Russia declares war on the Straussians (by Thierry Meyssan)

 Another article from Thierry Meyssan about Ukraine. I suspect he has some sources in the French Secret Services, otherwise he wouldn't know what he knows...

 Again, the story is NOT what it seems. Ukraine is a tragedy, but beyond that, it is a war to the finish to control the world. It is simply not possible that China can do nothing much longer. They will have to move sooner or later. 

At this stage, they must look with attention at the inefficiencies of the Russian army and how the West dominates the narrative. The risk for them is that Russia get cornered economically. Then it's either a nuclear war or they are next on the chopping block. They know, the Deep State knows. it's 11:59...

Here the ling to the article and other great articles about global geo-strategy.  https://www.voltairenet.org/article215879.html

At dawn on February 24, Russian forces entered Ukraine en masse. According to President Vladimir Putin, speaking on television at the time, this special operation was the beginning of his country’s response to "those who aspire to world domination" and who are advancing Nato’s infrastructure to his country’s doorstep. During this long speech, he summarized how NATO destroyed Yugoslavia without the authorization of the United Nations Security Council, even bombing Belgrade in 1999. Then he perused the destruction of the United States in the Middle East, in Iraq, Libya and Syria. Only after this lengthy presentation did he announce that he had sent his troops to Ukraine with the dual mission of destroying the Nato-linked armed forces and ending the Nato armed neo-Nazi groups.

Immediately all the member states of the Atlantic Alliance denounced the occupation of Ukraine as comparable to that of Czechoslovakia during the "Prague Spring" (1968). According to them, Vladimir Putin’s Russia had adopted the Soviet Union’s "Brezhnev doctrine". Therefore, the free world must punish the resurrected "Evil Empire" with "devastating costs".

The interpretation of the Atlantic Alliance is aimed above all at depriving Russia of its major argument: although Nato is not a confederation of equals, but a hierarchical federation under Anglo-Saxon command, Russia is doing the same. It refuses Ukraine the possibility of choosing its destiny, just as the Soviets refused it to the Czechoslovakians. It is true that Nato violates the principles of sovereignty and equality of states stipulated in the UN Charter, but it should not be dissolved, unless Russia is also dissolved.

Perhaps, but probably not.

President Putin’s speech was not directed against Ukraine, or even against the United States, but explicitly against "those who aspire to world domination", i.e. against the "Straussians" in the US power structure. It was a real declaration of war against them.

On February 25, President Vladimir Putin called the Kiev leadership "a clique of drug addicts and neo-Nazis". For the Atlantic media, these words were those of a mental patient.

During the night of February 25-26, President Volodymyr Zelensky sent a ceasefire proposal to Russia via the Chinese embassy in Kiev. The Kremlin immediately responded by setting out its conditions:
 arrest of all Nazis (Dmitro Yarosh and the Azov Battalion, etc.)
 removal of all street names and destruction of monuments glorifying Nazi collaborators during the Second World War (Stepan Bandera, etc.),
 laying down of weapons.

The Atlantic press ignored this event, while the rest of the world, which knew about it, held its breath. The negotiation failed a few hours later after Washington intervened. Only then would Western public opinion be informed, but the Russian conditions would always be hidden from them.

What is President Putin talking about? Who is he fighting against? And what are the reasons that have made the Atlanticist press blind and mute?

A brief history of the Straussians

Let us stop for a moment to consider this group, the Straussians, about whom Westerners know little. They are individuals, all Jewish, but by no means representative of either American Jews or of Jewish communities worldwide. They were formed by the German philosopher Leo Strauss, who took refuge in the United States during the rise of Nazism and became a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. According to many accounts, he had formed a small group of faithful students to whom he gave oral instruction. There is no written record of this. He explained to them that the only way for the Jews not to fall victim to a new genocide was to form their own dictatorship. He called them Hoplites (the soldiers of Sparta) and sent them to disrupt the courts of his rivals. Finally, he taught them discretion and praised the "noble lie". Although he died in 1973, his student fraternity continued.

The Straussians began forming a political group half a century ago, in 1972. They were all members of Democratic Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson’s staff, including Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. They worked closely with a group of Trotskyite journalists, also Jewish, who had met at the City College of New York and edited the magazine Commentary. Both groups were closely linked to the CIA, but also, thanks to Perle’s father-in-law Albert Wohlstetter (the US military strategist), to the Rand Corporation (the think tank of the military-industrial complex). Many of these young people intermarried until they formed a compact group of about 100 people.

Together they drafted and passed the "Jackson-Vanik Amendment" in the midst of the Watergate crisis (1974), which forced the Soviet Union to allow the emigration of its Jewish population to Israel under pain of economic sanctions. This was their founding act.

In 1976, Paul Wolfowitz [1] was one of the architects of the "Team B" charged by President Gerald Ford with assessing the Soviet threat [2]. He issued a delirious report accusing the Soviet Union of preparing to take over "global hegemony". The Cold War changed its nature: it was no longer a question of isolating (containment) the USSR, it had to be stopped in order to save the "free world".

The Straussians and the New York intellectuals, all of whom were on the left, put themselves at the service of the right-wing president Ronald Reagan. It is important to understand that these groups are neither truly left nor right wing. Some members have switched five times from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party and back again. What is important to them is to infiltrate power, whatever the ideology. Elliott Abrams became an assistant to the Secretary of State. He led an operation in Guatemala where he put a dictator in power and experimented with Israeli Mossad officers on how to create reserves for the Mayan Indians in order to eventually do the same thing in Israel with the Palestinian Arabs (the Mayan Resistance earned Rigoberta Menchú her Nobel Peace Prize). Then Elliott Abrams continued his exactions in El Salvador and finally in Nicaragua against the Sandinistas with the Iran-Contra affair. For their part, the New York intellectuals, now called "Neoconservatives", created the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the U.S. Institute of Peace, a mechanism that organized many colored revolutions, starting with China with the attempted coup d’état of Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang and the subsequent repression in Tiananmen Square.

At the end of George H. Bush’s (the father’s) term of office, Paul Wolfowitz, then number 3 in the Defense Department, drew up a document [3] based on a strong idea: after the decomposition of the USSR, the United States had to prevent the emergence of new rivals, starting with the European Union. He concluded by advocating the possibility of taking unilateral action, i.e. to put an end to the concerted action of the United Nations. Wolfowitz was undoubtedly the designer of "Desert Storm", the operation to destroy Iraq that allowed the United States to change the rules of the game and organize a unilateral world. It was during this time that Straussians valued the concepts of "regime change" and "democracy promotion."

Gary Schmitt, Abram Shulsky and Paul Wolfowitz entered the US intelligence community through the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence’s Working Group on Intelligence Reform. They criticized the assumption that other governments think the same way as the US government [4]. Then they criticized the lack of political leadership in intelligence, leaving it to wander into
unimportant issues instead of focusing on the essential ones. Politicizing intelligence is what Wolfowitz had already done with the B-team and what he would do again in 2002 with the Office of Special Plans, inventing arguments for new wars against Iraq and Iran (Leo Strauss’ "noble lie").

