The Sacred War in 8 Languages
The Sacred War – In Eight Languages (22:32 min)
Monthly Archives: February 2022
The Ukraine – Stop NATO’s Fascist State – Communist Party of the Russian Federation
IT IS TIME TO PUT A STOP TO NATO’S ACTIONS TO TURN UKRAINE INTO A FASCIST STATE
February 22, 2022
The situation on the border between Ukraine and the Donbass republics has deteriorated to the limit. Ukrainian armed units are intensifying the shelling of the territories of the DPR and LPR creating the need for a mass evacuation of the population. Simultaneously the West and pro-Western and nationalist Ukrainian media outlets are stepping up the information war against Russia. The situation obviously points to close coordination of military provocations and information aggression.
The US President is more and more openly masterminding the dangerous adventures. Biden personally announces mythical dates of the start of Russia’s war against Ukraine, comments on clashes in Donbass and reprimands Zelensky now for saying that he sees no signs of Russia’s preparations for aggression, now for making an ill-timed trip to the Munich Security Conference. In other words, Washington purposefully provokes growing tensions in Russia-Ukraine relations.
The Central Committee of the CPRF has repeatedly noted that the aim of the US authorities and their London co-thinkers is final enslavement of Ukraine and bleeding Russia white. Simultaneously the project of undermining the economic potential of the European Union and diminishing its influence in the modern world is being pursued. War in the center of Europe, forced sanctions against Russia, and decline of economic activity in the EU would increase the competitive advantages of the USA. Washington, growing weaker in its global competition with socialist China, seeks to solve its own problems by wrecking the economies of its NATO allies. Today, those who play according to Anglo-Saxon rules habitually subject Russia to a barrage of accusations and “do not notice” the provocative actions of official Kiev. The fact that Ukraine is being step-by-step turned into a Bandera state has long been ignored. Western leaders pretend that they do not know the meaning and spirit of the Nuremberg Trial decisions. Big business in the US and Europe, which connived at Hitler’s coming to power, is today ready to connive at bloodshed and aggression. In the middle of the last century humankind paid for such policy with millions of human lives. The Soviet people alone lost 27 million lives of its men and women in the fight against Fascism.
The CPRF is convinced that the West’s military blackmail must get a robust answer in the shape of Russia’s firm stand in defense of the civilian population of Donbass and punishment of aggressors. Putting a stop to the West’s actions aimed at turning Ukraine into a Fascist state is emerging as the key task of the world community. The situation prompts the following complex of emergency measures.
First. It is necessary to help the children, women and old people – all the refugees from Donbass — who seek shelter from the war on Russian territory. We call on everyone to render them all the assistance they need. This work must involve the bodies of state power, parties and movements, enterprises and organizations and citizens of our country.
Second. The appeal of the State Duma to the President of the RF to recognize the independence of the DPR and LPR is becoming ever more relevant. Today such a decision is emerging as the key to curbing the aggression against the two republics and to protecting their populations.
Third. That Washington is implementing a multi-pronged plan to enslave Ukraine, demonize Russia and weaken Europe has become perfectly clear. There is no point in hoping for a dialog with the heirs of Bandera and Shukhevich, especially considering that they have powerful patrons. A series of measures must be taken to coerce the initiators of mass bloodshed into peace.
Fourth. On the international arena the time has come to launch a decisive political offensive against any attempts at rehabilitation of Fascism. On the international arena the Russian authorities should use all the influence our country has at international organizations to that end. In mounting anti-Fascist and anti-war movements we propose to use the whole arsenal of bi-lateral and multi-lateral interaction with other countries, and make wide use of parliamentary and people diplomacy.
Everyone should be aware that democratic mechanisms in Ukraine have been abolished. After the 2014 state coup real policy on its territory is increasingly dictated by aggressive nationalist bands. Representing an absolute terrorist minority, they hold Ukrainian people in fear and impose rules of behavior on members of the political establishment. This accounts for the political transformation of Vladimir Zelensky. Elected by Ukrainians as the president of peace in Donbass and normalization of relations with Russia he became a vehicle of the opposite kind of policy.
