big Nonprofit Industrial Complex? Big Military/Propaganda/Bioweaponry/Digital Complex?

Or are the youth coming to classes so brain fogged from K12, that is, for all intents and purposes, which is the wasteland of intentional harm, intentional miseducation? This in a country of Republicans making anime shit with AOC as a murdered victim, and then, cancel culture on steroids, and then Neanderthals fighting real history in each community’s courts of public opinion fighting against the very real 1619 Project? Does this become more Monty Python-SNL fodder?

All Power to the People? Check it out, a documentary which can’t be shown in K12, say, even in a senior- level social studies class. These are murdering-book banning times, and the USA has always been a lynching country, a slaver country, one that puts the power into the hands of white supremacists with guns, bombs, and, well, now with these Fauci Types and Trump LLC’s and Republicans and Democrats and Bankers, they have the power of foreclosure. Foreclosing on people, on medicine, on health care, on housing, on education, on food, on electricity. This is the Out of This Universe bullshit of universal rights to a roof over your head? Come on, what are you thinking? So, that’s a one-0bedroom shack, with or without running water, and a toilet, and electricity? Hmm, is that with or without food? Hmm, is that with or without your diabetes meds? You get the picture. These billionaires and their Eichmann Armies are all about FORECLOSING, and that has wormed its way into the very thought processes of the average American, scared, pissed, etc. A snapshot into the perversity of every part of the Complex coming from the rightwing book publisher of RFK, Jr’s book. The Real Anthony Fauci [imagine a thousand books with that same title, but The Real Fill-in-the-Blank. FORECLOSING on the American MIND!

As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Anthony Fauci dispenses $6.1 billion in annual taxpayer-provided funding for scientific research, allowing him to dictate the subject, content, and outcome of scientific health research across the globe. Fauci uses the financial clout at his disposal to wield extraordinary influence over hospitals, universities, journals, and thousands of influential doctors and scientists—whose careers and institutions he has the power to ruin, advance, or reward.

During more than a year of painstaking and meticulous research, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unearthed a shocking story that obliterates media spin on Dr. Fauci . . . and that will alarm every American—Democrat or Republican—who cares about democracy, our Constitution, and the future of our children’s health.

The Real Anthony Fauci reveals how “America’s Doctor” launched his career during the early AIDS crisis by partnering with pharmaceutical companies to sabotage safe and effective off-patent therapeutic treatments for AIDS. Fauci orchestrated fraudulent studies, and then pressured US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulators into approving a deadly chemotherapy treatment he had good reason to know was worthless against AIDS. Fauci repeatedly violated federal laws to allow his Pharma partners to use impoverished and dark-skinned children as lab rats in deadly experiments with toxic AIDS and cancer chemotherapies.

In early 2000, Fauci shook hands with Bill Gates in the library of Gates’ $147 million Seattle mansion, cementing a partnership that would aim to control an increasingly profitable $60 billion global vaccine enterprise with unlimited growth potential. Through funding leverage and carefully cultivated personal relationships with heads of state and leading media and social media institutions, the Pharma-Fauci-Gates alliance exercises dominion over global health policy.

The Real Anthony Fauci details how Fauci, Gates, and their cohorts use their control of media outlets, scientific journals, key government and quasi-governmental agencies, global intelligence agencies, and influential scientists and physicians to flood the public with fearful propaganda about COVID-19 virulence and pathogenesis, and to muzzle debate and ruthlessly censor dissent.

Oh, those monkeys in those mad scientists’ experiments. Now, let’s graduate to . . . .

Homo Sapiens . . . . Children! And school hallway movements, oh boy:

And we wonder where are all the smarts in this new generation of children? Where are those future renters? Those future home buyers? Those future workers? Ya think this is not planned? Right, I am just a Tin Foil Hat conspiracy Freak.

“The pernicious new selling of virtual travel is potentially a way to kill off the dream center of children, to kill their imagination. To move freely, even within the area from which you were born, is in my opinion the most indelible of rights. What is going on is a ruling class soft coup, a less overtly violent coup and their vision of a digital feudal planet is terrifying, if only because it is cannot possibly work. It is delusion.” — A Solution Without a Solution, September 18, 2021, John Steppling

Yes, John, these are monsters, and they are elite, and they are the chosen few, and yes, they come from a select and selective grouping of people, schooled and trained, in the way of the financial abuser, in the art of propaganda and mind control, and they have the floor now, as their prostitutes in Congresses, Senates, on Boards, in Houses of Parliament, inside Presidential Palaces, what have you, are their work horses, all proud of their Eichmann Status — sure, updated Eichmann’s, but still, a spade is a spade:

“Our identity is, literally, who we are, and as the digital technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution advance, our identity is increasingly digital. This digital identity determines what products, services and information we can access – or, conversely, what is closed off to us.” – September 2018, World Economic Forum Insight Report, Identity in a Digital World, A New Chapter in the Social Contract November 1, 2018: “If Dave Birch of Consult Hyperion is correct, identity is the new money.”

