“A few hundred at the top, to plan and direct at every level; a few thousand to supervise and control (without a voice in policy) at every level; a few score thousand specialists (teachers, lawyers, journalists, scientists, artists, actors, athletes, and social workers) eager to serve or at least unwilling to pass up a job or to revolt; a million of the Pöbel, which sounds like ‘people’ and means ‘riffraff,’ to do what we would call the dirty work, ranging from murder, torture, robbery, and arson to the effort which probably employed more Germans in inhumanity than any other in Nazi history, the standing of ‘sentry’ in front of Jewish shops and offices in the boycott of April, 1933.”

—Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45 (paperback, Kindle, audiobook)

I’m willing to die to defend my liberty. Are you willing to die to take my liberty?

No? Good. Then stop enforcing totalitarian measures against your neighbors on behalf of the tyrants, who wouldn’t hesitate to annihilate you. Stop planning, directing, supervising, controlling, and performing their dirty work. Become part of the resistance instead of an enabler of democidal despots.

Whether you are a law enforcement officer, public health official, psychologist, scientist, medical professional, educator, employer, censor, propagandist, or any other agent of complicity in this war against the people, you are what makes dictatorships possible. You are what makes enslavement possible. You are what makes genocide possible. You are what makes the Biggest Lie in history possible.

You may not be one of the Gestapo agents beating individuals entering a public space without their vaxxport; wrenching children away from their vaxx criminal parents; pummeling anti-injection protesters; stripping and needle-raping resisters; reverting Australia to a penal colony; or restraining and forcibly injecting the elderly and mentally disabled (otherwise known as “useless eaters” by your predecessors).

You may not be one of the public health officials instituting ineffectual and deleterious mask guidelines and lockdowns based on fraudulent PCR tests; testing wastewater to justify iron-fisted measures; or falsifying the numbers to magnify a fabricated threat and conceal the deadly factual consequences and statistically astronomical number of adverse reactions to the injection.

You may not be one of the psychologists devising the mass persuasion campaign that has hypnotized the obedient, the gullible, and the ignorant around the globe.

You may not be one of the scientists too frightened of losing your career, credibility, grant funding, and future to denounce the fraud being perpetrated under the cloak of Science™.

You may not be one of the physicians violating the Hippocratic Oath and Nuremberg Code as you deny potentially life-saving medications, deploy murderous injections, administer lethal drugs such as Remdesivir, inflict ventilator-associated lung injuries, apply high-risk interventions like intubation, gang-inject patients, coerce pregnant mothers into risking miscarriage, refuse to treat non-GMO humans, and contemplate prioritizing ICU beds for the injected.

You may not be one of the nurses flouting the nursing code of ethics while pinning down screaming children as you plunge in the poison death jab.

You may not be one of the daycare employees torturing toddlers into wearing a mask.

You may not be one of the fascist institutions complying with the merciless edicts to fire the rational dissidents in your organization.

You may not be one of the censors suppressing evidence of all of the above atrocities while simultaneously silencing and smearing the honorable scientists, medical experts, whistleblowers, and other truth-tellers valiant enough to refute the preposterous narrative you have swindled so many into believing.

You may not be one of the propagandists blaring the Biggest Lie talking points over the loudspeakers through every conceivable mechanism 24/7/365 until the feeble-minded succumb to your relentless coercion from exhaustion, peer pressure, menticide, and Orwellian doublethink.

You don’t have to be any of those abominable scoundrels to be an enabler of tyranny.

You simply need to hold your tongue. You simply need to look the other way. You simply need to turn a deaf ear. You simply need to stifle your gut feeling that something is profoundly, irrevocably wrong about every venomous lie, absurd policy, and malignant mandate that has bombarded the public since spring 2020.

You simply need to live in fear. You simply need to cling to your ignorance. You simply need to follow the leader. You simply need to surrender to cowardice.

Every act of collusion, every stain on your conscience, every bureaucratic compromise of your values etches an ineradicable scar into your soul. 

As a philologist colleague of Milton Mayer’s explains in They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45:

“‘And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jew swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

“‘You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles.

“‘You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.

“‘Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.’”

In Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland1 (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), Christopher R. Browning ponders why only twelve men out of a battalion of nearly 500 kindled the courage to decline participation in the Józefów massacre of Polish Jews when Major Wilhelm Trapp (who himself “wept bitterly” at the command but ultimately complied, saying, “But orders are orders”)—offered to excuse anyone who asked.

Browning lists such factors as “the pressure for conformity”; Himmler’s “exalting obedience as one of the key virtues of all SS men”; “wartime brutalization, racism, segmentation and routinization of the task, special selection of the perpetrators, careerism, obedience to orders, deference to authority, ideological indoctrination”; and fear of “isolation, rejection, and ostracism.”

Thanks to the “growing callousness” that comes from habituation, the soldiers discovered “killing was something one could get used to.” 

Browning found Zygmunt Bauman’s explanation especially compelling, noting:

“For Bauman ‘cruelty is social in its origin much more than it is characterological.’ Bauman argues that most people ‘slip’ into the roles society provides them, and he is very critical of any implication that ‘faulty personalities’ are the cause of human cruelty.”

What set those twelve brave men apart? Browning summarizes Bauman’s observation:

“The exception—the real ‘sleeper’—is the rare individual who has the capacity to resist authority and assert moral autonomy but who is seldom aware of this hidden strength until put to the test.”

Browning goes on to cite the conclusion Philip Zimbardo drew from his notorious Stanford Prison Experiment:

“‘Most dramatic and distressing to us was the observation of the ease with which sadistic behavior could be elicited in individuals who were not “sadistic types.”’ The prison situation alone, Zimbardo concluded, was ‘a sufficient condition to produce aberrant, anti-social behavior.’”

He then recaps the findings of another famous experiment, Obedience to Authority conducted by Stanley Milgram:

“Milgram adduced a number of factors to account for such an unexpectedly high degree of potentially murderous obedience to a noncoercive authority.… Socialization through family, school, and military service, as well as a whole array of rewards and punishments within society generally, reinforces and internalizes a tendency toward obedience. A seemingly voluntary entry into an authority system ‘perceived’ as legitimate creates a strong sense of obligation. Those within the hierarchy adopt the authority’s perspective or ‘definition of the situation’ (in this case, as an important scientific experiment rather than the infliction of physical torture). The notions of ‘loyalty, duty, discipline,’ requiring competent performance in the eyes of authority, become moral imperatives overriding any identification with the victim. Normal individuals enter an ‘agentic state’ in which they are the instrument of another’s will. In such a state, they no longer feel personally responsible for the content of their actions but only for how well they perform.

“Once entangled, people encounter a series of ‘binding factors’ or ‘cementing mechanisms’ that make disobedience or refusal even more difficult. The momentum of the process discourages any new or contrary initiative. The ‘situational obligation’ or etiquette makes refusal appear improper, rude, or even an immoral breach of obligation. And a socialized anxiety over potential punishment for disobedience acts as a further deterrent.”

But Browning doesn’t solely focus on those who pulled the triggers. He also addresses the “desk murderers,” for whom homicidal acts were almost mundane thanks to “the desensitizing effects of division of labor.” He describes Raul Hilberg’s emphasis on “the bureaucratic and administrative aspects of the destruction process”:

“This approach emphasizes the degree to which modern bureaucratic life fosters a functional and physical distancing in the same way that war and negative racial stereotyping promote a psychological distancing between perpetrator and victim. Indeed, many of the perpetrators of the Holocaust were so-called desk murderers whose role in the mass extermination was greatly facilitated by the bureaucratic nature of their participation. Their jobs frequently consisted of tiny steps in the overall killing process, and they performed them in a routine manner, never seeing the victims their actions affected. Segmented, routinized, and depersonalized, the job of the bureaucrat or specialist—whether it involved confiscating property, scheduling trains, drafting legislation, sending telegrams, or compiling lists—could be performed without confronting the reality of mass murder. Such a luxury, of course, was not enjoyed by the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, who were quite literally saturated in the blood of victims shot at point-blank range.”

Soldiers and bureaucrats weren’t the only ones responsible for executing enemies of the Third Reich. Medical personnel were also enlisted, as revealed in the REMI Platinum Award–winning documentary Caring Corrupted: The Killing Nurses of the Third Reich:

Few of the individuals who slaughtered their fellow human beings were psychopaths initially. They were average folks just like you. They were simply doing their jobs, which required increasing levels of savagery over time. That is the process by which well-meaning individuals metamorphose into barbarous sociopaths.

The only way to keep yourself from transmogrifying into a monstrous sadist is to alchemize your cowardice into courage NOW.

Instead of being a tread in the panzer that is razing humanity, you can become a wrench in the gears.

You have the power to fell the Goliaths. You have the power to expose the corrupt. You have the power to subvert the technocrats. You have the power to uncloak the transhumanists. You have the power to bring to justice the self-installed oppressors demolishing and reconstructing the world in their own malevolent image.

