One year after the astounding US humiliation in Kabul – and on the verge of another serious comeuppance in Donbass – there is reason to believe Moscow is wary of Washington seeking vengeance: in the form of the ‘Afghanization’ of Ukraine.
With no end in sight to western weapons and finance flowing into Kiev, it must be recognized that the Ukrainian battle is likely to disintegrate into yet another endless war. Like the Afghan jihad in the 1980s which employed US-armed and funded guerrillas to drag Russia into its depths, Ukraine’s backers will employ those war-tested methods to run a protracted battle that can spill into bordering Russian lands.
Yet this US attempt at crypto-Afghanization will at best accelerate the completion of what Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu describes as the “tasks” of its Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine. For Moscow right now, that road leads all the way to Odessa.
It didn’t have to be this way. Until the recent assassination of Darya Dugina at Moscow’s gates, the battlefield in Ukraine was in fact under a ‘Syrianization’ process.
Like the foreign proxy war in Syria this past decade, frontlines around significant Ukrainian cities had roughly stabilized. Losing on the larger battlefields, Kiev had increasingly moved to employ terrorist tactics. Neither side could completely master the immense war theater at hand. So the Russian military opted to keep minimal forces in battle – contrary to the strategy it employed in 1980s Afghanistan.
Let’s remind ourselves of a few Syrian facts: Palmyra was liberated in March 2016, then lost and retaken in 2017. Aleppo was liberated only in December 2016. Deir Ezzor in September 2017. A slice of northern Hama in December and January 2018. The outskirts of Damascus in the Spring of 2018. Idlib – and significantly, over 25 percent of Syrian territory – are still not liberated. That tells a lot about rhythm in a war theater.
The Russian military never made a conscious decision to interrupt the multi-channel flow of western weapons to Kiev. Methodically destroying those weapons once they’re in Ukrainian territory – with plenty of success – is another matter. The same applies to smashing mercenary networks.
Moscow is well aware that any negotiation with those pulling the strings in Washington – and dictating all terms to puppets in Brussels and Kiev – is futile. The fight in Donbass and beyond is a do or die affair.
So the battle will go on, destroying what’s left of Ukraine, just as it destroyed much of Syria. The difference is that economically, much more than in Syria, what’s left of Ukraine will plunge into a black void. Only territory under Russian control will be rebuilt, and that includes, significantly, the bulk of Ukraine’s industrial infrastructure.
What’s left – rump Ukraine – has already been plundered anyway, as Monsanto, Cargill and Dupont have already bagged 17 million hectares of prime, fertile arable land – over half of what Ukraine still possesses. That translates de facto as BlackRock, Blackstone and Vanguard, top agro-business shareholders, owning whatever lands that really matter in non-sovereign Ukraine.
Going forward, by next year the Russians will be applying themselves to cutting off Kiev from NATO weapons supplies. As that unfolds, the Anglo-Americans will eventually move whatever puppet regime remains to Lviv. And Kiev terrorism – conducted by Bandera worshippers – will continue to be the new normal in the capital.
The Kazakh double game
By now it’s abundantly clear this is not a mere war of territorial conquest. It’s certainly part of a War of Economic Corridors – as the US spares no effort to sabotage and smash the multiple connectivity channels of Eurasia’s integration projects, be they Chinese-led (Belt and Road Initiative, BRI) or Russian-led (Eurasian Economic Union, EAEU).
Just like the proxy war in Syria remade large swathes of West Asia (witness, for instance, Erdogan about to meet Assad), the fight in Ukraine, in a microcosm, is a war for the reconfiguration of the current world order, where Europe is a mere self-inflicted victim in a minor subplot. The Big Picture is the emergence of multipolarity.
The proxy war in Syria lasted a decade, and it’s not over yet. The same may happen to the proxy war in Ukraine. As it stands, Russia has taken an area that is roughly equivalent to Hungary and Slovakia combined. That’s still far from “task” fulfillment – and it’s bound to go on until Russia has taken all the land right up to the Dnieper as well as Odessa, connecting it to the breakaway Republic of Transnistria.
It’s enlightening to see how important Eurasian actors are reacting to such geopolitical turbulence. And that brings us to the cases of Kazakhstan and Turkey.
The Telegram channel Rybar (with over 640k followers) and hacker group Beregini revealed in an investigation that Kazakhstan was selling weapons to Ukraine, which translates as de facto treason against their own Russian allies in the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). Consider too that Kazakhstan is also part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the EAEU, the two hubs of the Eurasian-led multipolar order.
As a consequence of the scandal, Kazakhstan was forced to officially announce the suspension of all weapons exports until the end of 2023.
It began with hackers unveiling how Technoexport – a Kazakh company – was selling armed personnel carriers, anti-tank systems and munitions to Kiev via Jordanian intermediaries, under the orders of the United Kingdom. The deal itself was supervised by the British military attaché in Nur-Sultan, the Kazakh capital.
Nur-Sultan predictably tried to dismiss the allegations, arguing that Technoexport had not asked for export licenses. That was essentially false: the Rybar team discovered that Technoexport instead used Blue Water Supplies, a Jordanian firm, for those. And the story gets even juicier. All the contract documents ended up being found in the computers of Ukrainian intel.
Moreover, the hackers found out about another deal involving Kazspetsexport, via a Bulgarian buyer, for the sale of Kazakh Su-27s, airplane turbines and Mi-24 helicopters. These would have been delivered to the US, but their final destination was Ukraine.
The icing on this Central Asian cake is that Kazakhstan also sells significant amounts of Russian – not Kazakh – oil to Kiev.
So it seems that Nur-Sultan, perhaps unofficially, somehow contributes to the ‘Afghanization’ in the war in Ukraine. No diplomatic leaks confirm it, of course, but bets can be made Putin had a few things to say about that to President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev in their recent – cordial – meeting.
The Sultan’s balancing act
Turkey is a way more complex case. Ankara is not a member of the SCO, the CSTO or the EAEU. It is still hedging its bets, calculating on which terms it will join the high-speed rail of Eurasian integration. And yet, via several schemes, Ankara allows Moscow to evade the avalanche of western sanctions and embargoes.
Turkish businesses – literally all of them with close connections to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) – are making a killing, and relishing their new role as crossroads warehouse between Russia and the west. It’s an open boast in Istanbul that what Russia cannot buy from Germany or France they buy “from us.” And in fact several EU companies are in on it.
Ankara’s balancing act is as sweet as a good baklava. It gathers economic support from a very important partner right in the middle of the endless, very serious Turkish economic debacle. They agree on nearly everything: Russian gas, S-400 missile systems, the building of the Russian nuclear power plant, tourism – Istanbul is crammed with Russians – Turkish fruits and vegetables.
Ankara-Moscow employ sound textbook geopolitics. They play it openly, in full transparence. That does not mean they are allies. It’s just pragmatic business between states. For instance, an economic response may alleviate a geopolitical problem, and vice-versa.
Obviously the collective west has completely forgotten how that normal state-to-state behavior works. It’s pathetic. Turkey gets “denounced” by the west as traitorous – as much as China.
Of course Erdogan also needs to play to the galleries, so every once in a while he says that Crimea should be retaken by Kiev. After all, his companies also do business with Ukraine – Bayraktar drones and otherwise.
And then there’s proselytizing: Crimea remains theoretically ripe for Turkish influence, where Ankara may exploit the notions of pan-Islamism and mostly pan-Turkism, capitalizing on the historical relations between the peninsula and the Ottoman Empire.
Is Moscow worried? Not really. As for those Bayraktar TB2s sold to Kiev, they will continue to be relentlessly reduced to ashes. Nothing personal. Just business.
The world is on the edge of nuclear catastrophe in no small part because of the failure of Western political leaders to be forthright about the causes of the escalating global conflicts. The relentless Western narrative that the West is noble while Russia and China are evil is simple-minded and extraordinarily dangerous. It is an attempt to manipulate public opinion, not to deal with very real and pressing diplomacy. ___________________________
The essential narrative of the West is built into US national security strategy. The core US idea is that China and Russia are implacable foes that are “attempting to erode American security and prosperity.” These countries are, according to the US, “determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their. militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence.”
