Don’t Believe Anything – But Recognize the Verge of a New Dark Age

Posted on April 5, 2023 by Reid Mukai

By Phil Butler

A decade ago, discovering every significant media outlet in the western world as tabloid news would have been inconceivable. Well, the unbelievable is all around us pounding pure lies into our brains on behalf of people eviler than Emperor Caligula. Just Google Putin, Russia, or even China, and with some effort, you’ll see what I mean.

In the mainstream, your average American gets, President Joe Biden is some kind of Dwight Eisenhower or Harry Truman figure. A man who cannot find his way off a stage or navigate the White House lawn is somehow a fit chess competitor for Vladimir Putin. The latest snafu is about his visit with Ukraine’s Zelensky a day before Putin spoke about a new phase of Russian policy. The CNN headline read “Biden’s Ukraine visit upstages Putin and leaves Moscow’s military pundits raging.” As an American who served his country in the military and other capacities, it’s sickening. Get this.

These media outlets and the Neocons have Americans believing a Chinese weather balloon that blew off course was gathering vital US nuclear missile silo intel. And Joe Biden waited until it flew all the way across the country before launching a multi-million-dollar F-22 strike to kill the spy machine. Days later, US fighter pilots shot down UFOs over Alaska. The only positive note after that was the Internet memes poking fun at the senile President and our goofball policies. Oh, but there’s more, oh so much more.

The New York Times and the rest are providing pushback on the Biden-authorized Nord Stream sabotage reported by one of the world’s most respected investigative journalists, Seymour Hersh. The guy who uncovered the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, key facts on Watergate, CIA domestic spy, and a lot more busted the Biden administration for using Navy Seals to detonate undersea charges dooming a Russia to Germany gas pipeline. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist’s revelations should have caused a media frenzy, a UN summit, and a NATO emergency meeting. But the people in charge can’t have that. The story of the decade so far is being slid under the rug. The reason why is explained in something Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said recently:

“In many cases, ruling elites in unfriendly countries do not act of their free will, but only because they must show solidarity within their block. NATO and the EU enforce heavy-handed discipline on their members at the initiative of an aggressive minority.”

“How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline” should be a reason for Biden’s impeachment hearings to be planned. The Germans should be banning US military personnel from their borders. And the Russians should probably go ahead and declare war when it all pans out true. We have this from Hersh’s sources and research:

“Last June, the Navy divers, operating under cover of the highly publicized NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with knowledge of the operational planning.”

The pipelines, which supplied Germany and much of Europe with cheap gas to run industry and fueled the lives of millions, were sabotaged without so much as a mention of the plan to America’s lawmakers. Hersh went on to describe how Biden, Jake Sullivan, Victoria Nuland, and Anthony Blinken were key conspirators in the illegal plan to undermine a NATO ally just to get to Putin and Russia. Biden had announced months before, after a meeting with Germany’s Scholz, that if Russia invaded Ukraine, “there would be no pipeline.”

Of course, Biden and his scandalous minions knew Russia had to act to prevent further NATO shenanigans in Ukraine, as we learned from the revelations of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel about the Minsk accords being a ruse. Talk about world-class liars and thugs. America’s leadership makes the worst Israeli mafioso seem harmless as Mickey Mouse. These people will get our world blown up.

Now Biden, Zelensky, all the EU criminals, and even exiled Putin enemy and Russian mafioso Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky have been seen at the Munich Security Council predicting Putin’s demise—some more. Once we’d have thought US presidents, New York Times publishers, and killer thugs kicked from Russia like bullying kids from the schoolyard would be strange bedfellows. But this Biden administration has to be the most corrupt bunch since the days of Al Capone and Lucky Luciano.

Get this, one of the men involved in the Hunter Biden laptop affair, Prof. Gal Luft, is now in leg irons in a Cyprus jail awaiting extradition to the US for, you won’t believe it, being an arms dealer. Luft had helped the FBI and other agencies with highly incriminating facts about Hunter Biden, and now he’s on a path like Jeffrey Epstein or Julian Assange. Hanged by the neck, or something like that. Oh, and congressional investigators are asking who paid millions of dollars for Hunter Biden’s art? The lunacy goes on, and on, and on.

I’ll leave off with the European Parliament bosses blocking public scrutiny of Ursula von der Leyen over a Pfizer contract she clearly benefitted from. And Pfizer gate is not the EU President’s only worry. She’s now pledged another €1 billion for Ukraine’s fast recovery. That is, if there is a Ukraine to rebuild once western weapons and mercenaries force the Russians to obliterate the country just to keep NATO and bio-weapons labs out. For me, it now seems obvious why the liberal world order has gone all in with this proxy war against Russia. If the citizens of our countries ever find out what their leaders have really done, there will be public hangings Mussolini style across the NATO cabal.

So, forget the tabloids except to use reverse psychology for understanding the news. If the White House says we did not blow up Nord Stream, you can bet your last dollar we did. Think about our track record, America’s I mean. Our leaders operate like very drunken Roman senators, and our military operates as if Hannibal were commanding the armed forces of every third-world country. We even have officials swearing that Putin does not have any nuclear weapons. No really. This is where we are with detente in the 21st century, on the verge of a new Dark Ages.

How Mainstream Media Becomes Controlled

Posted on April 4, 2023 by Reid Mukai

Most people think of money and agenda, and that’s part of the picture, but there’s one incredibly common factor most don’t consider: access. Let’s explore Kim Iverson’s Dershowitz interview.

By Joe Martino

Source: The Pulse

In personal development, one can’t change something about themselves until they are first made aware of the pattern or problem they are experiencing. Once they know, steps can be taken to adjust, better themselves, or grow beyond the problem.

The same can be said for how our society functions. After all, we as individuals are a microcosm of our collective story.

In that sense, I am a strong believer that if we don’t have an understanding of how our world works, then we don’t stand a chance in making it a better place as we don’t know what problem we are solving.

The first step towards uncovering truth is being able to re-examine our positions and embrace uncertainty.

Propaganda Produces Narrative

In my previous piece on propaganda I talked about how governments distribute a “story” or “narrative” about current events to rally the public behind an idea. It’s through this propaganda that people believe something about how the world works, even if it’s not at all true.

Mainstream media is the mouthpiece that connects government to the people. It has incredible power in shaping public opinion, and governments and powerful people know this.

The is how the masses come to believe they live in a democracy, that government is doing their best to fight enemies. Or that government is keeping people safe through their authoritarian actions, and attempting to create wellness in society. Don’t question government or else you’re a conspiracy theorist.

This narrative is all told through mainstream media. Control mainstream media and you control the masses’ perception.

Controlling Mainstream Media

There are many ways in which mainstream media can be controlled. A common belief is that newsroom directors are constantly getting phone calls from government people telling them not to run certain stories.

This may be true for a small portion of MAJOR stories as we saw with the government program Project Mockingbird.

A 1991 a declassified document from the CIA archives shows the Central Intelligence Agency had a close relationship with mainstream media and academia.

The document states that the CIA task force “now has relationships with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly, and television network in the nation,” and that “this has helped us turn some ‘intelligence failure’ stories into ‘intelligence success” stories,’ and has contributed to the accuracy of countless others.”

It admits the agency had “persuaded reporters to postpone, change, hold, or even scrap stories that could have adversely affected national security interests or jeopardized sources and methods.”

We learned through COVID that this sort of thing does still happen, especially with major stories. But for the most part this isn’t how media is controlled in my opinion.

One other common idea is that “all of the journalists at The New York Times or CBC know they are lying.” I don’t think this is true.

Most of these people fully believe in what they publish, and are more so regulated by a news culture and environment that is built around avoiding certain conclusions. They also tend to perform unbalanced investigation into certain subjects.

Part of how news culture is built, and what stops journalists from following their gut, is the fear of the loss of access.

What is Access?

Access is simple: a news outlet can gain access to certain individuals like politicians, powerful business people, or celebrities based on their reputation and knowledge that they won’t “cross the line” or surprise guests.

In this case “the line” is asking tough questions or holding people accountable. Cross the line, and word gets out that powerful people shouldn’t associate with those brands as readily.

Imagine during the Freedom Convoy if the CBC decided they were going to ask Justin Trudeau very tough questions about his abuse of power, lies, and hatred he was disseminating towards unvaccinated people.

You can bet that the CBC would be fearful Trudeau’s admin would give them less access to early stories, updates, interviews and so on if they don’t “play ball” with Trudeau.

If the CBC doesn’t play ball, they will be late on stories, their competition will get things first and the CBC would be playing catch up all the time. This is bad for business.

Access is directly tied to the profitability of many news organizations. Thus, it becomes a race to the bottom dynamic of kissing the ass of those in power and not upsetting them so you can compete amongst other news organizations to get access to stories and interviews first – or even at all.

A Prime Example

This concept is well demonstrated in a recent interview Kim Iverson conducted with Alan Dershowitz on her show. To note, Iverson’s program is independent, and not considered mainstream media.

Iverson interviewed Dershowitz about Trump’s looming arrest. During the interview, she also asked him about his ties to Epstein and whether or not Epstein had ties to Mossad.

Dershowitz went on to provide short, weak answers to the questions, but eventually became annoyed with Iverson questioning him about Epstein.

Dershowitz said:

“Are you used to having people come on your show to talk about one subject, and then sandbagging them on another subject without any warning? It’s nice to know you do that. I have nothing to hide, and I’m happy to talk about any of this, but I’m used to more ethical journalism.”

Iverson goes on to state that her team notified the people who booked Dershowitz onto the show that she would ask about Epstein.

Dershowitz said they never told him, and ended the interview by saying,

“[…] it’s the last time you’ll have me on your show, so take advantage of it.”

Iverson went on to provide proof that Dershowitz’s team was notified about upcoming Epstein questions.

Iverson asked Dershowitz tough questions that were significantly less “soft ball” than what he would get from mainstream media. He was also less prepared to tailor his answers perfectly because of an internal team mistake.

As a result, he won’t go on her show again. She lost access to him, and this message could spread throughout, causing her to lose access to others as well.

Simply put, the game is rigged. Play ball in the way powerful people want you to or you don’t get to play.

Put another way, ask tough questions that are “out of bounds” in authoritarian culture and you’ll stop getting interviews. Why then would someone ask tough questions?

But this instance also reveals something important: powerful people know the questions first before they appear on news shows. Does this make sense? Does this create the opportunity for true and honest answers?

Is real journalism even being done by mainstream outlets?

The Purpose of Media is Largely Lost, But Slowly Repairing

All of us who wonder why certain questions aren’t asked by mainstream journalists even when they are strikingly obvious, should consider the concept of access.

Every person listed on Epstein’s flight log could have been asked to explain themselves by The New York Times or Washington Post, but they weren’t. Because that’s not allowed.

However those organizations can forgo good journalistic practices to push COVID fear and propaganda all day long, because that will only gain them more access in the end.

Thus, mainstream media is controlled by the threat of losing access.

Does it make sense that a person should know all of the questions they are going to be asked before coming on a show? Does it make sense that they should be allowed to fully prepare those answers? Doesn’t that give a deep opportunity to deceive?

Why is this accepted as “ethical journalism” when in reality it can protect powerful people?

A Way Forward

This is why I believe we must point out the ways in which mainstream media has no incentive to tell the truth, and point out the ways in which mainstream journalism works.

We must also illustrate the ways in which the mainstream media is obviously wrong or misleading on certain subjects.

It is often too difficult to prove EXACTLY what is true, because that can be incredibly hard to know, but to critique the MSM in ways that reveal their deception can help people begin granting less legitimacy to MSM, and start embracing more uncertainty.

I do believe more and more people are seeing how corrupt mainstream media is, and perhaps we are getting closer to a tipping point. As a result, even The New York Times is trying to convince their audience they are ‘independent journalism.’

Ukraine is America’s Afghanistan More Than Russia’s

Posted on March 28, 2023 by Reid Mukai

By Peter Van Buren

Source: We Meant Well

The thinking in Washington goes like this: for the “low cost” of Ukrainian lives and some American dollars, the West can end Putin’s strategic threat to the United States. No Americans are dying. It’s not like Iraq or Afghanistan ’01-’21. This is post-modern, something new, a clean great power war, Jackson Pollack for war. Getting a lot of foreign policy mojo at little cost. It’s almost as if we should have though of this sooner.