You have the power NOT TO FOLLOW ORDERS.

When I snap my fingers, you will awaken from your hypnosis.

SNAP!

It is time to wake up. It is time to redirect your aggression from the people to the powers-that-shouldn’t-be. It is time to recognize you are one of the targets of this fiendish agenda, too.

Eventually, you will be replaced by robots. Then you will become one of the plebeians you presently persecute—and the few of us who survive the democide will be equally disempowered, dependent, divested of possessions, and enslaved to a totalitarian technocracy. Mass surveillance will monitor our every twitch, tallying credits and demerits to our social credit score in accordance with the autocratic algorithms.

There will be no humans left to administer mercy. There will be no halfway decent enforcer to let this one slide. There will be no compassionate official to consider mitigating circumstances.

All grays will be washed into an unending, unflinching, unsparing blackness from which the dawn never emerges.

The totality of this New World Tyranny is unprecedented in human history. Indeed, it may signal the end of all human history, now and forevermore.

Unless you stop colluding. Unless you stop enforcing. Unless you stop enabling.

Will you be one of the intrepid dozen to defy orders, setting an example for other colluders to follow while tipping the dominoes in favor of the people over the parasitic patriciate?

Stand up for truth. Stand up for freedom. Stand up for justice. Stand up for humanity—before you ensure our mutual destruction.

Take courage from the letter written by Police Constable Adrienne Gilvesy, in which she denies her consent to the illegal Mandatory Vaccination Requirement for Toronto Police Service Members.

Draw inspiration from Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, who has chosen to protect the rights of his employees rather than comply with the vaccine mandate.

Look to the Massachusetts State Troopers Union, which filed a lawsuit requesting that a hold be put on Governor Baker’s spike mandate.

Listen to Irish physician Dr. Anne McCloskey, who was suspended for bearing witness to the perils associated with the injection.

Take a lesson from Dr. Julie Ponesse, who was terminated from her position as professor of ethics at the University of Western Ontario for not consenting to a coercive and unethical decree:

Consider the example of the nineteen United States governors refusing to comply with the mandate—or Oregon State Senators Kim Thatcher and Dennis Linthicum, who have filed a formal petition for a federal grand jury investigation into the CDC and FDA for willful misconduct.

Join the heroic whistleblowers such as this ICU nurse, this senior NHS nurse, and the following nurses who stepped forward to expose the corrupt and toxic practices at their institutions:

Follow in the footsteps of the Niagara Police Department, whose members formed the Niagara Regional Police United for Human Rights group, issuing the following statement in response to vaccine mandates:

“Niagara: We stand behind you. We stand beside you. And if you need us to, we will stand in front of you. Discrimination has no place in Niagara, Ontario, or Canada. We took an oath to uphold the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and respect everyone in this Country which thrives in diversity and inclusivity. We hear you, and we are here for ALL of you.”

We CAN break the tyrannical spell that has been cast over the world—but we need you to stand behind us, stand beside us, and, if needed, stand in front of us. (read more and watch videos)

Amos Schocken is Israel’s equivalent of the latest Sulzberger to inherit control of the New York Times. Schocken, in his mid-70s, is the third generation of his family to run Haaretz, the most respected newspaper in Israel, and he speaks out regularly in columns and on social media. 

Just the other day, Schocken called Israel “an apartheid state.” He was indignantly responding to a right-wing member of the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament. Here’s the full quotation:

The product of Zionism, the State of Israel, is not a Jewish and democratic state, but has instead become an apartheid state, plain and simple.

Haaretz continues to be indispensable to understanding the vital truths about Israel/Palestine, truths the New York Times ignores and covers up. The latest example: yesterday’s Times has an analysis of the differences between the U.S. and Israel over the re-negotiations of the Iran nuclear deal. The article could have been ghost-written by hawks in the Israeli government. Its overall tone is sympathy with Israel, and a sense that American policymakers are naive. The report euphemistically mentions Israeli “covert strikes” and “sabotage operations” against Iran, but doesn’t give more details. Only in the final paragraph (the 23rd), does the Times acknowledge that the American CIA director, William Burns, says the U.S. “continues to believe that Iran has not made a decision to weaponize its nuclear program.”

Let’s turn to Haaretz. Start with its respected national security reporter, Amos Harel. He’s no radical, but he does know how to report and tell the full story, and he obviously has reliable sources within the Israeli military. He starts by raising doubts that Israel is even capable of a successful attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities, an angle the Times ignored: 

Realistically, an Israeli airstrike on Iran — an inherent topic of fierce professional debate — might have been possible a decade ago. Now, with the Israel Defense Forces only beginning to refresh the operational plans, it will probably take years before that option is given serious consideration.

Harel goes on to warn that an Israel raid would risk dangerous consequences across the Mideast, another angle the Times missed:

[There is a] risk that the attack will unleash a regional war in which the Israeli home front suffers an unprecedented onslaught by Hezbollah [Iran’s ally, the political/military movement in Lebanon]. In other words, the pistol Israel is brandishing has almost no ammunition at the moment.

Harel has the good reporter’s concern for specifics and a healthy disdain for euphemism. What the Times article called “sabotage operations” against Iran turn out to be “assassinations of nuclear scientists, explosions at nuclear sites, cyberattacks, attacks on Iranian ships, extensive airstrikes against pro-Iranian militias in Syria, and a systematic assault on convoys smuggling arms from Iran to Hezbollah. . .”

Haaretz’s truth-telling didn’t stop there. A lead editorial upbraided two top Israeli security officials for “parading a stream of arrogant, boastful threats against Iran in recent days,”  and warned that the current discussion should not focus on Israel’s saber-rattling but instead on “an Iran-Israel war that could erupt following such a dangerous attack.”

A decade ago, the New Yorker’s top editor, David Remnick, published an inspiring long report about Haaretz and its publisher, Amos Schocken. Remnick quoted at length from an article Schocken himself wrote back then, which argued that “Hatikvah,” Israel’s national anthem, should be changed because “its lyrics are about only Jewish aspirations.” Schocken said:

How can an Arab citizen identify with such an anthem? Hasn’t the time come to recognize that the establishment of Israel is not just the story of the Jewish people, of Zionism, of the heroism of the Israel Defense Forces and of bereavement? That it is also the story of the reflection of Zionism and the heroism of the IDF soldiers in the lives of the Arabs: the Nakba — the Palestinian “Catastrophe” as the Arabs call the events of 1948 — the loss, the families that were split up, the disruption of lives, the property that was taken away, the life under military government and other elements of the history shared by Jews and Arabs, which are presented on Independence Day, and now only on that day, in an entirely one-sided way.

You can read about her “radicalization” in The New Yorker. Didion, who passed this week, started her career with a healthy respect for Barry Goldwater, contributing essays to National Review. By the late 1980s, Didion developed a healthy skepticism of the American right. The essays in “Political Fictions,” released in 2001, start with “Insider Baseball,” a cutting critique of campaign theater with enduring relevance. She flays Dinesh D’Souza. She roasts Newt Gingrich.

Yet the book is almost transpartisan, unamused with the ritual choreography of American politics. Her 1996 review of Bob Woodward’s “The Choice” is above all a brutal piece of media criticism.

“What seems most remarkable in this Woodward book,” said Didion, “is exactly what seemed remarkable in the previous Woodward books, each of which was presented as the insiders’ inside story and each of which went on to become a number-one bestseller: these are books in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent.”

The charge Didion brings against Woodward, that he only obtains insider information by protecting the interests of those insiders, she also levels against the entire industry.

“The genuflection toward ‘fairness’ is a familiar newsroom piety, in practice the excuse for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy thinking but in theory a benign ideal,” wrote Didion. “In Washington, however, a community in which the management of news has become the single overriding preoccupation of the core industry, what ‘fairness’ has often come to mean is a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured.”

In the book, that essay appeared under the headline, “Political Pornography.”

Chomsky, of course, wouldn’t be caught dead in a hot rod. And therein lies the appeal of Joan Didion, whose life had all the glamor and tragedy of America in the 20th Century, and whose travels “South and West” and everywhere else had all the romance of the American imagination, of scribbling in a notebook from the bed of a midcentury motel on a stretch of remote highway far from home. She really did it.

Didion’s disillusionment with the left became a disillusionment with the system itself — as well it should have. While her thinking may have shifted, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” remains exact in its prescience, much like her musings on Woodward. Indeed, reading Didion can feel like mining for gold, finding in her dry wit and precise descriptions those standout passages that captured something true about her time then and our time now.

Burdened by anxiety before it became a national burden, Didion leaves us at a time when there is much to be gained from her work, just as bellbottoms return to the racks and cities return to decay. “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” begins with five famous words: “The center was not holding.”

“It was not a country in open revolution,” Didion wrote. She continued:

It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not. All that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job, and because nothing else seemed so relevant I decided to go to San Francisco.

It’s really too bad she can’t go back.