In the current situation, the task of liberating Ukraine from the Bandera dictatorship cannot be solved by the Ukrainian people itself. The country’s civilian population is still partly able to express its opinion through what remains of parliamentary procedures, but it cannot oppose the forces of terror which are armed to the teeth. The task of denazification of Ukraine must become the key concern of the world community.
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The Sacred War – Священная война
As the US turns its Back on Western Classics, China Embraces Them – by John Mac Ghllion – 23 Feb 2022
n 2019, the Society for Classical Studies, a non-profit North American scholarly organization devoted to all aspects of Greek and Roman civilization, held a rather memorable conference in San Diego. Titled “The Future of Classics,” panelists were asked for their opinions on “the diminution of our future role” in society. One of the panelists, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, an associate professor of classics at Princeton who researches and teaches the Roman Republic and early Empire, wasted no time in making his point, calling for all Classics to die “as swiftly as possible.” Peralta, a black academic, criticized Classics for their failure to represent non-whites, a criticism he still voices to this day. In May of 2021, Princeton caved into Peralta’s demands, and agreed to remove Greek and Latin course requirements for classics students in an effort to combat institutional racism.
As authors at The New Criterion noted: “Woke academics like Padilla want to cancel all that. All classics scholars, he has insisted, have a ‘responsibility . . . to race the discipline.’ Martin Luther King, Jr., taught that what matters is not the color of your skin but the content of your character. Padilla joins with the Black Lives Matter crowd in reversing that dictum.” As more US institutes of merit continue to self-flagellate and cancel the Classics, other countries start to embrace them. One of those countries happens to be China.What do we lose when we lose the Classics? Perspective. More specifically, historical perspective.
In a recent, truly eye-opening piece for SupChina, writer Chang Che outlines the many ways in which Chinese students are falling in love with the Classics. As Che notes, “China looks like an improbable place to find ‘new perspectives’ in the Classics.” However, “in the past few decades, its universities have grown into bastions of curiosity about the West and its traditions.” The irony, according to the author, “is palpable,” with “patriotic fervor” growing, and nationalists “more confident and dismissive of Western critics.” But “enter a humanities classroom and one is as likely to find students reciting speeches by Cicero as reading lines of Marx.”
What is going on here? After all, this is China, a country known for the promotion of strict ideologies, not open minds and Socratic dialogue. Not only are a generation of Chinese students studying the classics, they are also learning “to read and write Latin and ancient Greek,” according to Che.
Why? All in a hope of understanding the teachings and philosophies that shaped the western world. In other words, the Chinese are turning to the Classics to gain some historical perspective. To understand others, we must walk in their shoes, or at least attempt to. The Chinese seem to understand that.
The importance of Greek literature cannot be overstated. The west is a product of their great minds. The Greeks made important contributions to a number of fields like philosophy and mathematics, medicine, and astronomy. Greek culture played a huge role in shaping the Roman Empire. Instead of dismissing what the Greeks created, and attempting to save the Classics from whiteness, how about dissecting their teachings and learning from their mistakes (as well as their countless triumphs)?
In the US, sadly, the Classics empire is in decline. Fewer students are enrolling, and because of this classics departments are closing their doors. What do we lose when we lose the Classics? Perspective. More specifically, historical perspective. Right now, that’s the last thing American students need to be losing.
If in doubt, let me point you in the direction of recent test scores; American students are getting worse at history (as well as geography and civics). Only 15 percent of 8th-graders are proficient in history. That’s US history. One shudders to think what their grasp of world history is like. As the author Natalie Wexler wrote last year, many American “teenagers may not know what the American Revolution was all about, how a city differs from a state, or how to locate the United States on a map of the world.” Wexler believes that “it’s clear many Americans are unaware of basic facts about the world.”