Um, we did. It didn’t work out past the short run and there’s the message. Welcome to Afghanistan 1980’s edition with the U.S. playing both the American and the Soviet roles.

At first glance it seems all that familiar. Russia invades a neighboring country who was more or less just minding its own business. Russia’s goals are the same, to push out its borders in the face of what it perceives as Western encroachment on the one hand, and world domination on the other. The early Russian battlefield successes break down, and the U.S. sees an opportunity to bleed the Russians at someone else’s bodily expense. “We’ll fight to the last Afghani” is the slogan of the day.

The CIA, via our snake-like “ally” in Pakistan, floods Afghanistan with money and weapons. The tools are different but the effect is the same: supply just enough firepower to keep the bear tied down and bleeding but not enough to kill him and God forbid, end the war which is so profitable — lots of dead Russkies and zero Americans killed (OK, maybe a few, but they are the use-and-forget types of foreign policy, CIA paramilitary and Special Forces, so no fair counting them.) And ironic historical bonus: in both Afghanistan 1980s and Ukraine, some of the money spent is Saudi. See the bothersome thread yet?

Leaving aside some big differences that enabled initial successes in Afghanistan, chief among which is the long supply lines versus Ukraine’s border situation, let’s look at what followed early days.

Though NATO countries and others sent small numbers of troops and material to Afghanistan, the U.S. has gone out of its way to make Ukraine look like a NATO show when it is not. Washington supposedly declared support for Ukraine to preserve and empower NATO (despite the fact that Ukraine was not a member.) Yet, to keep Germany on sides in the Russian-Ukraine war, Washington (allegedly) conducted a covert attack on Germany’s critical civilian infrastructure that will have lasting, negative consequences for the German economy. Seymour Hersh reported the Nord Stream pipeline connecting cheap Russian natural gas to Europe via Germany was sabotaged by the United States. An act of war. The destruction of an ally’s critical infrastructure, and no doubt a brush back pitch carefully communicated to the Germans alongside a stern warning to stay put on sanctions against energy trade with Russia. It’s a helluva thing, blowing up the pipeline to force Germany to color inside the lines NATO (actually the U.S.) laid out. This, in addition to the U.S. treating NATO countries as convenient supply dumps and little more, shows that NATO will emerge from Ukraine broken. One does also wonder if the future of Europe is at stake why the greatest concern is expressed in Washington and not Bonn or Paris.

As with Afghanistan, there are questions if we Americans will ever be able to leave, about whether Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn” rules applies — you break it, you bought it. President Zelensky, portrayed in the West as a cross between Churchill and Bono, in actuality was a comedian and TV producer who won the 2019 Ukrainian presidential election. Zelensky’s popularity was due in part to his anti-establishment image and promises to fight corruption and improve the economy. He was also aided by his portrayal of a fictional president in a popular TV show, which helped to increase his name recognition and appeal to young voters.

Zelensky was preceded by the Ukrainian Revolution, also known as the Euromaidan Revolution, which began in late 2013 as a series of protests in response to then-President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to reject an association agreement with the European Union and instead pursue closer ties with Russia. The protests grew in size and intensity, with demonstrators occupying the central Maidan Nezalezhnosti square in Kiev, demanding Yanukovych’s resignation and new elections. In February 2014, the situation escalated when Yanukovych’s security forces cracked down on protesters, resulting in violent clashes that left dozens dead. This led to Yanukovych fleeing the country and a new government being formed in Ukraine. The revolution also sparked tensions with Russia, which subsequently annexed Crimea and supported separatists in eastern Ukraine. None of those problems goes away even if the Russia army retreats to its pre-invasion borders. The notion that there is nothing going on here except a rough land grab by a power-made Putin is shallow and incomplete.

What’s left are concerns about the level of corruption in Ukraine, and the U.S.’s role in addressing it. Despite the U.S. providing significant financial aid to Ukraine, there have been reports of corruption and mismanagement of funds. Some have argued that the U.S. has not done enough to address these issues, and has instead turned a blind eye in order to maintain its strategic interests in the region. America’s history with pouring nearly unlimited arms and money into a developing nation and corruption is not a good one (see either Afghanistan, 1980s or ’01 onward.) Corruption can only get worse.

A great fear in Afghanistan was arms proliferation, weapons moving off the battlefield into the wrong hands. Whether that be a container of rifles or the latest anti-aircraft systems, an awful lot of weapons are loose in Ukraine. In the case of Afghanistan, the real fear was for Stinger missiles, capable of shooting down modern aircraft, ending up in terrorist hands. The U.S. has been chasing these missiles through the world’s arms bazaars ever since, right into the Consulate in Benghazi. It is worse in Ukraine. America’s top-of-the-line air defense tools are being employed against Russian and Iranian air assets. What would those countries pay for the telemetry data of a shoot down, never mind actual hardware to reverse engineer and program against? There are no doubt Russian, Chinese, Iranian and other intelligence agencies on the ground in Ukraine with suitcases full of money trying to buy up what they can. Another cost of war.

It is also hard to see the end game as the demise of Putin. This would mean the strategy is not fight until the last Afghani/Ukrainian but to fight until the last Russian. The plan is for that final straw to break, that last Russian death, to trigger some sort of overthrow of Putin. But by whom? Trading Putin for a Russian-military lead government seems a small gain. Look what happened the last time Russia went through a radical change of government — we got Putin. In Afghanistan, it was the Taliban x 2.

History suggests the U.S. will lose in a variety of ways in Ukraine, with the added question of who will follow Putin and what might make that guy a more copacetic leader towards the United States. As one pundit put it, it is like watching someone play Risk drunk.

In a Multipolar World, the Idea of a New World Order Dies

Posted on March 23, 2023 by Reid Mukai

By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

When former US President and war criminal George W. Bush and his neocon regime launched their anti-terrorism campaign after the September 11^th attacks, he declared that “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Western threats against the Global South continues today. In the recent Munich Security Conference 2023, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said that “Neutrality is not an option, because then you are standing on the side of the aggressor,” she continued “and this is a plea we are also giving next week to the world again: Please take a side, a side for peace, a side for Ukraine, a side for the humanitarian international law, and these times this means also delivering ammunition so Ukraine can defend itself.” Most of the world does not agree with Western leaders that Russia is the aggressor in this conflict. Ukraine goal is to become a member of NATO which would be a threat to Russia’s security concerns right on its borders. As history shows, it was Ukraine who has bombed the Donbas region for more than 8 years which includes the areas of Donetsk and Luhansk killing more than 8,000 people with the help of US-NATO forces whose sole purpose is to destroy Russia. This is the work of the Western powers who want nothing more than to contain Russia’s rise as a major player on the world stage.

Not only Russia has been a victim of Western aggression, many countries in the Global South has also witnessed endless wars, coups and regime change operations with western-backed color revolutions since the end of World War II. Since the war started in Ukraine, it is only now that the mainstream media is starting to take notice that the Global South is starting to rebel against Western powers on many levels at least according to France24.com, ‘Ukraine war exposes splits between Global North and South’ reflects on the current situation that “a tectonic chasm appears to have split the Global North from the Global South. Confronted with the sort of aggression and territorial expansionism that the postwar world order was designed to avert, the Western alliance, also called the Global North, has overcome competition and rivalries to maintain unity.” The West defeated their “competition and rivalries” by bombing countries back to the stone age like they did to Iraq and Libya. It is well known that Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi wanted to change course in how their countries conducted business with the rest of the world by abandoning the use of US dollars in favor of other currencies. In the case of Iraq, the US and its allied partners were also doing Israel a favor in destroying an adversary. So, a shift has taken place with “more than 70 years after the end of World War II, several countries of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and South America that were “emerging” for decades have essentially emerged on the world stage” forming what is now known as the ‘Global South.’

The war in Ukraine has changed everything for the globalists insane vision for humanity, now they accuse Russia of being the aggressor for expanding its footprint in Ukraine but ignoring the 8-year bombing campaign in the Donbas region by the Ukrainian forces with NATO’s assistance. Did the US and in most cases their NATO allies “avert” their own “aggressive” wars against Vietnam, Iraq, or Libya? As for “territorial expansion” doesn’t the US, France, and other Western powers still have colonies around the world? The US also illegally occupies northern Syria and Iraq with military bases, and that is a form of territorial expansion.

Newsweek published an interesting opinion piece by Michael Gfoeller and David H. Rundell, ‘Nearly 90 Percent of the World Isn’t Following Us on Ukraine | Opinion’ says that there is a growing anti-Western sentiment in the Global South:

Alliances that were created in part to counter Western economic and political influence are expanding. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey have announced their interest in joining the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). The Shanghai Cooperative Organization currently links China, Russia, India, and Pakistan, among others. Iran plans to join this month while Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar are likely to become “dialogue partners,” or candidate members.

Additionally, China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative is tying many African nations to Beijing with cords of trade and debt. Russia is also reaching out in the form of Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who recently addressed his 22 Arab League counterparts in Cairo before touring a number of African countries.

If that’s not enough to give the West pause, Moscow is again on the offensive in Latin America, strengthening its military relationships with Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba. The two powerhouses of that region, Brazil, and Mexico, have pointedly refused to back Western sanctions against Russia

Gfoeller and Rundell admit on a mainstream media news magazine that dollarsare tools of economic warfare from imposing crippling sanctions to asset seizures on countries who don’t follow Washington’s orders, but it is only an opinion piece, obviously not an article that will make the front-page news:

The dollar’s reserve currency status remains a pillar of the global economic order, but trust in that order has been damaged. Economic sanctions have weaponized parts of the international banking and insurance sectors including the SWIFT fund transfer system. Assets have been seized and commodity contracts canceled. Calls for de-dollarization have become louder. When Russia demanded energy payments in rubles, yuan or UAE Dirhams, China and India complied.

These concerns are generating considerable anti-Western sentiment across much of the Global South. While a nuclear-armed Russia shows no willingness to end a war its leaders cannot afford to lose; the West is rapidly losing the rest and thus undermining the very rules-based international order it has sought to create. Our most promising solution to this dilemma is likely to be some sort of diplomatic compromise

Yes, it’s true the dynamics of the world order has changed dramatically since the day US President George H.W. Bush (whose father Prescott Bush, a founder of the Union Banking Corporation, an investment bank that had ties to a German businessman, Fritz Thyssen who supported the Nazis) gave a speech on the invasion of Iraq on January 16th, 1991. Here is part of what he said:

This is an historic moment. We have in this past year made great progress in ending the long era of conflict and cold war. We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order—a world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations. When we are successful—and we will be—we have a real chance at this new world order, an order in which a credible United Nations can use its peacekeeping role to fulfill the promise and vision of the U.N.’s founders

They had passed the test then, today, it’s a different story, the world is tired of Western hypocrisy, of its continuous wars and CIA-backed coups against their governments who don’t always agree with their prescriptions for democracy. However, the idea of a new world order did not begin with Bush Sr, it began after the creation of the League of Nations after World War I when US President Woodrow Wilson called for a new world order to enhance global security and democracy. But the idea of forming a new world order or globalist empire to impose a rules-based order should be a forgone conclusion, they don’t work, and they are destructive. Globalist power structures or empires eventually destroy themselves from within, so, is it worth it for the regime in power? Some people would also say that Russia and China want to rule the world. They don’t, they know managing an empire is immoral, extremely costly, and incredibly ridicules to rule a world full of different ideas, cultures, ethnicities, and languages. They know that diplomacy, respect, and trade is a better option for the sake of humanity. Now, does it mean that in a multipolar world, future wars will be prevented? Not necessarily, but at least it’s worth a try given the fact that the US and its Western allies have created nothing but wars and chaos since the end of World War II and now we are at a point that this world order-based system is about to unleash a devastating war involving nuclear weapons.

Since World War II, it has been the US at the forefront who has been building a world order based on its hegemonic projections to control every nation on earth. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs decided to take the gloves off and publish, ‘US Hegemony and Its Perils’ which exposes how the US has used its superpower status including its economic, financial, political, and military machine to create their ‘hegemonic playbook:

The United States has developed a hegemonic playbook to stage “color revolutions,” instigate regional disputes, and even directly launch wars under the guise of promoting democracy, freedom and human rights. Clinging to the Cold War mentality, the United States has ramped up bloc politics and stoked conflict and confrontation. It has overstretched the concept of national security, abused export controls and forced unilateral sanctions upon others. It has taken a selective approach to international law and rules, utilizing or discarding them as it sees fit, and has sought to impose rules that serve its own interests in the name of upholding a “rules-based international order.”

