Sen. Johnson's Senate Panel On The Vaccines Is The Red Pill We've All Been Waiting For

  This most certainly is a long post. Sorry for those who prefer elevator pitch. But what happened during Covid is complex and needs to be understood thoroughly if we want to avoid another such episode. 

  One thing is certain, the WHO should NOT be given a mandate in May to dictate worldwide medical policies. This will necessarily be abused and used by the Globalists to impose their diverse policies, most of them completely irrelevant to health. But hey, isn't your poor health mostly due to Global Warming rather than poor life choice and terrible processed food? 

Authored by 'A Midwestern Doctor' via 'The Forgotten Side Of Medicine' substack,

This excellent presentation meticulously breaks down exactly what went awry throughout COVID-19. What everyone needs to know is summarized below...

Ron Johnson has gradually become one of my favorite senators in American history. In 2020, he repeatedly advocated for early COVID-19 treatments to be made available to Americans (which had they been made available would have ended the pandemic).

Throughout 2021, he spoke out against the vaccine mandates and in November hosted a panel at the Senate which scrutinized the federal vaccine mandates and exposed how poorly those who experienced severe COVID-19 vaccine injuries were being treated. In January 2022, he hosted a panel which scrutinized the entire COVID-19 response, and in December of 2022, he hosted a panel focusing on everything we now know about the vaccines.

Being one of the most outspoken critics of the vaccination program in American history got him a lot of pushback, and in 2022, he decided to postpone his retirement to go through a grueling re-election campaign so there would be someone in the government who could advocate for everyone whose lives had been ruined by the COVID vaccines.

Despite being public enemy number one of the pharmaceutical industry, Johnson narrowly won, becoming the first politician in America’s history to run on the vaccine safety issue and win. Since then Johnson has kept his promise and fought for the vaccine injured (along with taking a variety of other difficult but important positions such as giving one of the most poignant speeches I’ve heard on the Ukraine War when he tried to block the Senate from continuing to fund it).

A lot of work has gone into producing each of the vaccine panels he’s hosted. On Monday, he hosted “Federal Health Agencies and the COVID Cartel: What Are They Hiding?” When it was all said and done, I believe this panel was the most effective presentation I have seen for explaining what happened throughout COVID-19 and waking people up to how much they have been lied to. Because of this I strongly encourage you to watch or share his presentation with people who you think might be open to understanding exactly what was done to all of us. This article will begin with his entire panel:

Note: I have been struggling to find the best term for these criminals. The four I’ve used are listed below; I would appreciate knowing what you think is the best one.

What's the best term for the COVID criminals?

• The COVID Cartel

• The Pandemic Profiteers

• The Pandemic Industrial Complex

• The Biosecurity Agenda

Lastly, for those who prefer to read, a transcript of Johnson’s symposium can be found here.

Note: for each of the videos embedded within this article, I (or the Vigilant Fox) edited them down to their most important parts. A lot of time was put into this article because of the importance of what was presented.

Federal Health Agencies and the COVID Cartel: What Are They Hiding?

Since the entire panel was 4 hours long, I recognize that many of you will not be able to watch all of it. For that reason, I tried to highlight what I felt were it’s most important parts.

First, in Johnson’s opening statement, he discusses just how hard it has been over the last three years to get any of the information his office is legally entitled to from the government. For example with (Fauci’s) NIH:

We are down to the last 50 pages [of the 4000 he originally requested]. They will not release these. It's been now going close to 2 years. This is what has been provided to us. Do you think there might be some incriminating information in this?

Likewise, these agencies have completely brushed off all evidence something is wrong. For example, with the NIH:

Just like former NIH director Francis Collins Collins told me when I asked about all the deaths being reported on VAERS, [he said], “Senator, people die.” The fact that both of these statements are as true as they are callous highlights the challenge we face in exposing the truth.

While with the FDA:

I've written 4 [letters on hot-lots] starting in December of 2021. The first letter compared 25,000 lots of COVID vaccine to 22,000 lots of flu vaccine. One COVID lot had 5,297 adverse reactions associated with it. The worst flu lot had a 137. So 5,300 versus 137.

365 COVID lots had more than 100 adverse events. Only 10 flu lots had more than 100. And 80% of the serious adverse events, those with emergency room visits, hospitalization, or death were associated with only 5% of the lots. So, again, to me, I'm from manufacturing. That shows to me a manufacturing process out of control.

[It] took us a year to get some kind of response and, basically, response from the agencies was, “we don't see any variation in lots.”

Johnson then illustrates how the current political climate has undermined everything science once stood for:

“Vaccine injuries are rare.” “The benefits outweigh the risk and that the science is clear and overwhelming.” “And anyone challenging this narrative is an is an anti science conspiracy theorist.” In other words, second opinions are not allowed. To me, this attitude is the antithesis of science.

I am amazed at the knowledge mankind has obtained over the millennia. But I would argue that what we don't know vastly exceeds what we do know. So as we pursue truth, we must pursue it with the humility that that reality demands.

Johnson’s opening statement was then followed by Robert Malone:

I'll be succinct. The SARS CoV 2 modified mRNA based vaccine products were deployed via emergency use authorization without adequate nonclinical and clinical testing and without full disclosure of known patient risk and efficacy data. This violated well established legislatively mandated patient informed consent requirements. The FDA and HHS justified these actions as necessary due to reliance on deeply flawed modeling data indicating that SARS CoV 2 was associated with an infection fatality rate of 3.4%.

Note: the IFR was subsequently shown to average between 0.018%-0.03% for everyone under 60 and was approximately 0.506% for those between 60-69 years of age.

Subsequent clinical research experience has revealed a number of problems with the genetic vaccine technology based SARS COV 2 products, which have been marketed as vaccines. In most cases, there has been an effort to obscure or deny facts in public communication by government and pharmaceutical industry representatives.

Malone then listed the key issues with the vaccines, to which Johnson replied:

Doctor Malone, I think one of the things that always bothers me is [that] so much of what we're learning in terms of harms of these vaccine was clearly known before they were rolled out.

Jessica Rose spoke next. After concisely summarizing all of the issues that had been found within VAERS, she concluded with:

Standard operating procedures for analysis of safety signals emergent from VAERS when utilized reveal causal links between the COVID 19 injectable products and the adverse events investigated. Standard operating procedures are not being followed by the owners of the data, namely CDC, HHS, and FDA, and this equates to hiding the millions of people reporting not only adverse events but injuries in the context of the COVID 19 injectable products.

Note: Rose also reviews the science behind why vaccinated individuals keep on catching COVID-19.

Edward Dowd then concisely presented the years of work his team has done to quantify just how devastating the vaccines have been for the world.

To quote part of Dowd’s testimony:

When analyzing the excess death human cost…in 2020, there were approximately 458,000 excess deaths, of which 73% were aged 65 and older and 15 to 64 comprising just 27%. However, in 2021, with the rollout of the “safe and effective vaccine,” there were approximately another 500,000 excess deaths, but a mix shift had occurred from older to younger. In 2021, the 65 plus age category was [only] 57…while the 15 to 64 cohort increased to 43%.

The absolute excess death increase from 2020 to 2021 for the productive working age 15 to 64 was 73% [124,000 to 215,000].

The total excess death since the rollout of the vaccine in the US, including 21, 22, and 23 is approximately 1,100,000. We estimate the economic cost, productive working age people dying at $15,600,000,000 When analyzing disabilities, it's interesting to note that there were no excess disabilities in 2020.

Using the civilian labor force, we have calculated an increase of 2,300,000 individuals with disabilities costing the economy an estimated $77,000,000,000. When analyzing lost work time, which we call injuries, we estimate 28,400,000 individuals are chronically absent resulting in an estimated economic cost of a $135,000,000,000 since 2021…Obviously, the policy cure was undeniably worse than the illness.

Kevin McKernan then discussed his groundbreaking discovery that there was widespread DNA plasmid contamination of the COVID vaccines and how horrendously the drug regulators have responded to that discovery.

This work has been replicated by many labs around the world, and now the FDA, the EMA, and even Health Canada, have admitted to this. The regulatory agents have admitted that Pfizer also omitted the SV40 sequences that are in their vaccine. They've deemed this contamination to be of little consequence, claiming the DNA is of too little concentration to matter or to be containing DNA of no functional consequence. These statements are false and are not supported by any independent testing by these regulators.

After the regulators have admitted to being deceived, they asked the opinion of the party that deceived them how bad was the deception. They shockingly believe the answer they were given, which is that these sequences have no relevance to plasmid manufacturing. As someone who has worked on the Human Genome Project manufacturing millions of plasmids, I can assure you that this is an overt lie. DNA contamination can lead to insertional mutagenesis. This is actually declared in Moderna's own patent regarding the mRNA vaccines.

This is also supported by Lim et al, which speaks to the rate of spontaneous integration in the genome during transfection. We are using transfection after all with LMPs. The SV40 DNA is in fact functional. It is published as a potent gene therapy tool in a nuclear targeting sequence as described by David Dean et al.