The United States has become a largely unserious country. Now, it’s becoming even more ignorant. How is a poorly-educated unserious country expected to compete with China? This is a serious question, especially when one recognizes that China is the world’s smartest country based on test scores in reading, math, and science–the basic ingredients for success. The US is not even in the top ten. The film “Idiocracy” was not a comedy; it was a prophecy of things to come.
Of course, this is not to say that education in China is flawless. Far from it. Heavy on propaganda, children are drip-fed unhealthy doses of misinformation from an early age. But at least Chinese propaganda is designed to benefit the country, not destroy it. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is desperately trying to create a more uniform, national identity.
In the US, meanwhile, kids, especially white kids, are being told that they are the products of original sin. They are sinners living in a sinful nation. Everything appears to be racist. The Classics. Math. Standard English. Even fruit. There is something entirely disheartening about a country like China, headed by the CCP, embracing great literature from the west, while supposedly the greatest country in the world turns its back on the very things that helped make America great in the first place: philosophy, reason, and logic.
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John Mac Ghlionn is a psychosocial researcher and essayist. His work has been published, among others, by the New York Post, Sydney Morning Herald, Newsweek, National Review, and The Spectator US. He covers psychology and social relations, and has a keen interest in social dysfunction and media manipulation. Follow him on Twitter, @ghlionn
RFK, Jr.’s ‘The Real Anthony Fauci’ Is a Record-Smashing Bestseller — But Mainstream Media Pretends It Doesn’t Exist
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s record-smashing bestseller, “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health,” demolishes the public images of Dr. Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates. But the corporate establishment has circled the wagons to censor it — by pretending it doesn’t exist.
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Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s record-smashing bestseller, “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health,” demolishes the public images — piously promoted by corporate media — of Dr. Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates.
Unfortunately, however, you won’t be able to read a review of Kennedy’s book in major media. That’s because the corporate establishment has circled the wagons to censor it — by pretending it doesn’t exist.
But it does exist. The book surged to #1 on Amazon.com even before it hit the bookstores, and it swept the bestseller lists of the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA TODAY and Publishers Weekly — none of which will even mention that the book was published, let alone review it.
It seems we are witnessing a mind-boggling first in U.S. book publishing history — when the hottest runaway bestseller of the season can’t even get its name mentioned in any major newspaper, TV or cable news program anywhere in the 50 states.
Say hello to a new kind of suppression: censorship by oblivion — brazen, vicious, ugly and cowardly.
This type of censorship subverts your right to make up your own mind after hearing both sides of a controversy.
Instead, it simply labels the side it doesn’t like as “misinformation” and keeps you from hearing it at all.
But is the censorship working?
Astonishingly, given how much establishment firepower was lined up to crush this book, it is not working.
Against all odds, the disturbing portrait Kennedy paints in “The Real Anthony Fauci” led the book to sell a record-breaking 110,000 copies in its first week. Through word of mouth, sales have reached more than 900,000 copies.
Do all those readers believe they are getting something they cannot get anywhere else?
“Yes,” Kennedy said. “They’re getting the truth.”
Whether or not you agree with everything you read in “The Real Anthony Fauci,” you will have to agree that it does not pull punches or play with euphemisms. The book paints an unsettling picture of Fauci as corrupt and cynically focused on amassing power and money (he is the highest-paid employee of the U.S. government, earning more than the president and four-star generals).
Kennedy’s book portrays Fauci as a power-hungry bureaucrat who has pursued a cynical agenda for more than 50 years, during which his reckless ambition and collusion with Big Pharma have needlessly sickened, crippled and caused the death of millions of Americans.
Is that dark portrait of Fauci accurate — or even fair?
That is a question that Fauci’s many admirers in government, industry, science and medicine should be able to answer with a resounding “No.” They should be able to bury Kennedy’s book under a mountain of indisputable facts that expose it as a false and slanderous assault on a great man and noble public servant.
So one might think. But one would be wrong.