This report, by presenting the relevant facts, seeks to expose the U.S. abuse of hegemony in the political, military, economic, financial, technological, and cultural fields, and to draw greater international attention to the perils of the U.S. practices to world peace and stability and the well-being of all peoples

China is not seeking to become the next empire as the mainstream media is warning about especially FOX news and others. In 2018, Dr. Chandra Muzaffar, a Malaysian political scientist and activist wrote ‘China, A New Imperial Power?‘ asked in his introduction “Is China a new imperial power threatening some of the developing economies in Asia and Africa?” He said that “this is a perception that is being promoted through the media by certain China watchers in universities and think-tanks mainly in the West, various politicians and by a segment of the global NGO community.” One of the red flags for US and European media networks was that China was offering unpayable loans to poor countries in what was and still is considered a “debt trap” at least to the China war hawks in Washington. Dr. Muzaffar explains why the West is wrong about China’s debt trap concerning one of the countries who accepted a loan and that is Pakistan:

Pakistan has taken loans from China for projects under the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). The US 50 billion CPEC is a network of infrastructure projects that are currently under construction throughout Pakistan that will connect China’s Xinjiang province with Gwadar port in Pakistan’s Balochistan province. A number of these projects will strengthen Pakistan’s energy sector which is vital for its economic growth. They will help to reduce its severe trade deficit. Debt servicing of CPEC loans which will only start this year amounts to less than 80 million.

Pakistan’s largest creditors are not China, but Western countries and multilateral lenders led by the IMF and international commercial banks. Its foreign debt “is expected to surpass 95 billion this year and debt servicing is projected to reach 31 billion by 2022-2023.” There is evidence to show that its creditors “have been actively meddling in Pakistan’s fiscal policies and its sovereignty through debt rescheduling programs and the conditionalities attached to IMF loans”

He also says that the majority of Africa’s long-term debt has been managed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank but says that “many African states have Chinese debt. This in itself is not a problem — provided loans are utilized for the public good. In this regard, infrastructure financing under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) — building ports, railways and fiber-optic cables — appears to be a major component of China’s involvement in Africa.”

Djibouti had excepted 1.4 billion from China that allowed China to build its first military base. Western bureaucrats and military officials claimed that China is expanding its empire in Africa according to a report by the US Naval Institute (USNI) on what U.S. Africa Commander Army Gen. Stephen Townsend told the House Armed Services Committee back in April 2021 “that the People’s Liberation Army was expanding its existing naval installation adjacent to a Chinese-owned commercial deep-water port and also seeking other military basing options elsewhere on the continent” and that “Their first overseas military base, their only one, is in Africa, and they have just expanded that by adding a significant pier that can even support their aircraft carriers in the future. Around the continent they are looking for other basing opportunities.” Dr. Muzaffar reminds us that “It should be noted at the same time that Djibouti also hosts the largest US military base in Africa” However, he also makes the case that China’s rise is economic in nature while the West continues its neocolonial agenda:

Djibouti aside, Chinese ventures in Africa have been almost totally economic. The quid pro quo for the Chinese it is true has been access to the continent’s rich natural resources. But it is always access, never control. Control over the natural resources of the nations they colonised was the driving force behind 19^th century Western colonialism. Control through pliant governments and, in extreme cases, via regime change continues to be a key factor in the West’s — especially the US’s — quest for hegemony over Africa and the rest of the contemporary world.

It is because China’s peaceful rise as a global player challenges that hegemony that the centres of power in the West are going all out to denigrate and demonise China. Labelling China as a new imperial or colonial power is part of that vicious propaganda against a nation, indeed a civilisation that has already begun to change the global power balance. It is a change — towards a more equitable distribution of power — that is in the larger interest of humanity. For that reason, the people of the world should commit themselves wholeheartedly to the change that is embracing all of us

China understands what invading empires are capable of since they were invaded themselves by Japan’s Imperial forces during World War II which was a horrible occupation that led to the countless deaths and the destruction of Chinese society. The Soviets also lived through the horrors of Hitler’s invading forces. Maintaining an empire is immoral and costly, so rising powers such as China, Russia or India are not interested in controlling and occupying any sovereign countries for their political or economic gain.

A Multipolar World is Inevitable as the UN Vote to Condemn Russia Invasion Fails

Western nations and their allies including the US, European Union, Canada, Australia, UK, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and other puppet governments represent more than 1 billion people which has been held together under a rules-based unipolar world order, as for the Global South, it accounts for more than 6 billion people. Regarding the war in Ukraine, many countries who are part of the Global South abstained from voting for a UN General Assembly on March 2^nd, 2022, to condemn Russia’s invasion including 17 African countries. The East African ‘17 African countries abstain from UN vote to condemn Russia invasion’ said that more than 35 countries had decided to abstain from voting to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “Some 35 countries abstained from the vote, including Russia and China, and African states – Burundi, Senegal, South Sudan, South Africa, Uganda, Mali and Mozambique.” Algeria, Bolivia, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Laos, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Pakistan, South Africa, and Vietnam also Abstained shows that the tide is turning against the West. Those who voted against the resolution was Belarus, Eritrea, North Korea, and Syria. Times are changing indeed.

The European branch of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace or Carnegieeurope.eu published an article by Senior fellow Stefan Lehne ‘After Russia’s War Against Ukraine: What Kind of World Order?’ began his piece with the European Union’s foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell and his comments on the difference between Europe and the rest of the world or as Borrell called the “jungle” earned protests and was criticized for it. Borrel said that “the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion that humankind has been able to build” as he compared Europe to the Global South by saying that “most of the world is a jungle and the jungle could invade the garden.” Lehne tried to justify Borrell’s comments by saying that “this was likely a reference to Robert Kagan’s 2018 book, The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World.” Lehne said that Kagan’s book “amounts to a stark warning about the consequences of a U.S. retreat from its global responsibilities. Kagan writes that without determined American leadership, nations would revert to traditional patterns of behavior and the world would relapse into disorder, darkness, and chaos.” So according to the European establishment and evidently, Robert Kagan who is the husband of Victoria Nuland who supported the coup in Ukraine back in 2014, only Europe and the US can lead the global population into a just, prosperous future even though they are responsible for many of the problems the world faces today. The fact is that Western powers support and sometimes participate in continues wars, maintain colonial possessions, impose economic and political sanctions against those who did not follow orders to offering poor nations loans from globalist institutions such as the World Bank or the IMF that can never be repaid to organizing regime change and coups against governments they don’t like. This is not to say that there are a handful of countries in the Global South who will betray their people for political or economic gain who will join the West if the opportunity arises such as the Brazilian president, Lula De Silva. Overall, it is the West who has created most of the disorder, darkness, and chaos around the world in the first place.

As for Russia, Lehne says that “Russia turned into an aggressive revisionist power.” But he fails to mention that the actions by US-NATO forces politically and militarily caused Russia to become aggressive. “As demonstrated by Russia’s war in Georgia in 2008, its annexation of Crimea and intervention in the Donbas in 2014, and its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the leadership in Moscow is determined to reverse some of the losses of the 1990s, increase Russia’s territory, and establish robust zones of influence.” So now Russia wants to expand its territory? So after, Ukraine the Russians will invade Poland, Finland, perhaps Italy, maybe Spain?

I disagree with Lehne’s conclusion that “Globalization has slowed but will not be completely reversed.” The Global South is already reversing the stranglehold of Western powers on many levels. One good example is what is happening in the African country of Burkina Faso as the government demanded that French troops withdraw from the country during rising tensions between both governments according to an africanews.com in a recent article ‘Burkina Faso confirms demanding France to withdraw troops’ reported that “The Burkina Faso government clarified on Monday that it has asked ex-colonial ruler France to pull its troops out of the insurgency-hit country within a month.” France has more than 400 special forces troops in what is called the junta-ruled nation. Spokesman Jean-Emmanuel Ouedraogo told Radio-Television du Burkina that“We are terminating the agreement which allows French forces to be in Burkina Faso,” government.” He said that diplomatic relations will not end despite increasing tensions between both governments, but that is just one example. Stepan Lehne believes that economic interdependence and international communications will need Western institutions and that is why he believes that the “the current multilateral system inherited from the postwar period will therefore survive.” Lehne does see the reality that the world order is becoming irrelevant in the years to come “But the commitment to its rules will continue to diminish, and power politics and transactional dealmaking will often prevail.”

The US-NATO Agenda: Balkanize Russia and Then Go to War Against China

As we all know, the US-NATO alliance is waging a proxy war in Ukraine to destabilize Russia. The ultimate goal is to balkanize Russia as they did to the former Yugoslavia. Washington’s war hawks both Democrat and Republican, long dreamed of breaking up Russia to prevent it from becoming a rising political and economic power on the world stage. Russia hater Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former US national security advisor to President, Jimmy Carter, a professor at Columbia University and a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Bilderberg group wrote ‘The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives’ which was published in 1998 clearly stated that “It is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America.”

As for the rise of China, the US is in the stages of planning for a war. On January 28^th, 2023, Reuter’s published ‘U.S. four-star general warns of war with China in 2025’ that “A four-star U.S. Air Force general said in a memo that his gut told him the United States would fight China in the next two years” General Mike Minihan, who heads the Air Mobility Command said, “I hope I am wrong,” he continued “My gut tells me will fight in 2025.” The bottom line is that the US and European bureaucrats, international bankers, corporations, intelligence agencies and their Military-Industrial Complex known as the MIC all fear a multipolar world and that’s why the talk of war with Russia and China is a major part of their agenda.

A joint statement between Russia and China was released on February 4^th, here is part of the statement:

The sides support the deepened strategic partnership within BRICS, promote the expanded cooperation in three main areas: politics and security, economy and finance, and humanitarian exchanges. In particular, Russia and China intend to encourage interaction in the fields of public health, digital economy, science, innovation and technology, including artificial intelligence technologies, as well as the increased coordination between BRICS countries on international platforms. The sides strive to further strengthen the BRICS Plus/Outreach format as an effective mechanism of dialogue with regional integration associations and organizations of developing countries and States with emerging markets

The West fears the BRICS coalition and their potential to draw in the rest of the Global South. Speaking of the Global South, an interesting analysis by the Bennet Institute for Public Policy’ sponsored by the University of Cambridge called the ‘War in Ukraine widens global divide in public attitudes to US, China and Russia – report’ suggests that the Global South and their support for China, Russia or both has increased significantly:

However the report also identifies a zone of illiberal and undemocratic societies, stretching from East Asia through the Middle East and out towards West Africa, characterised by the exact opposite trend: populations that have steadily increased support for China, Russia, or both, in recent years.

Among the 1.2 billion people who inhabit the world’s liberal democracies, three-quarters (75%) now hold a negative view of China, and 87% a negative view of Russia, according to the report, published today by the University’s Centre for the Future of Democracy (CFD).

Yet among the 6.3 billion who live in the world’s remaining 136 countries, the opposite is the case – with 70% of people feeling positively towards China and 66% towards Russia. The analysis includes significant public opinion data from emerging economies and the Global South, and suggests this divide is not just economic or strategic but based in personal and political ideology

Is the Idea of a New World Order Dead?

The Multipolar world is becoming a reality for Washington, Brussels, and the rest of their allies as their relevance is starting to diminish in the coming years, but Washington and its NATO lapdogs are willing to launch World War III against Russia and China and whoever they consider an enemy even if it means starting a nuclear war so that their world order remains relevant. Is the West willing to risk a nuclear war for the sake of their world order even if it kills them in the process? In the case of a nuclear war, where will the Western bureaucrats, bankers, corporate leaders, and their families run to? Patagonia, Argentina? perhaps to one of the small islands in the pacific, maybe Fiji? These Western leaders do not care about their citizens, they are psychopaths who are power hungry, and they will do anything they can to remain in power even if it means that their own lives will be at risk in the event of a nuclear war between the east and the west.

Hopefully, the West will come to its senses and try to make peace with the rest of the world and abandon its idea of globalism, but from what we see in the war in Ukraine and their saber-rattling with China over Taiwan, they won’t. Globalist David Rockefeller once said that “We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the Nations will accept the New World Order!” well, Rockefeller must be rolling in his grave because the world is experiencing a different kind of crisis that is challenging the economic, political, and military landscape that has been in place for centuries.