The Straussians were removed from power during Bill Clinton’s term. They then entered the Washington think tanks. In 1992, William Kristol and Robert Kagan (the husband of Victoria Nuland, widely quoted in the previous articles) published an article in Foreign Affairs deploring President Clinton’s timid foreign policy and calling for a renewal of "benevolent global hegemony" [5]. The following year they founded the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) at the American Enterprise Institute. Gary Schmitt, Abram Shulsky and Paul Wolfowitz were members. All of Leo Strauss’s non-Jewish admirers, including the Protestant Francis Fukuyama (the author of The End of History), immediately joined them.

In 1994, now an arms dealer, Richard Perle (a.k.a. "the Prince of Darkness") became an advisor to the President and ex-Nazi Alija Izetbegović in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It was he who brought Osama Bin Laden and his Arab Legion (the forerunner of Al Qaeda) from Afghanistan to defend the country. Perle was even a member of the Bosnian delegation at the signing of the Dayton Accords in Paris.

In 1996, members of the PNAC (including Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser) wrote a study at the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS) for the new Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. This report [6] advocates the elimination of Yasser Arafat, the annexation of the Palestinian territories, a war against Iraq and the transfer of Palestinians there. It was inspired not only by the political theories of Leo Strauss, but also by those of his friend, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of "revisionist Zionism", of whom Netanyahu’s father was the private secretary.

The PNAC raised funds for the candidacy of George W. Bush (the son) and published before his election its famous report "Rebuilding America’s Defenses". It called for a Pearl Harbor-like catastrophe that would throw the American people into a war for global hegemony. These are exactly the words that PNAC Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld used on September 11, 2001.

«»
Thanks to the 9/11 attacks, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz installed Admiral Arthur Cebrowski in Donald Rumsfeld’s shadow. He played a role comparable to that of Albert Wohlstetter during the Cold War. He imposed the strategy of "endless war": the US armed forces should not win any more wars, but start many of them and keep them going as long as possible. The aim would be to destroy all the political structures of the targeted states in order to ruin these populations and deprive them of any means of defending themselves against the US [7]; a strategy that has been implemented for twenty years in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen...

The alliance between the Strausians and the revisionist Zionists was sealed at a major conference in Jerusalem in 2003, which Israeli political figures from all sides unfortunately thought they should attend [8]. It is therefore not surprising that Victoria Nuland (Robert Kagan’s wife, then ambassador to NATO) intervened to declare a ceasefire in Lebanon in 2006, allowing the defeated Israeli army not to be pursued by Hezbollah.

Some individuals, such as Bernard Lewis, have worked with all three groups, the Straussians, the Neoconservatives and the Revisionist Zionists. A former British intelligence officer, he acquired both U.S. and Israeli citizenship, was an advisor to Benjamin Netanyahu and a member of the U.S. National Security Council. Lewis, who halfway through his career assured that Islam is incompatible with terrorism and that Arab terrorists are in fact Soviet agents, later changed his mind and assured with the same aplomb that the religion preaches terrorism. He invented the strategy of the "clash of civilizations" for the US National Security Council. The idea was to use cultural differences to mobilize Muslims against the Orthodox, a concept that was popularized by his assistant at the Council, Samuel Huntington, except that Huntington did not present it as a strategy, but as an inevitability that had to be countered. Huntington began his career as an advisor to the South African secret service during the aparteheid era, and later wrote a book, The Soldier and the State [9], arguing that the military (regular and mercenary) is a special caste, the only one capable of understanding national security needs.

After the destruction of Iraq, the Straussians were the subject of all sorts of controversies [10]. Everyone is surprised that such a small group, supported by neoconservative journalists, could have acquired such authority without having been the subject of a public debate. The U.S. Congress appointed an Iraq Study Group (the so-called "Baker-Hamilton Commission") to evaluate its policy. It condemned, without naming it, the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski strategy and deplored the hundreds of thousands of deaths it had caused. But Rumsfeld resigned and the Pentagon inexorably pursued this strategy, which it had never officially adopted.

In the Obama administration, the Straussians found their way into Vice President Joe Biden’s cabinet. His National Security Advisor, Jacob Sullivan, played a central role in organizing the operations against Libya, Syria and Myanmar, while another of his advisors, Antony Blinken, focused on Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. It was he who led the negotiations with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei that resulted in the arrest and imprisonment of key members of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s team in exchange for the nuclear deal.

Regime change in Kiev in 2014 was organized by the Straussians. Vice President Biden is firmly committed to it. Victoria Nuland came to support the neo-Nazi elements of the Right Sector and to supervise the Israeli "Delta" commando [11] in Maidan Square. A telephone intercept reveals her wish to "fuck the European Union" (sic) in the tradition of the 1992 Wolfowitz report. But the leaders of the European Union do not understand and protest only weakly [12].

"Jake" Sullivan and Antony Blinken placed Vice President Biden’s son, Hunter, on the board of one of the major gas companies, Burisma Holdings, despite opposition from Secretary of State John Kerry. Hunter Biden is unfortunately just a junkie, he would serve as a front for a gigantic scam at the expense of the Ukrainian people. He would appoint, under the supervision of Amos Hochstein, several of his stoner friends to become other front men at the head of various companies and to plunder Ukrainian gas. These are the people that President Vladimir Putin called a "clique of drug addicts".

Sullivan and Blinken relied on mafia godfather Ihor Kolomoysky, the country’s third largest fortune. Although he is Jewish, he financed the heavyweights of the Right Sector, a neo-Nazi organization that works for NATO and fought in Maidan Square during the "regime change". Kolomoïsky took advantage of his connections to take power within the European Jewish community, but his co-religionists rebelled and ejected him from international associations. However, he managed to get the head of the Right Sector, Dmytro Yarosh, appointed deputy secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defence Council and to get himself appointed governor of the Dnipropetrovsk oblast. Both men would be quickly removed from any political function. It was their group that President Vladimir Putin called a "clique of neo-Nazis."

In 2017, Antony Blinken founded WestExec Advisors, a consulting firm that brought together former senior Obama administration officials and many Straussians. The firm’s business is extremely low-key. It uses the political connections of its employees to make money; what anywhere else would be called corruption.

The Straussians are still the same as ever

Since Joe Biden returned to the White House, this time as President of the United States, the Straussians have been running the show. "Jake" Sullivan is National Security Advisor, while Antony Blinken is Secretary of State with Victoria Nuland at his side. As I have reported in previous articles, she went to Moscow in October 2021 and threatens to crush Russia’s economy if it ded not comply. This was the beginning of the current crisis.

Undersecretary of State Nuland resurrected Dmitro Yarosh and imposed him on President Zelinsky, a television actor protected by Ihor Kolomoysky. On November 2, 2021, he appointed him special advisor to the head of the army, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi. The latter, a true democrat, rebelled at first and finally accepted. When questioned by the press about this astonishing duo, he refused to answer and mentioned a question of national security. Yarosh gave his full support to the "white führer", Colonel Andrey Biletsky, and his Azov Battalion. This copy of the SS Das Reich division has been staffed since the summer of 2021 by American mercenaries formerly from Blackwater [13].

Having identified the Straussians, we must admit that Russia’s ambition is understandable, even desirable. To rid the world of the Straussians would be to do justice to the million or more deaths they have caused and to save those they are about to kill. Whether this intervention in Ukraine is the right way remains to be seen.