Legions of Fauci adorers have indeed rushed to defend Fauci, but not by rebutting or exposing any fact in Kennedy’s book as false or slanderous.
In fact, Fauci’s defenders don’t address the facts in Kennedy’s book at all, let alone try to rebut his accusations.
Instead, as if they were all singing from the same hymnal, they just call Kennedy names — “anti-vaxxer,” “conspiracy theorist,” “the dumbest Kennedy” — and then bask smugly in the warm applause they receive from the very media that refuse to acknowledge Kennedy’s book even exists.
Does something about this smell fishy?
According to The Washington Times, “The book is flying off the shelves even though technology platforms refuse to carry its advertising [and] mainstream media outlets won’t touch it.”
According to Kennedy’s publisher, the fix is in.
Tony Lyons, president and publisher of Skyhorse (Kennedy’s publisher), said, in a tone so frustrated and furious he can barely get the words out:
“I defy you to find a single case where the No. 1 bestselling book in America over a 16-day period has not been mentioned in one mainstream newspaper in the country.
“We pitched Bobby Kennedy to all of the mainstream media outlets — television, newspapers — and none of those places have even asked to see a copy of the book … So they don’t care about the content, and they’re not trying to refute any of the claims.”
In other words, no need for you to decide whether Kennedy is right or wrong about Fauci. Your overlords have already decided for you, and spared you the mental distress of encountering any information to the contrary.
A few paragraphs earlier, I characterized this as censorship by oblivion. It is also censorship by asphyxiation.
In other words, why stir up public resentment by preventing a dangerous book from being published? Or waste energy (and credibility) trying to rebut it?
Much smarter to let it be published — then starve it of oxygen by preventing it from ever being seen, heard, written about or discussed in any major medium of information or communication.
Perplexingly, Fauci himself seems unwilling or unable to seriously address, let alone rebut, any of the facts or accusations in Kennedy’s book.
Like his defenders, Fauci’s idea of a “rebuttal” is to call Kennedy names, or label him “a disturbed individual.
Here is a typical Fauci “rebuttal” when asked by an interviewer about the accusations in Kennedy’s book:
“I just think he’s a very disturbed individual. And I … I don’t like to have to say that, but it’s very, very clear. And it’s a shame because he comes from such an extraordinarily distinguished family, many members of whom I know personally, and I was very close to Senator Ted Kennedy, who was such an extraordinary person and a real warrior for public health … and to have RFK Jr. just spouting things that make absolutely no sense.”
Of course, that is not a rebuttal. It is an attempt to change the subject from accusations against Fauci to alleged defects in Kennedy’s character — or, in the above example, his mental health.
When asked by the same interviewer if Fauci and his family are receiving death threats, Fauci replied:
“Oh, the answer is yes … when you have the inflammatory statements [from] people like RFK Jr., and some of the Fox media personalities … And when they do that publicly, that’s when I get more death threats and people harass me, my wife and my children.”
Again, Fauci deftly pivots away from the charges against him in Kennedy’s book in order to make the irrelevant and inflammatory claim that Kennedy’s book is responsible for death threats against Fauci’s wife and children.
This kind of “rebuttal” reminds one of the knee-jerk response one gets from the Anti-Defamation League (or members of Congress who fear being primaried by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) whenever Israel is criticized.
If a news report says that an Israeli military attack on a Palestinian civilian area killed a large number of non-combatant women and children, the facts are never denied or even addressed.
Instead, the person or news source reporting these facts is accused of being “anti-Semitic” … a “Holocaust denier” … or “self-hating Jew.”
Result? The despicable, lying, Jew-hater (or “self-hating Jew”) is ridiculed, reviled and routed. Case closed.
Which is exactly what happens when Fauci is attacked. His defenders do not address the charges — they just name-call the accuser an “anti-vaxxer” or “conspiracy theorist.”