Will there be problems and conflicts in a Multipolar world? maybe, anything is possible, but it is fair to say that the world needs something different because from what has happened in the last 500 years with Britain, France, Spain, and the Netherlands and centuries later, the US as global rulers, they only led the world to endless wars and bloodshed, so it’s time for a change. What the world needs a new system where diplomacy, respect, and trade is the rule of law rather than wars, regime change, economic sanctions, interfering in foreign elections, biological warfare, and political assassinations. A Multipolar world has the chance to establish a balanced landscape where no Western power can dictate its rules-based order to its former colonies and to the rest of the planet, a new landscape where even the thought of a nuclear war becomes unthinkable, and that’s the kind of world we all want.

The Lords of Chaos

Posted on March 22, 2023 by Reid Mukai

The politicians and shills in the media who orchestrated 20 years of military debacles in the Middle East, and who seek a world dominated by U.S. power, must be held accountable for their crimes.

By Chris Hedges

Source: The Chris Hedges Report

Two decades ago, I sabotaged my career at The New York Times. It was a conscious choice. I had spent seven years in the Middle East, four of them as the Middle East Bureau Chief. I was an Arabic speaker. I believed, like nearly all Arabists, including most of those in the State Department and the CIA, that a “preemptive” war against Iraq would be the most costly strategic blunder in American history. It would also constitute what the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg called the “supreme international crime.” While Arabists in official circles were muzzled, I was not. I was invited by them to speak at The State Department, The United States Military Academy at West Point and to senior Marine Corps officers scheduled to be deployed to Kuwait to prepare for the invasion.

Mine was not a popular view nor one a reporter, rather than an opinion columnist, was permitted to express publicly according to the rules laid down by the newspaper. But I had experience that gave me credibility and a platform. I had reported extensively from Iraq. I had covered numerous armed conflicts, including the first Gulf War and the Shi’ite uprising in southern Iraq where I was taken prisoner by The Iraqi Republican Guard. I easily dismantled the lunacy and lies used to promote the war, especially as I had reported on the destruction of Iraq’s chemical weapons stockpiles and facilities by the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) inspection teams. I had detailed knowledge of how degraded the Iraqi military had become under U.S. sanctions. Besides, even if Iraq did possess “weapons of mass destruction” that would not have been a legal justification for war.

The death threats towards me exploded when my stance became public in numerous interviews and talks I gave across the country. They were either mailed in by anonymous writers or expressed by irate callers who would daily fill up the message bank on my phone with rage-filled tirades. Right-wing talk shows, including Fox News, pilloried me, especially after I was heckled and booed off a commencement stage at Rockford College for denouncing the war. The Wall Street Journal wrote an editorial attacking me. Bomb threats were called into venues where I was scheduled to speak. I became a pariah in the newsroom. Reporters and editors I had known for years would lower their heads as I passed, fearful of any career-killing contagion. I was issued a written reprimand by The New York Times to cease speaking publicly against the war. I refused. My tenure was over.

What is disturbing is not the cost to me personally. I was aware of the potential consequences. What is disturbing is that the architects of these debacles have never been held accountable and remain ensconced in power. They continue to promote permanent war, including the ongoing proxy war in Ukraine against Russia, as well as a future war against China.

The politicians who lied to us — George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden to name but a few — extinguished millions of lives, including thousands of American lives, and left Iraq along with Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Libya and Yemen in chaos. They exaggerated or fabricated conclusions from intelligence reports to mislead the public. The big lie is taken from the playbook of totalitarian regimes.

The cheerleaders in the media for war — Thomas Friedman, David Remnick, Richard Cohen, George Packer, William Kristol, Peter Beinart, Bill Keller, Robert Kaplan, Anne Applebaum, Nicholas Kristof, Jonathan Chait, Fareed Zakaria, David Frum, Jeffrey Goldberg, David Brooks and Michael Ignatieff — were used to amplify the lies and discredit the handful of us, including Michael Moore, Robert Scheer and Phil Donahue, who opposed the war. These courtiers were often motivated more by careerism than idealism. They did not lose their megaphones or lucrative speaking fees and book contracts once the lies were exposed, as if their crazed diatribes did not matter. They served the centers of power and were rewarded for it.

Many of these same pundits are pushing further escalation of the war in Ukraine, although most know as little about Ukraine or NATO’s provocative and unnecessary expansion to the borders of Russia as they did about Iraq.

“I told myself and others that Ukraine is the most important story of our time, that everything we should care about is on the line there,” George Packer writes in The Atlantic magazine. “I believed it then, and I believe it now, but all of this talk put a nice gloss on the simple, unjustifiable desire to be there and see.”

Packer views war as a purgative, a force that will jolt a country, including the U.S., back to the core moral values he supposedly found amongst American volunteers in Ukraine.

“I didn’t know what these men thought of American politics, and I didn’t want to know,” he writes of two U.S. volunteers. “Back home we might have argued; we might have detested each other. Here, we were joined by a common belief in what the Ukrainians were trying to do and admiration for how they were doing it. Here, all the complex infighting and chronic disappointments and sheer lethargy of any democratic society, but especially ours, dissolved, and the essential things — to be free and live with dignity — became clear. It almost seemed as if the U.S. would have to be attacked or undergo some other catastrophe for Americans to remember what Ukrainians have known from the start.”

The Iraq war cost at least $3 trillion and the 20 years of warfare in the Middle East cost a total of some $8 trillion. The occupation created Shi’ite and Sunni death squads, fueled horrific sectarian violence, gangs of kidnappers, mass killings and torture. It gave rise to al-Qaeda cells and spawned ISIS which at one point controlled a third of Iraq and Syria. ISIS carried out rape, enslavement and mass executions of Iraqi ethnic and religious minorities such as the Yazidis. It persecuted Chaldean Catholics and other Christians. This mayhem was accompanied by an orgy of killing by U.S. occupation forces, such as as the gang rape and murder of Abeer al-Janabi, a 14-year-old girl and her family by members of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne. The U.S. routinely engaged in the torture and execution of detained civilians, including at Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca.

There is no accurate count of lives lost, estimates in Iraq alone range from hundreds of thousands to over a million. Some 7,000 U.S. service members died in our post 9/11 wars, with over 30,000 later committing suicide, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project.

Yes, Saddam Hussein was brutal and murderous, but in terms of a body count, we far outstripped his killings, including his genocidal campaigns against the Kurds. We destroyed Iraq as a unified country, devastated its modern infrastructure, wiped out its thriving and educated middle class, gave birth to rogue militias and installed a kleptocracy that uses the country’s oil revenues to enrich itself. Ordinary Iraqis are impoverished. Hundreds of Iraqis protesting in the streets against the kleptocracy have been gunned down by police. There are frequent power outages. The Shi’ite majority, closely allied with Iran, dominates the country.

The occupation of Iraq, beginning 20 years ago today, turned the Muslim world and the Global South against us. The enduring images we left behind from two decades of war include President Bush standing under a “Mission Accomplished” banner onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier barely one month after he invaded Iraq, the bodies of Iraqis in Fallujah that were burned with white phosphorus and the photos of torture by U.S. soldiers.

The U.S. is desperately attempting to use Ukraine to repair its image. But the rank hypocrisy of calling for “a rules-based international order” to justify the $113 billion in arms and other aid that the U.S. has committed to send to Ukraine, won’t work. It ignores what we did. We might forget, but the victims do not. The only redemptive path is charging Bush, Cheney and the other architects of the wars in the Middle East, including Joe Biden, as war criminals in the International Criminal Court. Haul Russian President Vladimir Putin off to The Hague, but only if Bush is in the cell next to him.

Many of the apologists for the war in Iraq seek to justify their support by arguing that “mistakes” were made, that if, for example, the Iraqi civil service and army were not disbanded after the U.S. invaded, the occupation would have worked. They insist that our intentions were honorable. They ignore the hubris and lies that led to the war, the misguided belief that the U.S. could be the sole major power in a unipolar world. They ignore the massive military expenditures spent annually to achieve this fantasy. They ignore that the war in Iraq was only an episode in this demented quest.

A national reckoning with the military fiascos in the Middle East would expose the self-delusion of the ruling class. But this reckoning is not taking place. We are trying to wish the nightmares we perpetuated in the Middle East away, burying them in a collective amnesia. “World War III Begins With Forgetting,” warns Stephen Wertheim.

The celebration of our national “virtue” by pumping weapons into Ukraine, by sustaining at least 750 military bases in more than 70 countries and by expanding our naval presence in the South China Sea, is meant to fuel this dream of global dominance.

What the mandarins in Washington fail to grasp is that most of the globe does not believe the lie of American benevolence or support its justifications for U.S. interventions. China and Russia, rather than passively accepting U.S. hegemony, are building up their militaries and strategic alliances. China, last week, brokered an agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia to re-establish relations after seven years of hostility, something once expected of U.S. diplomats. The rising influence of China creates a self-fulfilling prophecy for those who call for war with Russia and China, one that will have consequences far more catastrophic than those in the Middle East.

There is a national weariness with permanent war, especially with inflation ravaging family incomes and 57 percent of Americans unable to afford a $1,000 emergency expense. The Democratic Party and the establishment wing of the Republican Party, who peddled the lies about Iraq, are war parties. Donald Trump’s call to end the war in Ukraine, like his lambasting of the war in Iraq as the “worst decision” in American history, are attractive political stances to Americans struggling to stay afloat. The working poor, even those whose options for education and employment are limited, are no longer as inclined to fill the ranks. They have far more pressing concerns than a unipolar world or war with Russia or China. The isolationism of the far right is a potent political weapon.

The pimps of war, leaping from fiasco to fiasco, cling to the chimera of U.S. global supremacy. The dance macabre will not stop until we publicly hold them accountable for their crimes, ask those we have wronged for forgiveness and give up our lust for uncontested global power. The day of reckoning, vital if we are to protect what is left of our anemic democracy and curb the appetites of the war machine, will only come when we build mass anti-war organizations that demand an end to the imperial folly threatening to extinguish life on the planet.

The MSM Never Was Objective—and It Never Questioned Power, Either

Posted on March 14, 2023 by Reid Mukai

By Iain Davis

Source: The Disillusioned Blogger

In his excellent exposé of the recent decision by the Knight-Cronkite News Lab (KCNL) to advocate journalism that goes beyond objectivity, and in light of the report from the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) confirming that RussiaGate was fabricated nonsense, genuinely independent researcher, writer and filmmaker James Corbett made a number of very salient points.

As Corbett points out:

As a moment’s sober reflection will immediately reveal, the mouthpiece mockingbirds of the controlled establishment media have never been objective and they have no credibility to damage.

But there is far more to this particular psyop than merely covering up the inconvenient history of media. The new narrative, sold to us in this instance by both KCNL and the CJR, is laying the foundations for a transformation of the media landscape.

The establishment wants us to believe that our “trust” in journalism is a vital component of our democracy—and, moreover, that the state can determine which news media organisation is deserving of our “trust.”

In truth, if democratic principles really matter to us, it is essential that we never trust any “news reports” from any journalist or news provider. Democracy places a duty upon us to be fierce critical thinkers. We should never unquestioningly accept anything we are told.

Journalism Is Story Telling

Every mainstream media (MSM) and “alternative media” outlet presents narratives. They are in the business of telling stories, not simply presenting “objective” facts.

Good journalism expresses an opinion and then cites the evidence that informs it. Well written journalism does this within the engaging and intriguing narratives it weaves. But no journalism is free from the journalist’s own conformation bias, and the tenor of the story is often directed by the editorial policy and allegiances of the publisher.

Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh’s recent investigation, in which he exposes the likelihood that the US government was behind the destruction of the Nord Stream II pipeline, is only available via independent outlets and on his own Substack. Despite this apparently being a story of enormous magnitude, the MSM seems extremely reluctant to bring it to wider attention. You can read about it only in the so-called “alternative media.”

While some MSM outlets report the official denial of Hersh’s piece, none have lent it much credibility, and many have been quick to cast aspersions on Hersh himself. Yes, the old game of attacking the messenger while avoiding the content of the message.

It is fair to say, based on the Hersh article alone, that no one can really verify his revelations in specific regard to Nord Stream II. He presents no evidence other than anecdotal accounts from unnamed sources. But nowhere in the MSM does there appear to be any interest in pursuing the needed investigation that Hersh’s piece demands.