The irony is that since 1980 the US has been in at least 15 overseas wars of choice (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Panama, Serbia, Syria, and Yemen just to name a few), while China has been in none, and Russia only in one (Syria) beyond the former Soviet Union. The US has military bases in 85 countries, China in 3, and Russia in 1 (Syria) beyond the former Soviet Union.
President Joe Biden has promoted this narrative, declaring that the greatest challenge of our time is the competition with the autocracies, which “seek to advance their own power, export and expand their influence around the world, and justify their repressive policies and practices as a more efficient way to address today’s challenges.” US security strategy is not the work of any single US president but of the US security establishment, which is largely autonomous, and operates behind a wall of secrecy.
The overwrought fear of China and Russia is sold to a Western public through manipulation of the facts. A generation earlier George W. Bush, Jr. sold the public on the idea that America’s greatest threat was Islamic fundamentalism, without mentioning that it was the CIA, with Saudi Arabia and other countries, that had created, funded, and deployed the jihadists in Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere to fight America’s wars.
Or consider the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, which was painted in the Western media as an act of unprovoked perfidy. Years later, we learned that the Soviet invasion was actually preceded by a CIA operation designed to provoke the Soviet invasion! The same misinformation occurred vis-à-vis Syria. The Western press is filled with recriminations against Putin’s military assistance to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad beginning in 2015, without mentioning that the US supported the overthrow of al-Assad beginning in 2011, with the CIA funding a major operation (Timber Sycamore) to overthrow Assad years before Russia arrived.
Or more recently, when US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recklessly flew to Taiwan despite China’s warnings, no G7 foreign minister criticised Pelosi’s provocation, yet the G7 ministers together harshly criticised China’s “overreaction” to Pelosi’s trip.
The Western narrative about the Ukraine war is that it is an unprovoked attack by Putin in the quest to recreate the Russian empire. Yet the real history starts with the Western promise to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not enlarge to the East, followed by four waves of NATO aggrandisement: in 1999, incorporating three Central European countries; in 2004, incorporating 7 more, including in the Black Sea and Baltic States; in 2008, committing to enlarge to Ukraine and Georgia; and in 2022, inviting four Asia-Pacific leaders to NATO to take aim at China.
Nor do the Western media mention the US role in the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych; the failure of the Governments of France and Germany, guarantors of the Minsk II agreement, to press Ukraine to carry out its commitments; the vast US armaments sent to Ukraine during the Trump and Biden Administrations in the lead-up to war; nor the refusal of the US to negotiate with Putin over NATO enlargement to Ukraine.
Of course, NATO says that is purely defensive, so that Putin should have nothing to fear. In other words, Putin should take no notice of the CIA operations in Afghanistan and Syria; the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999; the NATO overthrow of Moammar Qaddafi in 2011; the NATO occupation of Afghanistan for 15 years; nor Biden’s “gaffe” calling for Putin’s ouster (which of course was no gaffe at all); nor US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin stating that the US war aim in Ukraine is the weakening of Russia.
At the core of all of this is the US attempt to remain the world’s hegemonic power, by augmenting military alliances around the world to contain or defeat China and Russia. It’s a dangerous, delusional, and outmoded idea. The US has a mere 4.2% of the world population, and now a mere 16% of world GDP (measured at international prices). In fact, the combined GDP of the G7 is now less than that of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), while the G7 population is just 6 percent of the world compared with 41 percent in the BRICS. There is only one country whose self-declared fantasy is to be the world’s dominant power: the US. It’s past time that the US recognised the true sources of security: internal social cohesion and responsible cooperation with the rest of the world, rather than the illusion of hegemony. With such a revised foreign policy, the US and its allies would avoid war with China and Russia, and enable the world to face its myriad environment, energy, food and social crises.
Above all, at this time of extreme danger, European leaders should pursue the true source of European security: not US hegemony, but European security arrangements that respect the legitimate security interests of all European nations, certainly including Ukraine, but also including Russia, which continues to resist NATO enlargements into the Black Sea. Europe should reflect on the fact that the non-enlargement of NATO and the implementation of the Minsk II agreements would have averted this awful war in Ukraine. At this stage, diplomacy, not military escalation, is the true path to European and global security.
On August 1st, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) announced the beginning of a new campaign — #ThinkBeforeSharing. Intended to help counter and stop the spread of what it claims is harmful disinformation and conspiracy theories online.
They say, quite matter-of-factly, “The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked a worrying rise in disinformation and conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories can be dangerous: they often target and discriminate against vulnerable groups, ignore scientific evidence and polarize society with serious consequences. This needs to stop.”
Later quoting the UNESCO director general who says,
“Conspiracy theories cause real harm to people, to their health, and also to their physical safety. They amplify and legitimize misconceptions about the pandemic, and reinforce stereotypes which can fuel violence and violent extremist ideologies.”
Going on to affirm,
“A new campaign helps you learn how to identify, debunk, react to and report on conspiracy theories to prevent their spread. Check out the infographics and social media pack below and help spread the word that facts matter and no one is to blame. Thinking critically and being informed about conspiracy theories is key to challenging them.
This UNESCO campaign is implemented jointly with the European Commission, Twitter and the World Jewish Congress.”
Surly these would be noble sentiments, if they were genuine. But as you continue to peruse through the infographics it becomes quite apparent that the architects of this campaign only have one interest in mind: stifling public discourse, and discrediting anyone who dares to challenge the status quo narrative.
Indeed, upon browsing through the material provided it quickly establishes an air that only the supposed authorities are to be trusted, they would never lie to you or purposefully peddle false information. No, only those with whom the establishment has deemed fair, just, and honest are to be trusted. While seemingly encouraging critical thinking, they demand that you toss aside any critical thinking skills and blindly trust the figures whom you are told represent the best interests of everyone. While going on to paint anyone who disagrees and/or promotes alleged conspiracy theories as a dangerous bigot, and how one should react if you encounter one these dangerous people and their harmful ideas.
It is a carefully crafted package on how to identify “wrong think”. The latest salvo in the ongoing information war, paired with just enough of a Limited Hangout to appear good natured to the unaware.
In this special edition of The Free Thought Project’s Conspiracy Fact Series, we will dive into this latest propaganda effort to refute some of its key logical fallacies, before providing a number of examples of true conspiracies’ in order to demonstrate exactly why these kind of campaigns are antithetical to their stated purpose.
First of all, let us address the broadest question; What is a conspiracy theory? Put plainly, it is a hypothesis postulating that a conspiracy has or is taking place. And what is a conspiracy? A conspiracy is defined as follows:
An agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act.
A group of conspirators.
An agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime or accomplish a legal purpose through illegal action.
Conspiracies happen daily, and most places have laws regarding them within their legal code. Conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to commit fraud, conspiracy to traffic illicit material, etcetera, happen regularly and are charges faced by individuals within the legal system. And technically speaking, until law enforcement gathers enough evidence to prove that individuals participated in such a plot, the allegations against them would be considered conspiracy theories.
Of course the allegation ceases to be a theory when you have evidence. But somewhere along the line in our common discourse the term conspiracy theory has taken on a new meaning, it has become equated with “fake news”, insinuating that the mere postulation that one or more individuals may be involved in a conspiracy is in and of itself preposterous. An idea to be denied and ridiculed outright. This goes against logical thinking and is simply not the case. In reality this is what would be referred to as a thought terminating cliché.
Right at the start, in the second infographic dedicated to how to identify conspiracy theories, we are told one way to determine if a story is a conspiracy theory or not is to check the author. If they are connected to a reputable media outlet or organization then they are to be trusted.
You mean like so-called reputable organizations like the New York Times or the Washington Post who carried stories demonizing the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and peddling the unfounded conspiracy theory that it was “Russian disinformation” when it was in fact 100% true? Or those who pushed the thoroughly debunked Russiagate election meddling hoax? Both which we backed by seemingly trustworthy officials in the intelligence community who were then proven to be either incredibly incompetent at their jobs or outright liars.
It then goes on to say that trustworthy authors will use verifiable facts and evidence from academic or scientific research. And yet this flies in the face of corporate media practices during the COVID-19 pandemic when they refused to even consider the research of some of the world’s top virologists, epidemiologists, and other reputable medical professionals from esteemed institutions; such as those of The Great Berrington Declaration or Dr. John P. A. Ioannidis, one of the most esteemed in his field, who critiqued the establishments response to COVID-19 such as lockdown policies. Who in hindsight have clearly been proven right. Or the literal hundreds of medical studies providing evidence that such interventionist policies provided little benefit, while simultaneously carrying with them an incomprehensible amount of suffering and destruction.