We have an all-encompassing de facto fourth branch of government—the administrative state, the magnum opus of the progressive movement. The movement’s name itself is diabolical. Who isn’t for progress? Faster, bigger, better—it’s the zeitgeist of America. But the Progressives wanted a different type of progress: to progress beyond the Constitution.

The reality, which most Americans have readily grasped, is just the opposite: omicron appears to be the least dangerous strain of the virus yet. After five weeks of omicron’s spread in South Africa, where the variant first appeared, the news is encouraging: mild to nonexistent symptoms, hospitalization rates nine times lower than previous surges, and extremely low rates of severe illness and death even though only about a quarter of the population is vaccinated. Here in the United States, only one person has [allegedly] died from with the omicron variant thus far, even though omicron cases accounted for nearly three-quarters of new infections nationwide last week.

Rather than return to lockdowns and school closures — to say nothing of canceling holiday gatherings — there’s every reason to believe we’ll be able to weather this surge with minimal disruption.

Unless you’re a member of legacy media. In that case, you’re probably going to cancel your own birthday party like The Atlantic’s Ed Yong did, even though all his birthday guests were vaccinated and boosted, and probably would have been tested before showing up at his house. But no, it was just too great a risk.

Yong, you see, covers science. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Covid. He’s written too many stories about the pandemic to be dissuaded by mere data about omicron. For him, isolation, masking indoors, and eating outside are normal and necessary, and really what everyone should be doing.

This isn’t a healthy or sane response to the pandemic [of lies], especially not after nearly two years of Covid. Judging by how busy airports and movie theaters and restaurants are across the country, it’s also not normal. It’s borderline psychotic. Only people who have convinced themselves that the worst thing that could happen to them is get Covid would go to these absurd lengths.  

Yet that’s exactly what many Twitter blue checks have done. CNN’s Chris Cillizza confessed on Twitter last week that the omicron surge has really hit him hard because it made him realize, for the first time, that “the vaccines don’t, really, prevent you from getting the virus,” and that they “can never do what I had hoped: Ensure no one I loved will become infected.”

Imagine being so impervious to reality — to say nothing of science and data, or even just stories about Covid in the news — that you’d still think, in December 2021, that the Covid vaccines could prevent all your loved ones from getting infected. I know we all joke about how bad Cillizza’s takes are, but come on.

It would be one thing if this insanity were confined to the Acela corridor, but it’s not. Thanks to the hysterics of our media elite, a certain segment of the American people have lost their minds over Covid and essentially become some version of the mask-sealed-with-surgical-tape, “Shitton of Xanax” lady:

Now, where would this poor woman get the idea that all this is necessary to protect her from the omicron variant? Maybe she read Washington Post health reporter Dan Diamond’s latest column, in which he warns his readers not to expect a mild case of Covid from the omicron variant, to “brace yourself” for a positive test even if you’re vaccinated, to “expect hospitals to be pushed to their limits,” and to “upgrade your mask and think twice about taking risks.”

Understand that none of this advice has much to do with the science or data we have so far on omicron. Indeed, the South African doctor who first reported the omicron variant wrote earlier this month that she was “astonished by the extraordinary worldwide reaction” to the new strain of Covid, which she says is “out of all proportion to the risks posed by this variant.”

That reaction is being pushed by a small cohort of elite journalists and talking heads who live in large cities in the northeast, and whose entire approach to Covid and the pandemic are way out of step with the rest of the country. What’s more, their fear-driven approach hasn’t yielded better outcomes. Places that have imposed draconian lockdowns and school closures have fared no better (and sometimes worse) than places that have remained mostly open.

It’s time — long past time — to stop listening to these people. (read more)

Lt. General Michael Flynn has filed a complaint against Speaker Pelosi and her Select Committee along the lines of the complaint already filed by former White House counsel Mark Meadows, but with an important difference. 

Here’s the quick summary of the story of how science convinced RFK Jr to become a truthteller about vaccines:

1. Back in the 1990’s, RFK was trying to get public attention about the presence of mercury in fish due to pollution from coal plants. This is well known. He was respected as an environmentalist. Everyone (except the coal companies) loved him.

2. When he gave lectures, he noticed that a half dozen women would always arrive early and get seats at the front. After each lecture, they would try to get him interested in vaccines causing autism due to the mercury in the vaccines. They sought him out because he was a force and knew about mercury. They thought it would be a perfect fit.

3. But every time, Kennedy rejected their efforts. He wanted to stay focused on his environmental mission.

4. Finally, one of the women showed up on his doorstep with an 18” high stack of technical papers printed from medical journals. She said, “I’m not leaving until you read these.” That got his attention. He read all the papers. He was alarmed by what he had read.

5. He then contacted his friends (they were still his friends at that time) in the CDC and FDA asking them about why they were recommending pregnant women avoid fish, while at the same time recommending these same women get vaccines containing lots of mercury. None of the people at the agencies could answer his questions. They all said, “Talk to Paul Offit.”

6. In 2005, RFK called Offit. Offit said the reason why it was OK was that the mercury in thimerosal only lasted a week in the bloodstream; it was quickly eliminated per Pichichero (see this reference for a discussion).

7. But RFK had read all the papers. He knew he was being lied to. He immediately cited the pivotal study (by Burbacher in April 2005) that looked at where the mercury “disappeared to.” It went out of the bloodstream and accumulated in the brain where it permanently remained. Offit was speechless. Offit didn’t think anyone knew about the Burbacher study. Offit then acknowledged he knew about the Burbacher study, but said that other papers had overturned that study and offered to send RFK the references. Those references never arrived. That sealed the deal for RFK and led to his famous “Deadly Immunity” article in July 2005.

8. Shortly thereafter, Lyn Redwood, one of RFK’s friends, pointed him to the Simpsonwood transcripts showing the CDC knew about the dangers of thimerosal in July1999 and discussed it in a meeting on June 7 and 8, 2000 where the transcripts remained secret until finally released via FOIA request. It turns out, there were several versions of the Verstraeten paper (see “A “SIGNAL” DISAPPEARS ACROSS FIVE GENERATIONS OF STUDY”) each version making the effect on autism smaller (7.62, 2.48, 1.69 was the effect size on autism where 2 or more is very concerning) but there was an admission in an email on December 17, 1999 that Verstraeten sent to colleagues Robert Davis and Frank DeStefano under the subject line “It just won’t go away,” by which one presumes he meant the association between thimerosal and NDDs. At the Simpsonwood meeting, the scientists admitted that they couldn’t rule out that the mercury could be causing a whole host of diseases. They also pointed out that the meeting transcript might be disclosed via FOIA requests, so people were quite guarded in their comments. It was clearly serious because they gathered experts from all over the country for an urgent meeting that lasted nearly two days. They wouldn’t have done that if there wasn’t a serious problem.

In short, RFK Jr. was persuaded the vaccines were unsafe based on science and how people acted to deliberately cover it up. It’s no more complicated than that.

Postscript

The original Verstraten VSD data sets on thimerasol were turned over to a third party to keep them out of reach of FOIA. VSD data is more heavily guarded than the gold in Ft. Knox. Its all there; the vaccine damage to children's health since 1986.

Here we are today, over twenty years after thimerosal was known to cause problems. We know for sure it causes mercury accumulation in the brain. Here’s the most recent review showing RFK was right: 22 studies showing ethyl- and methylmercury cross the blood-brain barrier using the same LAT system: “In total, these studies indicate that ethylmercury-containing compounds and Thimerosal readily cross the BBB, convert, for the most part, to highly toxic inorganic mercury-containing compounds, which significantly and persistently bind to tissues in the brain, even in the absence of concurrent detectable blood mercury levels.” In short, it goes from the blood to your brain where it stays for the rest of your life.

Of course, the CDC is still lying about it today on their website.

If the truth ever got out to the public, say in a Joe Rogan interview, they’d be toast. Remember, you heard it here first :).

Fast forward to today

Clearly, the CDC can completely get away with lies about the safety of thimerosal even 20 years later.

So they are going to use similar techniques to convince everyone the current vaccines are safe, even in light of all the evidence that it isn’t. And they’ll get away with it for decades even after killing over 150,000 Americans in 2021 without anyone noticing.

Silencing critics through censorship, de-platforming, ad hominem attacks, and refusing to debate are all techniques that engage in today to hide the truth and keep it hidden for decades.

Any doctor or pharmacist or other medical professional who speaks against the narrative will be punished through loss of ability to earn a living, loss of medical licensing, or in some cases, loss of life. I can’t tell you how many calls I get a day of medical boards going after people who speak out when they discover that the vaccines are killing and/or injuring people.

The censorship and intimidation grows stronger and stronger every day because more and more people are waking up to the truth. (read more)

That was 15 years ago. At the time, I wrote about the changes I was witnessing, worrying that new White House guidelines (never voted on by Congress) allowed the government to put Americans in quarantine while closing their schools, businesses, and churches shuttered, all in the name of disease containment.