Monsters! (Watch: Digital ID; Freedom-as-a-Service. The Lure of Entitlement as the Method for Entrapment)

Finally, fortunately, the previous piece I wrote is up on DV, Collusion: The End of Nature, Brought to us by Zoom

And while we never are really finished tweaking our writing, but in this time of nanosecond news, we have to expect that once an article hits the digital ink, that’s that, move on. Luckily, here we are, add to this story, and it’s not pretty — Oregon middle school closes over safety concerns, student ‘socialization’ issues from year of virtual learning

Fistfights and yelling, and youth unable to sit, stand, walk still. Imagine that, as if the people like those I align with did not anticipate this. School has already been a shit-show of outbursts, “behaviors” (that’s what they call it, his or her behavior) and youth lacking concentration skills.

Ya think all those chemicals and compounds and poisons in the food, air, water, around us, they have nothing to do with ADHD, more and more Autism Spectrum disorder. Robert Kennedy Jr says it right when he points out that we do not see a bunch of 67 year olds (his age) walking around with helmets on and with weighted blankets and yammering Autistic jumbled nothingness. He stresses that EPA and FDA and USDA, the entire suite of agencies supposedly in the employ of the public, that they have no common sense to wonder why so many peanut allergies, so many learning and developmental disabilities?

So, get the jab-jab-booster-booster, and keep eating that nanoparticle filled cream pie, and, bam, we have the post lockdown, return to school, well, lockdown because of “behaviors.”

“The shifts in learning methods and isolation caused by COVID-19 closures and quarantines have taken a toll on the well-being of our students and staff,” superintendent Dr. Danna Diaz wrote in a letter to families and staff Tuesday justifying the sudden decision. “We are finding that some students are struggling with the socialization skills necessary for in-person learning, which is causing disruption in school for other students.”

A district spokesman, Steve Padilla, told The Oregonian that the closure was prompted by fights and other behavioral problems among students but declined to go into detail about the frequency of those on-campus brawls. He said weapons were not involved according to the best of his knowledge.

“We need to take care of this now. It’s urgent,” Padilla said. “It’s not just fighting – It’s disruptive behaviors as well. Students are disrupting other students, making it hard for them to learn.”

Yes, the isolation, the fear mongering, the pathetic death of common sense, common medicine, holism. We reap what we sow, no, RFK, Jr.?

Reality is —

Over 40 New Products Added to Nanotechnology Database

FDA has failed to take adequate action on dangerous chemicals despite acknowledging harm

Here, the interview of Kennedy, by Mercola, deemed one of the enemies of the world on the internet. Viral virus debunker spreader: Interview here!

In this interview, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental activist and attorney turned ultimate freedom fighter, discusses his latest book, “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health,” which is a must-read if you want to know more about the behind-the-scenes of this giant fraud. We could talk for hours and not cover but a fraction of what’s in this book, which Kennedy calls a “devastating indictment of Tony Fauci.”

In a nutshell, Kennedy describes how Fauci turned the National Institutes of Health into an incubator for pharmaceutical products, and essentially sold the entire country to the drug industry. The book is an incredibly well-referenced record of his history of decimating human health, and exposes him as a self-serving charlatan.

I particularly enjoyed how Kennedy placed Fauci in the context of Rockefeller’s legacy with respect to Bill Gates, who developed an alliance with Fauci over 20 years ago. Rockefeller set us on a course of toxic, profit-driven medicines synthesized from the byproducts of the oil refinery process a century ago, and Gates picked up where he left off and then collaborated heavily with Fauci.

Let the school Game of Thrones begin! More Tasers in school. More isolation rooms in schools. More SWAT teams in school (there is no defunding the Gestapo/Pigs/Cops!). The billionaires’ system is running very very smoothly.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

I was at a Chamber (local) meeting with 50 folk. Yesterday. Yeah, jolly jolly, out to a community college room, with pastries from the local bakery, and people there wondering really what the art world future of the little 2,100 populous Waldport has in store. Art? Crafts? This is delusion. Not real jobs, real community buttressing, real services, bringing in older people to live and survive in nice facilities, townhomes, what have you, with a thriving intergenerational community to aid those aging in place. What a dream, but not a Universal Right, no?