Where was the harsh criticism for all those who claimed that should one receive a COVID-19 vaccine they will not catch the virus and will not get sick, which is now a demonstrably false statement. And according to former CDC director Dr. Deborah Birx, a statement in which they knew was false from the beginning.
It also goes on to link so-called conspiracy theories and those who espouse them to hate, racism, and anti-Semitism. While this is certainly true in some circles and such beliefs should be ardently condemned and disavowed, one has to keep in mind that the true purpose of the UN campaign isn’t merely to target untrue conspiracy theories, but rather to discredit ANY dialog dissenting from the status quo. And it has been an emerging tactic in recent years to unfairly and incorrectly link any critique of the establishment to hate and racism as a means of discrediting it without engaging in debate.
The UNESCO diagram then goes on to assert that linking allegations of wrongdoing to Jewish individuals such as the Rothschild family, George Soros, or the state of Israel, is tantamount to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. The logical fallacy here is that the majority of criticism towards those such as the aforementioned has nothing to do with the fact that they are Jewish, and everything to do with the fact that they are powerful, notably corrupt, globalist insiders with a known history of manipulating economies and governments.
Similarly with regard to the settler-colonial state of Israel, the crimes of the Zionist regime are apparent for all to see. With reputable human rights organizations such as Amnesty International condemning the nation as an apartheid state for its heinous crimes against humanity committed in occupied Palestine; and whos intelligence service is arguably among the most corrupt in the world right along with our own CIA. Criticisms of such atrocities are not leveled due to the jewishness of the nation’s inhabitants, but rather due to the fact that such heinous acts are abhorrent.
No government should be free from criticism, especially those committing acts of ethnic cleansing. And attempting to dismiss such valid criticisms by exploiting the perpetrators Hebrew lineage is equally as despicable.
Next, in the “prebunking and debunking” portion, the campaign goes on to completely contradict itself. In order to empower people to be more resilient against dastardly conspiracy theories they encourage the use of rational thinking and questioning, while in the very next sentence asserting that a key trait of conspiratorial thinking is the suspicion of official accounts.
They then begin to take aim at COVID-19 specifically, continuing in its overbearingly hubristic tone. Deriding what is described as deceptive conspiracy theories that ignore scientific evidence and falsely blame individuals and groups not responsible for the pandemic. Listing four major red flags that one should look out for.
They include;
Claims that the virus was artificially created (e.g. in a laboratory) by people with a specific interest. (e.g. reducing world population)
Claims that the virus was spread intentionally or its natural spread augmented to harm as many people as possible (e.g. through 5G signals)
Claims that vaccines and cures are intentionally withheld to not disrupt the spread and harm as many people as possible.
Claims that certain sanitary measures to counter the spread of the virus are used to intentionally harm or control society (e.g. vaccines, masks)
This is compounded by what we know regarding gain-of-function research that took place in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in which documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act prove that the United States was in fact funding gain-of-function research on ‘Bat Coronaviruses Likely to Infect Humans’. In direct contradiction to Dr. Fauci’s sworn testimony before Congress.
What’s more, the shady ties and practices of EcoHealth Alliance, who partnered with the USAID and NIH in Wuhan, raises further concerns. Including an EcoHealth whistleblower, former Associate Vice President Dr. Andrew Huff, publicly accusing EcoHealth of being a cutout for the CIA citing a conversation with its President Peter Daszak.
Additionally, asserting that effective treatments for COVID-19 weren’t suppressed by the medical establishment are demonstrably false as well. Look at Ivermectin for example. It is an undeniable fact that as Ivermectin — which has won awards for its effectiveness in treating human ailments and was widely praised as a “wonder drug” in the years prior to COVID — gained more recognition that the medical establishment and mainstream media virtually went to war to discredit it and vilify anyone who promoted it, despite a growing body of evidence it can be effective against COVID-19.
A slew of mainstream press including but not limited to MSNBC and Rachel Maddow, The Hill, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, New York Daily News and others all spread an easily debunkable outright lie about a rural hospital becoming overwhelmed with a flood of ivermectin overdoses. And when the lie was exposed they were not only spared the ire of the “fact checkers”, but refused to retract it at all.
CNN lambasted Joe Rogan for his use of Ivermectin after catching COVID, unfavorably framing the drug as a “horse dewormer”, defaming Rogan and going so far as to alter the lighting of his Instagram video to make him appear more sick than he was.
Following the incident, CNN’s chief medical advisor Dr. Sanjay Gupta joined Joe Rogan on his podcast and was confronted about the defamatory statements. Ultimately conceding that the network made a mistake. However, after the episode aired, CNN’s Don Lemon yet again doubled down on their skewed coverage.
Finally, the assertion that certain measures definitely weren’t utilized as a means of controlling the population is also easily refuted. Again, by the admission of the very same people responsible for doing so.
An article penned in the UK Telegraph on 14th May, 2021 by the papers Associate Editor Gordon Rayner titled Use of fear to control behaviour in Covid crisis was ‘totalitarian’, admit scientists specifically details the accounts from several doctors in the UK governments Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour lamenting their overt use of fear as a means of controlling the population and enforcing lockdown mandates.
Similar techniques were also carried out elsewhere such as in Canada. Where documents from the Canadian Joint Operations Command revealed how the military saw the pandemic as a unique opportunity to test propaganda techniques against the domestic citizenry without the approval of the presidential cabinet, utilizing some of the same information warfare tactics deployed in Afghanistan.
Reported by the Ottawa Citizen;
The plan devised by the Canadian Joint Operations Command, also known as CJOC, relied on propaganda techniques similar to those employed during the Afghanistan war. The campaign called for “shaping” and “exploiting” information. CJOC claimed the information operations scheme was needed to head off civil disobedience by Canadians during the coronavirus pandemic and to bolster government messages about the pandemic.
In Israel, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz was caught on a hot mic admitting that restrictions such as the ‘Green Pass’ vaccine passport is meant to incentivize compliance with vaccine mandates on the population, touting the inaccurate “pandemic of the unvaccinated” trope. This was weeks after a major Israeli study confirmed once again that natural immunity is just as if perhaps not more effective than the jab. Now more than a year later and the social consequences of such policies have played a major role in tearing the country apart.
Fast forward to today and justification for vaccine passports and forced vaccination has been completely demolished, as in the United States the CDC has once again updated their guidelines now instructing policy to make no differentiation between vaccinated and unvaccinated. Creating quite the awkward situation for the thousands of people who were fired from their jobs, removed from school, harassed, and otherwise segregated and discriminated against for exercising bodily autonomy.
Speaking of the United States, rest assured much of the aforementioned manipulations apply here as well. Such as when A study from the US National Library of Medicine found that researchers at Yale University were testing propaganda messaging for the COVID-19 vaccine six months prior to its rollout. This was the exact same kind of messaging that was later adopted by media and government officials using some of the most classic propaganda tactics of shame, fear, anger, and embarrassment to coerce individuals into injecting themselves with the experimental shot.
Corroborated by a batch of emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act in March of this year which reveals clearly a conspiracy of collaboration between the Biden administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, and various mainstream media outlets to push a jab propaganda campaign.
With all this talk of state and corporate collusion conspiring to commit propaganda campaigns, it seems no better time than to transition into the final portion of this treatise. It has been shown above that the UN’s latest initiative is at best logically inconsistent and full of holes, and at worst deliberately disingenuous.
Yet further still to exemplify the true insidious nature of what is fundamentally at its core a campaign which implores individuals to abandon their faculties of rumination and trust only the official approved version of events as recounted to them by persons and institutions with perhaps the most sordid track record of dishonesty known to man.
So we will provide a few examples of so-called conspiracy theories that are now accepted common fact. Truths that, if the UN had their way with this model of thinking, would still be relegated to the realm of tinfoil hat nonsense despite the veracity behind them.
1.) Mockingbird Media
Of course having just mentioned propaganda operations we would be remiss not to mention first and foremost one of the most notable, far reaching, and still active conspiracies of the last several decades — Operation Mockingbird. As detailed in part one of this series, titled How Truth Was Destroyed So Americans Would Crave Propaganda, we concisely outline in great detail the hard evidence proving the United States corporate media apparatus is subservient to the intelligence community. Fully infiltrated by and under the influence of the Central Intelligence Agency.