I never believed it would happen in real life; surely there would be public revolt. Little did I know, we were in for a wild ride…

Last year, Venkayya and I had a 30-minute conversation; actually, it was mostly an argument. He was convinced that lockdown was the only way to deal with a virus. I countered that it was wrecking rights, destroying businesses, and disturbing public health. He said it was our only choice because we had to wait for a vaccine. I spoke about natural immunity, which he called immoral. So on it went.

The more interesting question I had at the time was why this certified Big Shot was wasting his time trying to convince a poor scribbler like me. What possible reason could there be?

The answer, I now realized, is that from February to April 2020, I was one of the few people (along with a team of researchers) who openly and aggressively opposed what was happening.

There was a hint of insecurity and even fear in Venkayya’s voice. He saw the awesome thing he had unleashed all over the world and was anxious to tamp down any hint of opposition. He was trying to silence me. He and others were determined to crush all dissent.

Fat chance. His greatest fears have been realized. The movement against what he did is now global, ferocious, and insuppressible. It’s not going away. It is only going to grow, despite his best efforts. 

This is how it has been for the better part of the last 21 months, with social media and YouTube deleting videos that dissent from lockdowns. It’s been censorship from the beginning. Now we see what happens: the lockdowns have birthed a new movement plus a new way of communicating plus new platforms that are threatening monopoly control the world over. Not only that: political and economic upheaval seem inevitable.

For all the problems with Lewis’s book, and there are plenty, he gets this whole backstory right. Bush came to his bioterrorism people and demanded some huge plan to deal with some imagined calamity. When Bush saw the conventional plan — make a threat assessment, distribute therapeutics, work toward a vaccine — he was furious.

“This is bulls**t,” the president yelled. 

“We need a whole-of-society plan. What are you going to do about foreign borders? And travel? And commerce?”

Hey, if the president wants a plan, he’ll get a plan.

“We want to use all instruments of national power to confront this threat,” Venkayya reports having told colleagues.

“We were going to invent pandemic planning.”

This was October 2005, the birth of the lockdown idea.

Dr. Venkayya began to fish around for people who could come up with the domestic equivalent of Operation Desert Storm to deal with a new virus. He found no serious epidemiologists to help. They were too smart to buy into it. He eventually bumped into the real lockdown innovator working at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.

His name was Robert Glass, a computer scientist with no medical training, much less knowledge, about viruses. Glass, in turn, was inspired by a science fair project that his 14-year-old daughter was working on.

She theorized (like the cooties game from grade school) that if school kids could space themselves out more or even not be at school at all, they would stop making each other sick. Glass ran with the idea and banged out a model of disease control based on stay-at-home orders, travel restrictions, business closures, and forced human separation.

Crazy right? No one in public health agreed with him but like any classic crank, this convinced Glass even more. 

I asked myself, “Why didn’t these epidemiologists figure it out?” They didn’t figure it out because they didn’t have tools that were focused on the problem. They had tools to understand the movement of infectious diseases without the purpose of trying to stop them.

Genius, right? Glass imagined himself to be smarter than 100 years of experience in public health. One guy with a fancy computer would solve everything! Well, he managed to convince some people, including another person hanging around the White House named Carter Mecher, who became Glass’s apostle.

Please consider the following quotation from Dr. Mecher in Lewis’s book: “If you got everyone and locked each of them in their own room and didn’t let them talk to anyone, you would not have any disease.”

At last, an intellectual has a plan to abolish disease — and human life as we know it too! As preposterous and terrifying as this is — a whole society not only in jail but solitary confinement — it sums up the whole of Mecher’s view of disease. It’s also completely wrong.

Pathogens are part of our world; they are not generated by human contact. We pass them onto each other as the price for civilization, but we also evolved immune systems to deal with them. That’s 9th-grade biology, but Mecher didn’t have a clue.

Jump forward to March 12, 2020. Who exercised the major influence over the decision to close schools, even though it was known at that time that SARS-CoV-2 posed almost no risk to people under the age of 20? There was even evidence that they did not spread COVID-19 to adults in any serious way.

Didn’t matter. Mecher’s models — developed with Glass and others — kept spitting out a conclusion that shutting down schools would drop virus transmission by 80%. I’ve read his memos from this period — some of them still not public — and what you observe is not science but ideological fanaticism in play.

Based on the timestamp and length of the emails, Mecher was clearly not sleeping much. Essentially he was Lenin on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution. How did he get his way?

There were three key elements: public fear, media and expert acquiescence, and the baked-in reality that school closures had been part of “pandemic planning” for the better part of 15 years. The lockdowners, over the course of 15 years, had worn out the opposition. Lavish funding, attrition of wisdom within public health, and ideological fanaticism prevailed.

Figuring out how our expectations for normal life were so violently foiled, how our happy lives were brutally crushed, will consume serious intellectuals for many years. But at least we now have a first draft of history.

As with almost every revolution in history, a small minority of crazy people with a cause prevailed over the humane rationality of multitudes. When people catch on, the fires of vengeance will burn very hot.

The task now is to rebuild a civilized life that is no longer so fragile as to allow insane people to lay waste to all that humanity has worked so hard to build. (read more)

We live in a postmodern age that promotes an alternative metaphysics. As I explain in “When Harry Became Sally,” at the heart of the transgender moment are radical ideas about the human person—in particular, that people are what they claim to be, regardless of contrary evidence. A transgender boy is a boy, not merely a girl who identifies as a boy.

It’s understandable why activists make these claims. An argument about transgender identities will be much more persuasive if it concerns who someone is, not merely how someone identifies. And so the rhetoric of the transgender moment drips with ontological assertions: People are the gender they prefer to be. That’s the claim.

Transgender activists don’t admit that this is a metaphysical claim. They don’t want to have the debate on the level of philosophy, so they dress it up as a scientific and medical claim. And they’ve co-opted many professional associations for their cause.

Thus the American Psychological Association, in a pamphlet titled “Answers to Your Questions about Transgender People, Gender Identity, and Gender Expression,” tells us, “Transgender is an umbrella term for persons whose gender identity, gender expression, or behavior does not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth.”

Notice the politicized language: A person’s sex is “assigned at birth.” Back in 2005, even the Human Rights Campaign referred instead to “birth sex” and “physical sex.”

The phrase “sex assigned at birth” is now favored because it makes room for “gender identity” as the real basis of a person’s sex.

In an expert declaration to a federal district court in North Carolina concerning H.B. 2, Dr. Deanna Adkins stated, “From a medical perspective, the appropriate determinant of sex is gender identity.” Adkins is a professor at Duke University School of Medicine and the director of the Duke Center for Child and Adolescent Gender Care (which opened in 2015).

Adkins argues that gender identity is not only the preferred basis for determining sex, but “the only medically supported determinant of sex.” Every other method is bad science, she claims: “It is counter to medical science to use chromosomes, hormones, internal reproductive organs, external genitalia, or secondary sex characteristics to override gender identity for purposes of classifying someone as male or female.”

This is a remarkable claim, not least because the argument recently was that gender is only a social construct, while sex is a biological reality. Now, activists claim that gender identity is destiny, while biological sex is the social construct.

Adkins doesn’t say if she would apply this rule to all mammalian species. But why should sex be determined differently in humans than in other mammals? And if medical science holds that gender identity determines sex in humans, what does this mean for the use of medicinal agents that have different effects on males and females? Does the proper dosage of medicine depend on the patient’s sex or gender identity?

But what exactly is this “gender identity” that is supposed to be the true medical determinant of sex? Adkins defines it as “a person’s inner sense of belonging to a particular gender, such as male or female.”

Note that little phrase “such as,” implying that the options are not necessarily limited to male or female. Other activists are more forthcoming in admitting that gender identity need not be restricted to the binary choice of male or female, but can include both or neither. The American Psychological Association, for example, defines “gender identity” as “a person’s internal sense of being male, female, or something else.”

Adkins asserts that being transgender is not a mental disorder, but simply “a normal developmental variation.” And she claims, further, that medical and mental health professionals who specialize in the treatment of gender dysphoria are in agreement with this view.

Transgender Catechism

These notions about sex and gender are now being taught to young children. Activists have created child-friendly graphics for this purpose, such as the “Genderbread Person.” The Genderbread Person teaches that when it comes to sexuality and gender, people have five different characteristics, each of them falling along a spectrum.

There’s “gender identity,” which is “how you, in your head, define your gender, based on how much you align (or don’t align) with what you understand to be the options for gender.” The graphic lists “4 (of infinite)” possibilities for gender identity: “woman-ness,” “man-ness,” “two-spirit,” or “genderqueer.”

The second characteristic is “gender expression,” which is “the way you present gender, through your actions, dress, and demeanor.” In addition to “feminine” or “masculine,” the options are “butch,” “femme,” “androgynous,” or “gender neutral.”

Third is “biological sex,” defined as “the physical sex characteristics you’re born with and develop, including genitalia, body shape, voice pitch, body hair, hormones, chromosomes, etc.”