You see, a city or town predicated on a few restaurants and art galleries (sic), and trickles of tourism bucks, that is the question. At a community college building that has largely been left vacant, save for the past year of letting the teachers of the K12 schools use the facility (five rooms) for a pop-up day care.

Oh yeah, day care, a universal right, too. (chuckle-chuckle). Not in a social Darwin dog-eat-dog, survival of the richest (fittest).

There were big ideas coming from people who, for the most part, are not precarious in the sense that they only have one giant frayed safety net — social security payments (oh, a universal right, right, etched in stone . . . or is it out-of-the-universe pie in the sky dream?) income (fixed and felonious) and that’s that. Maybe one or two renters, really, and they own a home or two, and not to knock them, some are trying to make a go at, well, food-art-crafts-kayaking. The rest are doing okay, in the upper middle class category kind of doing okay way. Most, not all. And that is the elephant in the room — listening to bluster and PR, when there are proverbial elephants in the room after proverbial gorillas in the room, wherever you go!

In a small town with aging housing stock, threats of ocean tide rises, lots of 10-inches-in-three-days rain events, and, well, that Republican and Democrat Build Nothing Back Better smile, and the menu for the morning was arts and crafts, and eateries.

Oh, a few wringing of the hands about housing (there is none for rent, and those for sale, are match stick cabanas for half a million$). But the beat goes on, as a city manager was in attendance ($100K a year?) and the mayor (he said he failed to read the entire email for this breakfast invitation so he was an hour late, after ending up driving north, to the Newport college campus, which on so many levels is inane and bizarre, since this town is called Waldport and this town has a community college campus building a mile from where the guy lives but this dude thinks we’d all be driving 30 minutes north to another town with their own Chamber of Commerce?). You gotta give it to small towns, but they are really, just big towns, are they not since many come to the rural areas from big town jobs and lives?

Testament after testament on the level (low bar) of schooling people have gotten, and are giving. Amazing the mental density of the average American. Oh, the local schools have failed — so we have a few thousand kids in all 11 schools in Lincoln County, and, well, the graduation rate is in the tank, and, the Zoom Doom is dooming more of them, and the generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is out the roof with Fauci’s Felony Follies, and, well, teachers are dropping like flies, that is, they are not wanting the gig anymore. Leaving. Quitting. Washing their hands of Five Decades of Failure! Public Education!

Here, what follows, our local rag’s coverage of a meeting of the school representative of the union giving some results of a survey for Lincoln County teachers, just a few days ago:

Before launching into the results, Lohonyay foreshadowed them with a personal note. “In the last 96 hours, I’ve gotten phone calls, text messages and emails from six teachers asking, ‘How can I can resign?’” he said, adding that there had been a dozen more such communications since classes started.

He said that while teachers were overwhelmingly happy to have students back in the classroom and “grateful for some of the stuff that the school district’s brought to us,” 85 percent of 121 teachers surveyed said they have experienced more job-related stress during the first two months of this school year than in previous years, and 73 percent said they were experiencing more anxiety. (Source — Teachers say they are over scrutinized, burned out)

It is complicated, no, working with young people, when staffing is threadbare, when classroom disruptions are out the ceiling, when parents are stressed and stressing youth, and that state of the state is like a 1984 War Zone, all fitted with masks, social distancing and the jab-jab-jab? “We want to have time to have fun with our students,” Lohonyay said, something he added was acutely missing this year.

So, the teachers are getting way to much evaluation, too many professional development requirements and are up to their ears in strict pacing guides and assessment schedules. They also want more support from building administrators, better communication with leadership and compensation for time spent covering for staff shortages and quarantine preparation, according to the survey.

The district superintendent states she was shocked at being broadsided by this survey, by the complaints, and, well, she did bring up another pre/during Covid fact —

“I want people to have fun in school, too. But 50 percent of our kids can’t read at grade level, so where’s the fun in that? There isn’t any.” (Superintendent Karen Gray)

Again, a superintendent who should not be in the job. In fact, there should not be this top down “management,” and one overlord, we know that, really,  come on. Spread out the work of a single superintendent, spread out the signature power for other people, too;  spread out the perspectives and contexts and background. But one superintendent who is over her head, big time? That is the broken system of systems management in the USA, elsewhere.