In any case, if the responsibility for the current events lies with the Straussians, all those who let them act without flinching also have a responsibility. Starting with Germany and France, who signed the Minsk Agreements seven years ago and did nothing to ensure that they were implemented, and then with the fifty or so states that signed the OSCE declarations prohibiting the extension of Nato east of the Oder-Neisse line and did nothing. Only Israel, which has just got rid of the revisionist Zionists, has expressed a nuanced position on these events.

This is one of the lessons of this crisis: democratically governed peoples are responsible for the decisions taken for a long time by their leaders and maintained after alternations in power.

Comments by Thierry Meyssan on Russia’s intervention in Ukraine

 Thierry Meyssan is clearly pro-Russian, but there is so much anti-Russian propaganda in the West that I believe it is important to offer another side of the conflict in Ukraine.

 Ukraine is still the victim, but not of Russia! It is the victim of the efforts of NATO to weaken and eventually dismember Russia as Thierry Meyssan explains.

 Diplomacy would have consisted in accepting a neutral position for Ukraine including a trade agreement with Europe but certainly not intransigence on the "freedom" to join NATO. 

The Americans must understand this so it is amazing to see how they keep pushing the Russians, knowing that eventually all these efforts consolidate the anti-Western axis of Russia, China and Iran. Other developing countries think no less but they just don't have the economic power to get their voice heard.

Link: https://www.voltairenet.org/article215849.html

Thierry Meyssan: Good day!

A few hours ago the Russian army conducted airstrikes against the sector of the Ukrainian armed forces that is linked to NATO. In 3 hours, the Russian army wiped out the entire Ukrainian anti-aircraft defenses and will continue its operation by next attacking the Azov battalion and all the Nazi officials that the United States and the United Kingdom introduced into the Ukrainian government. ‎

This should be good news for everyone, but here, in France, this operation is being portrayed as an invasion against Ukraine and as the forthcoming arrival of the Russian bear in Paris. So don’t be fooled. because there are very important elements that we are not being told. ‎ ‎

Only those aspects referring directly to Ukraine are reported on, but the general context is overlooked. And that context proves Russia right, as I am going to explain to you. ‎

In October, Victoria Nuland, Under Secretary of State, traveled to Russia and, in Moscow, she threatened to crush the Russian economy and demanded the resignation of President Vladimir Putin. But you never heard about it. Look it up online. It is very easy to verify. ‎

Later, [Victoria Nuland] went to Ukraine and ushered in Dimitro Yarosh, a NATO agent renowned for having set up – in 2007– the great Mariupol meeting [in Ukraine] bringing together European Nazi organizations and jihadists from all parts to go to fight against Russia in Chechnya. It was the same Dimitro Yarosh who – in 2014 – backed by his troops from the Right Sector [Pravy Sektor], organized the Maidan Square events and the “regime change” in Ukraine. He was later injured and disappeared for a while. Now he’s back. ‎

So [Victoria Nuland] installed Dimitro Yarosh as special adviser to the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Army [1], who is a perfectly democratic and normal man, but now he has been flanked by this character [Dimitro Yarosh]. And now this character has incorporated the Azov battalion – which is a truly Nazi group, with Nazi insignia and everything and which is led by the ‎‎“White Fuhrer” [Andrey ‎Biletsky] [2] – into the Ukrainian army. ‎

This is news that should have come as a shock to all of us ... but the media in France never reported on it.

So the Russians planned their response. ‎

In December, they sent the United States a draft proposal for a treaty aiming to guarantee peace. Therein, the United States is urged to respect International Law, as it was elaborated over time, first by the government of France and the imperial government of the Russian Tsar – in 1899, at the Hague Conference – and later formulated in the United Nations Charter –in 1945– and by the Third World countries –in 1955, with the Bandung Principles. ‎

This treaty is obviously unacceptable to the United States because for 70 years the United States has violated International Law on a daily basis and pretends to substitute it with a set of rules of its own, self-proclaiming, along with its allies, to stand for the “international community”. Well... [those countries] are not even half of the world’s population but they claim to run the world. ‎

The Russians are calling first and foremost for NATO to withdraw from the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, which should never have joined that bloc if the Potsdam Conference agreements had been respected – in 1945, at the end of World War II – which stipulated that US forces could only establish a presence west of the Oder-Neisse border, which separates Poland and Germany. Later, at the time of Germany’s reunification, France was very insistent that NATO should not expand to the east and there was even a long debate as to whether NATO forces would be allowed in the eastern part of Germany. – the former GDR– or be concentrated in the western part – the then Federal Republic of Germany. ‎

Finally there was an agreement – was endorsed by France – providing that the former East Germany would become part of NATO, within the framework of the reunification, but that there would be no expansion of NATO beyond.

And this was repeated several times, first within the OSCE – the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, born from the Helsinki agreements – in which 57 states signed 2 declarations. Fifty-seven States! ‎‎All the States of the European continent and even others since, for example, the United States ‎and Canada are also members!‎

Firstly, the OSCE recognized, in the 1999 Istanbul Declaration and in the 2010 Astana Declaration, that each State is free to sign on to the military alliance of its choice – France, for example, is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty, allying herself to the United States. ‎

But, secondly, it was also recognized that no State, absolutely no State!, can guarantee its security to the detriment of the security of others. And, from this point of view, joining NATO is illegal, yes illegal! Because NATO is not a confederation, in which everyone has equal status; it is a federation under the command of the United States and the United Kingdom. making the other States vassals of the United States and the United Kingdom. ‎

And France, unfortunately, returned to NATO, with [President] Nicolas Sarkozy, from which it had withdrawn under General de Gaulle, in 1966. General de Gaulle had expelled from French territory all occupation forces of the United States… that was the term he used, “occupation forces of the United States”. It’s not me who says it! ‎But we [the French] have once again willingly embraced our vassalage to the United States. ‎

So, Russia has called for the withdrawal of NATO forces from the entire territory of Central and Eastern Europe. They can still remain signatories of the North Atlantic Treaty. That is not the problem. ‎

And International Law will also have to be enforced in Western Europe. International Law, inter alia, prohibits the installation of nuclear weapons in countries that do not possess such weapons themselves. ‎

So, for example, what are there US [nuclear] weapons doing in Italy or in the Netherlands? It is an outright violation of international law. And that will have to end. ‎

We must realize that the United States is no longer the world’s leading economic power. It is now China. ‎

And it is no longer the first military power in the world. It is Russia. During the war in Syria – a war that NATO forces lost – Russia tested all kinds of new weapons that NATO cannot compete with. Only last weekend Russia showed that it has the capability to nuclearly destroy any target anywhere in the world without being intercepted because – as demonstrated – it deploys hypersonic launchers from submarines, from surface vessels, from bomber planes and mobile ground units. She can fire those launchers and destroy anything she wants anywhere in the world. It is impossible to deflect them because they move too fast. At the moment there is no way they can be intercepted. In minutes she can destroy whatever she wants and we should wonder that would happen if one day Russia may have to use such weapons against the Pentagon, the White House or the United States Congress. ‎

I don’t say that as a provocation. What I am saying is that if Russia were to do so, the United States would not have time to intercept them, it would not even have time to use its own nuclear weapons.

Let’s take things seriously and respect International Law. It’s what we all want. And it is in everyone’s interest. So bravo for what Russia just did today!‎

Greenwald: War Propaganda About Ukraine Becoming More Militaristic, Authoritarian, & Reckle

This a very long but essential article about the sorry propaganda state of the News Media in the West. My take on this is that it is beyond repair. The ghost of Tomas de Torquemada, grand inquisitor of Spain, must be steering in his grave!