Thus, it remains a piece of fantastic journalism, most notably because the very specific references it makes to orders given and operations undertaken during the BALTOPS22 exercise can be investigated. Detailed questions can be asked of officials. The blanket denials of Hersh’s story and his precise allegations are nowhere near enough to discredit it.

Given all the circumstantial evidence that also points towards US and NATO aligned culpability, his journalism—a great story—adds real fuel to the fire. This is real investigative journalism. That the story he presents in part reflects his own perspective is irrelevant.

The MSM Was Never Objective

One of the MSM’s main criticisms of the so-called “alternative media” is that it can often be described as activist journalism. This allegation implies that the perspective of the alternative news journalist biases their reporting. But such a criticism is itself a deception, because all journalism reports from a perspective.

There are basic commercial reasons why objectivity doesn’t suit journalism. Consumers of “news” don’t want to simply know what the facts are. They also want a steer on the broader implications of those facts. If that reaffirms their existing world view, all the better for sales. We all want to believe we are right and not be constantly reminded that we are probably wrong.

This is why very few Guardian readers also read the Daily Telegraph or Sun readers the Mirror, even when the presented “facts” are essentially the same. We pay for the perspective we agree with, not simply an objective reporting of the facts.

It is science, not journalism, that strives to achieve absolute objectivity in its pursuit of empirical facts. But the problem with scientific objectivity, beyond its corruption, is that it tends to introduce immense complexity and can be extremely boring to read. It doesn’t lend itself well to stirring up emotions or selling media content.

Other than a few obsessive researchers and the scientists themselves, few of us actually want to read highly technical and sterile scientific papers. We rely upon the journals and the MSM to tell us what the science says, wrongly assuming that their reporting of it is “objective.”

Our faith in the MSM places us in a vulnerable position, especially when it comes to the reporting of hard facts, such as those supposedly revealed by science. If those same alleged “facts” then become the basis for justifying government policy and/or our own decisions, then we had better be damn sure that our belief in the veracity of the story is well-placed.

The evidence that the MSM doesn’t even report the facts accurately is overwhelming. The CJR has exposed RussiaGate as the politically motivated nonsense it was. But this rubbish was relentlessly spewed out on both sides of the Atlantic for more than a year—alongside the equally baseless Skripal yarn—by a majority of MSM outlets. The obvious propaganda was designed to illegitimately demonise the Russian government.

https://odysee.com/$/download/Skripal-Salisbury-Chemical-Weapons-Attack-2018/890ead50a0e7139bbcca98425260c767e938590e

The CJR report demonstrates that today’s Western MSM is a mass purveyor of mis- and disinformation. We are presently regaled with highly spurious Ukraine war propaganda. This is the culmination of the Russophobic Western MSM agenda that has been building for many years.

The scene has seemingly been set, and we have all been psychologically prepared for the current conflict. This makes it easier for us to imagine that the Russians are our enemy.

State propaganda partnerships with the MSM are nothing new. Three examples quickly come to mind:

— British military intelligence were feeding senior broadsheet correspondents “stories” for decades, long before the MSM made up tales about WMD in Iraq to convince the public to accept a fake casus belli for the Iraq War.

— The Church Committee formally exposed the “Operation Mockingbird” network in the US in 1975. The CIA had been manipulating the reporting of the US MSM for many years, feeding selected operative journalists intel that they then reported as “objective journalism.”

— The Mockingbird Operation PBSuccess employed public relations guru Edward Bernays to use the media to overthrow the Guatemalan government on behalf of the United Fruit Company in 1954.

While proven MSM disinformation operations and campaigns, such as these, have purportedly been assigned to the annals of history, disinfo activity is manifestly ongoing. If anything, state control of the MSM narrative for propaganda purposes has reached heights that even Bernays couldn’t have imagined.

State propaganda has been privatised. Governments channel taxpayers’ money to their global corporate partners, which in turn pay the MSM to produce the desired disinformation. During the pseudopandemic we saw whole teams of behavioural scientists at the World Health Organisation global governance level and in various nations states “use” the MSM to unethically deploy applied psychology and disinformation to tackle what the establishment and its MSM hypocritically called “the infodemic.”

When Spi-B—the team of behavioural change experts within the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE)—recommended that the UK government should “use the media” to increase “the perceived level of personal threat” to convince British people that they were living through a pandemic, contrary to the evidence of their own eyes, the MSM dutifully obliged. They launched numerous corporate backed terror campaigns upon an unsuspecting public.

We are constantly told by the political class that “press freedom” is an essential part of our democracy. If the MSM really were a pluralistic and free media, it wouldn’t be possible to “use” it for propaganda. There would be too many dissenting articles by investigative MSM journalists to maintain a single, uniform narrative across all outlets simultaneously. But it isn’t a pluralistic and free media and never was, so it is entirely possible for the MSM to be co-opted. What does this say about our alleged democracy?

The so-called “infodemic,” identified by the World Health Organisation as being “just as dangerous” as an alleged global pandemic, included any and all information that questioned the diktats of our “democratic” policymakers. The MSM attacked all dissent—literally without question—on the behalf of governments and intergovernmental authorities and their corporate partners.

The infodemic, according to the establishment, was prompted by the public’s questions about government policy, about “science” as reported by the MSM, and about data that revealed statistical manipulation. The infodemic was also prompted by the MSM looking askance at sceptical scientific papers shared by people who dared question the reported “science” as well as at the millions of people who raised their voices in mass protests. These protests were either ignored by the MSM or the protestors views were distorted and their peaceful demonstrations labelled “extremist.”

There was nothing remotely “objective” about any of this mainstream “news coverage.” Rather, in total obedience to the state, the Western MSM attacked informed opinion, ridiculed all questions and demonised individuals who did not comply. Not because there was any justification for doing so, but because that is the role of the MSM. Objectivity is nowhere in sight, nor has it ever been.

The MSM Has Never Questioned Power

The Knight-Cronkite News Lab (KCNL) goal is to create a “set of standards for trustworthy news.” Indeed, maintaining the public’s “trust” is the overwhelming fixation of the MSM and its government partners. We are urged to place our faith in those who evidently lie to us and suppress facts all the time.

At one point the KCNL noted:

As early as the turbulent 1960s, some younger journalists, especially investigative reporters, began to question what objectivity really meant if it did not challenge power, privilege and inequality.

Similarly, the CJR report on RussiaGate states that “primary missions” of journalism include “informing the public and holding powerful interests accountable.”

We are told that “holding power to account,” or watchdog journalism, is the core principle of journalism. Yet nowhere in the International Federation of Journalists Charter of Ethics or in the UK National Union of Journalists Code of Conduct is there any mention of this alleged principle.

The American Press Association’s (APA) Principles of Journalism does say that journalism must serve as an independent monitor of power. But this “principle” speaks more about defending journalists’ alleged legal “rights” than it does about exposing any wrongdoing:

Journalism has an unusual capacity to serve as watchdog over those whose power and position most affect citizens. The Founders recognized this to be a rampart against despotism when they ensured an independent press; courts have affirmed it; citizens rely on it. As journalists, we have an obligation to protect this watchdog freedom by not demeaning it in frivolous use or exploiting it for commercial gain.

The APA’s watchdog principle is supposedly protected by the government and its courts. It is not a “right,” but rather a permit bestowed upon American journalists by the establishment. This permit can be rescinded. The extent to which journalists in the US can question “power” is based solely on the protection that legacy journalism receives from the institutions it allegedly questions.

Demeaning something as frivolous is precisely what the MSM does when it labels people as conspiracy theorists, as science deniers or as COVID deniers. These attacks are rarely, if ever, based upon any exploration of the evidence. In fact, the labelling system itself is used to omit, obscure or “deny” the evidence.

All the APA’s principles mean is that certain subjects and certain kinds of evidence, characterised as “frivolous,” must not be reported by its members. What is or is not considered “frivolous” is entirely subjective. Given journalism’s legislative “protections,” it seems pretty clear what will be considered “frivolous.” A high degree of subjectivity, not objectivity, is the full extent of the APA members’ ethical commitment to “watchdog” journalism.

We only need look at the history we’ve discussed to understand that the news media barely and rarely holds power to account. Instead, the MSM is more frequently an extension of state and corporate power and is used to control the people through disinformation, omission and misdirection rather than to inform them and question power of their behalf.

This is not to say that good MSM journalism doesn’t exist. But, on those few occasions when MSM journalists do expose state crimes, they pay a terrible price for doing so. Julian Assange is among the small band of journalists who have dared to question power. He currently languishes in a British high-security prison precisely because he did so.

The MSM doesn’t question power when it deceives the public about chemical weapon attacks on behalf of the state. It isn’t holding power to account with its refusal to investigate, or even report, evidence of malfeasance in office. Its ignoring of state crimes can in no way be considered “watchdog freedom.” And it certainly does not act as any kind of watchdog when it simply reports whatever it is ordered to report by a centrally controlled global propaganda network.

We Are the Problem and the Solution

Social media has been lambasted for corralling its users into self-affirming information silos. While this is somewhat concerning, it isn’t anything new. The technological capability of social media to control opinion is an added dimension, to be sure, but the MSM has been doing exactly the same thing for more than a century.

Unfortunately, the MSM is able to propagandise us with relative ease. It does this partly by exploiting our own misconceptions. While we all seem to agree that the Russian and Chinese MSM are state propaganda, we Westerners, for some unknown reason, apparently imagine that our own mainstream media isn’t.

There is, however, a caveat with regard to this apparent gullibility. Research statistics show that there is a remarkable lack of trust in the MSM in the West. Notably, in the US “trust” in the news is as low as 26%. The UK fares little better, at just 34%. “Trust” in the news is higher in Scandinavian countries.

We only need have brief conversations with friends and family to realise that the propaganda does, in fact, work. But what explains this disconnect between our lack of trust in the MSM with our continuing willingness to believe what it tells us?

The answer lies in the greatest achievement of the Western MSM and the parasite class it serves: They have convinced us that our media is free and is pluralistic—this despite it never being true.

Consequently, it seems that while we are wary of spin and propaganda, we refuse to contemplate the likelihood that the MSM is out-and-out lying to us. Perhaps that is because we perceive the MSM as basically serving the public interest—even if we admit to ourselves that it bends the truth a little. Our scepticism does not extend as far as disbelief.

We therefore remain unable to reconcile our credulous acceptance of MSM claims about itself with the reality that we are being misled en masse by that same institution. Cognitive dissonance—the uncomfortable psychological sensation we experience when we hold two or more contradictory thoughts at the same time—may account for our irreconcilable beliefs.

In other words, we are caught between not “trusting” the MSM, on the one hand, and, on the other, our inability to accept the fact that virtually nothing the MSM tells us is true. The implications of this dichotomy are beyond anything we want to contemplate. As a result, we still believe that “the news” is our window on the world.

If you think about it, the idea that all the important global events of the day can be condensed into a single “newspaper” or a 30-minute “evening news” broadcast is quite ridiculous. Even if it were composed of honest, unbiased reports, which it seldom is, “the news” cannot provide us with anything approaching a reasonable understanding of what is actually going on.

Therefore, if we genuinely want to know what’s happening, we have to actively seek information and critically evaluate it ourselves. As James Corbett wrote:

Granted, the realization that all media is constructed for us by someone with an interest in making us believe something is not a happy one for most people. Instead, it is a deeply unpopular realization, because it means we can’t just switch on the evening news, switch off our brain, and expect some totally neutral journalistic saviour to come along and hand us “the news” from on high.

Like it or not, it is our responsibility to think critically about all information, no matter who relays it. This responsibility applies equally to the stories we are fed by the “alternative media.” This article should be read critically! It is, after all, just information that’s being passed along to you.

The Knight-Cronkite News Lab suggests that journalists should give their “readers, viewers, listeners and users valuable information that helps them make better decisions and lead better lives.”

Here, the new breed of MSM journalists, no more nor less objective than their predecessors, has been given the task of reporting “the news” from a value-driven perspective. The aim is to change us by making us “better” people. So what are the values the new breed of journalists are being taught to advocate?

KCNL tell us:

There is broad consensus today about the reality of climate change and the threats that it poses. That may well inform how many resources a newsroom devotes to reporting on the issue as well as any point of view its stories reflect. The same might go for opposition to systemic racism, say, or support for LGBTQ rights. [. . .] One value we believe is worth stating out loud is support for democratic institutions, which are under attack on multiple fronts. Trustworthy news is essential to sustaining a healthy democracy.