The SV40 promoter DNA is also known to bind to the tumor suppressor gene known as p53.

Note: p53 defects are commonly linked to cancers.

We've applied these vaccine system cancer cell lines and have evidence that it enters the cell and can survive several cell divisions. We have preliminary evidence, although this requires replication in other labs, that this DNA can integrate into the genome. We found 2 spike sequence integration events in ovarian cancer cell lines of CAR 3 into chromosome 12 and 19 very recently. Since these vaccines were expected to only contain mRNA, they were never assessed for genotoxicity studies. These studies were therefore being conducted as guinea pig US citizens as we witnessed an unprecedented rise in cancer drug sales since the vaccines rolled out.

It is time for our representatives to repeal or review the PDUFA Act of 1992.  This act allows regulators to defray the cost of regulation by accepting payments directly from the companies they regulate. Over half of the FDA's budget is sourced through this act.

Note: I discussed the significance of the vaccine plasmid contamination in more detail here.

Dr. David Gortler (who previously served as a senior advisor at the FDA) then explains why the contamination and widespread variability we are seeing in the vaccines (e.g., the hot lots) being completely ignored is so unprecedented:

Federal rules requiring ingredient transparency date all the way back, believe it or not, to 1862 [and] it's the whole reason the FDA was started in 1906. Prior to COVIDsRNA injections, the FDA had approved 4 different RNA based products. Onpattro, shown here, was the 1st RNA product approved back in 2018…as you can see by looking at this label, Onpattro prominently details the exact structure, milligram strength, and molecular weight. Highlighted in green at the very top, you'll see it specifies [what its] lipid nanoparticles are engineered for.

In contrast to the previous labels I've shown, here is the official FDA label for COVID RNA injections. As you can see just looking at it, it details a lot less information. We don't [even] have the structure.

Of note, in pharmacology, even very minor deviations in any molecular structure can mean the difference between a drug and a poison…The lack of transparency means that scientists can't use modeling to test lipid nanoparticles for safety receptor specificity or analyze inequality [in batches of those products].

Unfortunately, around 70% of the 127 page document that explains the methodology to perform quality control on RNA injections are redacted much like the document I've shown here.

Next Dr. Harvey Risch discusses the “crushingly obsessive push to COVID vaccinate every living person on the planet” and provides a concise overview of the horrific bioweapons industry which gave birth to COVID-19 and then tried to pivot to vaccinating everyone rather than accept responsibility for what it had done.

Note: This catastrophic industry is discussed in more detail here (e.g., I highlighted how numerous modern diseases are the results of lab leaks).

Next, Barbara Loe Fisher, an activist who has spent decades fighting for vaccine safety shared the broader context of what we are now dealing with.

I worked with parents in congress to secure safety and informed consent provisions in the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. It was an historic law, the first official acknowledgment by government that federally licensed and state mandated vaccines can and do injure and kill some children. In January, my eyewitness perspective of how and why child vaccine victims and their parents were betrayed after that law was passed 38 years ago, was featured in a 2 hour conversation I had on the Highwire.

I encourage everyone to watch it and learn how parents trusted that the 5 years of work we put into that 1986 act to successfully secure life saving, informing, recording, reporting, and research provisions in it, and to protect the legal right of vaccine victims to sue vaccine manufacturers for product design defects, and to sue negligent doctors for medical malpractice, and to create an expedited, more just, less traumatic federal vaccine injury compensation system alternative to a lawsuit were all destroyed by congressional amendments, by federal health agencies, and the US Supreme Court after that law was passed. Following that betrayal of trust, Congress directed federal agencies to create lucrative public private business partnerships with the pharmaceutical industry, a business deal that has broken America's public health system.

Note: I previously wrote about how the 1986 Vaccine Injury Act forced the government to create VAERS (as parents had no way to report vaccine injuries) and ever since that time, the government has done everything it could to undermine VAERS.

Johnson then shares a poignant observation with Fisher that illustrates how effectively the pharmaceutical industry has bought out our media:

By the way,I became aware of you from that excellent documentary which I would also recommend. What struck me about [it] is back then in 1982 through 1986, you could talk about these things. You could advocate for your child who's vaccine injured.  You weren't ostracized. You were actually welcomed here in the senate by people like Senator Hatch and Senator Kennedy and you got this [law] signed by Ronald Reagan.

To which Fisher replies:

I never imagined when I began this work in 1982 that the day would come when I would not be able to exercise freedom of thought and conscience in the country I love. And I thank you for allowing me to exercise that right today.

Next, Bryan Hooker, the parent of a severely vaccine injured adult son shares his 23 years of work (e.g., 15 peer-reviewed papers) to get the data on vaccine injury the CDC has been hiding for decades.

In 1962, children received 5 vaccine doses, and in 1986, the schedule expanded to 25 doses of 5 different vaccine formulations. Shortly after the passage of the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, the law was amended to essentially erect a liability shield protecting vaccine manufacturers, and the schedule expanded dramatically. By 2023, 73 doses of 16 different vaccine formulations were given to children up to age 18. [As we discovered through lawsuits] the FDA approved these formulations individually only with minimal and inadequate safety testing, and the CDC has never tested the cumulative effect of the vaccine schedule on childhood health outcomes.

Since [proper trials] are really the only way to establish that a pharmaceutical product is safe, it is misinformation to state that the vaccines are safe.

However, independent researchers have assessed the outcomes of vaccinated versus unvaccinated children.

This [study] demonstrates that vaccinated children were at least twice as likely to be diagnosed with developmental delays, ear infections, and gastrointestinal disorders.

[In this study] a control group of over 1800 unvaccinated children recruited from 46 different states in the US were compared to the national average rates of the listed disorders…For each of the autoimmune, neurodevelopmental, and other disorders considered, the unvaccinated group fares much better with incidence rates between 4-20 times lower than their vaccinated counterparts.

The CDC has a database called the vaccine safety data link. It's over 10,000,000 individuals with 2,000,000 children from 10 participating HMOs.  I would say that within that database, there were at least 10,000 unvaccinated children that can be studied.

Neither do they they publish the results [discovered from that data], nor do they let any independent scientist in to look at that information. [That’s] because [they know] the bloated vaccination schedule is responsible is in part responsible for the epidemic of chronic disorders that we see in children in the United States.

Note: Hooker also discusses the evidence the COVID-19 vaccine harms children (e.g., that it appears to kill 30 children for each child it saves from COVID and has given many of our children myocarditis).

Next, Del Bigtree discusses the decade of work he and the non-profit ICAN have conducted to get that data from the government:

In his talk, he puts the results of a recent study which monitored 99 million people for 45 days post vaccination into context. It found that their risk for a variety of severe conditions increased by 2-7 times, something which quickly adds up as you when consider how many of those “rare” conditions exist (that often take more than 45 days to appear) and how many vaccines they’ve received. These results is turn sheds a light on exactly what’s been happening to our children.

Every one of the childhood vaccines has a similar [lengthy] list of [severe] side effects. Though they are considered rare, how rare is it when you multiply roughly 50 potential side effects 72 times, which is the total number of doses given to a child by the time they're 18. The revelations from the recent study of the COVID vaccine explains what we have been saying for years. Vaccines are not completely safe, and [though] those side effects are rare. What happens when you add them altogether?

Bigtree then shows this slide (which references this study and this study):

Next, Dr. Sabine Hazan shared how her [self-funded] research to evaluate the use of existing therapies to treat COVID-19 was blocked by the FDA, her discovery that the severity of COVID-19 was directly linked to a loss of bifidobacteria in the gut and that the vaccine also caused a loss of bifidobacteria in the gut.  She then contrasted this to how previous research she did (which supported the pharmaceutical industry) never ran into similar road blocks.
Note: I synopsized that research here.

Pierre Kory then discussed the lengthy number of mechanisms which are in place to ensure that repurposed (off-patent) drugs can never have enough evidence to be acknowledged as treatments for a disease someone is profiting off of.

Note: this talk has already been seen by over 1.6 million people on Twitter.

Next, Christian Perron MD PhD (former chairman of the WHO’s committee on vaccines and communicable diseases) recounted how early in the pandemic, he completed a study which showed hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin dramatically lowered the death rate from COVID-19. A political backlash forced the withdraw of his study and he was fired from his 26 year professorship.

Before long France then banned the use of hydroxychloroquine and began enacting harsher and harsher sanctions against French dissidents like Perron who tried to tell the truth—eventually forcing Perron to publish in a French newspaper which had originally been created to defy the Nazis (as every other publication censored him).