The massive circling of the wagons by mainstream media, corporate CEOs, Big Pharma, the White House, members of Congress, the American Medical Association, World Health Organization, Center for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency — in short, the entire deep state — to crush this book into oblivion, is not just astonishing, it is also alarming.
Why? Because one seldom knows when censorship by oblivion is taking place. That’s what makes it so deadly.
Another line of attack against Kennedy’s book — one that frees Fauci’s defenders from having to actually rebut its facts — is to point to how much approval and publicity the book is getting from Trump voters, from FOX News anchors like Tucker Carlson and from the right wing in general.
The inference you are supposed to draw, of course, is that if Trump, FOX and all those right-wing “deplorables” love this book, then every intelligent person ought to hate it.
In other words, whatever the “bad guys” say, real Americans should do the opposite.
Given that perverse logic, I shudder at the bloody consequences if, one day, Trump ever took it into his head to say he thinks it’s a bad idea to lick the edge of a sharp knife with one’s tongue.
What factual errors and disinformation have been discovered in Kennedy’s book?
Attackers claim Kennedy’s book is full of errors. Perhaps it is. But they never say what those errors are, only that Kennedy is a liar or mentally disturbed.
For example, this hit piece in the New York Post says:
“The only thing RFK Jr. is successful at, it seems, is lowering the bar for atrocious behavior and the deliberate spread of misinformation.”
If that were true, it would be a black mark against the book. But the author, Maureen Callahan, never identifies the “atrocious behavior” or “misinformation.”
Like other Kennedy attackers, Callahan considers it sufficient simply to smear Kennedy’s character.
So she calls him “the left’s most prominent anti-vaxxer” and for good measure tells you that another Kennedy male is “a sexual assaulter or rapist, or left a young woman paralyzed for life, or to die alone in a shallow body of water.”
Although none of that has anything to do with Kennedy or his book, the author of this hit piece clearly hopes you will think it does.
By the way, although Kennedy’s critics keep calling him an “anti-vaxxer,” he is not. He is only “anti” unsafe and ineffective vaccines.
As Kennedy said in a Town & Country Magazine interview:
“If you get a single injection, and it was safe and it gave you protection from COVID for life, of course I would take it [empasis added], as I think everybody would.”
His attackers know that, of course, but truth is not their goal. The goal, instead, is to destroy Kennedy and his book by any means possible, in order to protect Fauci.
But wait! That is not accurate. I misspoke.
The many powerful forces that have united to crush Kennedy and his book did not come together to protect Fauci. It seems they came together to protect themselves, and the system of exploitation and control that Fauci has so loyally served for 50 years.
Perhaps they fear that if Fauci falls, they will be dragged down with him. For even though the title of Kennedy’s book names only Anthony Fauci, its reach encompasses virtually every facet of what has now come to be called “the deep state.”
Kennedy’s deconstruction of Fauci’s near-mythic image as “America’s Doctor,” and that of Bill Gates as “the world’s most admired person” (for allegedly donating billions to charity with no expectation of reward), are merely entry wedges into the dark world of hidden interlocking power structures that manipulate and control the democratic façade beneath which they operate.
As Kennedy clearly states in his Introduction (which must have sent chills up and down the spines of some of America’s most powerful movers and shakers):
“In this book, I track the rise of Anthony Fauci from his start as a young public health researcher and physician through his metamorphosis into the powerful technocrat who helped orchestrate and execute 2020’s historic coup d’état against Western democracy. I explore the carefully planned militarization and monetization of medicine that has left American health ailing and its democracy shattered.
“I chronicle the troubling role of the dangerous concentrated mainstream media, Big Tech robber barons, the military and intelligence communities and their deep historical alliances with Big Pharma and public health agencies.
“The disturbing story that unfolds here has never been told, and many in power have worked hard to prevent the public from learning it.”
This may be why “The Real Anthony Fauci” has become a monster bestseller despite enormous efforts by the powers-that-be to keep its existence a secret.
Is every attack on Kennedy’s book a dishonest attempt to discredit him?