Authored by Glenn Greenwald via greenwald.substack.com,

In the weeks leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, those warning of the possible dangers of U.S. involvement were assured that such concerns were baseless. The prevailing line insisted that nobody in Washington is even considering let alone advocating that the U.S. become militarily involved in a conflict with Russia. That the concern was based not on the belief that the U.S. would actively seek such a war, but rather on the oft-unintended consequences of being swamped with war propaganda and the high levels of tribalism, jingoism and emotionalism that accompany it, was ignored. It did not matter how many wars one could point to in history that began unintentionally, with unchecked, dangerous tensions spiraling out of control. Anyone warning of this obviously dangerous possibility was met with the “straw man” cliché: you are arguing against a position that literally nobody in D.C. is defending.

WASHINGTON, DC - DECEMBER 1: (L-R) Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), vice-chair of the select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) listen during a committee meeting on Capitol Hill on December 1, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Less than a week into this war, that can no longer be said. One of the media's most beloved members of Congress, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), on Friday explicitly and emphatically urged that the U.S. military be deployed to Ukraine to establish a “no-fly zone” — i.e., American soldiers would order Russia not to enter Ukrainian airspace and would directly attack any Russian jets or other military units which disobeyed. That would, by definition and design, immediately ensure that the two countries with by far the planet's largest nuclear stockpiles would be fighting one another, all over Ukraine.

Kinzinger's fantasy that Russia would instantly obey U.S. orders due to rational calculations is directly at odds with all the prevailing narratives about Putin having now become an irrational madman who has taken leave of his senses — not just metaphorically but medically — and is prepared to risk everything for conquest and legacy. This was not the first time such a deranged proposal has been raised; days before Kinzinger unveiled his plan, a reporter asked Pentagon spokesman John Kirby why Biden has thus far refused this confrontational posture. The Brookings Institution's Ben Wittes on Sunday demanded: “Regime change: Russia.” The President of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, celebrated that “now the conversation has shifted to include the possibility of desired regime change in Russia.”

Having the U.S. risk global nuclear annihilation over Ukraine is an indescribably insane view, as one realizes upon a few seconds of sober reflection. We had a reminder of that Sunday morning when “Putin ordered his nuclear forces on high alert Sunday, reminding the world he has the power to use weapons of mass destruction, after complaining about the West’s response to his invasion of Ukraine” — but it is completely unsurprising that it is already being suggested.

There is a reason I devoted the first fifteen minutes of my live video broadcast on Thursday about Ukraine not to the history that led us here and the substance of the conflict (I discussed that in the second half), but instead to the climate that arises whenever a new war erupts, instantly creating propaganda-driven, dissent-free consensus. There is no propaganda as potent or powerful as war propaganda. It seems that one must have lived through it at least once, as an engaged adult, to understand how it functions, how it manipulates and distorts, and how one can resist being consumed by it.

As I examined in the first part of that video discussion, war propaganda stimulates the most powerful aspects of our psyche, our subconscious, our instinctive drives. It causes us, by design, to abandon reason. It provokes a surge in tribalism, jingoism, moral righteousness and emotionalism: all powerful drives embedded through millennia of evolution. The more unity that emerges in support of an overarching moral narrative, the more difficult it becomes for anyone to critically evaluate it. The more closed the propaganda system is — either because any dissent from it is excluded by brute censorship or so effectively demonized through accusations of treason and disloyalty — the more difficult it is for anyone, all of us, even to recognize one is in the middle of it.

When critical faculties are deliberately turned off based on a belief that absolute moral certainty has been attained, the parts of our brain armed with the capacity of reason are disabled. That is why the leading anti-Russia hawks such as former Obama Ambassador Michael McFaul and others are demanding that no “Putin propagandists” (meaning anyone who diverges from his views of the conflict) even be permitted a platform, and why many are angry that Facebook has not gone far enough by banning many Russian media outlets from advertising or being monetized. Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), using the now-standard tactic of government officials dictating to social media companies which content they should and should not allow, announced on Saturday: “I'm concerned about Russian disinformation spreading online, so today I wrote to the CEOs of major tech companies to ask them to restrict the spread of Russian propaganda.” Suppressing any divergent views or at least conditioning the population to ignore them as treasonous is how propagandistic systems remain strong.

It is genuinely hard to overstate how overwhelming the unity and consensus in U.S. political and media circles is. It is as close to a unanimous and dissent-free discourse as anything in memory, certainly since the days following 9/11. Marco Rubio sounds exactly like Bernie Sanders, and Lindsay Graham has no even minimal divergence from Nancy Pelosi. Every word broadcast on CNN or printed in The New York Times about the conflict perfectly aligns with the CIA and Pentagon's messaging. And U.S. public opinion has consequently undergone a radical and rapid change; while recent polling had shown large majorities of Americans opposed to any major U.S. role in Ukraine, a new Gallup poll released on Friday found that “52% of Americans see the conflict between Russia and Ukraine as a critical threat to U.S. vital interests” with almost no partisan division (56% of Republicans and 61% of Democrats), while “85% of Americans now view [Russia] unfavorably while 15% have a positive opinion of it.”

The purpose of these points, and indeed of this article, is not to persuade anyone that they have formed moral, geopolitical and strategic views about Russia and Ukraine that are inaccurate. It is, instead, to highlight what a radically closed and homogenized information system most Americans are consuming. No matter how convinced one is of the righteousness of one's views on any topic, there should still be a wariness about how easily that righteousness can be exploited to ensure that no dissent is considered or even heard, an awareness of how often such overwhelming societal consensus is manipulated to lead one to believe untrue claims and embrace horribly misguided responses.

To believe that this is a conflict of pure Good versus pure Evil, that Putin bears all blame for the conflict and the U.S., the West, and Ukraine bear none, and that the only way to understand this conflict is through the prism of war criminality and aggression only takes one so far. Such beliefs have limited utility in deciding optimal U.S. behavior and sorting truth from fiction even if they are entirely correct — just as the belief that 9/11 was a moral atrocity and Saddam (or Gaddafi or Assad) was a barbaric tyrant only took one so far. Even with those moral convictions firmly in place, there are still a wide range of vital geopolitical and factual questions that must be considered and freely debated, including:

1. The severe dangers of unintended escalation with greater U.S. involvement and confrontation toward Russia;

2. The mammoth instability and risks that would be created by collapsing the Russian economy and/or forcing Putin from power, leaving the world's largest or second-largest nuclear stockpile to a very uncertain fate;

3. The ongoing validity of Obama's long-standing view of Ukraine (echoed by Trump), which persisted even after Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014 following a referendum, that Ukraine is of vital interest only to Russia and not the U.S., and the U.S. should never risk war with Russia over it;

4. The bizarre way in which it has become completely taboo and laughable to suggest that NATO expansion to the Russian border and threats to offer Ukraine membership is deeply and genuinely threatening not just to Putin but all Russians, even though that warning has emanated for years from top U.S. officials such as Biden's current CIA Director William Burns as well as scholars across the political spectrum, including the right-wing realist John Mearsheimer to the leftist Noam Chomsky.