From the early days of ad manipulation in the 1920s and the father of propaganda himself Dr. Edward Bernays, to the Nazi origins of CIA media influence operations imported to the US via Project Paperclip; To the 1975 Church and Pike congressional committees, and the explosive investigation by renowned journalist Carl Bernstein, and even a myriad of leaked and declassified documents through to the modern day. The empirical evidence establishes the irrefutable fact that the mainstream corporate media by and large operates at the behest of state interests exerting undue influence on the public as purveyors of propaganda.
2.) Provocation Operations
Governments are, by their very nature, two things incontrovertibly; pathological liars, and monopolies on violence. Nowhere is this better seen than with warfare. Nations concocting untrue narratives to manufacture consent and justify military assaults on their adversaries is almost as old as time itself. Though only recently was the concept of false flag attacks ushered from the realm of tinfoil hat lunacy to the accepting arms of the mainstream.
For the longest time if you claimed that the government staged an attack against itself and framed its rival in order to justify military intervention abroad you would be considered crazy, “They would never do that!” detractors would exclaim. However as pointed out in Part two of this series, in the midst of the fervor of US/ NATO backed warmongering in Eastern Europe, government officials through their own accusations outright confirmed that false flag attacks indeed do happen.
But of course us “conspiracy theorists” didn’t need the pontifications of Jake Sullivan to know that. The historical proof of false flag operations has been out in the open for anyone willing to research for decades. As we elaborated in our article, whether it be the Nazis’ Operation Himmler to justify the invasion of Poland at the beginning of World War Two; The Israeli military blunder in Egypt known as The Lavon Affair; Or the infamous Operation Northwoods. In which officially declassified documents prove the CIA had planned to orchestrate a campaign of terror attacks against innocent Americans to justify an invasion of Cuba at the height of the Cuban missile crisis — the official admission of false flag operations by government officials is but the most recent example of conspiracy theory becoming openly acknowledged as conspiracy fact. But one that was a fact all along.
3.) Mass Surveillance
One of the more tame yet no less prolific conspiracy theories that has been around since at least the 1930’s is the allegation that the government is spying on you. For decades accusations abound that the feds were able to track every conversation and know everything we do. And for decades such an argument would have one labeled as a paranoid lunatic.
But in the spring of 2013 everything changed. That’s when a young contractor by the name of Edward Snowden leaked explosive documents to journalist Glenn Greenwald revealing the scope of an illegal mass surveillance program conducted by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) known as PRISM.
Since then, Snowden has become a household name, as well as the various real life conspiracies of warrantless mass spying that he helped to uncover. In the years since, various other spying scandals have occurred which have vindicated Snowden even further, Now, the government can even spy on you through your TV. But it was Snowden’s revelations in and of themselves that vindicated all who came before him. The so-called conspiracy theorists who had for so long tried to expose the government’s longstanding practice of spying on their own citizens. Whether it be PRISM, The Echelon Affair of the late 1990s, the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation (or it’s modern counterpart), going as far back as 1895, as revealed by renowned journalist Meyer Berger in a 1938 article for The New Yorker, and again in a 1955 New York Times exposé on wiretapping. Evidence abounds proving the conspiracy theories were conspiracy facts.
4.) Inhumane Experiments
Throughout the entirety of the coronavirus pandemic proponents of mandatory medical intervention have constantly made the case that the experimental injection is 100% safe, and the oh so virtuous multinational pharmaceutical corporations who stand to make billions upon billions of dollars off of it, who certainly don’t have a long documented track record of corruption, would never mislead the public about their health. That it is a ridiculous conspiracy theory to ever question whether or not the federal government and their corporate cohorts would engage in such malfeasance as to put our health at risk, or even worse, to deliberately endanger the public’s well-being.
Despite this however, as The Free Thought Project reported in January of 2021, there are a myriad of facts stretching back decades exemplifying precisely why blind trust for these authorities either federal or corporate is ill advised. They can and often have put citizens at great risk for their own benefit.
In this comprehensive analysis, we outlined hundreds of instances corroborated by official government documents of blatant wrongdoing. Including but not limited to, unethical radiation experiments on handicapped children and infants; Clandestine military operations exposing Americans to carcinogenic substances; Eugenics based forced sterilization; Knowingly allowing the spread of syphilis throughout African American communities; Kidnapping and torturing American citizens during the MK ULTURA program; hundreds of germ warfare tests on the unconsenting public; Agrochemical corporations deliberately exposing Americans to cancer causing herbicides; Distributing contaminated doses of polio vaccine; and much, much more.
But if the UN had their way, you wouldn’t know any of this. It would be dismissed as wrong think and censored, leaving us all none the wiser.
There are so many more examples of alleged conspiracy theories throughout the decades to mention that were once ridiculed and now openly accepted as fact. The Business Plot of the mid-1930’s literally conspired to overthrow the Roosevelt presidency and install a fascist dictatorship in the United States. The CIA trafficking drugs into urban communities is such a widely known fact now that that it’s featured as a key plot point in movies and prime time FX dramas and no one bats an eye. You get the point.
The notorious saga of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein is perhaps one of the most egregious examples. Before the case became public knowledge if you were to try to have a serious conversation about high level government officials, up to and including intelligence agencies, the President of the United States, end even royalty, being tied to an international child trafficking and pedophilia ring you would run the risk of being institutionalized. But since the Epstein saga has unfolded so dramatically the whole world is now well aware of that fact. And for the astute observer, the conspiracy theorist, they were already well aware of it. Looking at instances such as Jimmy Savile in the UK, The Finders, the NXIVM cult, the Catholic church, and so on just to name a few all point to a very deep rooted and sadistic web of child trafficking and abuse among the world’s most powerful.
If we went by the United Nations advice, blissfully believing the official story, completely credulous and entirely dependent on the proper authorities, how much of this information would we actually know? How much of the world would still be secreted away from us? There is no virtue in being willfully ignorant. No matter how much the social engineers of civilization attempt to convince you otherwise. The lesson remains the same — always question authority.
No one, including the most bullish supporters of Ukraine, expect the nation’s war with Russia to end soon. The fighting has been reduced to artillery duels across hundreds of miles of front lines and creeping advances and retreats. Ukraine, like Afghanistan, will bleed for a very long time. This is by design.
On August 24, the Biden administration announced yet another massive military aid package to Ukraine worth nearly $3 billion. It will take months, and in some cases years, for this military equipment to reach Ukraine. In another sign that Washington assumes the conflict will be a long war of attrition it will give a name to the U.S. military assistance mission in Ukraine and make it a separate command overseen by a two- or three-star general. Since August 2021, Biden has approved more than $8 billion in weapons transfers from existing stockpiles, known as drawdowns, to be shipped to Ukraine, which do not require Congressional approval.
Including humanitarian assistance, replenishing depleting U.S. weapons stocks and expanding U.S. troop presence in Europe, Congress has approved over $53.6 billion ($13.6 billion in March and a further $40.1 billion in May) since Russia’s February 24 invasion. War takes precedence over the most serious existential threats we face. The proposed budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in fiscal year 2023 is $10.675 billion while the proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is $11.881 billion. Our approved assistance to Ukraine is more than twice these amounts.
The militarists who have waged permanent war costing trillions of dollars over the past two decades have invested heavily in controlling the public narrative. The enemy, whether Saddam Hussein or Vladimir Putin, is always the epitome of evil, the new Hitler. Those we support are always heroic defenders of liberty and democracy. Anyone who questions the righteousness of the cause is accused of being an agent of a foreign power and a traitor.
The mass media cravenly disseminates these binary absurdities in 24-hour news cycles. Its news celebrities and experts, universally drawn from the intelligence community and military, rarely deviate from the approved script. Day and night, the drums of war never stop beating. Its goal: to keep billions of dollars flowing into the hands of the war industry and prevent the public from asking inconvenient questions.
In the face of this barrage, no dissent is permitted.CBS News caved to pressure and retracted its documentary which charged that only 30 percent of arms shipped to Ukraine were making it to the front lines, with the rest siphoned off to the black market, a finding that was separately reported upon by U.S. journalist Lindsey Snell. CNN has acknowledged there is no oversight of weapons once they arrive in Ukraine, longconsidered the most corrupt country in Europe. According to a poll of executives responsible for tackling fraud, completed by Ernst & Young in 2018, Ukraine was ranked the ninth-most corrupt nation from 53 surveyed.