The final two characteristics concern sexual orientation: “sexually attracted to” and “romantically attracted to.” The options include “Women/Females/Femininity” and “Men/Males/Masculinity.” Which seems rather binary.

The Genderbread Person tries to localize these five characteristics on the body: gender identity in the brain, sexual and romantic attraction in the heart, biological sex in the pelvis, and gender expression everywhere.

The Genderbread Person presented here is version 3.3, incorporating adjustments made in response to criticism of earlier versions. But even this one violates current dogma. Some activists have complained that the Genderbread Person looks overly male.

A more serious fault in the eyes of many activists is the use of the term “biological sex.” Time magazine drew criticism for the same transgression in 2014 after publishing a profile of Laverne Cox, the “first out trans person” to be featured on the cover.

At least the folks at Time got credit for trying to be “good allies, explaining what many see as a complicated issue,” wrote Mey Rude in an article titled “It’s Time for People to Stop Using the Social Construct of ‘Biological Sex’ to Defend Their Transmisogyny.” (It’s hard to keep up with the transgender moment.)

But Time was judged guilty of using “a simplistic and outdated understanding of biology to perpetuate some very dangerous ideas about trans women,” and failing to acknowledge that biological sex “isn’t something we’re actually born with, it’s something that doctors or our parents assign us at birth.”

Today, transgender “allies” in good standing don’t use the Genderbread Person in their classrooms, but opt for the “Gender Unicorn,” which was created by Trans Student Educational Resources. It has a body shape that doesn’t appear either male or female, and instead of a “biological sex” it has a “sex assigned at birth.”

Those are the significant changes to the Genderbread Person, and they were made so that the new graphic would “more accurately portray the distinction between gender, sex assigned at birth, and sexuality.”

According to Trans Student Education Resources, “Biological sex is an ambiguous word that has no scale and no meaning besides that it is related to some sex characteristics. It is also harmful to trans people. Instead, we prefer ‘sex assigned at birth’ which provides a more accurate description of what biological sex may be trying to communicate.”

The Gender Unicorn is the graphic that children are likely to encounter in school. These are the dogmas they are likely to be catechized to profess.

While activists claim that the possibilities for gender identity are rather expansive—man, woman, both, neither—they also insist that gender identity is innate, or established at a very young age, and thereafter immutable.

Dr. George Brown, a professor of psychiatry and a three-time board member of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, stated in his declaration to the federal court in North Carolina that gender identity “is usually established early in life, by the age of 2 to 3 years old.”

Addressing the same court, Adkins asserted that “evidence strongly suggests that gender identity is innate or fixed at a young age and that gender identity has a strong biological basis.” (At no point in her expert declaration did she cite any sources for any of her claims.)

Transgender Contradictions

If the claims presented in this essay strike you as confusing, you’re not alone. The thinking of transgender activists is inherently confused and filled with internal contradictions. Activists never acknowledge those contradictions. Instead, they opportunistically rely on whichever claim is useful at any given moment.

Here I’m talking about transgender activists. Most people who suffer from gender dysphoria are not activists, and many of them reject the activists’ claims. Many of them may be regarded as victims of the activists, as I show in my book.

Many of those who feel distress over their bodily sex know that they aren’t really the opposite sex, and do not wish to “transition.” They wish to receive help in coming to identify with and accept their bodily self. They don’t think their feelings of gender dysphoria define reality.

But transgender activists do. Regardless of whether they identify as “cisgender” or “transgender,” the activists promote a highly subjective and incoherent worldview.

On the one hand, they claim that the real self is something other than the physical body, in a new form of Gnostic dualism, yet at the same time they embrace a materialist philosophy in which only the material world exists. They say that gender is purely a social construct, while asserting that a person can be “trapped” in the wrong gender.

They say there are no meaningful differences between man and woman, yet they rely on rigid sex stereotypes to argue that “gender identity” is real, while human embodiment is not. They claim that truth is whatever a person says it is, yet they believe there’s a real self to be discovered inside that person.

They promote a radical expressive individualism in which people are free to do whatever they want and define the truth however they wish, yet they try ruthlessly to enforce acceptance of transgender ideology.

It’s hard to see how these contradictory positions can be combined. If you pull too hard on any one thread of transgender ideology, the whole tapestry comes unraveled. But here are some questions we can pose:

If gender is a social construct, how can gender identity be innate and immutable? How can one’s identity with respect to a social construct be determined by biology in the womb? How can one’s identity be unchangeable (immutable) with respect to an ever-changing social construct? And if gender identity is innate, how can it be “fluid”?

The challenge for activists is to offer a plausible definition of gender and gender identity that is independent of bodily sex.

Is there a gender binary or not? Somehow, it both does and does not exist, according to transgender activists. If the categories of “man” and “woman” are objective enough that people can identify as, and be, men and women, how can gender also be a spectrum, where people can identify as, and be, both, or neither, or somewhere in between?

What does it even mean to have an internal sense of gender? What does gender feel like? What meaning can we give to the concept of sex or gender—and thus what internal “sense” can we have of gender—apart from having a body of a particular sex?

Apart from having a male body, what does it “feel like” to be a man? Apart from having a female body, what does it “feel like” to be a woman? What does it feel like to be both a man and a woman, or to be neither?

The challenge for the transgender activist is to explain what these feelings are like, and how someone could know if he or she “feels like” the opposite sex, or neither, or both.

Even if trans activists could answer these questions about feelings, that still wouldn’t address the matter of reality. Why should feeling like a man—whatever that means—make someone a man? Why do our feelings determine reality on the question of sex, but on little else? Our feelings don’t determine our age or our height. And few people buy into Rachel Dolezal’s claim to identify as a black woman, since she is clearly not.

If those who identify as transgender are the sex with which they identify, why doesn’t that apply to other attributes or categories of being? What about people who identify as animals, or able-bodied people who identify as disabled? Do all of these self-professed identities determine reality? If not, why not?

And should these people receive medical treatment to transform their bodies to accord with their minds? Why accept transgender “reality,” but not trans-racial, trans-species, and trans-abled reality?

The challenge for activists is to explain why a person’s “real” sex is determined by an inner “gender identity,” but age and height and race and species are not determined by an inner sense of identity.

Of course, a transgender activist could reply that an “identity” is, by definition, just an inner sense of self. But if that’s the case, gender identity is merely a disclosure of how one feels. Saying that someone is transgender, then, says only that the person has feelings that he or she is the opposite sex.

Gender identity, so understood, has no bearing at all on the meaning of “sex” or anything else. But transgender activists claim that a person’s self-professed “gender identity” is that person’s “sex.”

The challenge for activists is to explain why the mere feeling of being male or female (or both or neither) makes someone male or female (or both or neither).

Gender identity can sound a lot like religious identity, which is determined by beliefs. But those beliefs don’t determine reality. Someone who identifies as a Christian believes that Jesus is the Christ. Someone who identifies as a Muslim believes that Muhammad is the final prophet. But Jesus either is or is not the Christ, and Muhammad either is or is not the final prophet, regardless of what anyone happens to believe.

So, too, a person either is or is not a man, regardless of what anyone—including that person—happens to believe. The challenge for transgender activists is to present an argument for why transgender beliefs determine reality.

Determining reality is the heart of the matter, and here too we find contradictions.

On the one hand, transgender activists want the authority of science as they make metaphysical claims, saying that science reveals gender identity to be innate and unchanging. On the other hand, they deny that biology is destiny, insisting that people are free to be who they want to be.

Which is it? Is our gender identity biologically determined and immutable, or self-created and changeable? If the former, how do we account for people whose gender identity changes over time? Do these people have the wrong sense of gender at some time or other?

And if gender identity is self-created, why must other people accept it as reality? If we should be free to choose our own gender reality, why can some people impose their idea of reality on others just because they identify as transgender?

The challenge for the transgender activist is to articulate some conception of truth as the basis for how we understand the common good and how society should be ordered.

As I document in depth in “When Harry Became Sally,” the claims of transgender activists are confusing because they are philosophically incoherent. Activists rely on contradictory claims as needed to advance their position, but their ideology keeps evolving, so that even allies and LGBT organizations can get left behind as “progress” marches on.

At the core of the ideology is the radical claim that feelings determine reality. From this idea come extreme demands for society to play along with subjective reality claims. Trans ideologues ignore contrary evidence and competing interests, they disparage alternative practices, and they aim to muffle skeptical voices and shut down any disagreement.

The movement has to keep patching and shoring up its beliefs, policing the faithful, coercing the heretics, and punishing apostates, because as soon as its furious efforts flag for a moment or someone successfully stands up to it, the whole charade is exposed. That’s what happens when your dogmas are so contrary to obvious, basic, everyday truths.

A transgender future is not the “right side of history,” yet activists have convinced the most powerful sectors of our society to acquiesce to their demands. While the claims they make are manifestly false, it will take real work to prevent the spread of these harmful ideas.  (read more)

Washington Post columnist George Will understandably is not most Republicans’ cup of tea considering his abandonment of the party, which started well before his hatred for Donald Trump became a thing.