It gets worse — so those youth with developmental, intellectual, learning disabilities/challenges/ realities, they are getting fewer hours of special education instruction on life skills, social skills, the 3 R’s, etc. Staffing shortages have dented the Lane Education Service District, representing 16 school districts including Eugene. They are cutting one day a week of Life Skills classes for students with cognitive disabilities.

It’s a teacher-counselor-paraeducator shortage, statewide — and that, my friends, is the Zoom plan, the at-home zooming crap that has created so much anxiety in the first place, yet, the consequences are dire on every Build Nothing Back Better level: Giving an unequal (less) amount of instruction time to students with disabilities is a violation of the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

“Civil rights don’t go away in the midst of a pandemic,” said committee member Sen. Sara Gelser Blouin, D-Corvallis. “It’s against the law, it’s outrageous and it’s immoral.” (School staffing issues in Oregon called ‘real, emergency situation’)

And so this all comes back to Waldport, to families, to people wanting to enroll in college, when in fact, there is no housing, and, this Highway 101 strip is for retirees and marine scientists, and builders and laborers and hotel staff. This is not a family-engaging place, on some levels, and with so many parents pre-during Covid shirking their responsibilities around engaging kids (their own, neighbors’ kids) and getting them to read and think, this place seems like a dead zone, Zombie Land, since Disneyfication of La-La Land has pretty much hijacked a majority of families into mind-numbing consumerism and endless TV and video games.

And this is just Oregon, this emergency!!

But that Build Back Nothing Better beat keeps on tapping — Oh, those Centers for Disease Control reports the United States hit over 100,000 drug overdose deaths over a 12-month period ending April 2021 — they say, nearly 30-percent increase over the previous year. CDC states it’s the first time annual U.S. overdose deaths reached six figures. Oh, these new dashboards we can put on our smartphones — Covid infections, Covid death, Overdose hospitalization, Overdose deaths! Get your hear rate, BP and number of steps while tracking Techno Hell! We get all sorts of causes for ODs, such as isolation and stress brought on by the pandemic led to higher rates of drug abuse. Opioids including Sackler Family stuff, and the powerful drug fentanyl accounted for about three-quarters of all overdose deaths. But they miss the point of capitalism as inflammatory DISEASE!

So what do I as a college teacher, who can’t get a class here on The Zombie Coast, but if I could what would I be able to teach if he/I were teaching critical reading and writing classes at the college level? In reality, Build Back Nothing Better is killing the education arena in higher education. Right now, after 10 years of lagging community college enrollments countrywide (but community college presidents get six figures and their henchmen and henchwomen get six figures and pretty landscaping and building construction continues and state legislatures continue to defund them), community colleges are struggling big time. They will go the way of the Dodo, that is, correspondence Zoom Doom, University of Phoenix Power Point and Webinar crap. That was in the plan, remote unlearning! Decades ago!

The technofascists have been working on this project for decades, way before DARPA and the virus, and this fear-fear-fear has been a project of the United Slaves of America for two centuries, or more, really, when that Smith Colony come in looking for wood, metals, gems, gold, and slaves, really. That dark-dark forest and those dark-dark men and women, they were the devil’s doing. Captain Smith, err, Captain Fear, The Village style.

In a hypothetical class, would I be able to look at the public record of say, Fauci, the highest paid government official, or would that be a fineable/fireable offense, or worse — myself being brought before a tribunal of cancel culture henchwomen and henchmen? Tattooed on my forehead, a  scarlet letter, “A,” “A” for Anti-Christ, Anarchist, Antithesis of Capitalism’s Soldiers? Fauci, and his record — something to chew on, a sadist’s story, really.

Flesh-eating flies on these animals (above image), for 90 days, while the sentient beings’ vocal chords were slashed without anesthesia so the mad scientists wouldn’t have to hear their screams as their faces were being eaten alive. NIH, Fauci style: New reports allege that Fauci’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) division greenlit tests in which experimenters drugged beagle puppies and locked their heads in cages filled with hungry, infected sandflies. The drug tests were apparently executed even though the Food and Drug Administration doesn’t require new drugs to be tested on dogs.

This, from Simon and Schuster’s website for Kennedy’s most recent book, see below. Would this book be allowed in a community college? Would fellow faculty (most being Covidians) allow students to course through some debates and critical thinking exercises using this book as one of several to explore the entire concept of Big Pharma? Do we get to look at Big Medicine? Big Mining? Big Oil? Big Media? Big Finance? Big Prison? Big Ag? Big Real Estate? Big Timber? Big Retail? Big Surveillance? Big AI? Big Fourth Industrial Revolution? Big New Green Lie? Big Nonprofit Industrial Complex? Big Military/Propaganda/Bioweaponry/Digital Complex?