5. The clearly valid questions regarding the actual U.S intentions concerning Ukraine: i.e., that a noble, selfless and benevolent American desire to protect a fledgling democracy against a despotic aggressor may not be the predominant goal. Perhaps it is instead to revitalize support for American imperialism and intervention, as well as faith in and gratitude for the U.S. security and military state (the Eurasia Group's Ian Bremmer suggested this week that this is the principal outcome in the West of the current conflict). Or the goal is the elevation of Russia as a vital and grave threat to the U.S. (the above polling data suggests this is already happening) that will feed weapons purchases and defense and intelligence budgets for years to come. Or one might see a desire to harm Russia as vengeance for the perception that Putin helped defeat Hillary Clinton and elected Donald Trump (that the U.S. is using Ukraine to “fight Russia over there” was explicitly stated by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA).

   Or perhaps the goal is not to “save and protect” Ukraine at all, but to sacrifice it by turning it into a new Afghanistan, where the U.S. arms a Ukrainian insurgency to ensure that Russia remains stuck in Ukraine fighting and destroying it for years (this scenario was very compellingly laid out in one of the best analyses of the Russia/Ukraine conflict, by Niccolo Soldo, which I cannot recommend highly enough).

   Jeff Rogg, historian of U.S. intelligence and an assistant professor in the Department of Intelligence and Security Studies at the Citadel, wrote in The LA Times that the CIA has already been training, funding and arming a Ukrainian insurgency, speculating that the model may be the CIA's backing of the Mujahideen insurgency in Afghanistan that morphed into Al Qaeda, with the goal being “to weaken Russia over the course of a long insurgency that will undoubtedly cost as many Ukrainian lives as Russian lives, if not more."

Again, no matter how certain one is about their moral conclusions about this war, these are urgent questions that are not resolved or even necessarily informed by the moral and emotional investment in a particular narrative. Yet when one is trapped inside a system of a complete consensus upheld by a ceaseless wave of reinforcing propaganda, and when any questioning or dissent at all is tantamount to treason or “siding with the enemy,” there is no space for such discussions to occur, especially within our minds. When one is coerced — through emotional tactics and societal inventive — to adhere only to one script, nothing that is outside of that script can be entertained. And that is all by design.

Besides 9/11 and the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, Americans have been subjected to numerous spates of war propaganda, including in 2011 when then-President Obama finally agreed to order the U.S. to participate in a France/UK-led NATO regime change operation in Libya, as well as throughout the Obama and early Trump years when the CIA was fighting a clandestine and ultimately failed regime change war in Syria, on the same side as Al-Qaeda, to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. In both instances, government/media disinformation and emotional manipulation were pervasive, as it is in every war. But those episodes were not even in the same universe of intensity and ubiquity as what is happening now and what happened after 9/11 — and that matters a great deal for understanding why so many are vulnerable to the machinations of war propaganda without even realizing they are affected by it.

One realization I had for the first time during Russiagate was that history may endlessly repeat itself, but those who have not lived through any such history or paid attention to it previously will not know about it and thus remain most susceptible to revisionism or other tactics of deceit. When Russiagate was first elevated as a major 2016 campaign issue — through a Clinton campaign commercial filled with dark and sinister music and innuendo masquerading as “questions” about the relationship between Trump and the Kremlin — I had assumed when writing about it for the first time that most Americans, especially those on the left taught to believe that McCarthyism was one of the darkest moments for civil liberties, would instantly understand how aggressively the CIA and FBI disseminate disinformation, how servile corporate media outlets are to those security state agencies, how neocons are always found at the center of such manipulative tactics, and how potent this sort of propaganda is: creating a foreign villain said to be of unparalleled evil or at least evil not seen since Hitler, and then claiming that one's political adversaries are enthralled or captive to them. We have witnessed countless identical cycles throughout U.S history.

But I also quickly realized that millions of Americans — either due to age or previous political indifference — began paying attention to politics for the first time in 2016 due to fear of Trump, and thus knew little to nothing about anything that preceded it. Such people had no defenses against the propaganda narrative and deceitful tactics because, for them, it was all new. They had never experienced it before and thus had no concept of who they were applauding and how such official government/media disinformation campaigns are constructed. Each generation is thus easily programmed and exploited by the same propaganda systems, no matter how discredited they were previously.

---

Although such episodes are common, one has to travel back to the period of 2001-03, following the 9/11 attack on U.S. soil, and through the invasion of Iraq in order to find an event that competes with the current moment in terms of emotional intensity and lockstep messaging throughout the West. Comparing that historical episode to now is striking, because the narrative themes deployed then are identical to those now; the very same people who led the construction of that narrative and accompanying rhetorical tactics are the ones playing a similar role now; and the reaction that these themes trigger are virtually indistinguishable.

Many who lived through the enduring trauma and mass rage of 9/11 as an adult need no reminder of what it was like and what it consisted of. But millions of Americans now focused on Ukraine did not live through that. And for many who did, they have, with the passage of two decades, revised or now misremember many of the important details of what took place. It is thus worthwhile to recall the broad strokes of what we were conditioned to believe to see how closely it tracks the consensus framework now.

Both the 9/11 attack and the invasion of Iraq were cast as clear Manichean battles: one of absolute Good fighting absolute Evil. That framework was largely justified through its companion prism: the subsequent War on Terror and specific wars (in Iraq and Afghanistan) represented the forces of freedom and democracy (the U.S. and its allies) defending itself against despotism and mad, primitive barbarism. We were attacked not because of decades of intervention and aggression in their part of the world but because they hated us for our freedom. That was all one needed to know: it was a war between enlightened democrats and psychotic savages.

As a result no nuance was permitted. How can there be room for nuance or even questioning when such clear moral lines emerge? A binary framework was thus imposed: “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists,” decreed President George W. Bush in his speech to the Joint Session of Congress on September 20, 2001. Anyone questioning or disputing any part of the narrative or any of the U.S. policies championed in its name stood automatically accused of treason or being on the side of The Terrorists. David Frum, fresh off his job as a White House speechwriter penning Bush's war speeches, in which Bush proclaimed the U.S. was facing an “Axis of Evil,” published a 2003 article in National Review about right-wing opponents of the invasion of Iraq aptly titled: “Unpatriotic Conservatives.” Go look how cheaply and easily people were accused of being on the side of The Terrorists or traitors for the slightest deviation from the dominant narrative.

Like all effective propaganda, the consensus assertions about 9/11 and Iraq had a touchstone to the truth. Indeed, some of the fundamental moral claims were true. The civilian-targeting 9/11 attack was a moral atrocity, and the Taliban and Saddam really were barbaric despots (including when the U.S. had previously supported and funded them). But those moral claims only took one so far: specifically, they did not take one very far at all. Many who enthusiastically embraced those moral propositions ended up also embracing numerous falsehoods emanating from the U.S. Government and loyal media outlets, as well as supporting countless responses that were both morally unjustified and strategically unwise. Polls at the start of the Iraq War showed large majorities in favor of and believing outright falsehoods (such as that Saddam helped personally plan the 9/11 attack), while polls years later revealed a “huge majority” views the invasion as a mistake. Similarly, it is now commonplace to hear once-unquestioned policies — from mass NSA spying, to lawless detention, to empowering the CIA to torture, to placing blind faith in claims from intelligence agencies — be declared major mistakes by those who most vocally cheerlead those positions in the early years of the War on Terror.