Perron was followed by Raphael Lataster PhD, who is one of the leading researchers working with the BMJ (one of the top 5 medical journals) to expose the fraud within the COVID vaccine trials:

These [abhorrent] policies [e.g., the vaccine mandates] were justified via claims about the vaccine’s effectiveness and safety. Now recent research published in major medical journals reveals that these claims were highly exaggerated…we have found in the studies varying definitions of fully vaccinated and unvaccinated. And, generally, what we find with the term fully vaccinated is that they are ignoring COVID cases, COVID infections, in the partially vaccinated…that effect was found to be up to 48% using data from Pfizer's trial as an example.

We can't be sure what the actual exaggeration is because we aren't supplied with all the data. So it's impossible to actually know. But it looks like there are huge exaggerations of effectiveness because of what you could call manipulation of the data. So if these [omitted COVID cases] were included, or if even just some of these were included, we could have an effectiveness of the vaccines of around 10%...[which]is well below the 50% required for approval. Furthermore, looking to safety in the clinical trials, adverse effect counting windows are again incredibly short.

Note: Lataster also discusses many of the safety issues with the vaccines that were demonstrated within the trial data but hidden from the public (e.g., that the vaccines have a significant risk of myocarditis) and states “now Pfizer also admits that they're still trying, this is a quote ‘to determine if Cominati is safe and effective and if there is a myocarditispericarditis association that should be noted’. That's on clinicaltrials.gov still right now. They're trying to find out if it's safe and effective right now.”

Award winning investigative journalist Lara Logan then provides a poignant summary of how her profession has been hijacked by the government and how a variety of shadowy organizations now enforce this vast propaganda apparatus.  This was the most compelling part of her talk:

Note: Her testimony was followed by one from Jason Christoff, a propaganda expert, who explained why flooding the population with a single narrative and way of thinking has caused many people to adopt completely dysfunctional beliefs at odds with everything they’d held dear

They were then followed by Rodney Palmer, who was a Canadian journalist for 20 years, sharing his perspectives on the current state of the media.

If the news reporters did their jobs instead of reporting propaganda, this fraud would have been exposed from the outset.

Censorship is what actually caused these deaths. It was the lie that assured us it was safe when it wasn't, and it still isn't

In America, it's much worse. The vaccine companies are allowed to sponsor the news directly…To a visiting Canadian, the news here looks like one big ad for pharmaceutical products. It's a bit of a culture shock when you turn on the TV. There wouldn't even be a US newscast without Pharma ads. So the reporters on your newscasts are all conflicted.

They can't bite the hand that feeds them. They can't possibly investigate the most important stories of our time.

It appears that the reporters are actually colluding with their sponsors to break FDA advertising laws.  FDA law requires them to conspicuously describe the known risks of any pharmaceutical product [which news anchors promoting vaccines never do.

The good news is no one believes the TV news anymore. Only 15% of Canadians, 15%, are getting the boosters.

[The media has] now canceled lunchtime news hours. It's canceled weekend newscasts. After these reporters are laid off, we'll only be left with the trusted favor of the trusted faces of our favorite news anchors, delivering the propaganda of the day, instead of the news of the day. But when those trusted faces are telling us lies, they're like a super weapon aimed directly at us. The news anchors are now the finger on the trigger in that game of Russian roulette.

When the news is poisoned, so is Democracy…most every other country is letting this happen, but where goes America, so goes the world. You have a unique role in setting the moral tone for Western democracies.

So I respectfully recommend that the senate investigate the role of American television news networks, including with pharmaceutical advertisers to skirt the FDA laws that require them to declare the known risks of a pharmaceutical product. This investigation should extend to any reporters, news anchors, editors, and executives who lied to their audience about the safety of the COVID vaccines.

Note: Palmer also describes how he gradually saw the corrupting influence of the pharmaceutical industry enter Canada’s media over the last decade. One of the most compelling observations he shared was that during the pandemic, the doctors who spoke on television didn’t talk like doctors but instead appeared to have corporate media training, which he took as an early sign a lengthy PR campaign was being enacted to sell as many vaccines as possible.

Next, Matthias Desmet provided a concise summary of the crowd psychology which explained how it was possible for so many people to refuse to see what was being hidden from them, even thing after thing happened which made it clear we were all being lied to:

Note: I recently completed an article relating Desmet’s work on crowd psychology to how individuals commonly become trapped in cults and dangerous spiritual practices.

Brett Weinstein then describes the institutional breakdown gripping our society and the malicious forces which are taking away each thing we had previously depended upon for truth and justice (e.g., our premier scientific apparatus).  I wanted to quote one exchange he had with Johnson:

[Johnson] Now I kind of want to ask you, I describe my eyes being opened up, certainly during COVID to a number of things…Can you just describe your [red pill] journey here?

[Weinstein] Well, I think we are all on a similar journey. I did not think that I was naive 7 years ago, and then I learned that I had been very naive and I keep learning that lesson. Each new discovery reveals that I was missing something that was right in front of me, and I think that's actually the hallmark of the exact pattern I'm describing.

Canadian Randy Hillier served in Ontario’s parliament for 15 years and was the first member to publicly oppose his government's response to COVID. Like Canada’s citizens, Hillier was targeted by the government for doing so, and argues we are at the tip of a slippery slope with this.  In this part of his testimony, he shares how Ontario’s leadership told him they made the decision to continually coverup the damage of the COVID policies because they felt the political consequences would be too severe if they admitted their mistakes:

Next, Dr. Sorin Titus Muncaciu shared his experience as a Romanian member of parliament who watched the central authorities use every tool at their disposal to forcefully vaccinate Romania.

We are a party having probably 10% of the votes we got in the parliament in 2020, and we, from the very beginning of this pandemic, we decided that the rights of the people to decide if they accept, or [do not accept receiving] an experimental drug should be respected.

When the European Union started behaving like the USSR with those commissars coming to us and mister Barnier came to Romania. This gentleman was the commissioner for internal affairs of the European Union and pushed us, pushed the Romanian parliament to vote [for COVID vaccine mandates].

But in Romania the problem they face is that we are 40 years after a communist dictatorship, 30, 34 years after a communist dictatorship. And it's in our genes to distrust the government because we knew every time a communist government is saying anything or is directing anything, we knew that's a lie, that's something that we should not trust or we should not follow.

We did everything in the book that we could to stop that and we stopped it. And, as a consequence to that, the Romanian rate of vaccination was probably less than half of what the other European countries experienced or United States, Canada and Australia [experienced]. And, therefore we can compare now the low rate and the excess mortality. And that's the best proof I can bring to the table is the fact that having a relationship between a low rate of vaccination and low excess mortality, which is right there you see it on the, Romania is the last country on the right which means we have negative excess mortality while all the other countries in Europe have positive excess mortality.

Rob Roos (a European member of Parliament) and Phillip Kruse (a lawyer) then discussed who actually funds the WHO and the disastrous treaty it is trying to sneak through which will force everyone to comply with the pandemic cartel and silence anyone who challenges their next pandemic response.

Note: I discussed this treaty and the grass roots effort to stop it in more detail here. I consider that article to be one of the most important articles I’ve published on Substack.

Finally, Ryan Cole concluded the talk by discussing how he was punished for speaking out, how everything which happened throughout the pandemic has violated our fundamental constitutional rights and how critical it is for us to reclaim what our Founding Fathers fought for.

Note: for anyone considering being a whistleblower, Johnson requested for you to contact his office here.

Conclusion

Since Johnson packed this presentation with so many impactful points, it was quite hard to decide which was the best one to conclude it with. Eventually however, I settled on this one, which while brief, I believe is the critically important message all Americans can agree with:

It is remarkable how much each successive panel Johnson has hosted has improved upon the one which preceded it. I consider this to be both a product of how dedicated each participant has been to fixing this mess and how much the alternative media has facilitated the production of high quality information that has rapidly unravelled the immensely complex web we were trapped within.

Without each of your supporting the wonderful community of dissident authors on Substack, much of this would likely have never happened, and I thank each of you from the bottom of my heart for giving me the opportunity to be part of it.

Lastly, if you have anyone close to you who is on the fence about the vaccines, please consider sharing this article or a video of Johnson’s panel with them; it’s something than can persuade people who are at last beginning to become open to hearing the truth and we have reached the moment where it is critical for the truth to reach as many people as possible.

Douglas Macgregor assessment of the war in Ukraine (Video)

  An amazing analysis of the war in Ukraine.

 

Pentagon Chief: If Ukraine Is Defeated, NATO Will Be At War With Russia

  As most analysts describe him, Lloyd Austin is seldom the brightest bulb in the room. This definition also applies quite accurately to olaf scholz or Emmanuel Macron. Still, there is little doubt that behind closed doors, the West is panicking. Nobody knows exactly when the Ukrainian army will collapse but the question now only focuses on when, not if. The hundreds of billions of dollars and Euros are lost. The expected return on investment with the dismantlement of Russia is certain not to happen. Credibility is gone. What do you do next? Negotiate or double down?