Or are the youth coming to classes so brain fogged from K12, that is, for all intents and purposes, which is the wasteland of intentional harm, intentional miseducation? This in a country of Republicans making anime shit with AOC as a murdered victim, and then, cancel culture on steroids, and then Neanderthals fighting real history in each community’s courts of public opinion fighting against the very real 1619 Project? Does this become more Monty Python-SNL fodder?

All Power to the People? Check it out, a documentary which can’t be shown in K12, say, even in a senior- level social studies class. These are murdering-book banning times, and the USA has always been a lynching country, a slaver country, one that puts the power into the hands of white supremacists with guns, bombs, and, well, now with these Fauci Types and Trump LLC’s and Republicans and Democrats and Bankers, they have the power of foreclosure. Foreclosing on people, on medicine, on health care, on housing, on education, on food, on electricity. This is the Out of This Universe bullshit of universal rights to a roof over your head? Come on, what are you thinking? So, that’s a one-0bedroom shack, with or without running water, and a toilet, and electricity? Hmm, is that with or without food? Hmm, is that with or without your diabetes meds? You get the picture. These billionaires and their Eichmann Armies are all about FORECLOSING, and that has wormed its way into the very thought processes of the average American, scared, pissed, etc. A snapshot into the perversity of every part of the Complex coming from the rightwing book publisher of RFK, Jr’s book. The Real Anthony Fauci [imagine a thousand books with that same title, but The Real Fill-in-the-Blank. FORECLOSING on the American MIND!

As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Anthony Fauci dispenses $6.1 billion in annual taxpayer-provided funding for scientific research, allowing him to dictate the subject, content, and outcome of scientific health research across the globe. Fauci uses the financial clout at his disposal to wield extraordinary influence over hospitals, universities, journals, and thousands of influential doctors and scientists—whose careers and institutions he has the power to ruin, advance, or reward.

During more than a year of painstaking and meticulous research, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unearthed a shocking story that obliterates media spin on Dr. Fauci . . . and that will alarm every American—Democrat or Republican—who cares about democracy, our Constitution, and the future of our children’s health.

The Real Anthony Fauci reveals how “America’s Doctor” launched his career during the early AIDS crisis by partnering with pharmaceutical companies to sabotage safe and effective off-patent therapeutic treatments for AIDS. Fauci orchestrated fraudulent studies, and then pressured US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulators into approving a deadly chemotherapy treatment he had good reason to know was worthless against AIDS. Fauci repeatedly violated federal laws to allow his Pharma partners to use impoverished and dark-skinned children as lab rats in deadly experiments with toxic AIDS and cancer chemotherapies.

In early 2000, Fauci shook hands with Bill Gates in the library of Gates’ $147 million Seattle mansion, cementing a partnership that would aim to control an increasingly profitable $60 billion global vaccine enterprise with unlimited growth potential. Through funding leverage and carefully cultivated personal relationships with heads of state and leading media and social media institutions, the Pharma-Fauci-Gates alliance exercises dominion over global health policy.

The Real Anthony Fauci details how Fauci, Gates, and their cohorts use their control of media outlets, scientific journals, key government and quasi-governmental agencies, global intelligence agencies, and influential scientists and physicians to flood the public with fearful propaganda about COVID-19 virulence and pathogenesis, and to muzzle debate and ruthlessly censor dissent.

Oh, those monkeys in those mad scientists’ experiments. Now, let’s graduate to . . . .

Homo Sapiens . . . . Children! And school hallway movements, oh boy:

And we wonder where are all the smarts in this new generation of children? Where are those future renters? Those future home buyers? Those future workers? Ya think this is not planned? Right, I am just a Tin Foil Hat conspiracy Freak.