But he wrote a column last week that deliciously ripped apart the “1619 Project” and the New York Times’ amplification of it, in the process enraging “woke” leftists who didn’t appreciate the inconvenient truths he told about the project’s creator Nikole Hannah-Jones’ flagrant rewriting of history.

In it, Will examined the central component of Nikole Hannah-Jones’ deeply flawed argument: That the basis for the American Revolution was to preserve slavery. That claim and many others she made have been discredited by scholars and historians alike, but because the New York Times published it and because she received so many seemingly prestigious accolades from the usual corners (including a Pulitizer prize) as a result, the “hate America” contingent of the Democratic party latched on to it as “further proof” that America was “systemically racist” from the start.

Because this myth persists, and because tenets of it in concert with CRT are being taught as subject matter on college campuses and in some public school classrooms as part of a larger plan by so-called progressives to radically transform America into something it’s not, Will decided to tackle the claim as well:

[Claim:] The war was supposedly ignited by a November 1775 British offer of freedom to Blacks who fled slavery and joined British forces. Well.

That offer came after increasingly volcanic American reactions to various British provocations: After the 1765 Stamp Act. After the 1770 Boston Massacre. After the 1773 Boston Tea Party. After the 1774 Coercive Acts (including closure of Boston’s port) and other events of “The Long Year of Revolution” (the subtitle of Mary Beth Norton’s “1774”). And after, in 1775, the April 19 battles of Lexington and Concord, the June 17 battle of Bunker Hill and George Washington on July 3 assuming command of the Continental Army.

Writing history is not like doing physics. But event A cannot have caused event B if B began before A.

Will also referenced comments by Gordon S. Wood, who he described as “today’s foremost scholar of America’s Founding.” At a recent speaking engagement, Wood suggested that “the New York Times has the history completely backwards,” pointing out that when the war started, Britain “was not threatening to abolish slavery in its empire” and that colonists in the north were forming abolition movements in 1776:

“It was the American colonists who were interested in abolitionism in 1776. … Not only were the northern states the first slaveholding governments in the world to abolish slavery, but the United States became the first nation in the world to begin actively suppressing the despicable international slave trade. The New York Times has the history completely backwards.”

Will concluded his piece by noting that the New York Times’ claim that American exceptionalism stems in large part from slavery and racism proves that “the 1619 Project’s historical illiteracy is not innocent ignorance.” At its core, Will correctly concluded that the purpose behind the project was to “service … progressivism’s agenda,” not to correct any alleged historical inaccuracies.

It did not take long for the Usual Suspects to start trotting out the race cards and related words like “white supremacy” in an attempt to deflect from his argument (perhaps because they couldn’t refute it):

Of course George Will demonizes 1619. He's part of the conservative establishment that upholds the "American Dream" myth where the white man built this utopia by himself w/ just "grit," meritocracy, & bootstrapping, w/ no acknowledgment of white supremacy's exploitation of POC.

— Wajahat Ali (@WajahatAli) December 17, 2021

[...] Melanie Sill, who was the executive editor of the Raleigh News and Observer at the time the Duke lacrosse rape allegations were made, also went after Will, claiming his column was “as intellectually dishonest as anything I’ve ever read,” saying “it’s a reminder that those who cannot be curious and reconsider beliefs should not be journalists”:

George Will has written the worst column I’ve seen from him, as intellectually dishonest as anything I’ve ever read. It’s not worth anyone’s time, and I won’t link it, but it’s a reminder that those who cannot be curious and reconsider beliefs should not be journalists.

— Melanie Sill (@melaniesill) December 17, 2021

It was an especially laughable attack when one considers her and her  former paper’s very central roles in perpetuating the rape hoax with daily unsubstantiated “reporting” that they later admitted relied too heavily on statements made by disgraced former District Attorney Mike Nifong.

This Twitter user summed up Will’s column and the leftist outrage on it perfectly:

The responses to George Will's critique of the 1619 Project prove two things:

(a) he's right
(b) the 1619 Project has attained the status of religious dogma

Sadly (b) indicates Hannah-Jones has succeeded.

No lie is too big if you really hate the US.https://t.co/HLkq7hGmX3

— Baxter Bentley (@BentleyBaxter) December 17, 2021

But even the biggest lies can be exposed, which is exactly what has happened with the continued pushback from critics of Hannah-Jones, the NY Times, and their project. And no matter where the debunking comes from, whether it’s from distinguished commentators and educators conservatives like or anti-Trump columnists they don’t, it’s something that needs to keep happening because radical leftists should not be allowed to get away with such a contemptuous attempt at rewriting American history and in the process completely (and deliberately) undoing its foundations. (read more)

In fact, it is an even bigger deal than it may appear at first glance because natural immunity acquired from having COVID is actually greatly superior to that afforded by the vaccines. As evidenced by the explosion in new COVID cases in highly vaccinated nations and U.S. states, vaccine immunity is increasingly proving to be illusory at best.

Professor Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins had this to say on the topic in a recent article he wrote in the Washington Post.

“More than 15 studies have demonstrated the power of immunity acquired by previously having the virus. A 700,000-person study from Israel two weeks ago found that those who had experienced prior infections were 27 times less likely to get a second symptomatic covid infection than those who were vaccinated. This affirmed a June 2021 Cleveland Clinic study of healthcare workers (who are often exposed to the virus), in which none who had previously tested positive for the coronavirus got reinfected. The study authors concluded that “individuals who have had SARS-CoV-2 infection are unlikely to benefit from covid-19 vaccination.” And in May, a Washington University study found that even a mild covid infection resulted in long-lasting immunity.”

Makary is not alone. Professor Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer for England, recently admitted as much. In discussing reasons why the Omicron variant was not as big an issue in South Africa as elsewhere, Whitty cited the fact that much of the population had already been exposed to the Delta variant and had COVID. In Whitty’s words, as a consequence, there “is more immunity in South Africa now.”

The reasons for the superiority of natural immunity are summarized well in this portion of an article by Dr. Mercola.

“The reason natural immunity is superior to vaccine-induced immunity is because viruses contain five different proteins. The COVID shot induces antibodies against just one of those proteins, the spike protein, and no T cell immunity. When you’re infected with the whole virus, you develop antibodies against all parts of the virus, plus memory T cells.

This also means natural immunity offers better protection against variants, as it recognizes several parts of the virus. If there are significant alternations to the spike protein, as with the Delta variant, vaccine-induced immunity can be evaded. Not so with natural immunity, as the other proteins are still recognized and attacked.

Not only that but the COVID jabs actually actively promote the production of variants for which they provide virtually no protection at all, while those with natural immunity do not cause variants and are nearly universally protected against them.

If we are to depend on vaccine-induced immunity, as public health officials are urging us to do, we’ll end up on a never-ending booster treadmill. Boosters will absolutely be necessary, as the shot offers such narrow protection against a single protein of the virus. Already, Moderna has publicly stated that the need for additional boosters is expected.” Dr. Mercola, Citizens Journal

At least half the American population has had COVID and cannot get the disease again. Their immunity against reinfection is demonstrably superior to that afforded by “vaccines,” which are failing dramatically all around us. Yet, this natural immunity continues to be ignored by the Biden administration and the “experts” around him.

There is no scientific basis for this. This has nothing to do with biology. It has to do with another subject you may have also studied in high school – economics. Big Pharma intends to make billions if not trillions from vaccinating you, revaccinating you, and forcing you to take “booster” shots for the rest of time. If we go down the road of recognizing natural immunity and face the fact that we are fast approaching herd immunity, all of that money goes away. The biggest payday in world history vanishes.

Natural immunity can’t be recognized. There is way too much money at stake. (read more)

Manchin made the comments during an interview on West Virginia MetroNews radio, after telling Fox News on Sunday he would not be able to vote for the $1.75 trillion Build Back Better bill.

Manchin said he would not say "the real reason" talks failed.

But when asked what that was, he said: "The bottom line is ... it's staff. It's staff purely. ... It's not the president. It's staff. And they drove some things and put some things out that were absolutely inexcusable."

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement on Sunday that Manchin's halting negotiations on the bill would represent a "sudden and inexplicable reversal in his position, and a breach of his commitments to the President and the Senator’s colleagues in the House and Senate."

Manchin's move prompted Goldman Sachs to lower its forecasts for U.S. economic growth [based on trillions in magic money].

A Manchin aide called the White House shortly before the senator's Fox interview, people familiar with the matter said. The White House was unable to reach the senator directly in response before he announced on air that he was done with the discussions.

Biden and Manchin spoke on Sunday night, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity, leading to some hope that talks can continue in the new year on cordial terms. (read more)

You said the mandates were fine "because you took the jab" allegedly "voluntarily" so you didn't care.

Well, guess what?  Now the booster mandates are starting.

Johns Hopscam has now announced that you must be boosted by February 1st in order to set foot on campus.