Herein lies the problem. Every one of these “values” serves global political agendas and dovetails neatly with government policy and, perhaps most notably, with global governance policy. That is to say, the MSM’s new values are exactly the same as their old values. Their “new” objective, just like the old objective, is to advocate for power, not question it.

Contrary to the KCNL’s claims, democracy is not founded upon our acceptance of whatever we are told by government “institutions.” Rather, it is predicated upon our ability not just to question the state but to limit it. Thus, KCNL’s contention that a “healthy democracy” is one where “democratic institutions” assert sovereignty over us is entirely false.

To point out that these institutions have no authority over us whatsoever is not to attack “democracy.” On the contrary, doing so defends “democracy.” But you will never hear that from the MSM. The MSM’s continuing mission is to maintain the lies that ensure we never realise this “truth.”

It is ironic that the MSM attacks their alternative counterparts for advocacy journalism and yet the MSM’s own apparent solution to the trust issue that preoccupies it is to itself emulate advocacy journalism. The difference? The alternative media is far more likely to advocate the questioning of power, while the MSM looks set to continue advocating for power.

Seeing as how the concept of “news” is, in and of itself, absurd, the suggestion that news should be “trusted” simply adds another layer of misdirection to this new MSM advocacy journalism. So, if our “faith” in the stories we are told is part of the problem, a solution is self-evident. We should abandon any notion of “trust.” We should invest our efforts in being “better” critical thinkers.

The “alternative” media outlet UK Column sums up this point nicely. It asks:

Why should I trust the UK Column? Put simply, you shouldn’t. The question of whether or not to trust a news organisation is a false choice. Making such a choice is promoted by government, the old media, and two new organisation types: the fact checker and the trust provider.

It disenfranchises readers, viewers and listeners. It is based on the principle that if you trust the media organisation you are visiting, there is no need for you to check the information they present. So we ask you not to trust us. Instead, view everything published here with a critical eye. Where possible, primary source material is made available for everything we publish: check it; make up your own mind.

In his previously referenced article, James Corbett provides a list of questions we should all ask ourselves whenever we encounter information offered by any source. We don’t need government or any other “democratic institution” to control information for us, nor we do need to be told what to think about it. We just need to think critically and answer these simple questions to our own satisfaction:

Why is this media outlet showing us this report?
What interest do they have in making us think a particular way about the issue presented?
Can the information in the report be independently confirmed or triangulated from other sources?
Whose viewpoint is being shown, and how is that viewpoint portrayed? Whose viewpoint is being excluded? Why?
What language is being used to frame the issue?
What does the report make us believe about the world?
Are we in agreement with the report? Why or why not?

Ultimately, as ever, the choice is yours. You can gather information from any source you wish. If you want to know what the state wants you to believe and what behaviour it expects of you, then go to the MSM. If you want to explore broader criticism of government and its policies, then the more independent “alternative media” provides richer pickings.

Treat those two impostors just the same. There is honest, high-quality journalism in both. There is also propaganda to be found in both. Fortunately, if you answer James Corbett’s suggested questions, you’ll be able to spot the difference more often than not.

Was the Pentagon and CIA Behind the COVID-19 Pandemic?

Posted on March 13, 2023 by Reid Mukai

By Jeremy Kuzmarov

Souce: Covert Action

Bioterrorism expert and whistleblower alleges that CIA secretly collaborated in supporting unethical gain of function research that resulted in the manufacture of the COVID-19 virus, which was then leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Dr. Andrew G. Huff is an Iraq War veteran and infectious disease epidemiologist with a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota who, in September 2014, went to work for EcoHealth Alliance, an NGO that received over $118 million in grants from federal agencies whose mission was to protect the public from infectious diseases.

In a new book, The Truth About Wuhan: How I Uncovered the Biggest Lie in History (New York: Skyhorse Press, 2022), Huff claims that his boss at EcoHealth Alliance, Dr. Peter Daszak, was working with the CIA and that beginning in 2012, he oversaw the development of the biological agent known as SARS-CoV-2 that results in the disease COVID-19.

The development occurred through gain-of-function research funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).^[1]

According to Huff, Dr. Daszak and Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 until his retirement in December 2022, along with other colleagues, “behaved like a pseudoscience mafia entrenched in the halls of the medical military industrial complex.”^[2]

They not only engineered the COVID-19 pandemic but “criminally conspired to smear” anyone who did not support their narrative—including Huff who was subjected to a campaign of FBI surveillance and harassment that nearly resulted in his death.

Engineering a Deadly Virus—and a Vaccine to Allegedly Combat It

One of the first tasks that Dr. Huff undertook while working at EcoHealth Alliance was to review an NIH proposal titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” written by Dr. Daszak with Zhengli Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and some other scientists.

The study had the support of “the grandfather of Gain-of-Function research,” Dr. Ralph Baric, a virologist at the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Public Health, which ranks third in NIH funding. (According to Huff, “Fauci has been [the school’s] de facto Don for decades.”^{^[3]})

The proposal advocated for studying people in rural China who may have come into contact with bats that spread the Coronavirus among humans and to screen for the virus with the goal of being able to better predict Coronavirus transmission. It further aimed to develop new Coronavirus strains and perform experiments that would enhance the ability of bat coronavirus to infect human cells and laboratory animals using techniques of genetic engineering.^[4]

This study fit the definition of Gain-of-Function research, whose aim is to “purposefully enhance the pathogenicity, infectivity, virulence, survivability or transmissibility of an infectious agent,” as Huff defines it, or put more simply, “make an infectious agent more dangerous.”^[5]

On October 17, 2014, the Obama administration declared a moratorium on Gain-of-Function research related to influenza, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) after an accident at the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Dr. Fauci subsequently outsourced the Gain-of-Function research to China’s Wuhan lab and licensed the lab to continue receiving U.S. government funding. The moratorium on Gain-of-Function research was lifted by the Trump administration in December 2017, and Dr. Fauci sent $3.7 million from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to restart the coronavirus bat project.

By trying to make bats capable of infecting human cells, Huff came to believe that his employer was involved not only in unethical Gain-of-Function but also bioweapons research. Its end result was “the creation of SARS-CoV-2,” which “causes the disease known as COVID-19.”^{^[6]}

According to Huff, the infectious agent SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine—which Huff characterizes as gene therapy—were co-developed under the same research program.^[7]

Huff writes that EcoHealth Alliance used Dr. Baric’s work for testing experimental vaccines, treatments and therapeutics against the newly engineered SARS-CoV-2 strain years before COVID-19 was known to the public to determine which countermeasures would be most effective at mitigating the disease in humanized mice.^[8]

EcoHealth Alliance Rebuttal

Upon publication of The Truth About Wuhan, EcoHealth Alliance issued a statement asserting that “Andrew Huff is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.” According to EcoHealth Alliance, the actual truth about Wuhan is:

1) Mr. Huff was employed by the EcoHealth Alliance from 2014 to 2016. However, reports that he worked at or with the Wuhan Institute of Virology during that time are untrue. He was assigned to a completely different project working on computer-based algorithms to assess emerging disease threats.

2) Mr. Huff alleges that EcoHealth Alliance was engaged in Gain-of-Function research to create SARS-CoV-2. This is not true.

3) Mr. Huff makes a number of other speculations and allegations about the nature of the collaboration between EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Given that he never worked at or with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, his assertions along these lines cannot be trusted.

4) Mr. Huff claims that SARS-CoV-2 emerged as a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology based on research conducted there on bat coronaviruses and, further, that this research was related to U.S. intelligence gathering efforts. This is not true.

The EcoHealth Alliance statement went on to quote from Dr. Francis Collins, then director of the NIH, who said in December 2021 that “analysis of published genomic data and other documents from the grantee demonstrate that the naturally occurring bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant are genetically far distant from SARS-CoV-2 and could not possibly have caused the COVID-19 pandemic. Any claims to the contrary are demonstrably false.”

The EcoHealth Alliance statement continued: “The scientific evidence to date indicates that the virus is likely the result of viral evolution in nature, potentially jumping directly to humans or through an unidentified intermediary animal host. Historically, many viruses have emerged from animals to cause epidemics and pandemics, including influenza, Ebola, Zika, West Nile fever, SARS, and more. Importantly, after an intensive investigation, agencies in the U.S Intelligence Community agreed that the virus was not developed as a biological weapon and most agencies assessed that SARS-CoV-2 most likely was not genetically engineered.”

Higher Hand?

A key qualifier in this latter statement is “most,” which leaves the possibility that some assessed otherwise. In a one page summary, the intelligence community, which was asked to assess the origins of COVID-19 by the Biden administration, made clear that it could not rule out the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) emerged from a laboratory.

Sampling by Chinese authorities of animals in Wuhan wet markets and in the wild significantly found not a single wild animal harboring the SARS-CoV-2 virus, with Wuhan being 1,000 miles away from the nearest wild bats that carry the type of SARS-related coronaviruses that caused the pandemic.

A small group of virologists queried by the NIH in February, 2020 told the NIH leadership that SARS-CoV-2 might have arisen from laboratory research, noting that the virus has “unusual features that virologists in the U.S. have been using in experiments for years–often with support from the NIH.”

These unusual features include a sequence of eight amino acids identical to those found in cells that line human airways, according to Columbia University Professors Jeffrey Sachs and Neil Harrison, indicating that the virus could have been genetically manufactured from humans in a laboratory.

Suspiciously, Huff discovered that someone edited the NIH proposal after it was submitted on April 15, 2014; he also observed heavy micromanagement of the project by USAID personnel, U.S. Embassy staff, and other employees of the State Department.^[9]

A leading subcontractor was Metabiota, which was partially owned by Rosemont Seneca, a venture capital firm partially owned by Hunter Biden and the CIA’s venture capital firm In-Q-Tel, which invests in companies that make technology of national security interest.^[10]

Huff concluded that EcoHeath Alliance was in the business of collecting intelligence on foreign laboratories and personnel while involved in the development of the Coronavirus. Dr. Daszak even told him that the CIA had approached him and was interested in “the places we’re working, the people that we are working with, and the data that we are collecting.”^[11]

The CIA had in the past been involved in cultivating deadly viruses as bioweapons at the secret U.S. Army facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and history appeared to be repeating itself.

EcoHealth Alliance Executive Vice President William Karesh was linked directly to the top of the U.S. bio-defense establishment as a member of an Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR) blue-ribbon panel on bio-defense.^[12]

Huff points out that, traditionally, bioweapons are released to demoralize, incapacitate or force the use of vast medical resources in treating the wounded, and this all could be a motive for the alleged leak of the coronavirus after its manufacture at the Wuhan lab.

According to Huff, Pfizer and Moderna could make billions of dollars from the vaccine, and the global economic and political elite could advance their idea of the “Great Reset” in which they would further empower large corporations in an environment where the public was too bewildered to fight back.

COVID as Global Coup d’État

The latter is the scenario advanced by Michel Chossudovsky in his new book, The Worldwide Corona Crisis: Global Coup D’état Against Humanity: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression (Montreal, Canada: Global Research Publishers, 2022).

An economist at the University of Ottawa, Chossudovsky is President and Director of the Center for Research on Globalization (CRG), which runs the website globalresearch.ca that has published important cutting edge articles challenging the official narrative about COVID-19.

According to Chossudovsky, the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a de facto coup d’état by the billionaire class, which spread panic among the population so they would suspend rational judgment and sign away their civil liberties with the imposition of medically unnecessary lockdowns, distancing and masking requirements, and vaccine passports.

Chossudovsky writes that “the Coronavirus provides a pretext and justification to powerful financial interests and corrupt politicians to precipitate the entire world into a spiral of mass unemployment, bankruptcy, extreme poverty and despair…Entire national economies have been placed in jeopardy, martial law was declared in some cases, and all aspects of love and life were banned.”

According to Chossudovsky, the manufactured fear campaign was very similar to those adopted by the ruling class to obtain public support for illegal overseas military interventions.

Like with war dissenters, those who opposed the lockdowns were publicly ostracized, fired from their jobs, banned from social media, or branded as psychopaths.