Of course not. For example, in preparing this article, since there were no reviews by mainstream media, I looked at some of the reader reviews on the Amazon.com website (which is making lots of money selling the book, but won’t accept ads for it, although it can’t refuse to print reader comments about it).
One reader pointed out a serious error he said undermined his belief in the book’s credibility. I thought his criticism sounded so reasonable that I asked Kennedy for his response.
Kennedy responded in less than 24 hours with 10 pages of evidence including six pages of graphs that revealed the “error” to be — not Kennedy’s — but the reader’s.
If that were not enough, Kennedy intends to upload the reader’s criticism to his website, alongside his rebuttal, both of which will be included in the next edition of the book.
That is how serious scholars address serious criticism — not by name-calling but by providing verifiable documentation. (If you wish to read the reader’s criticism and Kennedy’s 10-page response, you can find them here).
How do mainstream media justify refusing to review a book by an important public figure about a subject that affects the life (and death) of millions?
Simple. They don’t bother to justify it at all. They don’t even admit they’re doing it.
The same way that Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and all the other mega-platforms don’t admit they have tweaked their algorithms to make it harder and harder (sometimes impossible) to find information that contradicts the official government narrative — whether the subject is COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, Russiagate, corporate crime, police brutality or the alleged “threat” to America from “the rise of China.”
Anything that contradicts the official line is deemed “misinformation” and subject to censorship by the giant internet and social media monopolies, which do the bidding (the illegal bidding) of the government, which tells them what and whom to censor under threat of being taxed or harassed or even broken up by more aggressive enforcement of the antitrust laws.
You don’t have to agree with Kennedy’s book to agree that allowing the government and its corporate media allies to prevent you from reading it should not be in any way acceptable — or legal.
Yet even so-called progressive figures like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) are urging private internet companies to censor free speech in the name of preventing “the spread of disinformation,” as she wrote in her astonishing letter to Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy.
Warren’s letter urges Jassy (under implied threat of government sanctions that could hurt his company) to “modify” Amazon’s algorithms, so that any books dealing with COVID-19 treatments and vaccines will support the official government line.
This means Amazon would have to downgrade, hide or even refuse to sell books that question or challenge official government pronouncements, even when those books are written by eminent doctors and scientists with unimpeachable medical credentials.
There are two serious problems with this.
The first is that this constitutes government censorship, which is illegal, even if the government pretends that the censorship is being exercised by private corporations.
The courts have ruled the government cannot evade First Amendment protections for free speech by intimidating private companies into censoring speech by proxy that which the government is legally forbidden to censor directly.
The second, more serious problem is: Who gets to define what constitutes “disinformation?” Too often, it is whoever controls the levers of government at any particular moment.
Today, those in control happen to be “the Establishment,” “the Deep State,” “the Powers-That-Be” — or whatever you wish to call them. They have denounced Kennedy for allegedly spreading “disinformation,” though his reports are verified and confirmed by eminent doctors and scientists all over the world, who are reporting successful treatments — and cures — for COVID-19 without jabbing their patients with arguably dangerous vaccines associated with pulmonary blood clots, strokes, heart attacks and miscarriages.
Two of the many prominent scientists who support the findings in Kennedy’s book are Dr. Meryl Nass, a biological warfare epidemiologist and world-renowned authority on vaccine-induced illnesses, and Dr. Robert Malone, who helped develop the very mRNA technology on which the Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are based.
Those vaccines, it must be mentioned, were developed with grants of billions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer dollars. But once the vaccines were ready, instead of giving them to the American public that paid to create them, the government “signed secret vaccine deals” that gave away the exclusive patent rights for these vaccines to Pfizer, Moderna, Merck and other giant drug companies — enabling them to charge taxpayers another $100 billion for the very vaccines the taxpayers had already paid billions to develop. We can thank Fauci for that — as the drug companies have been thanking him for the last 50 years.