Which means for those of you who said "oh yeah, its ok": You were stupid, you were played, you believed it was one and done (or two and done) and no, it isn't, no it will never be and since you didn't destroy them the first time now you're ****ed in terms of being able to sue as well!

After you you consented to them having control over forcing you to take a medical procedure.

You gave up one of your most-sacred rights and now it has been rammed up your ass.

You were stupid and now you're going to pay for it.

The adverse events are racking up like cordwood.  Oh sure, they all say "it's not related."  Uh huh.  Go ahead, keep believing that line of bull****.

Even Pfizer admits that myocarditis from its jabs in young people is equally or more likely than getting hospitalized by ***** itself and that is without boosters.  What, you think the risk isn't at least additive and might be exponential?  Good luck with that.

I have zero sympathy of any sort for anyone who went along with the original bull**** or remained silent and a part of it if they decided on their own to take the jabs for their own personal reasons.  If you didn't put a stop to the mandate crap in your life, whether it school or work, you own this.  Every bit of it.  And you deserve every single risk and bad outcome that comes from it.

Pay attention New York, Chicago and elsewhere. (read more)

Point One – The “Build Back Better” agenda was never about anything except radical climate change legislation.  Once you accept that, now admitted, baseline, things start to become much clearer.

Point Two – The “Build Back Better” phrase came from the World Economic Forum and was promoted by a multitude of international leaders and left-wing organizations.   That reality then brings up the most important point.  To get to “building back better”, you first need to destroy something.  That thing they needed to destroy was how the global economic dependency on carbon-based fuel supplies (oil, gas, coal, etc.).

Point Three – In order to destroy the ‘something of that scale’, the energy program for the entire world, something massive is needed to fundamentally change the entire world approach toward energy production.  Something is needed to create the crisis that provides the origin for the process to initiate.

Point Four – That triggering mechanism was/is SARS-CoV-2, or what we now call COVID-19 and all variants therein.

There you have it.  That’s the summary soup to nuts explanation of why a virus was created, and the subsequent panic pushing to create social structures that would facilitate the global acceptance of an entire new economic system that would be designed around saving the planet [from a fictitious threat].

Through the prism of that motive, all irreconcilable panic-selling from government entities starts to make sense.

You don’t have to be a true believer at the top of the climate change pyramid to see the massive financial opportunities created by an agenda to structurally change the entire foundation of energy use on a global scale.

Factually, I would be surprised if the biggest people within Klaus Schwab’s WEF believed in anything even resembling climate change.  However, they would see the opportunity for a massive shift in global wealth, and with that comes a myriad of mechanisms and more opportunities to control it.

As I have repeated on these pages for a decade, everything is downstream from the economics of everything.  The love of money and power is at the root of all evil.

Fascism was traditionally defined as an authoritarian government working hand-in-glove with corporations to achieve objectives. A centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, using severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.

That system of government didn’t work in the long-term, because the underlying principles of free people reject government authoritarianism.  Fascist governments collapsed, and the corporate beneficiaries were nulled and scorned for participating.  Then, along came a new approach to achieve the same objective.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) was created to use the same fundamental associations of government and corporations.  Only this time it was the multinational corporations who organized to tell the government(s) what to do.  The WEF was organized for multinational corporations to assemble and tell the various governments how to cooperate with them, in order to be rewarded by them.   Corporatism was/is the outcome.  The government now doing what the multinationals tell them to do, and in return the multinationals install the compliant politicians

Fascism, the cooperation between government and corporations, is still the underlying premise; the World Economic Forum simply flipped the internal dynamic putting the corporations in charge of handing out the instructions.

What results is a slightly modified definition of fascism:

…A massive multinational corporate conglomerate; telling a centralized autocratic government leader what to do; and using severe economic and social regimentation as a control mechanism; combined with forcible suppression of opposition by both the corporations and government.

Doesn’t that define our current reality, especially in the era of COVID?

The instructions from the multinationals to government would be called “Build Back Better”.

The triggering mechanism to create the crisis (BBB is designed to solve), is called SARS-CoV-2.

The program to control backlash and ensure sheeple compliance from various populations would be called “a vaccine.”

Driving fear of the Rona would be needed and disproportionate to the risk itself.   This keeps backlash in line (lockdowns, regulations etc).  If any opposition to the agenda begins to mount, the same people pushing the originating narrative then create and push a variant.  The variant, real or imagined, is then pushed forward in order to get compliance (acceptance of the BBB objective) back on track.

In my opinion, structurally changing the global economy around the threat of climate change is what this entire Coronavirus mess is all about.  They needed the virus to trigger the crisis.  The crisis then creates the roadmap to rebuilding all society -on a global level- away from fossil fuels.

Put another way: the motive behind the origin of the Coronavirus is climate change. (read more)

This reaction from the White House is exactly what the communist Democrats do whenever they are rebuked.  We should anticipate the extremely angry Biden administration will retaliate with even stronger economic punishment against all Americans this Tuesday.

WHITE HOUSE – “Senator Manchin’s comments this morning on FOX are at odds with his discussions this week with the President, with White House staff, and with his own public utterances. Weeks ago, Senator Manchin committed to the President, at his home in Wilmington, to support the Build Back Better framework that the President then subsequently announced. Senator Manchin pledged repeatedly to negotiate on finalizing that framework “in good faith.”

On Tuesday of this week, Senator Manchin came to the White House and submitted—to the President, in person, directly—a written outline for a Build Back Better bill that was the same size and scope as the President’s framework, and covered many of the same priorities. While that framework was missing key priorities, we believed it could lead to a compromise acceptable to all. Senator Manchin promised to continue conversations in the days ahead, and to work with us to reach that common ground. If his comments on FOX and written statement indicate an end to that effort, they represent a sudden and inexplicable reversal in his position, and a breach of his commitments to the President and the Senator’s colleagues in the House and Senate.

Senator Manchin claims that this change of position is related to inflation, but the think tank he often cites on Build Back Better—the Penn Wharton Budget Institute—issued a report less than 48 hours ago that noted the Build Back Better Act will have virtually no impact on inflation in the short term, and, in the long run, the policies it includes will ease inflationary pressures. Many leading economists with whom Senator Manchin frequently consults also support Build Back Better.

Build Back Better lowers costs that families pay. It will reduce what families pay for child care. It will reduce what they pay for prescription drugs. It will lower health care premiums. And it puts a tax cut in the pockets of families with kids. If someone is concerned about the impact that higher prices are having on families, this bill gives them a break.

Senator Manchin cited deficit concerns in his statement. But the plan is fully paid for, is the most fiscally responsible major bill that Congress has considered in years, and reduces the deficit in the long run. The Congressional Budget Office report that the Senator cites analyzed an unfunded extension of Build Back Better. That’s not what the President has proposed, not the bill the Senate would vote on, and not what the President would support. Senator Manchin knows that: The President has told him that repeatedly, including this week, face to face.

Likewise, Senator Manchin’s statement about the climate provisions in Build Back Better are wrong. Build Back Better will produce a job-creating clean energy future for this country—including West Virginia.

Just as Senator Manchin reversed his position on Build Back Better this morning, we will continue to press him to see if he will reverse his position yet again, to honor his prior commitments and be true to his word. (read more)

This is going to get ugly. (read more)

In my opinion, Manchin is positioning himself for a Democrat presidential race.

It is not coincidental that Manchin makes this statement today, on Fox News, as polling shows massive drops in support for Joe Biden.  Manchin knows he is sitting in a spotlight of an inflection point.  Manchin is politically astute and cunning to the ways of politics.  Manchin comes across as meek and mild-tempered, a man of reasonable disposition… but that doesn’t accurately portray his cunning.  This is his chance to make a big move.

Senator Joe Manchin also knows that Democrats are going to implode, as the Obama allied communist puppet masters behind Biden have a one term agenda to exploit their control over the dementia patient currently occupying the White House.  Manchin knows the collapse of the Democrat Party is his opportunity.  He also knows THE REALITY behind the released Marist Poll [data here] showing a majority of non-communist Democrats want nothing to do with the senile occupant of the White House.

Manchin is again making a BIG club move by positioning himself as reasonable right now.

Manchin is testing his strength.

Manchin will likely be the #1 contender in 2024, and he knows it.

Manchin is cunning.

Manchin is not only reaching out to ‘moderate’ registered Democrats….

Manchin is reaching the minds of registered Republicans.

Manchin is a very worthy adversary… (read more)

• gain-of-function research on coronaviruses
• Color Revolution that wracked the U.S.
• Pandemic of Lies based on meaningless “cases” not genuine infections
• overreaction to SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19 including masks, lockdowns and clot shots

Out of all of the thousands of January 6’s protesters, and the thousands of hours of publicly available footage from that fateful day, Ray Epps has turned out to be perhaps the only person nailed dead to rights confessing on camera to plotting a pre-planned attack on the Capitol. On both January 5 and January 6, Epps announced multiple times, at multiple locations, his upcoming plot to breach the US Capitol. He then spent hours attempting to recruit hundreds of others to join him. On top of it all, Epps was seen leading key people and managing key aspects of the initial breach of the Capitol grounds himself.