In other words, correctly apprehending key moral dimensions to the conflict provided no immunity against being propagandized and misled. If anything, the contrary was true: it was precisely that moral zeal that enabled so many people to get so carried away, to be so vulnerable to having their (often-valid) emotions of rage and moral revulsion misdirected into believing falsehoods and cheering for moral atrocities in the name of vengeance or righteous justice. That moral righteousness crowded out the capacity to reason and think critically and unified huge numbers of Americans into herd behavior and group-think that led them to many conclusions which, two decades later, they recognize as wrong.

It should not be difficult, even for those who did not live through those events but who can now look back at what happened, to see the overwhelming similarities between then and now. The role of bin Laden and Saddam — as unhinged, mentally unwell, unrepentant mass murderers and despots, the personification of pure evil — is now occupied by Putin. “Putin is evil. Every American watching what’s happening in Ukraine should know that,” instructed Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), daughter of the author of the virtually identical 9/11 and Iraq morality scripts. Conversely, the U.S. and its allies are the blame-free, morally upright spreaders of freedom, defenders of democracy and faithfully adhering to a rules-based international order.

This exact framework remains in place; only the parties have changed. Now, anyone questioning this narrative in whole or in part, or disputing any of the factual claims being made by the West, or questioning the wisdom or justice of the role the U.S. is playing, is instantly deemed not “on the side of the terrorists" but "on the side of Russia”: either for corrupt monetary reasons or long-hidden and hard-to-explain ideological sympathy for the Kremlin. “There is no excuse for praising or appeasing Putin,” announced Rep. Cheney, by which — like her father before her and McFaul now — she means anyone deviating in any way from the full panoply of U.S. assertions and responses. Wyoming's vintage neocon also instantly applied this accusatory treason matrix to former President Trump, arguing that he “aids our enemies” and his “interests don’t seem to align with the interests of the United States of America."

Everyone watching this week-long mauling of dissenters understood the messaging and incentives: either get on board or stay silent lest you be similarly vilified. And that, in turn, meant there were fewer and fewer people willing to publicly question prevailing narratives, which made it in turn far more difficult for anyone else to separate themselves from unified group-think.

One instrument of propaganda that did not exist in 2003 but most certainly does now is social media, and it is hard to overstate how much it is exacerbating all of these pathologies of propaganda. The endless flood of morally righteous messaging, the hunting down of and subsequent mass-attacks on heretics, the barrage of pleasing-but-false stories of bravery and treachery, leave one close to helpless to sort truth from fiction, emotionally manipulative fairy tales from critically scrutinized confirmation. It is hardly novel to observe that social media fosters group-think and in-group dynamics more than virtually any other prior innovation, and it is unsurprising that it has intensified all of these processes.

Another new factor separating the aftermath of 9/11 from the current moment is Russiagate. Starting in mid-2016, the Washington political and media class was obsessed with convincing Americans to view Russia as a grave threat to them and their lives. They created a climate in Washington in which any attempts to forge better relations with the Kremlin or even to open dialogue with Russian diplomats and even just ordinary Russian nationals was depicted as inherently suspect if not criminal. All of that primed American political culture to burst with contempt and rage toward Russia, and once they invaded Ukraine, virtually no effort was needed to direct that long-brewing hostility into an uncontrolled quest for vengeance and destruction.

---

That is why it is anything but surprising that incredibly dangerous proposals like the one by Rep. Kizinger for deployment of the U.S. military to Ukraine have emerged so quickly. This orgy in high dungeon of war propaganda, moral righteousness, and a constant flow of disinformation produces a form of collective hysteria and moral panic. In his 1931 novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley perfectly described what happens to humans and our reasoning process when we are subsumed by crowd sentiments and dynamics:

Groups are capable of being as moral and intelligent as the individuals who form them; a crowd is chaotic, has no purpose of its own and is capable of anything except intelligent action and realistic thinking. Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice. Their suggestibility is increased to the point where they cease to have any judgment or will of their own. They become very ex­citable, they lose all sense of individual or collective responsibility, they are subject to sudden accesses of rage, enthusiasm and panic. In a word, a man in a crowd behaves as though he had swallowed a large dose of some powerful intoxicant. He is a victim of what I have called "herd-poisoning." Like alcohol, herd-poison is an active, extraverted drug. The crowd-intoxicated individual escapes from responsibility, in­telligence and morality into a kind of frantic, animal mindlessness.

We have seen similar outbreaks many times over the last couple of decades, but nothing produces it more assuredly than war sentiments and the tribal loyalties that accompany them. And nothing exacerbates it like the day-long doom scrolling through Twitter, Facebook and Instagram which so much of the world is currently doing. Social media platforms, by design, enable one to block out all unpleasant information or dissident voices and only feed off content and claims that validate what they wish to believe.

Kinzinger's call for a US-imposed no-fly zone is far from the only unhinged assertion or claim spewing forth from the U.S. opinion-shaping class. We are also witnessing a radical increase in familiar authoritarian proposals coming from U.S. politicians. Two other members of Congress who are most beloved by the media, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), suggested that all Russians should be immediately deported from the U.S., including Russian students studying at American universities. The rationale is similar to the one that drove FDR's notorious World War II internment of all people of Japanese descent — citizens or immigrants — in camps: namely, in times of war, all people who come from the villain or enemy country deserve punishment or should be regarded as suspect. A Washington Post columnist, Henry Olsen, proposed banning all Russia athletes from entering the U.S.: “No Russian NHL, football, or tennis players so long as the war and claims on Ukrainian territory exist.”

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), long a vocal advocate of requiring congressional approval for the deployment by the president of military forces to war zones, argued on Friday that Biden's troop movements to Eastern Europe constitute war decisions that constitutionally necessitate Congressional approval. “President Biden’s unilateral deployment of our Armed Forces to the European theater, where we now know they are in imminent hostilities, triggers the War Powers Act, necessitating that the President report to Congress within 48 hours,” he said. Sen. Lee added: “The Constitution requires that Congress must vote to authorize any use of our Armed Forces in conflict.”

For this simple and basic invocation of Constitutional principles, Lee was widely vilified as a traitor and Russian agent. “Are you running for Senator of Moscow? Because that’s where you belong,” one Democratic Congressional candidate, the self-declared socialist and leftist Joey Palimeno (D-GA), rhetorically asked. Now-perennial independent candidate Evan McMullin, formerly a CIA operative in Syria, dubbed Lee “Moscow Mike” for having raised this constitutional point, claiming he did so not out of conviction but “to distract from the fact that he traveled to Russia and brazenly appeased Vladimir Putin for his own political gain.”

Other than calling Lee a paid Russian agent and traitor, the primary response was the invocation of Bush/Cheney's broad Article II executive power theories to insist that the president has the unfettered right to order troop deployments except to an active war zone — as if the possibility of engaging Russian forces was not a primary motive for these deployments. Indeed, the Pentagon itself said the troop deployments were to ensure the troops “will be ready if called upon to participate in the NATO Response Force” and that “some of those U.S. personnel may also be called upon to participate in any unilateral actions the U.S. may undertake." Even if one disagrees with Lee's broad view of the War Powers Act and the need for Congress to approve any decisions by the president that may embroil the country in a dangerous war, that Lee is a Kremlin agent and a traitor to his country merely for advocating a role for Congress in these highly consequential decisions reflects how intolerant and dissent-prohibiting the climate has already become.