There is little ostensible reason for censoring critics of the war in Ukraine. The U.S. is not at war with Russia. No U.S. troops are fighting in Ukraine. Criticism of the war in Ukraine does not jeopardize our national security. There are no long-standing cultural and historical ties to Ukraine, as there are to Great Britain. But if permanent war, with potentially tenuous public support, is the primary objective, censorship makes sense.
War is the primary business of the U.S. empire and the bedrock of the U.S. economy. The two ruling political parties slavishly perpetuate permanent war, as they do austerity programs, trade deals, the virtual tax boycott for corporations and the rich, wholesale government surveillance, the militarization of the police and the maintenance of the largest prison system in the world. They bow before the dictates of the militarists, who have created a state within a state. This militarism, as Seymour Melman writes in The Permanent War Economy: American Capitalism in Decline, “is fundamentally contradictory to the formation of a new political economy based upon democracy, instead of hierarchy, in the workplace and the rest of society.”
“The idea that war economy brings prosperity has become more than an American illusion,” Melman writes. “When converted, as it has been, into ideology that justifies the militarization of society and moral debasement, as in Vietnam, then critical reassessment of that illusion is a matter of urgency. It is a primary responsibility of thoughtful people who are committed to humane values to confront and respond to the prospect that deterioration of American economy and society, owing to the ravages of war economy, can become irreversible.”
If permanent war is to be halted, as Melman writes, the ideological control of the war industry must be shattered. The war industry’s funding of politicians, research centers and think tanks, as well as its domination of the media monopolies, must end. The public must be made aware, Melman writes, of how the federal government “sustains itself as the directorate of the largest industrial corporate empire in the world; how the war economy is organized and operated in parallel with centralized political power — often contradicting the laws of Congress and the Constitution itself; how the directorate of the war economy converts pro-peace sentiment in the population into pro-militarist majorities in the Congress; how ideology and fears of job losses are manipulated to marshal support in Congress and the general public for war economy; how the directorate of the war economy uses its power to prevent planning for orderly conversion to an economy of peace.”
Rampant, unchecked militarism, as historian Arnold Toynbee notes, “has been by far the commonest cause of the breakdown of civilizations.”
This breakdown is accelerated by the rigid standardization and uniformity of public discourse. The manipulation of public opinion, what Walter Lippman calls “the manufacture of consent,” is imperative as the militarists gut social programs; let the nation’s crumbling infrastructure decay; refuse to raise the minimum wage; sustain an inept, mercenary for-profit health care system that resulted in 25 percent of global Covid deaths — although we are less than 5 percent of the world’s population — to gouge the public; carries out deindustrialization; do nothing to curb the predatory behavior of banks and corporations or invest in substantial programs to combat the climate crisis.
Critics, already shut out from the corporate media, are relentlessly attacked, discredited and silenced for speaking a truth that threatens the public’s quiescence while the U.S. Treasury is pillaged by the war industry and the nation disemboweled.
You can watch my discussion with Matt Taibbi about the rot that infects journalism here and here.
The war industry, deified by the mass media, including the entertainment industry, is never held accountable for the military fiascos, cost overruns, dud weapons systems and profligate waste. No matter how many disasters — from Vietnam to Afghanistan — it orchestrates, it is showered with larger and larger amounts of federal funds, nearly half of all the government’s discretionary spending. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven the U.S. debt to over $30 trillion, $6 trillion more than the U.S. GDP of $24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spend more on the military, $813 billion for fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.
An organization like NewsGuard, which has been rating what it says are trustworthy and untrustworthy sites based on their reporting on Ukraine, is one of the many indoctrination tools of the war industry. Sites that raise what are deemed “false” assertions about Ukraine, including that there was a U.S.-backed coup in 2014 and neo-Nazi forces are part of Ukraine’s military and power structure, are tagged as unreliable. Consortium News, Daily Kos, Mint Press and Grayzone have been given a red warning label. Sites that do not raise these issues, such as CNN, receive the “green” rating” for truth and credibility. (NewsGuard, after being heavily criticized for giving Fox News a green rating of approval in July revised its rating for Fox News and MSNBC, giving them red labels.)
The ratings are arbitrary. The Daily Caller, which published fake naked pictures of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was given a green rating, along with a media outlet owned and operated by The Heritage Foundation. NewsGuard gives WikiLeaks a red label for “failing” to publish retractions despite admitting that all of the information WikiLeaks has published thus far is accurate. What WikiLeaks was supposed to retract remains a mystery. The New York Timesand The Washington Post, which shared a Pulitzer in 2018 for reporting that Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin to help sway the 2016 election, a conspiracy theory the Mueller investigation imploded, are awarded perfect scores. These ratings are not about vetting journalism. They are about enforcing conformity.
NewsGuard, established in 2018, “partners” with the State Department and the Pentagon, as well as corporations such as Microsoft. Its advisory board includes the former Director of the CIA and NSA, Gen. Michael Hayden; the first U.S. Homeland Security director Tom Ridge and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former secretary general of NATO.
Readers who regularly go to targeted sites could probably care less if they are tagged with a red label. But that is not the point. The point is to rate these sites so that anyone who has a NewsGuard extension installed on their devices will be warned away from visiting them. NewsGuard is being installed in libraries and schools and on the computers of active-duty troops. A warning pops up on targeted sites that reads: “Proceed with caution: This website generally fails to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability.”
Negative ratings will drive away advertisers, which is the intent. It is also a very short step from blacklisting these sites to censoring them, as happened when YouTube erased six years of my show On Contact that was broadcast on RT America and RT International. Not one show was about Russia. And not one violated the guidelines for content imposed by YouTube. But many did examine the evils of U.S. militarism.
In an exhaustive rebuttal to NewsGuard, which is worth reading, Joe Lauria, the editor-in-chief of Consortium News, ends with this observation:
NewsGuard’s accusations against Consortium News that could potentially limit its readership and financial support must be seen in the context of the West’s war mania over Ukraine, about which dissenting voices are being suppressed. Three CN writers have been kicked off Twitter.
PayPal’s cancellation of Consortium News’ account is an evident attempt to defund it for what is almost certainly the company’s view that CN violated its restrictions on “providing false or misleading information.” It cannot be known with 100 percent certainty because PayPal is hiding behind its reasons, but CN trades in information and nothing else.
CN supports no side in the Ukraine war but seeks to examine the causes of the conflict within its recent historical context, all of which are being whitewashed from mainstream Western media.
Those causes are: NATO’s expansion eastward despite its promise not to do so; the coup and eight-year war on Donbass against coup resisters; the lack of implementation of the Minsk Accords to end that conflict; and the outright rejection of treaty proposals by Moscow to create a new security architecture in Europe taking Russia’s security concerns into account.
Historians who point out the onerous Versailles conditions imposed on Germany after World War I as a cause of Nazism and World War II are neither excusing Nazi Germany nor are they smeared as its defenders.
The frantic effort to corral viewers and readers into the embrace of the establishment media — only 16 percent of Americans have a great deal/quite a lot of confidence in newspapers and only 11 percent have some degree of confidence in television news — is a sign of desperation.
As the persecution of Julian Assange illustrates, the throttling of press freedom is bipartisan. This assault on truth leaves a population unmoored. It feeds wild conspiracy theories. It shreds the credibility of the ruling class. It empowers demagogues. It creates an information desert, one where truth and lies are indistinguishable. It frog-marches us towards tyranny. This censorship only serves the interests of the militarists who, as Karl Liebknechtreminded his fellow Germans in World War I, are the enemy within.
Why would Black people laud the FBI or criticize protection against self-incrimination? The FBI search of Donald Trump’s home has reawakened Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Progressives love the FBI? Leftists embrace the Espionage Act? Of course, one man is responsible for this madness, and he is none other than Donald J. Trump, 45th president of the United States. The fallout from the FBI search conducted at Trump’s home shows the rank confusion spread by people who call themselves liberal but who are as dangerous as anyone on the right. From the moment that Trump announced the raid they were in full fascist mode, even as they claimed to be fighting fascism.