It would be one thing if Epps’s repeated calls on January 5 to “go into the Capitol” had simply amounted to bluster. But Epps followed through on his stated mission to shepherd others inside. In clips 4-6 of the above compilation, we see Epps actively orchestrate elements of the very first breach of the Capitol barricades at 12:50 p.m, while Trump still had 20 minutes left in his rally speech.

It is noteworthy that this Ray Epps breach occurs just one minute after Capitol Police began responding to reports of two “pipe bombs” located at DNC and GOP headquarters, respectively. Rather conveniently, the already-handicapped Capitol Police thus had still-fewer resources with which to respond to the barricade breach in question.

While the “pipe bombs” turned out to be a dud, the Ray Epps breach proved fateful. Today, the official stories told by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the US Justice Department all depict the apparent Ray Epps-orchestrated 12:50 p.m. initial breach of metal barricades as the “Big Bang” event of January 6.

In large part, this description is hardly an exaggeration. Indeed, it was the 12:50 p.m. breach of the Capitol grounds, in conjunction with a handful of suspicious individuals ripping down fencing and signage, that set in motion the conditions allowing for 1/6 to turn from a rally into a riot. 

In this report, we will blow open this network of still-unindicted key operators who appear to have been at work either with or around Ray Epps during the initial Capitol grounds breach. You, dear reader, will be scandalized — though perhaps unsurprised — to learn that none of the actors covered in this report have received attention in the mainstream press, despite their active and indispensable roles in the events of 1/6.

As we explained in detail in our previous report, the FBI originally put Ray Epps’s face on its Capitol Violence “Most Wanted List” on January 8, 2021, just two days after 1/6. They offered a cash reward for information leading to his arrest. In fact, rank-and-file FBI agents initially deemed Epps’s role as an apparent riot organizer so important that they named him Suspect #16—one of the first 20 high-profile FBI targets in a database now packed with more than 500 suspects.

Then, six months later on June 30, 2021, both Revolver News and The New York Times published inconvenient stories that encouraged a more aggressive interrogation of the “Ray Epps third rail,” leading reasonable people to wonder why this publicly identified man on the Most Wanted List still had no charges filed against him.

The FBI responded to these important media stories the very next day. But their response was to quietly purge all online Ray Epps files from their website, then switch to a posture of “What? Who? Ray Epps? Never heard of him.”

Agents of the FBI Field Office in Phoenix (where Epps lives) have gone so far as to explicitly deny knowledge that Ray Epps even exists. Instead of pursuing Epps, FBI agents have instead pursued journalists who had the temerity to ask Epps in person if he was a government operative. “I understand that, but I can’t say anything,” is all Epps would tell them.

[...]

Synthesis: We Now Know How They Did It

It increasingly appears that we now know how rogue elements of federal agencies pulled off the January 6 Fedsurrection. If the Ray Epps Breach Team hypothesis is correct, a group of government-sponsored provocateurs were all instructed separately by handlers to arrive at the Peace Monument before 12:45 p.m., where they front-ran the arrival of the Proud Boys, who would serve as the scapegoat for the breach. Then, post-breach, key operators such as Epps and ScaffoldCommander directed the crowd to “move forward,” while others removed barricades, fencing and signage.

There is simply no way the FBI did not know the Proud Boys march would end up at the Peace Monument just after 12:45 p.m. That march was led by Proud Boy leader Joe Biggs. Biggs is an FBI informant who says he “spoke often” with his bureau contacts. Biggs’s Proud Boy boss Enrique Tarrio was also an FBI informant. And the FBI was reading their cell phone group chat messages ahead of time.

Epps, for his part, may not have understood any of the bigger picture. If the former Oath Keeper state chapter president is indeed a longtime government informant, as it fully appears, he may be very much used to getting text messages from an agency contact telling him “Hey, go to this right-wing event and test the crowd for troublemakers. We’re looking to flush out the crazies.” Certainly, Epps made it sound like he was no novice to crowd control at large-scale protest events. His Facebook profile picture was a previous mass march on Washington, and he was fond of telling those around him he’s “been doing this a long time.”

[...]

Finally, Ray Epps, if you’re reading this: We know that you are conflicted, and that you want the truth to come out. You can still be a hero.

Simply come forward, and tell the world your story.

What really happened on January 6? (read more)

Over the last 18 months, many progressives and Democrats have argued that public concern over crime, particularly in liberal cities, doesn’t reflect reality. “Overall crime [in San Francisco] was down 25 percent from 2019,” noted Washington Post columnist Radley Balko in July, “and all major categories of crime remained well below their five-year average.” Said progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) earlier this month, “A lot of these allegations of organized retail theft are not actually panning out. I believe a Walgreens in California cited it, but the data didn’t back it up.” And, last week, Philadelphia’s progressive District Attorney, Larry Krasner, said, “We don’t have a crisis of lawlessness, we don’t have a crisis of crime, we don’t have a crisis of violence.”

But homicides, shoplifting, and crime in general did indeed rise in 2020, and rose even more in 2021, including well above the five-year average. Homicides, the worst of all crimes, increased 30 percent nationwide in 2020. Whether or not shoplifting was the sole or even main reason Walgreens has been closing stores in San Francisco, there is no question they were being regularly ransacked by shoplifters, harming revenues, and putting employees in danger. And burglaries increased 50 percent in San Francisco between 2019 and 2021, while brazen “hot prowl” burglaries, where residents are at home while criminals steal, doubled.

It’s true that some crimes declined in 2020, and that many crimes are still far below what they were in the 1980s and 1990s. The national murder rate in 2020 was still 40% lower than where it hovered in the 1980s and 1990s. There were 175 homicides in Oakland in 1992 in and 102 in 2020. As for San Francisco, wrote Balko, “Murders did increase in 2020, but only by 14 percent (from 41 to 47) from a 56-year low in 2019.”

But over two-thirds of America’s largest cities will have more homicides in 2021 than in 2020, and at least 13 big cities will set all time records for homicides, including Philadelphia, Austin, St. Paul, Baton Rouge, Rochester, Toledo, Indianapolis, Portland, Minneapolis, Louisville, Columbus, Albuquerque, and Tucson.

And many of the crimes that declined in 2020 did so due to covid, and have since increased. Car break-ins in San Francisco declined temporarily from reduced tourism in 2020 but have since skyrocketed to new heights, reaching 3,000 in November. Many San Francisco business leaders and residents say they no longer bother reporting crimes. Now, big cities are seeing a wave of spectacular smash-and-grab burglaries of luxury stores like Louis Vuitton by criminal gangs.

The downplaying of crime by progressive Democrats has provoked a backlash from moderate Democrats. Last Friday, former Philadelphia mayor, Michael Nutter, who is black, accused Krasner, who is white [Jewish], of “white privilege” and “white wokeness… to have so little regard for human lives lost, many of them black and brown.”

Higher crime, and the downplaying of it by progressives, could hurt Democrats in 2022 and 2024 Congressional and presidential elections. In 2020, more voters said they trusted Republicans more than Democrats on law enforcement and criminal justice. Since then, crime has worsened. The share of Americans who say they support Biden’s handling of crime declined from 43 percent in October to 36 percent last week. And the percentage of Americans who say crime in their local area is getting worse rose from 38 to 51 percent between 2020 and 2021.

[...] Vaccine hesitancy is not driven by pure opposition to vaccines in/of themselves; rather the commonsense hesitancy is driven by the reality of an mRNA vaccine potentially not being reversible if any long-term negative outcome was to eventually surface.

The unvaccinated population are essentially a real world control group, and in the interest of public disclosure, I am a member of that group.

Specific to the United States, we must also remember there is a large number, tens-of-millions of Americans, who have watched in real time how various institutions of government have been revealed to be corrupt.   Never before, in recent memory, have so many people lost trust in government institutions as a result of sunlight upon them.

Institutions including the U.S. Dept of Justice, the FBI and the various intelligence agencies, as well as corporate media, the U.S. education network, and now the medical establishment -writ large- have seen stunning collapses in trust and credibility.

The impact of the collapse in trust of those institutions is going to reverberate for generations. The issue of whether anything resembling their prior credibility ever being achieved again is an open-ended question for the next several generations.

Watching the metastatic virus of corruption and corporate influence infect the institutions of government is also not a unique issue for the United States.  Globally, one only has to glance around at the visible protests to see that trust in almost all government is now at its lowest point in memory.  That reality only provides more reason to doubt the vaccination rates being reported by those same corporate/government institutions.

The “we are doing it for your health” talking point seems absolutely ridiculous when you contrast that claim against the harm caused by the COVID dictates.  A solid argument can be made that the popular government deployed solution, totalitarian oppressions, has been far more detrimental than the virus itself.

Put all of that together with the visible anger amid the daily protests on almost every continent, and yeah, it makes sense to read that these vaccination rates are wildly over accounted by the government entities and institutions who have demanded them. (read more)