“The pernicious new selling of virtual travel is potentially a way to kill off the dream center of children, to kill their imagination. To move freely, even within the area from which you were born, is in my opinion the most indelible of rights. What is going on is a ruling class soft coup, a less overtly violent coup and their vision of a digital feudal planet is terrifying, if only because it is cannot possibly work. It is delusion.” — A Solution Without a Solution, September 18, 2021, John Steppling

Yes, John, these are monsters, and they are elite, and they are the chosen few, and yes, they come from a select and selective grouping of people, schooled and trained, in the way of the financial abuser, in the art of propaganda and mind control, and they have the floor now, as their prostitutes in Congresses, Senates, on Boards, in Houses of Parliament, inside Presidential Palaces, what have you, are their work horses, all proud of their Eichmann Status — sure, updated Eichmann’s, but still, a spade is a spade:

“Our identity is, literally, who we are, and as the digital technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution advance, our identity is increasingly digital. This digital identity determines what products, services and information we can access – or, conversely, what is closed off to us.” – September 2018, World Economic Forum Insight Report, Identity in a Digital World, A New Chapter in the Social Contract November 1, 2018: “If Dave Birch of Consult Hyperion is correct, identity is the new money.”

Monsters! (Watch: Digital ID; Freedom-as-a-Service. The Lure of Entitlement as the Method for Entrapment)

Finally, fortunately, the previous piece I wrote is up on DV, Collusion: The End of Nature, Brought to us by Zoom

And while we never are really finished tweaking our writing, but in this time of nanosecond news, we have to expect that once an article hits the digital ink, that’s that, move on. Luckily, here we are, add to this story, and it’s not pretty — Oregon middle school closes over safety concerns, student ‘socialization’ issues from year of virtual learning

Fistfights and yelling, and youth unable to sit, stand, walk still. Imagine that, as if the people like those I align with did not anticipate this. School has already been a shit-show of outbursts, “behaviors” (that’s what they call it, his or her behavior) and youth lacking concentration skills.

Ya think all those chemicals and compounds and poisons in the food, air, water, around us, they have nothing to do with ADHD, more and more Autism Spectrum disorder. Robert Kennedy Jr says it right when he points out that we do not see a bunch of 67 year olds (his age) walking around with helmets on and with weighted blankets and yammering Autistic jumbled nothingness. He stresses that EPA and FDA and USDA, the entire suite of agencies supposedly in the employ of the public, that they have no common sense to wonder why so many peanut allergies, so many learning and developmental disabilities?

So, get the jab-jab-booster-booster, and keep eating that nanoparticle filled cream pie, and, bam, we have the post lockdown, return to school, well, lockdown because of “behaviors.”

“The shifts in learning methods and isolation caused by COVID-19 closures and quarantines have taken a toll on the well-being of our students and staff,” superintendent Dr. Danna Diaz wrote in a letter to families and staff Tuesday justifying the sudden decision. “We are finding that some students are struggling with the socialization skills necessary for in-person learning, which is causing disruption in school for other students.”

A district spokesman, Steve Padilla, told The Oregonian that the closure was prompted by fights and other behavioral problems among students but declined to go into detail about the frequency of those on-campus brawls. He said weapons were not involved according to the best of his knowledge.

“We need to take care of this now. It’s urgent,” Padilla said. “It’s not just fighting – It’s disruptive behaviors as well. Students are disrupting other students, making it hard for them to learn.”

Yes, the isolation, the fear mongering, the pathetic death of common sense, common medicine, holism. We reap what we sow, no, RFK, Jr.?

Reality is —

Over 40 New Products Added to Nanotechnology Database

FDA has failed to take adequate action on dangerous chemicals despite acknowledging harm

Here, the interview of Kennedy, by Mercola, deemed one of the enemies of the world on the internet. Viral virus debunker spreader: Interview here!

In this interview, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental activist and attorney turned ultimate freedom fighter, discusses his latest book, “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health,” which is a must-read if you want to know more about the behind-the-scenes of this giant fraud. We could talk for hours and not cover but a fraction of what’s in this book, which Kennedy calls a “devastating indictment of Tony Fauci.”

In a nutshell, Kennedy describes how Fauci turned the National Institutes of Health into an incubator for pharmaceutical products, and essentially sold the entire country to the drug industry. The book is an incredibly well-referenced record of his history of decimating human health, and exposes him as a self-serving charlatan.

I particularly enjoyed how Kennedy placed Fauci in the context of Rockefeller’s legacy with respect to Bill Gates, who developed an alliance with Fauci over 20 years ago. Rockefeller set us on a course of toxic, profit-driven medicines synthesized from the byproducts of the oil refinery process a century ago, and Gates picked up where he left off and then collaborated heavily with Fauci.

Let the school Game of Thrones begin! More Tasers in school. More isolation rooms in schools. More SWAT teams in school (there is no defunding the Gestapo/Pigs/Cops!). The billionaires’ system is running very very smoothly.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.