Trump did what he usually does, play fast and loose with the truth. Of all former presidents only he would ignore subpoenas and claim to have declassified documents when he hadn’t done so. He can’t get out of his own way and thus makes himself a target. But Democrats should know that the search is seen as nothing more than a personal attack against him. Millions of people who love Trump will love him all the more and conclude that the raid was meant to keep him from running for president again. Liberal dead-enders will be happy, but everyone else will say that something rotten was conducted at Mar a Lago.
Attorney General Merrick Garland says that the documents were subpoenaed but the former president didn’t respond. The FBI search warrant states that the search encompassed three different issues: gathering, transmitting or losing defense information, which is part of the Espionage Act; concealment, removal, or mutilation concerning the handling of records and reports; and the destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in Federal investigations and bankruptcy, which is part of a section dealing with obstruction of justice. The warrant also states a search for information on Roger Stone and on the President of France.
Aside from the item descriptions, no one knows what Trump had or what the FBI found. Leaks from the Justice Department indicate something about nuclear weapons, but no one knows what that means. The lack of information hasn’t stopped the speculation which Trump always causes. There is conjecture that he was selling information to Russia or to Saudi Arabia or was plotting some other treason. There are even claims that documents were buried with his recently deceased ex-wife. It is fascinating that there can be so much guesswork about issues no one can know.
The years long Russiagate investigation is responsible for ordinarily sensible people losing their minds. Hardly anyone recalls that the charge of collusion was actually disproven, that Robert Mueller only indicted for process crimes, such as those which occur when people let down their guard and talk to the FBI. Most Americans who know the name Paul Manafort think he was a Russian spy but don’t know that he went to jail for tax and bank fraud. Propaganda works very well when it is repeated over and over again.
Worse than the silly Trump inspired derangement is the way that those who call themselves left or progressive have chosen to defend federal law enforcement and bad legislation like the Espionage Act. The Espionage Act is a relic from the earliest days of the cold war, and Woodrow Wilson’s infamous Palmer Raids which targeted the left for persecution and prosecution. Barack Obama used it more than all previous presidents combined in order to prosecute journalists who published what the state didn’t want us to know. As for the FBI, its Counter Intelligence Program, COINTELPRO, created dissension in the liberation movement, targeted individuals for prosecution, spied on Martin Luther King and told him to commit suicide, and killed Fred Hampton and Mark Clark among others. The FBI continues to use informants to entrap Black people in phony terror cases.
It is truly shameful to see Black people exalt the FBI and act as if punishing Trump is the organizing principle of all political activity. The Trump organization is also under investigation by the New York Attorney and the former president refused to answer questions put to him in a deposition. The right to remain silent is one of the most important in American law and should be used a lot more often. But copaganda television shows and Trump hatred have caused their own form of insanity, and his exercise of a fundamental right was widely lampooned. No one should ever be condemned for utilizing their fifth amendment right, not even Donald Trump.
Of course, this spectacle is also used to deflect from Biden administration failures. His approval rating is still low, for the simple reason that he didn’t do what he claimed he would for American voters. He continues to pour public money into the losing effort in Ukraine and needlessly provokes Russia and China. But who is paying attention if there is speculation that Trump put files in Ivana’s casket?
It is time to nip this foolishness in the bud before it goes any further. Trump should not live rent free in our collective consciousness any longer. He cannot be allowed to distract from the current president’s actions or become a rallying point for politics which will inevitably be useless. No one has to follow Trump’s shenanigans any longer or allow the corporate media or the democratic party to make him their focus. Doing so only makes it harder to do the already hard work of recreating Black politics.
Douglas Valentine says that “Zelensky doesn’t go to the bathroom without asking permission from his CIA case officer.”
Alexander Dugin and his daughter Darya and charred vehicle of the Toyota Land Cruiser that blew up with Darya in it on Saturday night. [Source: metro.co.uk]
CIA expert Douglas Valentine, author of the seminal book The Phoenix Program (1990), believes that the CIA was behind the car bomb that killed Darya Dugina, a journalist and daughter of well-known Russian intellectual Alexander Dugin.
Ms. Dugina, 29, was killed on Saturday night when a bomb blew up the Toyota Land Cruiser she was driving in a suburb of Moscow. She was the intended target along with her father, whose promotion of a Eurasian Union has influenced the thinking of Vladimir Putin and members of his inner circle.
Vovk allegedly rented an apartment from where she researched Ms. Dugina, attended “The Tradition” celebration where her father gave a speech and Ms. Dugina was killed, and after planting the bomb, fled to Estonia via Pskov.
According to Douglas Valentine, “Zelensky doesn’t go to the bathroom without asking permission from his CIA case officer. Ten billion dollars comes with a lot of strings attached. The CIA would have been intimately involved in recruiting the woman assassin, preparing the plan every step of the way including escape. That’s just Standard Operating Procedure.”
Valentine admits of course that there is no direct evidence to implicate the CIA in Dugina’s killing and that he’s making an “educated guess,” however, “clandestine ops occur by definition without anyone knowing they happened.” Valentine further told CAM that “the CIA doesn’t conduct a covert operation of this grandiosity unless it’s deniable and worth the risk. That’s known. So there’s rarely any evidence.”
Phoenix Program Redux
Just days before Dugina’s assassination, The New York Times published a front-page article about Ukrainian guerrilla fighters, or partisans, who openly admitted to planting car bombs targeting pro-Russian police officers and politicians behind Russian lines.
Ukraine’s Special Services (SBU) is also known to have set up a Phoenix-style kidnapping and assassination program targeting dissidents, including mayors and local government officials considered sympathetic to Russia.
Valentine told CAM in April that the CIA “is applying the same organizational structure in Ukraine as it used in South Vietnam to conduct an updated version of the typical ‘two tier’ Phoenix program. The top tier is to assure political control, the lower tier to pacify the population.”
Valentine continued:
“CIA foreign intelligence officers advise SBU security service to assure ‘top tier’ internal security and political control; and Ukrainian CIA agents run ops into Donbas, Russia and Belarus, sending illegal travelers, smugglers, and agents to set up agent nets and penetrate the enemy in his territory, [and carry out] sabotage and subversion. SBU and Ukrainian CIA are where hit-lists get authored. CIA officers advise military, militias and mercenaries in deniable political, paramilitary and psychological operations to terrorize and otherwise persuade civilian population to support Zelensky while demoralizing and fighting the enemy.”
Valentine stated that the “original Phoenix was responsible for the planned assassination of between 25,000 to 40,000 people in South Vietnam. Based on the Phoenix organizational model, assassination became a standarized component of military and CIA operations. It has since been perfected, as evidenced by the assassination of Dugina and scores of other examples from Central Americca to Iran to Africa and the Far East.”
The CIA, Valentine added, is “always finding a reason to start a war, so they can send the next generation of young men into battle, to learn how to kill people in the most brutal fashion—that’s Phoenix, always rising from the ashes of war.”
A Russian website of the NemeZida project, which publishes data on Ukrainian servicemen posted in April that Natalya Shaban, born in 1979, served in the Azov-based National Guard. (The National Guard is not the same as the U.S. National Guard; rather, it was formed directly by the hardcore Azov Regiment, with many members not directly members of the Azov.) The April posting displays a copy of Vovk/Shaban’s certificate indicating military unit No. 3057, in which the 12th brigade of the National Guard of Ukraine is stationed. Shaban is the name that her daughter, Sophia Shaban, used when they entered Russia—and the assumption is that Natalya Vovk is the maiden name of Natalya Shaban. The photograph of the National Guard member is a close match with the Natalya Vovk renting an apartment next to Darya Dugina’s residence. ↑
There is a video clip making the rounds showing President Biden speaking at a recent NATO summit about the seven billion dollars the US government had – at that time – provided to Ukraine. Attached to that is another clip showing the horrific state of several US major cities, including in Pennsylvania, California, and Ohio. The video of American cities is shocking: endless landscapes of filth, trash, homelessness, open fires on the street, drug-addicted zombies. It doesn’t look like the America most of us remember.
Watching Biden bragging about sending billions of dollars to corrupt leaders overseas with American cities looking like bombed-out Iraq or Libya is US foreign policy in a nutshell. The Washington elites tell the rest of America that they must “promote democracy” in some far-off land. Anyone who objects is considered in league with the appointed enemy of the day. Once it was Saddam, then Assad and Gaddafi. Now it’s Putin. The game is the same, only the names are changed.