In France, a doctor and retired university professor who opposed the vaccines, Jean-Bernard Fourtillan was arrested and placed in solitary confinement and in the psychiatric hospital of Uzes. And in Maine, Dr. Meryl Nass had to undergo a psychological exam before she was allowed a hearing with the state’s medical board to challenge the removal of her medical license after forty years on spurious grounds.^[13]

According to Chossudovsky, the evidence amply documented is that the mRNA vaccine has not curtailed the spread of COVID-19—a Harvard study looking at COVID-19 in 68 countries and 2,947 U.S. counties in August and September 2022 found that the countries and counties with the highest vaccination rates had higher rates of new COVID-19 cases per one million people.^[14]

Other studies detailed how the mRNA vaccine has resulted in an upward trend in mortality and morbidity, with the highest excess of deaths above normal being experienced by teenagers. A European mortality monitoring organization reported shocking increases in deaths of children under 14 after the vaccine was introduced. According to data from EuroMOMO, excess deaths among children in Europe surged 554% in 2021 following the European Medicines Agency’s approval of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine for children.^[15]

A cheaper and more effective way of treating COVID-19 patients is with hydroxychloroquine, which Dr. Fauci made sure would not be widely distributed.

In July 2020, Dr. Marcus Zervos, the chief epidemiologist in the Henry Ford Medical System and a board certified infectious disease specialist, conducted a study that found that COVID-19 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine within twenty-four hours of admission to the hospital reduced risk of death by about half.^[16]

Nass also points to the effectiveness of Ivermectin, an off-patent drug from which Big Pharma could not make a profit. Dr. Fauci branded it as a “horse medicine,” even though two scientists who developed it, William C. Campbell and Satoshi Omura, won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2015 for developing a therapy against infections caused by roundworm parasites.^[17]

Scare Tactics and Lies

The deceit by America’s scientific establishment was apparent in the fact that, according to Chossudovsky, a secret Pfizer report detailed that Pfizer, previously convicted of “fraudulent marketing” of another product, received more than 1,200 reports of deaths allegedly caused by its vaccine between mid-December 2020 and the end of February 2021.

There were also tens of thousands of reports of “adverse events,” including 23 cases of spontaneous abortions out of 270 pregnancies and more than 2,000 reports of cardiac disorders.

According to Chossudovsky, a flawed Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) test was established by national governments to generate fake data with a view to justifying excessive and socially repressive policy mandates.

The RT-PCR test produces a high volume of false positives, with the test having been set up to detect a small segment of the nucleic acid which is part of a virus—not necessarily the COVID-19 one or any other specific viruses, according to Dr. Kary Mullis, the inventor of the PCR technique, who said this about the tests before he died in August 2019.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported that 94% of the deaths attributed to COVID-19 have co-morbidities, or deaths due to other causes. In only 6% of deaths was COVID-19 the only cause mentioned.

According to Chossudovsky, had the CDC used criteria in its Medical Examiners’ and Coroners’ Handbook on Death Registration and Fetal Death Reporting, COVID-19 fatalities would have been 90.2% lower than the officially reported totals.^[18]

On March 11, 2020, when the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared a worldwide pandemic, the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 outside China was of the order of 44,279, with 1,440 deaths.

The use of scare tactics had been previewed during the phony H1N1 “swine flu” scare of 2009-2010—one of the “greatest medical scandals of the century,” according to Wolfgang Wodarg, then head of health at the European Council—where billions of vaccines were ordered by national governments but then destroyed.

Wodarg is currently involved with Dr. Michael Yeadon, a former Pfizer Vice President, in the campaign against the COVID-19 vaccines, whose rushed introduction without proper testing was criminally negligent in their view.^{^[19]}

The main drivers of governmental policy have been corporate foundations like the Rockefeller, Soros, Ford and Gates Foundations.^[20]

Their goal was to a) boost the profits of pharmaceutical companies in which they had investments; b) establish more authoritarian forms of global governance and a digital tyranny; and c) advance the World Economic Forum (WEF)’s Great Reset, whose aim is to restructure the global economy in the interests of select corporate monopolies by effectively shutting down huge sectors of the pre-COVID economy and driving certain older enterprises into bankruptcy.^[21]

A War and Not Health Response—With the Usual Gamut of Corruption and Lies

Sasha Latypova, a former pharmaceutical executive, has exposed that the Pentagon, which controlled the COVID-19 program from the beginning, adopted shady contracting practices while shielding Big Pharma from liability.

The latter benefited from changes in informed consent rules under the Obama administration to carry out unethical human experimentation and introduce vaccines that were never properly tested or regulated—and which Latypova describes as bio-weapons that “behave like shrapnel in the body; causing recipient cells to inadvertently destroy themselves.”

Latypova explained that the U.S. National Security Council is responsible for COVID-19 policy. This department represents defense and intelligence, and has no health representation. Health and Human Services are managing information but not setting policy, and Latypova concludes that consecutive U.S. governments have therefore treated COVID-19 as a war response, not a health response, whilst deliberately deceiving the public.

The planning for this started as early as 2012, as evidenced by a “pandemic enterprise”, which she describes as a public-private partnership involving ten heads of federal agencies. Secret meetings have been held between these leaders to discuss pandemic countermeasures, and how to maintain utmost secrecy and confidentiality of discussions and plans. Latypova questions why an alleged health event needs to be kept secret from the public.

According to Latypova, the pharmaceutical industry and “investor world” have been taken over by the Pentagon and military intelligence agencies. “A lot of money [pretends] to be venture funds while actually being funded by CIA,” Latypova says.

More Suggestions of Foreknowledge

The discovery of a contract awarded by the U.S. Department of Defense to Labyrinth Global Health for “COVID-19 Research” in November 2019 has raised further suspicion about government foreknowledge of the novel coronavirus.

The contract was part of a larger project for a “Biological threat reduction program in Ukraine,” suggesting that elements in the U.S. Government was at the very least aware of the alleged virus before it spread through Wuhan, China in December 2019, or had a hand in its creation through lab based Gain-of-Function research, as Andrew G. Huff suggests.

How else would they have known the name of the novel coronavirus disease three months prior to the WHO officially naming it Covid-19 in February 2020. And it may also explain why Moderna and Fauci’s NIAID had a confidentiality agreement for an mRNA Coronavirus vaccine candidate in early December 2019, which was developed and jointly owned by Moderna and Fauci’s NIAID.

Coordinated Propaganda Effort

According to Dr. Robert W. Malone, an expert in bio-defense and vaccinology, the Gates Foundation—which was granted a non-exclusive license to the Moderna mRNA Covid-19 injection, and therefore profited from its use—paid more than $319 million to control the mainstream media narrative about COVID-19.

The Department of Health and Human Services and Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) paid more than one billion to control the media narrative.^[22]

Even late night comedians have been enlisted in the propaganda campaign: ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel called for denying ICU beds to unvaccinated people.^[23]

In 2021, a Facebook whistleblower revealed that Facebook censors vaccine-related content based on a secret “vaccine hesitancy” algorithm, which determines whether and to what extent the content (even if completely accurate) could induce vaccine hesitancy in viewers.^{^[24]}

Dr. Malone believes that British intelligence assets have been involved in smearing medical professionals like him who question the dominant COVID-19 narrative on Wikipedia, and that the “five eyes” spy alliance (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and U.S.) has been exploited during the COVID-19 crisis to enable reciprocal domestic propaganda activities by participant states against the citizens of other member states that otherwise forbid their intelligence agencies from domestic propaganda activities.^{^[25]}

The coordinated propaganda effort and repressive political climate is reminiscent of the World War I era when the Wilson administration set up the Committee on Public Information (CPI) to sell U.S. military intervention in Europe at a time when anti-war dissenters were being spied upon, demonized and jailed.^{^[26]}

In his book, Lies My Gov’t Told Me, Dr. Malone emphasizes how the “cancel culture” encourages censorship as does the prevalence of tribal tendencies and a cognitive dissonance where people have trouble accepting viewpoints that differ from their entrenched beliefs and reject those willing to speak out against inconvenient truths.

These trends, are behind what amounts to a modern-day witch-hunt that threatens to stifle the advancement of scientific and medical knowledge and has given a criminal elite free reign to carry out nefarious social experiments that have altered human life as we know it.

Science for Hire

Dr. Malone and Michel Chossudovsky’s analysis is reinforced in a new documentary, Science for Hire, produced by WBAI radio host Gary Null, which exposes the corruption of America’s scientific elite.

Null concurs with Huff’s assessment that, in supporting Gain-of-Function research, Dr. Fauci and his colleagues were “fooling with mother nature;” creating super-viruses so that pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer could emerge as heroes for developing vaccines that made them billions of dollars in profits.

COVID-19, however, was more like a seasonal flu so hospital administrators had to manipulate data to give the impression of a mass pandemic that required everyone to be vaccinated. Hospice patients with terminal illnesses like end-stage renal failure and congestive heart failure were put on the COVID death list to pad the numbers.^[27]

COVID-19 patients at the same time were sent home without treatment because of the reliance on vaccines that yielded unreported adverse health effects, such as a rise in myocarditis, blood clots, infertility, and heart attacks among healthy young people.

According to Null, Dr. Fauci was following the playbook of the HIV-AIDS pandemic in the 1980s where a fear campaign he presided over was followed up by the introduction of untested drugs such as AZT that wound up killing tens of thousands of gay men.

cientists who challenged the dominant paradigm were deprived of NIH funding that Fauci controlled, and marginalized with the advent of a “Medical McCarthyism” reflective of the societal slide toward corporate autocracy.

The only way to overcome the latter is to build a worldwide movement against Corona tyranny that outlaws Gain-of-Function research and would restore the integrity of science and real democracy through a socialist transformation.

Andrew G. Huff, The Truth About Wuhan: How I Uncovered the Biggest Lie in History (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2022), 190. ↑
Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 191. ↑
Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 137. ↑
Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 177; Fred Guterl, “Dr. Fauci Backed Controversial Wuhan Lab With U.S. Dollars For Risky Coronovirus Research,” Newsweek, April 28, 2020. By identifying unknown viruses before they spilled into humans, or “finding them before they find us,” Shi Zhengli claimed that “researchers could hope to find an early-warning system. Columbia professors Jeffrey Sachs and Neil Harrison point out that “the precise nature of the experiments that were conducted [in Wuhan], including the full array of viruses collected from the field and the subsequent sequencing and manipulation of those viruses, remains unknown.” Sharon Lerner, “Jeffrey Sachs Presents Evidence of Possible Lab Origin of COVID-19,” The Intercept, May 19, 2022.
Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 94. Dr. Richard Ebright, an infectious disease expert at Rutgers quoted as an expert in a Newsweek article on the topic, along with many other scientists, has been a vocal opponent of Gain-of-Function research because of the risk it presents of creating a pandemic through accidental release from a lab. Dr. Fauci, however, has expressed belief that “determining the molecular Achilles’ heel of these viruses can allow scientists to identify novel antiviral drug targets that could be used to prevent infection in those at risk or to better treat those who become infected,” and that “decades of experience tells us that disseminating information gained through biomedical research to legitimate scientists and health officials provides a critical foundation for generating appropriate countermeasures and, ultimately, protecting the public health.”
Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 95, 178, 179; Christina Lin, “Why U.S. Outsourced Bat Virus Research to Wuhan,” April 22, 2020. ↑
Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 178, 185. Gene therapy is a technique where doctors alter someone’s genes to help treat them for a disease. ↑
Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 182, 185. ↑
Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 183. Huff believes that EcoHealth Alliance was engaged in irregular financial transactions regarding U.S. government grants, specifically time-card fraud. He observed what appeared to be double dipping on contracts, or material support, between government organizations and private donors (e.g., Skoll Foundation, Google Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and Welcome Trust). ↑
Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 183. ↑
Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 142. ↑
Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 187. ↑
On the latter case, see Dr. Robert Malone, “The Extraordinary Story of a Truth Warrior Persecuted for Advocating and Providing Life Saving Treatment,” in Lies My Gov’t Told Me: And the Better Future Coming (New York: Skyhorse, 2022), ch. 3. Nass is a former contributor to CovertAction Information Bulletin [predecessor to CovertAction Magazine] who documented the Southern Rhodesian government’s use of biological warfare against the Black population in modern Zimbabwe during its liberation war. ↑
Malone, Lies My Gov’t Told Me, 116. ↑
See also Ed Dowd, with foreword by Robert Kennedy Jr. “Cause Unknown:” The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 and 2022 (New York: Skyhorse, 2023), which points out that during the third and fourth quarters of 2021, coinciding with a period of mass vaccination, death in people of working age (18–64) was 40 percent higher than it was before the pandemic, with the majority of deaths not attributed to COVID. ↑
Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 152. See also Malone, “The Extraordinary Story of a Truth Warrior Persecuted for Advocating and Providing Life Saving Treatment,” in Lies My Gov’t Told Me, 70. ↑
Malone, Lies My Gov’t Told Me, 117. The drug has been made available to poor people around the globe for pennies per dose. ↑
See also Malone, Lies My Gov’t Told Me, which presents similar data, including a study which found that, even among hospitalized COVID-19 patients who were 90 years or older, nearly 90% survived. Most COVID deaths were of the very elderly—in Canada, the total was around 70%. In Italy, 100 percent of COVID deaths had another fatal condition whereas in South Korea as many as 99 percent of active COVID-19 cases in the general population did not require any medical treatment. A study of 3,300 inmates in U.S. state prisons found that 96% who tested positive for COVID-19 had no symptoms. See also Dr. Joseph Mercola and Ronnie Cummins, The Truth About COVID-19: Exposing the Great Reset, Lockdowns, Vaccine Passports, and the New Normal, foreword by Robert Kennedy Jr. (White River Junction Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2021), 56 which emphasizes that many alleged COVID deaths died actually from medical errors, including in parts of New York that were designated as being at the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. ↑
Dr. Yeadon initially raised concerns that the COVID-19 vaccine could cause fertility issues in young women. ↑
The Rockefeller and Ford Foundations have long and deep connections to the CIA. ↑
The plan is for the jobless to be placed on a universal basic income. Some have suggested that another goal is depopulation because of concern about overpopulation and a belief in an extreme Social Darwinian philosophy (“survival of the fittest”) and eugenics by Gates and others. ↑
Malone, Lies My Gov’t Told Me, 42. ↑
Malone, Lies My Gov’t Told Me, 113. ↑
Malone, Lies My Gov’t Told Me, 170. Facebook openly states that it blocks content “which public health experts have advised us could lead to COVID-19 vaccine rejection.” ↑
Malone, Lies My Gov’t Told Me, 279. ↑
Malone, Lies My Gov’t Told Me, 53. ↑
In 2020, CDC director Robert Redfield admitted that hospital incentives likely elevated hospitalization rates and death toll statistics around the U.S. In Mercola and Cummins, The Truth About COVID-19, 57. ↑