Disinformation and utter hoaxes are now being aggressively spread as well. Both Rep. Kinzinger and Rep. Swalwell ratified and spread the story of the so-called "Ghost of Kyiv,” a Ukrainian fighter pilot said to have single-handedly shot down six Russian planes. Tales and memes commemorating his heroism viralized on social media, ultimately ratified by these members of Congress and other prominent voices. The problem? It is a complete hoax and scam, concocted through a combination of deep fake videos based on images from a popular video game. Yet to date, few who have spread this fraud have retracted it, while censorship-happy Big Tech corporations have permitted most of these fraudulent posts to remain without a disinformation label on it. We are absolutely at the point — even as demands escalate for systematic censorship by Big Tech of any so-called “pro-Russian” voices — where disinformation and fake news are considered noble provided they advance a pro-Ukrainian narrative.

Western media outlets have also fully embraced their role as war propagandists. They affirm any story provided it advances pro-Ukrainian propaganda without having the slightest idea whether it is true. A charming and inspiring story about a small group of Ukrainian soldiers guarding an installation in a Black Sea island went wildly viral on Saturday and ultimately was affirmed as truth by multiple major Western news outlets. A Russian warship demanded they surrender and, instead, they responded by replying: “fuck you, Russian warship,” their heroic last words before dying while fighting. Ukraine said “it will posthumously honour a group of Ukrainian border guards who were killed defending a tiny island in the Black Sea during a multi-pronged Russian invasion.” Yet there is no evidence at all that they died; the Russian government claims they surrendered, and the Ukrainian military subsequently acknowledged the same possibility.

Obviously, neither the Russian nor Ukrainian versions should be accepted as true without evidence, but the original, pleasing Ukrainian version should not either. The same is true of:

• the equally inspiring story that the Ukrainian military shot down two Russian Il-76s transport plains (no evidence);

• a Russian tank purposely and randomly ran over a civilian car (the video suggests a possible accident and, more importantly, subsequent news accounts acknowledged: “it wasn’t immediately clear if the armored vehicle was Russian or Ukrainian hardware, or when this crash took place”);

• a mega-viral thread from a member of the EU Parliament claiming Russian oligarchs and Putin were screaming at each other in a bunker in desperation (pronounced “likely disinfo” by the US-intel-friendly and vehemently anti-Russia site Bellingcat);

• a gratifying story that Turkey told Ukraine that it informed Russia it was barred from using Turkish straits to enter the Black Sea (Turkey denied telling this to President Zelensky and said they could not and would not do that, then on Sunday said they had determined these events constitute a “war” such that they may have the power them to ban both Ukraine and Russia, but had not yet decided to so);

• a thrilling photo of Zerlensky in body armor on the front lines against Russia (it was from months ago), and,

• claims that Russia targeted a civilian apartment building with a missile (it appears at least possible that the missile was a misguided Ukrainian air defense weapon).

But we are way past the point where anyone cares about what is or is not factually true, including corporate outlets. Any war propaganda — videos, photos, unverified social media posts — that is designed to tug on Western heartstrings for Ukrainians or appear to cast them as brave and noble resistance fighters, or Russians as barbaric but failing mass murderers gets mindlessly spread all over without the slightest concern for whether it is true. To be on social media or to read coverage from Western news outlets is to place yourself into a relentless vortex or single-minded, dissent-free war propaganda. Indeed, some of the above-referenced stories may turn out to be true, but spreading them before there is any evidence of them is beyond reckless, especially for media outlets whose role is supposed to be the opposite of propagandists.

None of this means the views you may have formed about the war in Ukraine are right or wrong. It is of course possible that the Western consensus is the overwhelmingly accurate one and that the moral framework that has been embraced is the correct prism for understanding this conflict. All sides in war wield propaganda, and that certainly includes the Russians and their allies as well. This article is not intended to urge the adoption of one viewpoint or the other.

It is, instead, intended to urge the recognition of what the effects of being immersed in one-sided, intense and highly emotionalized war propaganda are — effects on your thinking, your reasoning, your willingness to endorse claims or support policies, your comfort with having dissent either banished or inherently legitimized. Precisely because this propaganda has been cultivated over centuries to so powerfully and adeptly manipulate our most visceral reactions, it is something to be resisted even if — perhaps especially if — it is coming from the side or viewpoint you support.

Neil Oliver: We watch Russia - but we must watch what our leaders are up to here in the West

 Difficult to put it into better words! 

Zelensky has proven to be the unlikely Braveheart of Ukraine against the Russian invaders, but who will be our Braveheart to defend our freedom against the stealth encroachment of our not so benevolent leaders?

 

Covid Vaccine: Is science dead?

 More than science, it is our society which is dying and almost everything it stands for. Outrage for Kiev (rightfully) but not for Baghdad? For Syria but not for Saudi Arabia? Not to worry, very soon, we will all do our share against global warming by not being able to afford gas and electricity. 

To my opinion, we are heading straight into a second Middle Age. A Middle Age 2.0, more technological but just as doctrinaire and narrow minded as the first one. Where the pontiffs of a new religion will decide what is "true" as they did for Covid. The virus crisis was just the appetizer. Now, with the wars coming, the main dish will be served. And yes, unfortunately: Science is dead! But with canons in the background and empty bellies, who will care?

Guest Post by Steve Kirsch

I think so. I asked to give a talk about COVID at MIT, but they couldn’t find a faculty member to sponsor it. Apparently they don’t allow viewpoints that challenge the mainstream narrative.

Twenty four years ago (in 1998), I donated $2.5M to MIT. They named the auditorium in the EECS building named in my honor: the Kirsch Auditorium, Room 32-123.

I’ve never asked to speak in the auditorium until now.

I wanted to give a talk at MIT about what the science is telling us about the COVID vaccines and mask wearing and how science is being censored.

I also wanted an opportunity to defend myself against unfair accusations made in MIT’s Tech Review accusing me of being a “misinformation superspreader.”

Am I a misinformation superspreader? Or is MIT one by publishing their article?

Read my rebuttal and decide for yourself who is telling the truth. There were 652 comments, nearly all of them suggesting I sue MIT for defamation.

They couldn’t find a member of the MIT faculty who was willing to sponsor me to give a talk that would examine the possibility that MIT made a serious mistake that jeopardizes the lives of students, staff, and faculty

MIT requires a faculty sponsor for all talks and they said they couldn’t find one willing to sponsor my talk.

Therefore, students will not have the opportunity to consider that there may be an alternate hypothesis that better fits the evidence on the table.

I had always believed that MIT was above politics, but it is clear I was mistaken in that belief.

Science is about objectively looking at the data and making hypotheses that fit the data

My claim is important and relevant to everyone at MIT. I claim that MIT made a serious mistake in mandating vaccines for students, staff, and faculty.

As Robert Malone has often said, “where there is risk, there must be choice.” The evidence couldn’t be more clear that the COVID vaccines are the most deadly vaccines in human history.

Shouldn’t this be a topic of great interest and relevance?

Or does science dictate that anyone with opposing views must be silenced and not given a platform to speak?

I have a message to the MIT faculty: you are on the wrong side of history.