What is seldom asked, is what is in this deal for those Americans who suffer to pay for our interventionist foreign policy. Do they really think a working American in Ohio or Pennsylvania is better off or safer because we are supposedly protecting Ukraine’s borders? I think most Americans would wonder why they aren’t bothering to protect our own borders.
A reported 200,000 illegals crossed the border into the US in July alone. You can believe they are learning quickly about the free money provided by the US government to illegals. They’ll probably get a voting card as well.
Last Friday the Pentagon announced that yet another $775 million would be sent to Ukraine. As Antiwar.com reported, it was the eighteenth weapons package to Ukraine in six months. Has there ever been a more idiotic US intervention in history?
Supporters of this proxy war may celebrate more aid to Ukraine, but the reality is that it is in no way aid to Ukraine. That’s not how the system works. It is money created out of thin air by the Fed and appropriated by Congress to be spent propping up the politically-connected military-industrial complex. It is a big check written by middle America to rich people who run Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. Americans watch their budget being stretched to the limit while the Beltway fat-cats loosen their belts to continue enjoying the gravy train.
Bloomberg reported earlier this summer that inflation is costing the average American household more than $5,200 this year. Inflation is a tax on middle class and poor Americans. The wealthy – like those who run Raytheon and Lockheed Martin – always get the new money first, before prices go up. The rest of us watch as the dollar buys less and less.
As Washington salivates over fighting Russia in Ukraine, the rest of America feels like we’re becoming Zimbabwe. How long until it takes a trillion dollars for a loaf of bread? Will there be a run on wheelbarrows?
There is a way out. It’s called “non-interventionism.” The war in Ukraine was caused by the US regime change in 2014 and the neocon insistence that Ukraine join NATO. The State Department and CIA thought it was a great victory to overthrow the elected government, but meanwhile the rest of us get the bill. No NATO and not one more penny for Ukraine!
Since late last year, messenger RNA for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines, including its recently reformulated Omicron booster, has been exclusively manufactured by a little known company with significant ties to US intelligence.
Earlier this week, the United Kingdom became the first country to approve Moderna’s reformulated version of its COVID-19 vaccine, which claims to provide protection against both the original form of the virus and the significantly less lethal but more transmissible Omicron variant. The product was approved by the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) with the support of the UK government’s Commission on Human Medicines.
Described by UK officials as a “sharpened tool” in the nation’s continued vaccination campaign, the reformulated vaccine combines the previously approved COVID-19 vaccine with a “vaccine candidate” targeting the Omicron variant BA.1. That vaccine candidate has never been previously approved and has not been the subject of independent study. The MHRA approved the vaccine based on a single, incomplete human trial currently being conducted by Moderna. The company promoted incomplete data from that trial in company press releases in June and July. The study has yet to be published in a medical journal or peer reviewed. No concerns have been raised by any regulatory agency, including the MHRA, regarding Moderna’s past history of engaging in suspect and likely illegal activity in past product trials, including for its original COVID-19 vaccine.
The approval comes shortly before several Western countries, including the UK, plan to conduct a massive COVID-19 booster vaccination campaign this fall. Moderna has also noted that approval for its Omicron booster vaccine are pending in the US, EU, Australia and Canada – all of which are also planning fall vaccination campaigns focused on COVID-19. The company’s CEO, Stéphane Bancel, has called the reformulated vaccine “our lead candidate for a Fall 2022 booster.”
However, unlike the company’s original COVID-19 vaccine, the genetic material, or messenger RNA (mRNA), for this new vaccine, including the newly formulated genetic material meant to provide protection against the Omicron variant, is being manufactured, not by Moderna, but by a relatively new company that has received hardly any media attention, despite its overt links to US intelligence. Last September, it was quietly announced that a company called National Resilience (often referred to simply as Resilience) would begin manufacturing the mRNA for Moderna COVID-19 vaccine products. Under the terms of the multi-year agreement, “Resilience will produce mRNA for the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine at its facility in Mississauga, Ontario, for distribution worldwide.”
“Reinventing Biomanufacturing”
National Resilience was founded relatively recently, in November 2020, and describes itself as “a manufacturing and technology company dedicated to broadening access to complex medicines and protecting biopharmaceutical supply chains against disruption.” It has since been building “a sustainable network of high-tech, end-to-end manufacturing solutions with the aim to ensure the medicines of today and tomorrow can be made quickly, safely, and at scale.” It furtherplans to “reinvent biomanufacturing” and “democratize access to medicines,” namely gene therapies, experimental vaccines and other “medicines of tomorrow.”
In pursuit of those goals, the company announced it would “actively invest in developing powerful new technologies to manufacture complex medicines that are defining the future of therapeutics, including cell and gene therapies, viral vectors, vaccines, and proteins.” It was founded with the reported intention “to build a better system for manufacturing complex medicines to fight deadly diseases” as a way to improve post-COVID “pandemic preparedness.”
The company initially marketed its manufacturing capabilities as “the Resilience platform”, and offers principally “RNA Modalities”, including RNA development for vaccines, gene editing and therapeutics; and “Virus Production”, including viral vectors, oncolytic viruses (i.e. a virus engineered to preferentially attack cancer cells), viruses for use in vaccine development and gene-edited viruses for unspecified purposes. It is worth noting that, to date, many controversial “gain-of-function” experiments have justified modifying viruses for the same purposes as described by National Resilience’s Virus Production capabilities. In addition, National Resilience offers product formulations and other modalities, such as biologics and cell therapies, to its clientele and the “Virus Production” of its website has since been removed.
National Resilience, being such a young company, has very few clients and there is little publicly available information on its manufacturing capabilities aside from the company’s website. The firm only acquired its first commercial manufacturing plant in March 2021, located in Boston, MA and purchased from Sanofi, followed shortly thereafter by the acquisition of another separate plant located in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. Makeovers were announced for the plants, but little is publicly known about their progress. Prior to the acquisitions, the company had been subleasing a Bay area facility in Fremont, California. Reporters were puzzled at the time as to why a company with roughly 700 employees at the time had acquired a total of 599,00 square feet of manufacturing space after having only emerged from stealth less than 6 months prior.
In April 2021, National Resilience acquired Ology Bioservices Inc., which had received a $37 million contract from the US military the previous November to develop an advanced anti-COVID-19 monoclonal antibody treatment. This acquisition also provided National Resilience with its first Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) laboratory and the ability to manufacture cell and gene therapies, live viral vaccines and vectors and oncolytic viruses.
Despite being in the earliest stages of developing its “revolutionary” manufacturing capabilities, National Resilience entered into a partnership with the Government of Canada in July of last year. Per that agreement, the Canadian government plans to invest CAD 199.2 million (about $154.9 million) into National Resilience’s Ontario-based subsidiary, Resilience Biotechnologies Inc. Most of those funds are destined for use in expanding the Ontario facility that Resilience acquired last March and which is now manufacturing the mRNA for Moderna’s COVID-19 products. Canada’s Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, François-Philippe Champagne, asserted at the time that the investment would “build future pandemic preparedness” and help “to grow Canada’s life science ecosystem as an engine for our economic recovery.” More recently, in 2022, the company has announced a few new clients – Takeda, Opus Genetics and the US Department of Defense.
According to National Resilience’s executives, the company’s ambitions apparently go far beyond manufacturing RNA and viruses. For instance, Resilience CEO Rahul Singhvi has claimed that the company is seeking to build “the world’s most advanced biopharmaceutical manufacturing ecosystem.” Yet, Singhvi has declined to offer much in the way of specifics when it comes to exactly how the company plans to become the planet’s most elite biomanufacturing company.
In an interview with The San Francisco Business Times, Singhvi states that Resilience is looking to fill its massive manufacturing plants with “technologies and people that can set and apply new standards for manufacturing cell therapies and gene therapies as well as RNA-based treatments.” Prior to Resilience, Singhvi was CEO of NovaVax and an operating partner at Flagship Pioneering, which played a major role in the creation and rise of Moderna.