Awash in revenue from Big Pharma advertising, mainstream media convinced millions of Americans Fauci is their hero. Have they been fooled?
As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Fauci dispenses $6.1 billion in annual taxpayer-provided funding for scientific research. This financial clout allows him to exert a powerful influence over hospitals, universities and medical journals, and over thousands of doctors and scientists who court his good will, and who will say whatever he wants them to say, because he can make or break their careers merely by picking up the phone.
“The Real Anthony Fauci” shows how “America’s Doctor” launched his career during the early AIDS epidemic — not by helping to fight it — but by opportunistically partnering with pharmaceutical companies to sabotage safe and effective off-patent therapeutic treatments in favor of costly but profitable drugs like AZT, which reportedly killed more patients than the disease.
Kennedy offers evidence that Fauci orchestrated fraudulent studies, and then pressured regulators at the FDA into approving a deadly chemotherapy treatment he had good reason to know was worthless against AIDS.
According to Kennedy’s documentation, Fauci repeatedly violated federal laws to allow his Pharma partners to use poverty-ridden dark-skinned children in Third World countries as lab rats in deadly experiments with toxic AIDS and cancer chemotherapies, without obtaining proper informed consent from their parents, who often did not realize what would be done to their children.
In early 2000, Fauci shook hands with Bill Gates in the library of Gates’ $147 million Seattle mansion, cementing a partnership to launch and control the spectacularly profitable $60 billion global vaccine market. As a result of U.S. funding leverage and personal relationships with heads of state and influential media institutions, the Pharma-Fauci-Gates alliance became a colossus that dominates every aspect of global health policy.
Kennedy walks you through the secret deals by which Fauci, Gates and their powerful Big Pharma allies manipulate media outlets, scientific journals, key government decision-makers, global intelligence agencies and scientists on their payroll into terrifying the public with propaganda about the virulence of COVID-19 — while at the same time ruthlessly muzzling debate and censoring dissenting voices, especially those who question the need for costly and reportedly dangerous vaccines when there already exist safe and inexpensive drugs that reports show are more effective than vaccines against COVID-19.
Perhaps one of the most serious charges against Fauci is his funding of gain-of-function (GOF) research on viruses.
“Gain of function” refers to genetic alteration of a natural virus so that it becomes more contagious and more deadly to humans. Proponents of GOF research argue that creating these enhanced deadly viruses enables them to develop antidotes to fight them.
But there was a huge uproar against this kind of research in the scientific and medical community, which was alarmed at the real possibility that one of these super-germs might escape and wreak terrible havoc.
As a result, President Obama banned any further GOF research. But Fauci disobeyed him, and secretly diverted taxpayer money to continue funding this research by relocating it to a lab in Wuhan, China.
When COVID-19 struck, Fauci was alarmed. He did not want Wuhan’s GOF experiments to be traced back to his research as a possible source of the pandemic.
So he became one of the chief proponents of the theory that the COVID-19 virus came from an infected bat or pangolin in Wuhan’s wet market.
But scientists who examined the virus believe it may have been genetically engineered — that is, man-made — and could have escaped from Fauci’s GOF lab experiments.
Fauci has already been accused of lying about his funding for GOF research in Wuhan when called to testify before Congress. He may well be indicted not only for lying and illegally diverting taxpayer money to China, but for having caused the Covid-19 pandemic, and the deaths of millions.
Kennedy describes the process by which he says Fauci helps drug companies who lie about their tests to get their drugs accepted by the FDA.
Such drugs — like Vioxx, Fentanyl, Thalidomide and many others — can be wildly profitable, but may wind up crippling and killing untold numbers of Americans. Vioxx caused more than 140,000 heart attacks and killed more than 60,000 users before it was finally recalled.
Prescription drugs overall are “the third leading cause of death in America after heart attacks and cancer.”
The government, of course, fines drug companies for deceptive advertising. But that is a game, since the fines amount to only a fraction of the huge profits the companies make by lying.