Pentagon Chief: If Ukraine Is Defeated, NATO Will Be At War With Russia

This is the single most important, dangerous and highly revealing statement from a top defense official in the West in a long time... It also demonstrates the precarious urgency of the moment and the huge stakes going into the November US election. The world truly stands on the precipice of a nuclear nightmare with the following fresh assertion of Biden's Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, who said before Congress on Thursday: 

"If Ukraine falls, I really believe that NATO will be in a fight with Russia," Austin stated.

What's more is that this came the very day that Russian President Vladimir Putin warned things could easily spiral toward nuclear war in the scenario that NATO sends troops to Ukraine. Watch:

According to the fuller context of the Pentagon chief's statements, he emphasized that more Washington funding is crucial for Ukraine in order to prevent a situation where "one country can redraw its neighbors’ boundaries and illegitimately take over its sovereign territory."

"We know that if Putin is successful here, he will not stop. He will continue to take more aggressive actions in the region. And other leaders around the world, other autocrats around the world will look at this and will be encouraged by the fact that this happened and we failed to support a democracy," he added.

"If you are a Baltic state, you are really worried about whether you are next. They know Putin. They know what he is capable of. And, frankly, if Ukraine falls, I really believe that NATO will be in a fight with Russia," Austin said.

What is even more alarming about this statement is that everyone now knows that Ukraine forces are in retreat at this very moment, especially after the Russian capture of the city of Avdiivka, and surrounding villages.

Bloomberg on Thursday issued a report predicting total collapse of the Ukrainian front lines by summer, as the headline suggests (Ukraine Sees Risk of Russia Breaking Through Defenses by Summer): "Ukrainian officials are concerned that Russian advances could gain significant momentum by the summer unless their allies can increase the supply of ammunition, according to a person familiar with their analysis," the report says. According to more from Bloomberg:

Internal assessments of the situation on the battlefield from Kyiv are growing increasingly bleak as Ukrainian forces struggle to hold off Russian attacks while rationing the number of shells they can fire.

Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said Thursday that mistakes by frontline commanders had compounded the problems facing Ukraine’s defenses around Avdiivka, which was captured by Russian forces this month. Syrskyi said he’d sent in more troops and ammunition to bolster Ukrainian positions.

US DoD/Flickr

So the consensus narrative and belated mainstream media admission is that Ukraine's military is a mere months away from clear defeat, and the top US defense chief just said NATO will go to war with Russia "if Ukraine falls".

The conflict has reached a dire and perilously unpredictable moment indeed, and clearly the already slim chances of jump-starting serious peace negotiations to end the war are slipping away fast.

A Global, Digital Coup d'État

  Great article which resume very well what happened during the last 4 years with the Global Pandemic, lockdowns and vaccination campaigns.

  Personally, I believe the real coup d'etat took place in 2001 with the 9/11 crisis. Covid was just a further step to increase the control which is now almost total. 

  We'll see in November if resistance is futile.

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

There was a time.

What seemed to be unfolding was a huge intellectual error for the history books.

A new virus had come along and everyone was freaking out and smashing all normal social functioning.

The excuse turns out just to be the cover story. Still, it bears examination.

Even though plenty of outside commentators said the pathogen should be handled in the normal way—with known treatment and calm while those most susceptible stayed cautious until endemicity—some people on the inside fell prey to a great fallacy. They had come to believe computer models over known realities. They thought that you could separate everyone, drive down infections, and then the virus would die out.

This was never a plausible scenario, as anyone who knew something about the history of pandemics would report. All known experience stood against this cockamamie scheme. The science was very clear and widely available: lockdowns do not work. Physical interventions in general achieve nothing.

But, hey, they said it was an experiment born of new thinking. They would give it a whirl.

When it became clear that the lockdowners had gained sway over policy, many of us thought, truly, how long can this really last? A week, maybe two. Then we would be done. But then something strange happened. The money began to flow. And flow. The states thought that was awesome so they kept it up. The money printers got to work. And general chaos broke out: social, cultural, educational, economic, and political.

It all happened so fast. The months rolled on with no break in the narrative. It became crazy after a time. There were so few critics. We didn’t know it but they were being silenced by a new machinery that had already been constructed for this purpose.

Among that which was censored was criticism of the inoculation potion that was being rolled out and which would eventually be forced on populations all over the world. They said it was 95 percent effective, but it wasn’t clear what that could mean. No coronavirus had ever been controlled by any vaccination. How could this be true? It wasn’t true. Nor did the shot stop the spread.

Many people said this at the time. But we couldn’t hear them. Their voices were muffled or silenced. The social media companies had already been taken over by government-connected interests working on behalf of intelligence agencies. We had believed that these tools were designed to increase our connections with others and enable free speech. Now they were being used to broadcast a preset regime narrative.

Strange industrial shifts took place. Gas cars were deprecated in favor of a new experiment in electric vehicles, thanks to intense consumer demand caused by shortages owing to supply chain breakages. Digital learning platforms got a huge boost because physical classrooms were closed. Online ordering and doorstep delivery became the rage because people were told not to leave their homes and small businesses were forcibly closed.

The pharma companies were riding high of course, gradually acculturating the population to a subscription model. There were attempts to convert whole countries to a health passport system. New York City tried this, along with actual physical segregation of the entire city, with the vaccinated considered clean while the unvaccinated were not allowed into restaurants, libraries, or theaters. The digital app didn’t work however, so that plan fell apart quickly.

All of this happened in less than one year. What began as an intellectual error in public health ended up looking like a digital coup d’état.

Coups of the past featured rebel armies from the hills storming the cities and joined by the military as they invaded the palace and the leader and his family fled in a carriage or helicopter depending on the epoch.

This was different. It was organized and planned by intelligence agencies within the structure of the global state, a great reset to reject the forms of the past and replace them all with a new dystopia.

Initially, the people who said this was a great reset were derided as crazed conspiracy theorists. But then it turned out that the head of the World Economic Forum (WEF), Klaus Schwab, had written a book by the very title that you could buy from Amazon. It turns out to be H.G. Wells’s “The Open Conspiracy” updated for the 21st-century technology.

There turns out to be much more than that. There was an angle to all of this that impacts the mechanisms we use for democratic control of societies. Buried in the flurry of bills shoved through in March 2020 was a liberalization of balloting and voting that would never have been tolerated before. In the name of social distancing, mail-in ballots would become the norm, along with the known irregularities they introduce.

Implausibly, this too was part of the plan.

Researching and realizing all of this in real time has been a bit much. It has shattered the old ideological paradigms. The old theories no longer explain the world as it is unfolding. It causes all of us to revisit our priors, at least those with minds adaptable enough to pay attention. For vast swaths of the intellectual class, this is not possible.

Looking back, we should have known something was up at the outset. There were too many anomalies. Were the people in charge really so stupid as to believe that you can make a virus go away by making everyone stay home? It’s absurd. You cannot control the microbial kingdom this way, and surely everyone with a modicum of intelligence knows this.

Another clue: there never was an exit plan. What exactly was fourteen days of frozen activity going to achieve? What was the benchmark of success? We were never told. Instead, the elites in media and government simply encouraged fear. And then met that fear with ridiculous protocols like dousing ourselves with sanitizer, masking while walking, and presuming every other person is a disease vector.

This was psychological warfare. To what end and how ambitious are these hidden plans for us?

Only four years later, we are grasping the fullness of what was going down.

For those of us schooled in the persistent incompetence of government to get anything right, much less deploy a plan with anything like precision, elaborate conspiracy theories of plots and schemes always seem implausible. We just don’t believe them.

This is why it took us so long to see the fullness of what was deployed in March 2020, a scheme that combined a plethora of seemingly disparate governmental/industrial ambitions including:

1) rollout of subscription/platform model of Pharma distribution,

2) mass censorship,

3) election management/rigging,

4) universal basic income,

5) industrial subsidies to digital platforms,

6) mass population surveillance,

7) cartelization of industry,

8) shift in income distribution and entrenchment of administrative state power,

9) crushing of ‘populist’ movements worldwide, and

10) the centralization of power generally speaking.

To top it off, all these efforts were global in scope. This whole model truly stretches the bounds of plausibility. And yet all the evidence points to exactly the above. It just goes to show that even if you don’t believe in conspiracies, conspiracies believe in you. It was a digital-age coup d’état unlike anything humanity has ever experienced.

How long will it take us to process this reality? We seem to be only at the early stages of understanding, much less resisting.

Leaked Military Files Show Russia's Nuclear Strike Threshold Lower Than Previously Known

  How far are we from a nuclear war? If both Russia and the West consider the war in Ukraine as existential, the answer may be very close! 

  With this in mind, the current policies of Europe are difficult to understand. They want to save the planet and for this are ready to deindustrialize and make our lives quite difficult indeed by focusing on one atom (C) , But conversely won't negotiate with Russia and take into consideration another far more dangerous atom (U). 

  So Global Warming is wrong but Global Scalding is fine? 

This week the Financial Times has published contents of a cache of leaked classified Russian documents said to lay out the country's doctrine and strategy for tactical nuclear weapons use. Included in the documents is info on the Kremlin's minimum criteria for using tactical nukes.