There is ample evidence on the table now from credible sources that cannot be explained if the vaccines are safe.

This is why nobody will debate us. I even offered $1M to incentivize people to show up at the debate table. No takers. So I raised it to a “name your price” offer. Still no takers.

The MIT faculty doesn’t want to hear any of it. They will not let the MIT students hear any of it either.

The safety and efficacy of the vaccines shall not be questioned. The MIT faculty will not allow it.

That’s not how science is supposed to work.

Is there a single member of the MIT faculty who is the least bit curious that there might be another side of the narrative that is being unfairly suppressed?

Why doesn’t anyone want to know the answer to these questions?

There are many important questions that any critical thinker would have that need to be explored:

• Why did all these people suddenly go “rogue” at the same time and adopt the same position on the evidence?
• If the vaccines are safe and effective, why do the manufacturers need liability protection?
• There are over 10 ways to show that the number of Americans that have been killed by these vaccines (excess deaths that can only be explained by the vaccines) is over 150,000. That is nearly three orders of magnitude more deadly than the smallpox vaccine which is deemed to be too deadly to use. Shouldn’t the vaccines be halted? How can 200 deaths be a stopping condition for smallpox, but 200,000 deaths justifies a mandate?
• How does MIT explain over 200,000 excess deaths in the VAERS system? If it wasn’t the vaccine, what caused the spike?
• How can there be 4 myocarditis cases at the Monte Vista Christian School after the vaccines rolled out? There are fewer than 400 vaccinated teenage boys at that school so that’s a rate of 1 in 100 which is more than 50 times higher than what the CDC claims.
• Why won’t the CDC compute the underreporting factor in VAERS? Did MIT do this before mandating the vaccine? What URF did MIT calculate and why was this never disclosed?
• What’s in the vials? Why isn’t anyone allowed to analyze what’s in them? Is the gene sequencing the same in all the vials?
• There is new evidence that the mRNA in the vaccines gets reverse transcribed and integrates into your DNA. That was never supposed to happen. Shouldn’t be concerned?
• How does MIT explain a 12 sigma deviation in the death rate of those under 65 reported by a large insurance company? Other insurance companies have reported similar results. It can’t be random. It wasn’t COVID. What caused all those deaths?
• What causes mysterious blood clots seen in over 40% of cases seen by embalmers? These clots were never seen before the vaccines rolled out and you cannot live with these clots for very long. If the vaccines didn’t cause these clots, what did?
• This letter got published in the Lancet that shows that the vaccines aren’t working. If the vaccines work, how do we explain this?
• Has anyone seen the risk-benefit analysis done by MIT for why students must be vaccinated?
• How do you explain this?
  

  

• And many more…

Apparently, none of the MIT faculty want to know the answer to any of these questions. It doesn’t even merit a serious discussion.

We are left with an unfortunate, but inevitable conclusion.

Institutional science is dead.

Russia, China "Plotting Behind The Scenes" Ahead Of Ukraine Invasion

 This article is just a reminder about China...

I do not think that Russia and China are "plotting", I think China is the main contender behind this confrontation. The Chinese are bidding their time. More than looking at the reaction of the West, they are getting ready. Without energy from Russia and without microchips from Taiwan, the confrontation is more equal...

Sunday, Feb 27, 2022

Authored by Eva Fu via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Moscow and Beijing have been keeping each other abreast of their plans in the leadup to the Ukraine attack, according to two lawmakers.

“I think they have coordinated and I think that China is in a better position letting Russia go first, to evaluate,” Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) told EpochTV’s “China Insider” program at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Feb. 25.

By watching the world’s reaction on Ukraine, China is trying to gauge its next steps on Taiwan, the self-ruled island that the Chinese Communist Party claims as its own territory and long planned to bring under its control, by force if necessary.

“China has designs on Taiwan,” said the lawmaker during an interview in Orlando, Florida. “And they want to see if the world imposes real sanctions on Russia, and how much it hurts Russian, and what really the willpower is to stop an aggressive nation from gaining further territory.”

Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) held a similar view.

He made a particular note of Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s meeting with China’s Xi Jinping at the Beijing Olympics’ opening day three weeks ago, which ended with the two countries forming a “no limits” partnership.

“They’ve been plotting behind the scenes,” he told NTD, an affiliate of The Epoch Times, at the CPAC event.

Ukraine was one subject discussed during “in-depth discussions” between the two nations’ foreign ministers, which took place a day prior to the Xi-Putin meeting. From the Kremlin readout, Moscow also “reaffirms its support” for Beijing’s claim that Taiwan is part of China.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Chinese foreign ministry has been peppered with questions about whether Xi had prior knowledge about the plan and even gave Putin “his blessing,” but its officials had avoided making a direct answer.

“Russia is an independent major country,” spokesperson Hua Chunying told reporters on Thursday.

She accused the reporter of having “rich” imagination when asked if the timing of the assault, only days after the Beijing Olympics concluded, was coincidental.

‘Distraction’

The intensifying Ukraine crisis is a boon for Beijing, Buck said. A military conflict would shift the U.S. attention away from its rivalry with China, handing Beijing an opportunity to exploit.

“If the United States starts pouring troops into Europe to defend Europe and do our part as a NATO partner, we are not going to be able to do what we want to do or need to do in the Pacific,” said Buck.

“It serves as a distraction,” he added.

“In China’s view, it serves as a way of siphoning off resources that can be used in other areas,” the congressman said. “China is most interested in making sure that this is prolonged, and that Russia continues to maintain a threat to the Baltics, Poland, to Hungary, to other countries in Europe.”

Beijing has so far refrained from directly labeling Russia’s attack on Ukraine as an invasion, but at the same time has maintained that it respects “all countries’ sovereignty and territorial integrity,” an oblique reference to its insistence that Taiwan is part of China.

While the United States is not ready to engage in a ground war with Russia over Ukraine, the stakes are different when it comes to Taiwan, said Buck.

“The will to defend Taiwan is greater than the will to defend Ukraine,” he said.

“The idea that China and the way they have cheated trade relationships, the way they have stolen intellectual property, the way they have made themselves a military power in recent years, and have tried to affect shipping lanes that are necessary for trade, is different,” he said.

“Taiwan sits in a position that could impact our ability to trade with Japan, with Korea and other neighbors,” he added. “And to really embolden China to interfere with strategic trading partners … I don’t think the United States wants that to happen.”

According to a January poll by the Trafalgar Group, an overwhelming majority of Americans are against sending troops or military equipment to Ukraine in the event of a Russian invasion. Only 15 percent of those polled believed that the United States should provide troops, while 30 percent believed it should provide weapons and other supplies only.

By contrast, 58 percent of those polled believed that U.S. military assets should be used to defend Taiwan in the event of an invasion by mainland China.

To deter China from following Russia’s steps requires stronger action by the United States, both lawmakers said.

“It’s absolutely critical that they [Beijing] realize if they attack [Taiwan] that will end up in serious military confrontation with the United States,” Chabot said, in calling Washington to change its long standing policy of strategic ambiguity, in which the United States remains deliberate vague on whether it’d come to Taiwan’s defense in the event of a Chinese invasion.

“China is not being at all helpful,” Chabot added. “But that’s not unexpected because the two chief rivals on the globe right now … the worst of the bad actors are Putin and Xi—Russia and China.”