Singhvi has further insisted that National Resilience is “not a therapeutics company, not a contractor and not a tools company” and instead aims “to boost production using the new therapeutic modalities” such as RNA-based treatments, which have become normalized in the COVID-19 era. Whereas contract manufacturers “are like kitchens, with pots and pans ready for any recipe,” “what we’re trying to do is fix the recipes,” Singhvi has explained. One member of Resilience’s board of directors, former FDA Commissioner and Pfizer Board member Scott Gottlieb, has described the company as seeking to act as the equivalent of Amazon Web Services for the biotechnology industry.
Essentially, Resilience bills itself as offering solutions that will allow “futuristic” medicines, including mRNA vaccines, to be produced more quickly and more efficiently, with the apparent goal of monopolizing certain parts of the biomanufacturing process. It also appears poised to become the manufacturer of choice for mRNA vaccines and experimental therapeutics in the event of a future pandemic, which some public health “philanthropists” like Bill Gates have said is imminent.
Perhaps the company’s most noteworthy ambition relates to their claims that they support clients through the government regulatory process. Given the company’s emphasis on speedy mass production of experimental gene therapies, its stated intention of getting the “futuristic” medical products it manufactures to market as quickly as possible seems at odds with the slower, traditional regulatory processes. Indeed, one could easily argue that the approvals of mRNA vaccines for the first time in human history during the COVID-19 crisis were only possible because of the major relaxing of regulatory procedurse and safety testing due to the perceived urgency of the situation.
Resilience seems intent on seeing that phenomenon repeat itself. As previously mentioned, the company claims to allow for the setting and application of “new standards for manufacturing cell therapies and gene therapies” and also says it plans to become a “technology-aggregating standards bearer that helps therapies come to market more efficiently.” It previously offered on its website “regulatory support” and “strategy consulting” to clients, suggesting that it would seek to mediate between clients and government regulators in order to fulfill its goal of having the products it manufactures taken to market more quickly. In addition, upon launch, the company claimed it planned to obtain unspecified “regulatory capabilities.” If so, it is certainly notable that former top Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials are either on the company’s board or, as will be noted shortly, played a major role in the company’s creation.
The People Behind Resilience
Resilience was co-founded by Biotech venture capitalist Robert Nelsen, who is known for listening “to science’s earliest whispers, even when data are too early for just about anyone else.” Nelsen was one of the earliest investors in Illumina, a California-based gene-sequencing hardware and software giant that is believed to currently dominate the field of genomics. As mentioned in a previous Unlimited Hangout investigation, Illumina is closely tied to the DARPA-equivalent of the Wellcome Trust known as Wellcome Leap, which is also focused on “futuristic” and transhumanist “medicines.” Nelsen is now chairman of National Resilience’s board, which is a “Who’s Who” of big players from the US National Security State, Big Pharma and Pharma-related “philanthropy.”
However, while Nelsen has been given much of the credit for creating Resilience, he revealed in one interview that the idea for the company had actually come from someone else – Luciana Borio. In July of last year, Nelsen revealed that it was while talking to Borio about “her work running pandemic preparedness on the NSC [National Security Council]” that had “helped lead to the launch of Nelsen’s $800 million biologics manufacturing startup Resilience.”
At the time of their conversation, Borio was the vice president of In-Q-tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA that has been used since its creation in the early 2000s to found a number of companies, many of which act as Agency fronts. Prior to In-Q-Tel, she served as director for medical and biodefense preparedness at the National Security Council during the Trump administration and had previously been the acting chief scientist at the FDA from 2015 to 2017.
Borio is currently a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, a consultant to Goldman Sachs, a member of the Bill Gates-funded vaccine alliance CEPI, and a partner at Nelsen’s venture capital firm ARCH Venture Partners, which funds Resilience. Nelsen’s ARCH previously funded Nanosys, the company of the controversial scientist Charles Lieber. Around the time of her conversation with Nelsen that led to Resilience’s creation, Borio was co-writing a policy paper for the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security that recommended linking COVID-19 vaccination status with food stamp programs and rent assistance as a possible means of coercing certain populations to take the experimental vaccine.
Borio is hardly Resilience’s only In-Q-Tel connection, as the CEO of In-Q-Tel, Chris Darby, sits on the company’s board of directors. Darby is also on the board of directors of the CIA Officers Memorial Foundation. Darby was also recently a member of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), where members of the military, intelligence community and Silicon Valley’s top firms argued for the need to reduce the use of “legacy systems” in favor of AI-focused alternatives as a national security imperative. Among those “legacy systems” identified by the NSCAI were in-person doctor visits and even receiving medical care from a human doctor, as opposed to an AI “doctor.” The NSCAI also argued for the removal of “regulatory barriers” that prevent these new technologies from replacing “legacy systems.”
Another notable board member, in discussing Resilience’s intelligence ties, is Drew Oetting. Oetting works for Cerberus Capital Management, the firm headed by Steve Feinberg who previously led the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board under the Trump administration. Cerberus is notably the parent company of DynCorp, a controversial US national security contractor tied to numerous scandals, including scandals related to sex trafficking in conflict zones. Oetting is also part of the CIA-linked Thorn NGO ostensibly focused on tackling child trafficking that was the subject of a previous Unlimited Hangout investigation.
Oetting is also the co-founder of 8VC, a venture capital firm that is one of the main investors in Resilience. 8VC’s other co-founder is Joe Lonsdale and Oetting “started his career” as Lonsdale’s chief of staff. Lonsdale is the co-founder, alongside Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, of Palantir, a CIA front company and intelligence contractor that is the successor to DARPA’s controversial Total Information Awareness (TIA) mass surveillance and data-mining program. In addition, Oetting previously worked for Bill Gates’ investment fund.
Also worth noting is the presence of Joseph Robert Kerrey, former US Senator for Nebraska and a former member of the conflict-of-interest-ridden 9/11 Commission, on Resilience’s board. Kerrey is currently managing director of Allen & Co., a New York investment banking firm which has hosted an annual “summer camp for billionaires” since 1983. Allen & Co. has long been a major player in networks where organized crime and intelligence intersect, and is mentioned repeatedly throughout my upcoming book One Nation Under Blackmail. For instance, Charles and Herbert Allen, who ran the firm for decades, had considerable business dealings with organized crime kingpins and frontmen for notorious gangsters like Meyer Lansky, particularly in the Bahamas. They were also business partners of Leslie Wexner’s mentors A. Alfred Taubman and Max Fisher as well as associates of Earl Brian, one of the architects of the PROMIS software scandal – which saw organized crime and intelligence networks cooperate to steal and then compromise the PROMIS software for blackmail and clandestine intelligence-gathering purposes. Allen & Co. was a major investor in Brian’s business interests in the technology industry that Brian used in attempts to bankrupt the developers of PROMIS, Inslaw Inc. and to market versions of PROMIS that had been compromised first by Israeli intelligence and, later, the CIA.
In addition to these intelligence-linked individuals, the rest of Resilience’s board includes the former CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Susan Desmond-Hellmann; former FDA Commissioner and Pfizer board member, Scott Gottlieb; two former executives at Johnson & Johnson; former president and CEO of Teva Pharmaceuticals North American branch, George Barrett; CalTech professor and board member of Alphabet (i.e. Google) and Illumina, Frances Arnold; former executive at Genentech and Merck, Patrick Yang; and Resilience CEO Rahul Singhvi.
To Boost or Not to Boost
It is certainly telling that the normally publicity hungry Moderna has said so little about its partnership with Resilience and that Resilience, despite its ambitious plans, has also avoided the media limelight. Considering Moderna’s history and Resilience’s connections, there may be more to this partnership that meets the eye and concerned members of the public would do well to keep a very close eye on Resilience, its partnerships, and the products it is manufacturing.
Given that we now live in a world where government regulatory decisions on the approval of medicines are increasingly influenced by corporate press releases and normal regulatory procedures have fallen by the wayside for being too “slow,” there is likely to be little scrutiny of the genetic material that Resilience produces for the “medicines of tomorrow.” This seems to be already true for Moderna’s recently retooled COVID-19 vaccine, as there has been no independent examination of the new genetic sequence of mRNA used in the Omicron-specific vaccine candidate or its effects on the human body in the short, medium or long term. For those who are skeptical of the outsized role that intelligence-linked companies are playing in the attempted technological “revolution” in the medical field, it is best to consider Resilience’s role in the upcoming fall vaccination campaign and in future pandemic and public health scenarios before trying its “futuristic” products.
After the Crash 