The criteria outlined in the secret files range "from an enemy incursion on Russian territory to more specific triggers, such as the destruction of 20% of Russia's strategic ballistic missile submarines," according to FT.

Images: Getty & Wikimedia 

The question of the possibility of Russia and NATO stumbling toward nuclear war is without doubt heavy on the minds of many this week, especially after French President Emmanuel Macron's Monday comments wherein he raised sending Western troops to fight Russia in Ukraine and said of the possibility, "nothing should be ruled out."

Putin appeared to respond directly in his Thursday state of the nation televised address, spelling out: "Everything that they are coming up with now, with which they threaten the entire world – all this really threatens a conflict with the use of nuclear weapons, and therefore the destruction of civilization – don’t they understand this, or what?"

"They must ultimately understand that we also have weapons – and they know about it, just as I now said  – we also have weapons that can hit targets on their territory," he warned.

As for tactical nuke usage, Russia's tactical arsenal has more limited range in comparison to strategic weapons, and thus are designed and intended for the possibility of a 'nearer' war in Europe or Asia. 

But worrisomely, the FT review of the documents (which date from 2008-2014) finds that the Kremlin likely has a threshold "lower than Russia has ever publicly admitted, according to experts who reviewed and verified the documents." Experts cited in the FT say the contents of the leaks likely remain part of Moscow's current nuclear doctrine.

The documents show that Russia has recently rehearsed scenarios involving war with China. Per the leaks and the FT report:

One exercise outlining a hypothetical attack by China notes that Russia, dubbed the “Northern Federation” for the purpose of the war game, could respond with a tactical nuclear strike in order to stop “the South” from advancing with a second wave of invading forces.

“The order has been given by the commander-in-chief . . . to use nuclear weapons . . . in the event the enemy deploys second-echelon units and the South threatens to attack further in the direction of the main strike,” the document said.

And for another scenario involving a hypothetical enemy invasion of Russian territory: 

A separate training presentation for naval officers, unrelated to the China war games, outlines broader criteria for a potential nuclear strike, including an enemy landing on Russian territory, the defeat of units responsible for securing border areas, or an imminent enemy attack using conventional weapons.

The slides summarise the threshold as a combination of factors where losses suffered by Russian forces “would irrevocably lead to their failure to stop major enemy aggression”, a “critical situation for the state security of Russia”.

Another envisioned situation seems to apply more for something like a Ukraine escalation scenario where there's runaway escalation. According to the FT's analysis and citations of the documents:

Other potential conditions include the destruction of 20 per cent of Russia’s strategic ballistic missile submarines, 30 per cent of its nuclear-powered attack submarines, three or more cruisers, three airfields, or a simultaneous hit on main and reserve coastal command centres.

Russia’s military is also expected to be able to use tactical nuclear weapons for a broad array of goals, including “containing states from using aggression […] or escalating military conflicts”, “stopping aggression”, preventing Russian forces from losing battles or territory, and making Russia’s navy “more effective”.

The particular above section has language in it which seems to lay out the most minimal threshold, but which perhaps leaves open the most interpretation for Russian leadership. Publicly at least, Kremlin leadership has said nuclear weapons could only be deployed if Russian territory and population face existential threat.

Putin in his aforementioned Thursday major address seemed to appeal in his nuclear warning given to NATO to this doctrine of "containing states from using aggression" - given that's precisely what he's now accusing the West of in Ukraine.

"Americans Are Being Lied To About Ukraine" - Tucker Carlson Reflects On Putin, Zelensky, Navalny & Nuclear War

  We are still witnessing the fallback of the Tucker Carlson interview of Vladimir Putin a couple of weeks ago but now the deep state is trying to regain control of the narrative.

  This is an extraordinary fight between a Goliath which control all the news media and a David which has the ear of a majority of the population. 

  The underlying problem is that the US based system cannot live with an independent Russia or China and will therefore double down rather than negotiate. Europe is even in a worse position. Without cheap Russian energy, the continent is toast and condemned to de-industrialization. This explains the current panic.  

"Americans Are Being Lied To About Ukraine" - Tucker Carlson Reflects On Putin, Zelensky, Navalny & Nuclear War

The international attacks on Tucker Carlson, especially from within US mainstream media and NATO-connected circles, have only increased following his hugely controversial eight day visit to Russia earlier this month where he interviewed President Vladimir Putin. Russian state media has even this week claimed authorities uncovered an "assassination plot" - rumored to have been backed by Kiev.

This week the former FOX prime time host was interviewed about his trip and the whole Putin interview experience in three-hour podcast hosted by Lex Fridman. Tucker Carlson revealed more about what motivated him to do the televised Putin segment, and further discussed his personal take on the Russia-Ukraine war and where it could go from here, now having entered its third year. Interestingly, Carlson's main critique of the war focused not on Putin or the Kremlin's actions in Ukraine, which of course are not under his control or influence, but on the impact to America.

Carlson explained that the West's escalation of the conflict long ago into a full-blown proxy war has not only resulted in more needless Ukrainian deaths, but it has been devastating for the United States. "I reject the whole premise of the war in Ukraine from the American perspective," Carlson told Fridman. "There’s a war going on that is wrecking the US economy in a way and at a scale that people do not understand." He also generally characterized the response of the US political class to the conflict, along with the American public which has uncritically followed, as naive.

Carlson emphasized that what would be a cautiously realist approach was utterly abandoned by Washington from the start, as has been typical of the past decades of US interventionism abroad. "It doesn’t even matter what I want to happen… that’s a distortion of what is happening," Carlson explained, and pointed to Russia having 100 million more people and more defense industry might "than all of NATO combined."

He described that a big part of the rationale behind the Putin interview was to bring "more information" to the West so that "people could make their own decisions about whether" escalation of weapons to Kiev and jingoistic rhetoric from Western capitals is a good idea.

Ultimately, he said, Americans are being lied to:

"Just to be clear, I have no plans to move to Russia. I think I would probably be arrested if I moved to Russia. Ed Snowden, who is the most famous openness, transparency, advocate in the world, I would say along with Assange, doesn’t want to live in Russia. He’s had problems with the Putin government. He’s attacked Putin. They don’t like it. I get it. I get it. I’m just saying, what are the lessons for us?

The main lesson is we are being lied to in a way that’s bewildering and very upsetting. I was mad about it all eight days I was there because I feel like I’m better informed than most people because it’s my job to be informed. I’m skeptical of everything and yet I was completely hoodwinked by it."

Topics highlighted throughout the long-ranging conversion included Carlson's personal take on being one-on-one with a seemingly "nervous" Putin, the question of ending the war in Ukraine, the role of the CIA and Western intelligence services, the prospect that the crisis could spiral into nuclear confrontation with the West, the Alexei Navalny saga, as well as a foray into the Israel-Palestine conflict near the end. Watch the full Carlson-Fridman interview below...

The following are some key excerpts of Tucker Carlson's words from the interview, selected by ZeroHedge [emphasis ours]...

* * *

Carlson On Putin. "I want to know who this guy is."

I thought he seemed nervous, and I was very surprised by that. And I thought he seemed like someone who’d overthought it a little bit, who had a plan, and I don’t think that’s the right way to go into any interview. My strong sense, having done a lot of them for a long time, is that it’s better to know what you think, to say as much as you can honestly, so you don’t get confused by your own lies, and just to be yourself. And I thought that he went into it like an over-prepared student, and I kept thinking, “Why is he nervous?” But I guess because he thought a lot of people were going to see it...

I mean, I asked him as I usually do the most obvious dumbest question ever, which is, “Why’d you do this?” And he had said in a speech that I think is worth reading. I don’t speak Russian, so I haven’t heard it in the original, but he had said at the moment of the beginning of the war, he had given this address to Russians, in which he explained to the fullest extent we have seen so far why he was doing this. And he said in that speech, “I fear that NATO the West, the United States, the Biden administration will preemptively attack us.” And I thought, “Well, that’s interesting.” I can’t evaluate whether that’s a fear rooted in reality or one rooted in paranoia. But I thought, “Well, that’s an answer right there.”

And so I alluded to that in my question and rather than answering it, he went off on this long from my perspective, kind of tiresome, sort of greatest hits of Russian history. And the implication I thought was, “Well, Ukraine is ours, or Eastern Ukraine is ours already.”...

I want to know who this guy is. I think a western audience, a global audience, has a right to know more about the guy, and so just let him talk. Because I don’t feel like my reputation’s on the line. People have already drawn conclusions about me, I suppose to the extent they have. I’m not interested really in those conclusions anyway, so just let him talk. And so I calmed down and just let him talk. And in retrospect, I thought that was really, really interesting. Whether you agree with it or not, or whether you think it’s relevant to the war in Ukraine or not, that was his answer. And so it’s inherently significant.