In Nord Stream attack, US officials use proxy media to blame proxy Ukraine

Posted on March 10, 2023 by Reid Mukai

One month after Seymour Hersh reported that the US blew up the Nord Stream pipelines, US officials find a scapegoat in Ukraine and stenographers in the New York Times.

By Aaron Maté

Source: Aaron Maté Substack

Nearly six months after the Nord Stream pipelines exploded and one month after Seymour Hersh reported that the Biden administration was responsible, US officials have unveiled their defense. According to the New York Times, anonymous government sources claim that “newly collected intelligence” now “suggests” that the Nord Stream bomber was in fact a “pro-Ukrainian group.”

The only confirmed “intelligence” about this supposed “group” is that US officials have none to offer about them.

“U.S. officials said there was much they did not know about the perpetrators and their affiliations,” The Times reports. The supposed “newly collected” information “does not specify the members of the group, or who directed or paid for the operation.” Despite knowing nothing about them, the Times’ sources nonetheless speculate that “the saboteurs were most likely Ukrainian or Russian nationals, or some combination of the two.” They also leave open “the possibility that the operation might have been conducted off the books by a proxy force with connections to the Ukrainian government or its security services.” (emphasis added)

When no evidence is produced, anything is of course “possible.” But the Times’ sources are oddly certain on one critical matter: “U.S. officials said no American or British nationals were involved.” Also, there is “no evidence President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine or his top lieutenants were involved in the operation, or that the perpetrators were acting at the direction of any Ukrainian government officials.”

Despite failing to obtain any concrete information about the perpetrators, the Times nonetheless declares that the US cover story planted in their pages “amounts to the first significant known lead about who was responsible for the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines.”

It is unclear why the Times has deemed their evidence-free “lead” to be “significant”, and not, by contrast, the Hersh story that came four weeks earlier. Not only does Hersh’s reporting predate the Times’, but his story contained extensive detail about how the US planned and executed the Nord Stream explosions.

Tellingly, the Times distorts the basis for Hersh’s reporting. “In making his case,” the Times claims, Hersh merely “cited” President Biden’s “preinvasion threat to ‘bring an end’ to Nord Stream 2, and similar statements by other senior U.S. officials.” In falsely suggesting that he relied solely on public statements, the Times completely omits that Hersh in fact cited a well-placed source.

By contrast, the Times has no information about its newfound perpetrators or about any other aspect of its “significant” lead.

“U.S. officials declined to disclose the nature of the intelligence, how it was obtained or any details of the strength of the evidence it contains,” The Times states. Accordingly, US officials admit that “that there are no firm conclusions” to be drawn, and that there are “enormous gaps in what U.S. spy agencies and their European partners knew about what transpired.” For that apparent reason, “U.S. officials who have been briefed on the intelligence are divided about how much weight to put on the new information.” The Times, by contrast, apparently feels no such evidentiary burden.

In sum, US officials have “much they did not know about the perpetrators” – i.e. everything; “enormous gaps” in their awareness of how the (unknown) “pro-Ukraine group” purportedly carried out a deep-sea bombing; uncertainty over “how much weight to put on” their “intelligence”; and even “no firm conclusions” to offer. Moreover, all of this supposed US “intelligence” happens to have been “newly collected” — after one of the most accomplished journalists in history published a detailed report on how US intelligence plotted and conducted the bombing.

Given the absence of evidence and curious timing, a reasonable conclusion is not that a Ukrainian “proxy force” was the culprit, but that the US is now using its Ukrainian proxy as a scapegoat.

As the standard bearer of establishment US media, the Times’ “reporting” is perfectly in character. Days after the September 2022 bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipelines, the Times noted that “much of the speculation about responsibility has focused on Russia” – just as US officials would certainly hope. The narrative was echoed by former CIA Director John Brennan, who opined that “Russia certainly is the most likely suspect,” in the Nord Stream attack. Citing anonymous “Western intelligence officials”, CNN claimed that “European security officials observed Russian Navy ships in vicinity of Nord Stream pipeline leaks,” thus casting “further suspicion on Russia,” which is seen by “European and US officials as the only actor in the region believed to have both the capability and motivation to deliberately damage the pipelines.”

With the story that Russia blew up its own pipelines no longer tenable, the Times’ new narrative asks us to believe that some unnamed “pro-Ukraine group”, which “did not appear to be working for military or intelligence services” somehow managed to obtain the unique capability to plant multiple explosives on a heavily sealed pipeline at the bottom of the Baltic Sea.

That narrative is already being laundered through the German media. Hours after the Times story broke, the German outlet Die Zeit came out with a story, sourced to German officials, that claims the bombing operation was carried out by a group of six people, including just “two divers.” These supposed perpetrators, we are told, arrived at the crime scene via a yacht “apparently owned by two Ukrainians” that departed Germany. How a yacht managed to carry the equipment and explosives needed for the operation is left unexplained.

The saboteurs somehow possessed the capability to carry out a deep-sea bombing, but not the awareness to properly clean up their floating crime scene. According to Die Zeit, the boat was “returned to the owner in an uncleaned condition,” which allowed “investigators” to discover “traces of explosives on the table in the cabin.” Should this lean “pro-Ukraine” crack team of naval commandos conduct another act of deep-sea sabotage, they will only need to hire a cleaning professional to get away with it.

As for motivation, we are somehow also asked to forget that Biden administration officials not only expressed the motivation, but the post-facto satisfaction. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward,” senior US official Victoria Nuland vowed in January 2022. President Biden added the following month that “if Russia invades… there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” After the Nord Stream pipelines were bombed, Secretary of State Antony Blinken greeted the news as a “tremendous strategic opportunity.” Just days before Hersh’s story was published, Nuland informed Congress that both she and the White House are “very gratified” that Nord Stream is “a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”

Not only are global audiences asked to ignore the public statements of Biden administration principals, but their blanket refusal to answer any questions. This was put on display in Washington this past weekend, when German Chancellor Olaf Scholz paid Biden a White House visit. Unlike Scholz’s last DC trip, there was no joint news conference. This was understandable: the last time they appeared together, Biden blurted out that he would “bring an end” to Nord Stream, leaving Scholz to stand next to him in awkward silence. This time around, the two briefly sat before a group of reporters who were quickly shooed out of the room, much to Biden’s apparent glee.

Scholz's visit underscored that US media is state media. No joint presser, for obvious reasons: they can't risk a question from a German reporter about Sy Hersh's Nord Stream scoop.

Everyone here got the memo: no US outlet covering Scholz's visit even mentioned Hersh's story. pic.twitter.com/9xeBJMtc38
— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) March 6, 2023

US media outlets got the memo: in a sit-down interview with Scholz, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria did not find the time to mention Hersh’s reporting. In covering the German Chancellor’s visit, US media outlets like the Times and the Washington Post adopted a similar vow of silence.

Not one question from Fareed Zakaria about Nord Stream as German Cuckmeister Olaf Scholz rambles on about his country's supposed energy independence

Fareed intervenes only to push Scholz to commit more money to Ukraine's military – and therefore less to German social welfare pic.twitter.com/GQJxK27pis
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) March 6, 2023

Inadvertently, the Times’ account exposes new holes in the failed attempts to refute Hersh’s story.

Members of the NATO state-funded website Bellingcat, falsely presented to NATO state audiences as an independent investigative outlet, have attempted to cast doubt on Hersh’s claims by arguing that open-source tracking at the time of the bombing fails to detect the vessels he reported on. But as the Times story notes, investigators are seeking information about ships “whose location transponders were not on or were not working when they passed through the area, possibly to cloak their movements.” Hersh has made this same point in interviews, noting that when Biden flew into Poland before his visit to Kiev last month, his “plane switched off its transponder” to avoid detection, as the Associated Press reported. Unfortunately for self-styled digital sherlocks, major international crimes – particularly those involving intelligence agencies – cannot be solved from their laptops.

Hersh was also pilloried for citing a single anonymous source. The Times’ story, by contrast, relies on multiple anonymous sources, who, unlike Hersh, have no tangible information to offer. After ignoring Hersh’s story for a full month, the Times’ news section was forced to acknowledge it for the first time. And the best that its anonymous sources could come up with is not only an evidence-free, caveat-filled narrative, but a story that does not challenge a single aspect of Hersh’s detailed account.

In another contrast, Hersh is one of the most accomplished and impactful journalists in the history of the profession. Two of the journalists on the Times story, Julian E. Barnes and Adam Goldman, have bylined multiple stories that spread demonstrable falsehoods sourced to anonymous US officials.

In the summer of 2020, Barnes and Goldman were among the Times journalists who laundered CIA disinformation that Russia was paying bounties for dead US troops in Afghanistan. When the Biden administration was forced to acknowledge that the allegation was baseless, the Times tried to water down its initial claims in an attempt to save face.

In January, Barnes co-wrote a Times story which claimed, citing unnamed “U.S. officials” more than a dozen times, that “Russian military intelligence officers” were behind “a recent letter bomb campaign in Spain whose most prominent targets were the prime minister, the defense minister and foreign diplomats.” But days later, as the Washington Post reported, Spanish authorities arrested “a 74-year-old Spaniard who opposed his country’s support for Ukraine but appears to have acted alone.” (Moon of Alabama is one the few voices to have called out the Times’ fraudulent reporting).

That same month, Goldman shared a byline, alongside fellow “Russian bounties” stenographer Charlie Savage, on a Times story which argued that Special Counsel John Durham has “failed to find wrongdoing in the origins of the Russia inquiry,” even though Durham’s findings have yet to be released. As I reported for Real Clear Investigations, the Times made its case by omitting countervailing information and distorting the available facts – as is the norm for establishment media coverage of Russiagate.

The US officials behind the Times’ latest Nord Stream tale presumably believe that they have offered the best counter to Hersh that they could. That it is devoid of concrete information, and written by Times staffers with a track record of parroting US intelligence-furnished propaganda, ultimately has the opposite effect.

The Times’ narrative can only be seen as further confirmation that Hersh found the Nord Stream bomber in Washington. That explains why anonymous US officials are now using proxies in establishment media to scapegoat their proxy in Ukraine.

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