American falsehoods & the Ukraine war

I mean, I guess I reject the whole premise of the war in Ukraine from the American perspective, which is a tiny group of dumb people in Washington has decided to do this for reasons they won’t really explain. And you don’t have a role in it at all as an American citizen, as the person who’s paying for it, whose children might be drafted to fight it. To shut up and obey, I just reject that completely. I think, I guess I’m a child of a different era. I’m a child of participatory democracy to some extent, where your opinion as a citizen is not irrelevant. And I guess the level of lying about it was starting to drive me crazy.

The idea that Ukraine would inevitably win this war. Now victory was never, as it never is, defined precisely. Nothing’s ever defined precisely, which is always to tell that there’s deception at the heart of the claim. But Ukraine’s on the verge of winning. Well, I don’t know. I mean, I’m hardly a tactician or military expert. For the fifth time, I’m not an expert on Russia or Ukraine. I just looked at Wikipedia. Russia has a hundred million more people than Ukraine, a hundred million.

It has much deeper industrial capacity, war material capacity than all of NATO combined. For example, Russia is turning out artillery shells, which are significant in a ground war at a ratio of seven to one compared to all NATO countries combined. That’s all of Europe. Russia is producing seven times the artillery shells as all of Europe combined. What? That’s an amazing fact, and it turns out to be a really significant fact. In fact, the significant fact. But if you ask your average person in this country, even a fairly well-informed person of good faith who’s just trying to understand what’s going on, who’s going to win this war? Well, Ukraine’s going to win. They’re on the right side.

...And I raised that question in my previous job, and I was denounced as of course a traitor or something. But okay, great, I’m a traitor. What’s the answer? What’s the answer? [Vic]Toria Nuland, who I know, not dumb, hasn’t helped the US in any way, an architect of the Iraq war, architect of this disaster, one of the people who destroyed the US dollar. Okay, fine, but you’re not stupid. So you’re trying to get a war by acting that way, what’s the other explanation? By the way, NATO didn’t want Ukraine because it didn’t meet the criteria for admission. So why would you say that? Because you want a war, that’s why. And that war has enriched a lot of people to the tune of billions. So I don’t care if I sound like some kind of left-wing conspiracy nut, because I’m neither left-wing nor a conspiracy nut. Tell me how I’m wrong.

On feeling sorry for Zelensky

If I’m a Russian or a Ukrainian, let’s just be sovereign countries now. We’re not run by the U.S. State Department. We’re just our own countries. I believe in sovereignty, okay? So that’s my view. I also want to say one thing about Zelensky. I attacked him before because I was so offended by his cavalier talk about nuclear exchange because it would kill my family. So I’m really offended by that. Anyone who talks that way I’m offended by. But I do feel for Zelensky. I do. He didn’t run for president to have this happen.

I think Zelensky’s been completely misused by the State Department, by Toria Nuland, by our Secretary of State, by the policymakers in the U.S. who’ve used Ukraine as a vessel for their ambitions, their geopolitical ambitions, but also the many American businesses who’ve used Ukraine as a way to fleece the American taxpayer, and then by just independent ghouls like Boris Johnson who are hoping to get rich from interviews on it. The whole thing, Zelensky is at the center of this. He’s not driving history. NATO and the United States is driving history. Putin is driving history. There’s this guy, Zelensky. So I do feel for him, and I think he’s in a perilous place.

The prospect of nuclear war

Well it’s been what, 80 years? Not even 80 years, 79. And so we haven’t had a world war in 79 years. But one nuclear exchange would of course kill more people than all wars in human history combined.

I am counting. Because I think it obviously, it’s completely demonic and everyone pretends like it’s great. Nuclear weapons are evil.

The use of them is evil, and the technology itself is evil. And in my opinion, I mean, it’s like if you can’t, that’s just so obvious. And what I’m saying is I’m not against all technology. I took a shower this morning. It was powered by an electric pump, heated by a water heater. I loved it. I sat in an electric sauna. I’m not against all technology, obviously, but the mindless worship of technology?

The possibility of Russia-Ukraine Peace: Putin "wants a settlement"

He [Putin] wants a settlement, he wants a settlement. He doesn’t want to fight with them rhetorically and he just wants to get this done. He made a bunch of offers at the peace deal. We wouldn’t even know this happened if the Israelis hadn’t told us. I’m so grateful that they did that, that Johnson was dispatched by the State Department to stop it. I mean, I think Boris Johnson is a husk of a man. But imagine if you were Boris Johnson and you spend your whole life with Ukraine flag, “I’m for Ukraine,” and then all those kids died because of what you did, and the lines haven’t really moved. It hasn’t been a victory for Ukraine. It’s not going to be a victory for Ukraine. It’s like, how do you feel about yourself if you did that? I mean, I’ve done a lot of shitty things in my life, I feel bad about them, but I’ve never extended a war for no reason. That’s a pretty grave sin in my opinion.

Well, the U.S. government’s not allowing negotiations. So that for me is the most upsetting part. It’s like in the end, what Russia does, I’m not implicated in that. What Ukraine does, I’m not implicated in that. I’m not Russian or Ukrainian. I’m an American who grew up really believing in my country. I’m supporting my country through my tax dollars. It’s like I really care about what the U.S. government does because they’re doing it in my name, and I care a lot because I’m American. We are the impediment to peace, which is another way of saying we are responsible for all these innocent people getting dragooned out of public parks in Kiev and sent to go die. What? That is not good. I’m ashamed of it.

On the Alexey Navalny saga

Well, it’s awful. I mean, imagine dying in prison. I’ve thought about it a lot. I’ve known a lot of people in prison a lot, including some very good friends of mine. So I felt instantly sad about it. From a geopolitical perspective, I don’t know any more than that. And I laugh at and sort of resent, but mostly find amusing the claims by American politicians, who really are the dumbest politicians in the world actually, “This happened and here’s what it means.” And it’s like, “Actually as a factual matter, we don’t know what happened. We don’t know what happened.” We have no freaking idea what happened. We can say, and I did say, and I will say again, I don’t think you should put opposition figures in prison. I really don’t. I don’t, period. It happens a lot around the world, happens in this country, as you know, and I’m against all of it.

But do we know how we died? The short answer? No, we don’t. Now, if I had to guess, I would say killing Navalny during the Munich Security Conference in the middle of a debate over $60 billion in Ukraine funding, maybe the Russians are dumb. I didn’t get that vibe at all. I don’t see it. But maybe they killed him. I mean, they certainly put him in prison, which I’m against. But here’s what I do know is that we don’t know. And so when Chuck Schumer stands up and... Joe Biden reads some card in front of him with lines about Navalny, it’s like, I’m allowed to laugh at that because it’s absurd. You don’t know.

An interesting CIA anecdote

I was like, live in foreign countries, see history happen. I’m for that. I applied to the Operations Directorate. They turned me down on the basis of drug use actually. True. But anyway, whatever. I was unsuited for it so I’m glad they turned me down. But the point is I didn’t see CIA as a threat, partly because I was bathing in propaganda about CIA and I didn’t really understand what it was and didn’t want to know. But second, because my impression at the time was it was outwardly focused. It was focused on our enemies. I don’t have a problem with that as much. The fact that CIA is playing in domestic politics and actually has for a long time, was involved in the Kennedy assassination, that’s not speculation. That’s a fact. And I confirmed that from someone who had read their documents that are still not public, it’s shocking.

You can’t have that. And the reason I’m so mad is I really believe in the idea of representative government. Acknowledging its imperfections, but I should have some say, I live here, I’m a citizen. I pay all your freaking taxes. So the fact that they would be tampering with American democracy is so outrageous to me. And I don’t know why Morning Joe is not outraged. This parade of dummies, highly credentialed dummies they have on Morning Joe every day. That doesn’t bother them at all. How could that not bother you? Why is only Glenn Greenwald mad about it? I mean, it’s confirmed. It’s not like a fever dream. It’s real. They played in the last election domestically, and I guess it shows how dumb I am because they’ve been doing that for many years. I mean, the guy who took out Mosaddegh lived on my street. One of the Roosevelt's, CIA officer.

Carlson on the Israel-Palestine conflict

 I mean, it’s not a topic that I get into a lot because I’m a non-expert and because I’m not… Unlike every other American, I’m not emotionally invested in other countries just in general. I mean, I admire them or not, and I love visiting them. I love Jerusalem, probably my favorite city in the world, but I don’t have an emotional attachment to it. So maybe I’ve got more clarity. I don’t know, maybe less. Here’s my view. I believe in sovereignty as mentioned, and I think each country has to make decisions based on its own interest, but also with reference to its own capabilities and its own long-term interest.

And it’s very unwise for… I’m not a huge fan of treaties. Some are fine, too many bad. But I think US aid, military aid to Israel and the implied security guarantees, some explicit, but many implied, security guarantees of the United States to Israel probably haven’t helped Israel that much long-term. It’s a rich country with a highly capable population. Like every other country, it’s probably best if it makes its decisions based on what it can do by itself. So I would definitely be concerned if I lived in Israel because I think fair or unfair-

But now it’s not possible. If you had a coalition of countries against Israel, I know Israel has nuclear weapons and has a capable military and all that and the backing of the United States, but it’s a small country, I think I’d be very worried. So there’s that. I don’t see any advantage to the United States. I mean, I think it’s important for each country to make its own decisions.

Japan's Demographic Implosion: Live Births Crash To Record Low, 12 Years Ahead Of Forecast

  Japan's society is sick. In fact it is dying, literally. With a birth rate of just 1.26 children per women, the population is crashing ever faster, almost 10 years ahead of the most pessimistic projections of the government. And the trend will accelerate further in the coming years since very few children are being born in the cities and the average age in the countryside is rising fast. It is exactly the same problem in China with an index of 1.09 and in Korea 0.72. Just worse.

  This is the result of company friendly policies which completely ignored the needs of young people to raise families. It has now become prohibitively expensive and inconvenient to have a family in these countries and young people behave correspondingly, they don't. 

  There are other social problems making the situation worse. Most young women now work and salaries have been rising for them faster than for men in parallel with education. Most certainly a good thing except that for society this is a catastrophe since most women will not marry a man who earn less than they do! Why would they? This means automatically that almost half the population will never marry which gives us an index of 1 or less for the years ahead even if all couples had two children each which itself is unlikely. The problem is so deep that it is hard to find a practical solution. There may be none!

 

When it comes to monetary and fiscal policy, Japan is doomed. Unfortunately it is also doomed demographically.

Extending what has long been the most dismal trend in Japan's civilizational history, government data showed that the number of babies born in Japan fell for an eighth straight year to a fresh record low in 2023, underscoring the daunting task the country faces in trying to stem depopulation.

The number of births in 2023 fell 5.1% from a year earlier to 758,631, while the number of marriages slid 5.9% to 489,281, the first time in 90 years the number fell below 500,000 - the last time the number was this low the US had just dropped the atom bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki - signaling even greater declines in the population as out-of-wedlock births are rare in Japan.

The drop comes more than a decade earlier than the government's National Institute of Population and Social Security Research forecast, which estimated births would decline to below 760,000 in 2035, according to Kyodo news.

Meanwhile, the number of deaths also hit a record - only in the other direction - rising to 1,590,503, while divorces increased to 187,798, up by 4,695.

As a result, Japan's population, including foreign residents, fell by 831,872, with deaths outnumbering births by a record 831,872, double where it was just five years ago.

Asked about the latest data, Japan's top government spokesperson said the government will take "unprecedented steps" to cope with the declining birthrate, such as expanding childcare and promoting wage hikes for younger workers.

None of those measures have led to any perceptive improvement in Japan's demographic bust in the past.

The fast pace of decline in the number of newborns has been attributed to late marriages and people staying single. The administration of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has called the period leading up to 2030 "the last chance" to reverse the trend; all Japan has to do is divert the millions of illegal immigrants entering the US every month through the southern border - with the expectation they will all become diligent Democratic voters - and give them a red carpet welcome.

"The declining birthrate is in a critical situation," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi told reporters. "The next six years or so until 2030, when the number of young people will rapidly decline, will be the last chance to reverse the trend."

A fall in the number of marriages is clearly followed by a drop in births, said Kanako Amano, a senior researcher at the NLI Research Institute. In order to increase the number of marriages, the government must conduct labor reforms, such as increasing wages in rural areas and eliminating the gender gap, Amano said.

The government is planning on submitting related legislation, including a bill on boosting child allowances to combat the declining birthrate, to the current session of parliament.

The number of births has been on a downward trend after hitting a peak in 1973 at around 2.09 million babies. It fell below 1 million in 2016.

The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare is set to release possibly in June population data excluding foreign residents. The revised figure for 2022 showed births falling to 770,747, down about 30,000 from the preliminary figure. If a similar trend continues in 2023, the number of births excluding foreign residents is likely to total around 730,000.

Mindful of the potential social and economic impact, and the strains on public finances, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has called the trend the "gravest crisis our country faces", and unveiled a range of steps to support child-bearing households late last year.

Japan's population will likely decline by about 30% to 87 million by 2070, with four out of every 10 people aged 65 or older, according to estimates by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.

They're Ready, Are You? Simon Hunt on How To Prepare For The Next Global Order (Video)

   With actual inflation above 10% and 900 billion dollars of real estate debt to refinance in 2024, does the market represent real value? The answer is rather obvious. 

  Then, what will puncture the bubble and when? This unfortunately is impossible to predict. Will it be the expending war in the Middle East as Simon Hunt predicts? A catastrophic direct involvement of some Western countries in Ukraine as is currently being discussed? Something else? Nobody knows what will be the actual black swan. The only certain thing is that we are already hearing the roar of the waterfall ahead. Getting ready now as Simon Hunt advises may indeed be a good idea.

 

It Has All Gone So Dreadfully Wrong For The Establishment

  You can still find great articles on Zero Hedge. This is one of them. But it's getting more and more difficult as the platform is slowly, step by step, being taken over by the deep state. The CIA in other words. It is relatively easy to understand just by looking at the growing proportion of articles exposing the views of the neo-cons. Insidious by real and effective. 

  It is unfortunate but a reality. Soon, as international relations deteriorate further, it will be almost impossible to find independent comments and articles. Enjoy while it last!

Authored by Nikolai Hubble via FortuneAndFreedom.com,

• When it rains, it pours for those in power

• Have the people suddenly woken up?

• How will the Establishment respond?

Our Betters have been very busy these last few years. Climate change, diversity equity and inclusion, ESG, net zero, vaccine rollouts, lockdowns, wars, political scandals, court cases and investigations, causing and then preventing inflation, bank meltdowns, government bond market meltdowns, debanking, sanctions, CBDCs, transgenderism, renewable energy, crypto crackdowns and so much more.

 

There’s no challenge too big for the powerful. Even the global climate and the definition of a woman is in their control.

But what’s truly striking is that, all of a sudden, things don’t seem to be going according to plan on any of their initiatives. Nobody seems to believe anything they say anymore.

It’s all gone so dreadfully wrong for our Betters.

The Establishment, the Deep State, the Davos crowd, the Elites, the House of Lords, the Globalists, and whoever else you’d like to add to the totalitarian mix – they’re on the retreat, right across the board.

From climate change to migration policy to the economy, if you were to make a list of their pet policies, you could cross them right off again given the news stories coming thick and fast. I’ve never seen so many top-down initiatives flop in such rapid succession.

I mean, I expected net zero to prove problematic. But I thought they’d at least give it a good go. They seem to be giving up at the first hurdle.

There’s probably no need to add insult to injury. But let’s do it anyway by providing a quick summary of what’s unravelling, and then get to why I’m telling you about it.

On the climate change front, it’s all gone so dreadfully wrong. Even the EU is pulling the plug on its own green initiatives. Heck, the German Greens are leading the charge to water down the EU’s green policies.

No prizes for guessing why – the EU’s farmers are up in arms, literally. It’s totally bizarre to see what was the EU’s most coddled interest group, its farmers, rise up against it.

Remembering that the union was originally a protectionist coal and steel trade zone, it’s worth noting that those two groups of workers didn’t exactly kick up half as much of a fuss as they were phased out by their own protectors. But the farmers had other ideas.

The UK was one step ahead of the EU, watering down a long list of climate change policies over the past few months. You’ve heard plenty about all that already.

In central London, Robin Hood and his merry men have been keeping everyday motorists safe from the sheriff by sabotaging his Ultra Low Emission Zone cameras which punish motorists who can’t afford to pay their green taxes or get an EV. “Let them eat cake to avoid the crippling ULEZ charge,” scream the Elites. Or is that bugs?

But what chance have 15-minute cities got if ULEZ faces this much opposition?

The German government, green virtue signallers extraordinaire, have upped their game from transitioning back to coal by felling windmills. Instead, they now want to fill the gap left by shutting down carbon-emission-free nuclear power with billions of euros of new gas power stations.

To be fair, the idea is that they will be converted to hydrogen at some point in the future. With the hydrogen produced… somewhere, somehow, by someone using something other than nuclear power.

The announcement out of Germany was, of course, carefully timed for an announcement from the US to freeze approvals of new natural gas exports. Cue what must have been a truly bizarre diplomatic spat, with the Europeans complaining that the Americans weren’t exporting enough fracking fossil fuels to support the green energy transition. I mean, what was Nord Stream 2 blown up for?

It’s like an episode of Hogan’s Heroes.

In Australia, a landmark wind farm was hung out to dry by the government over environmental damage it would’ve done to a wetland. To be fair, we’ll have a lot more wetland should climate scientists be right about climate change. But it leaves everyone wondering what sort of power is permissible in a world where the environment comes first. And it’s not like fossil fuels will be kept online for a lack of renewables… or will they?

Even if we did decide to build a green energy system, we still haven’t figured out where the metal will come from. The German government has walked back EU plans to ensure that the metals used in the energy transition are sustainably sourced. In a truly bizarre twist of fate, it’s the Australian mining billionaire Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest who is complaining about it.

What sort of bizarre world do we live in where Australian mining magnates complain about the lack of green regulation coming out of the EU!? And what will the EU shift do to investment in sustainably sourced metal in the future?

Not that the EU needed to add to the existing damage there. The Australian Financial Review newspaper recently had this headline: “Rich List fortunes gouged by green metals slump”. The idea is that those who invested in green metals projects in Australia have lost a fortune, literally.

One executive responded to his stock losing 52% as only a green dream believer could: “I’m not really wealth motivated to be honest.” I wonder if his shareholders are pleased to hear this.

Capitalism’s greatest strength is that it acts as an accountability mechanism. It forces people to put their own money where their mouth is and parts the gullible from said money if the scheme was never going to work.

That’s why car rental companies are trying to offload their EVs at an eyewatering pace. They’re not just refusing to buy more. And they’re not selling them off slowly to avoid crashing the market either. They’re running for it, presumably because the cars won’t take them where they need to go.

The environmentalists are getting so desperate in their plan to save the planet that they’re turning on the world’s cutest animals to try and save it. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this Telegraph headline: “Squirrels will be chemically castrated and deer will be culled, cooked and served to prisoners under net zero plans to protect England’s trees.”

My first thought was to ask what Australia will do? They don’t have any squirrels to cull to save the planet. And the last time the country had a war on Emus, it lost.

Ironically enough, not so long ago, it was trees that were getting vilified over climate change, with Ohio State News complaining, “Climate change is turning the trees into gluttons,” and theories that trees only temporarily sequester carbon because they eventually die off and release it all again. If trees were to live 26 years, those planted today would wreak havoc on our 2050 net zero goals by dying off…

So, for climate change activists, it’s difficult to tell whether squirrels or trees are the real villains in the story of stopping human caused climate change. Why not go after both?

What we do know is that the targets we set ourselves in the fight against climate change are falling left right and centre. The Renewable Energy Magazine reports, “UK solar target for 2035 obliterated by inflated costs and gridlock.” The French have dropped their renewable energy targets. Bloomberg reports, “California’s ‘Ambitious’ Offshore Wind Goal Seen as Unachievable,” and they’re being polite about it. Fossil fueller Shell calculated in its report on liquefied natural gas (LNG) that the world could fall miles short of net zero because of booming gas demand.

Governments are responding to this shortfall in style. The Labour Party plans to cut its green investment pledge by half…

The current government’s much publicised easing of onshore wind farm regulations have resulted in a grand total of zero new onshore wind turbine project applications, a bit like that offshore wind farm auction we had last year.

The world’s leading wind energy companies are running for the hills, with Orsted and Siemens Energy both shuffling their way out of the wind industry.

EVs, the pride and joy of the environmental movement, are struggling in a surprisingly long list of ways. Even the sceptics couldn’t have come up with such a list. Their share of sales, their ability to move in cold weather, their ability to retain value and plenty more is accumulating into a rather large embarrassment. China’s EV graveyards are in the news, drawing allusions to the ghost cities of a decade ago.

Never afraid to take the moral high ground, the UK’s House of Lords found someone to blame for the EV disappointment: Mr Bean. Apparently he had given EVs a bad review.

It’s of course beautifully ironic that EVs don’t work in the sorts of weather conditions that climate change makes more likely, or less likely, but still rather prevalent, depending on which climate change activist you’re listening to.

More and more governments are abandoning bizarre policies to promote EVs as their various shortfalls and links to China become ever more obvious. The same goes for other vanity projects like heat pumps, electric boilers and more.

Soon the scandals will emerge. Things like the thousands of households in Spain that were left high and dry by the government after overinvesting in solar power based on subsidy promises that evaporated.

Nuclear power, the painfully obvious solution to all this, is becoming ever more difficult to ignore. But that just makes the attempts to ignore it ever more unhinged. The EU is implicitly demanding the French shut down nuclear power to increase the share of renewables on their grid to the EU target of 40%…

But it’s not just climate change that is falling apart for the Globalists. It’s everything else too.

Russian sanctions are proving to be laughable as the Houthis manage to disrupt more shipping than the Western world’s combined efforts against Russia, and Western exports to Russia’s neighbours just happen to go berserk.

Good reason to add more sanctions then, isn’t it? This time for the death of a jailed Russian opposition leader.

While Tucker Carlson is reporting from Moscow about their lavish subway stations and cheap food, Western economies are in or skirting recession.

The only thing that does seem to be going in favour of the Establishment is the stock market. On the days recessions were announced in the UK and Japan, for example, stocks in both places rallied healthily.

That’s because, these days, the only thing keeping markets alive is government and central bank intervention. And recessions make more intervention more likely.

But is that really the basis of a sustainable rally? And what does it do to society to see stocks go up on the misery of everyone else?

Inflation is proving to be “sticky” in many places, just when central bankers were ready to declare victory. Some are even threatening to hike interest rates again, instead of cutting as the markets demand! If the markets are wrong, stocks could plunge.

Facing this difficult situation, the European Central Bank is behaving like my four-year-old who runs around Kindy telling everyone, “You’re not my best friend any more!” One of the ECB’s governors recently said this about those who see the ECB’s climate change agenda as being contrary to its legal mandate: “I don’t want these people anymore.” You know what? We don’t want you either.

The verdict on pandemic era policies are growing increasingly embarrassing, putting all other Globalist mandate plans at risk. Masks, social distancing and lockdowns are viewed by many as debunked, the origin of the virus is looking ever more likely to have been manmade, and vaccines are proving rather unpopular. Sometimes, even government policymakers are the obvious.

In the US, the sitting president, for he can barely stand, has been described as too senile to stand trial for the same crimes that his opponent is sitting trial for. The crime would seem to qualify you for president though, given the response from both supporter’s camps about their own candidate’s performance. But then there’s Hillary Clinton, who also mishandled classified information, but didn’t win an election for it.

With Donald Trump leading polls, the Democrats’ new plan is very American: import voters from overseas. But the consequences of opening borders seem to be costing the Democrats more voters than they can gain. Those who argued for open borders and defunded police are begging the police to remove the migrants on their doorsteps.

Indeed, the mass migration policies which voters associate with the Globalists, because no national government that expects to be held to account at the ballot box would approve them, are triggering protests in some of the most welcoming nations I’ve ever migrated to.

I lived in Austria when the Syrians arrived in 2015. I lived in Ireland before Schengen opened the country to mass migration and visited again several times after. I lived in Germany and the UK when the EU established freedom of movement and the right to reside. I lived in Australia when Tony Abbott’s campaign against illegal immigration began and when the country was flooded with economic migrants from Europe after 2008. Let me tell you, perfectly ordinary people are furious about the current surge in migration. They must have taken a turn for the far right…

Most damning of all are of course the excess deaths figures which continue to bubble away without any government panic, let alone investigation. If only someone would model the deaths instead of reporting on actual ones, then something would be done about it. For now, it’s left to the conspiracy theorists to ponder what’s behind them. And they are getting ever closer.

To be honest, the collapse of these supranational policies is happening so fast it resembles the end of every Star Wars movie, when two hours of accumulated problems and challenges suddenly evaporate in one fell victorious swoop of a spaceship, leaving no loose ends to worry about. But there always has to be another sequel, right?

The collapse of so many campaigns has been very amusing, especially for the people who manage to avoid the disastrous consequences of all the government policies gone wrong. It’s not so funny for German factory workers who burn wood to keep warm in winter as their employer moves to Texas or China. Nor for the Irish who can’t go to their favourite pub for fear of being mugged.

I’m moving to Japan in two weeks, where a lot of this chicanery simply doesn’t fly. And my Japanese isn’t good enough to understand what sort of nonsense the local politicians get up to instead. But, let me tell you, they know what a woman is.

For those of you stuck living in a Western democracy, especially in Europe, the consequences are plain to see. People are taking to the streets and abandoning the mainstream political parties like it matters who you vote for. This is where things get dangerous.

A 2022 survey found trust in government in the EU had fallen from 4.7 out of 10 to 3.6. Can you imagine what it is at now?

For those of you who feel vindicated by all the changes happening around you, don’t. Because they aren’t finished with you yet.

I want to raise the old mantra about dangerous and being cornered. It applies to our leaders, including the ones behind the curtains. Can they really stomach such a defeat across the board without raising the stakes? Or are we going to discover a new disease, asteroid, or social cause imminently to justify a new round of eye-watering government intervention in our lives?

What would you do if you were Klaus Schwab and your agenda began to melt away?

Do the do-gooders slink back into their Swiss caves, universities and think tanks whence they came? Do they give up on trying to engineer the world?

Or do they turn to more drastic measures to keep you in line?