So they keep on lying, and keep on making huge profits by selling the government drugs that cost pennies to make but for which they charge patients as much as $4,000 per dose.
Good for the drug companies. Good for Fauci. But not so good for the American people.
Of special interest to many will be Kennedy’s report on ivermectin as a treatment and cure for COVID-19.
Many people know about ivermectin only from reading the negative propaganda about it spread by mainstream media, which dismiss it as “ineffective” and “unsafe.”
But it is neither.
Although the media keep referring to it as a “dangerous horse de-wormer,” ivermectin is one of the safest and most important medicines ever created. Called “the Wonder Drug,” it has protected millions in Africa, Asia and Latin America from blindness, debilitation and death.
The discoverers of ivermectin received the Nobel Prize and the drug is on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines. More than 3 billion doses have been administered during the last 35 years with virtually no adverse effects.
When ivermectin was tried against COVID-19 and found to be effective, did the pharmaceutical companies jump for joy? No, they panicked, because there was no profit in ivermectin.
Not only had its patent expired, but ivermectin cost only 4 cents per treatment. According to Kennedy, that’s why Fauci and the drug companies kept insisting there was no known treatment for COVID-19 and that therefore they needed to develop vaccines (which are very profitable).
To make sure no one used ivermectin, they launched a worldwide propaganda blitz to stigmatize it as ineffective and dangerous, despite considerable scientific evidence to the contrary.
Fauci and Big Pharma wanted to destroy the credibility of ivermectin because U.S. statutes prohibit any vaccine from being approved by the FDA if there already exists an alternate treatment.
On that basis, Fauci and his allies would have had to convince the world there was no alternate treatment, especially not ivermectin. To do this, they got the media to ban articles or appearances by the many scientists who were willing to testify from first-hand experience that ivermectin worked.
They bullied social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram into canceling the accounts of these doctors and scientists, and de-platforming anyone who posted favorable information about ivermectin.
If that were not enough, Fauci-connected organizations such as UNITAID awarded huge funding grants to assure no favorable reports about ivermectin would appear.
Take, for example, the case of Dr. Andrew Hill, “the most influential ivermectin advocate in the world.”
A scandalous medical controversy arose over reports that Hill’s parent institution, the University of Liverpool, had just received a $40 million donation from UNITAID four days before Hill’s ivermectin paper was published, and Hill’s conclusion was changed 180 degrees from his position just a few weeks earlier.
Hill admitted that his sponsors (UNITAID) pressured him to alter his conclusion. Hill explained, “I think I’m in a very sensitive position here.”
False news stories were either planted or encouraged about how people were getting sick or dying from taking ivermectin. Such stories scared millions.
One infamous example was a news story reporting that gunshot victims were being turned away from an Oklahoma hospital because all the beds were filled by people who were dying from overdoses of ivermectin.
Although this story was totally false, it made the front pages of newspapers all over the U.S. and was given prominent coverage on leading TV and cable news programs, including The Hill, New York Daily News, the Guardian and Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC.
Rolling Stone even ran this chilling (and totally false) headline to its massive Twitter audience: “Gunshot Victims Left Waiting as Horse Dewormer Overdoses Overwhelm Oklahoma Hospitals, Doctor Says.”
Even after the story was exposed as bogus, the media continued to dismiss ivermectin as ineffective and dangerous.
Doctors who prescribed ivermectin were hounded by the AMA and threatened with loss of their licenses. And patients who tried to get medical information about it were ridiculed and called “anti-vaxxers” or “nut cases.”
For the entire year before vaccines were finally developed, Fauci and the medical establishment offered no treatment whatsoever for COVID-19 patients. Patients were simply told to stay home and wait until they could no longer breathe — then go to the hospital and get put on a ventilator, after which, according to clinical reports, most of those patients would die anyway.
Based on the success of ivermectin reported by U.S. doctors and doctors around the world, many of those patients might have been saved. But they died because Fauci so powerfully discouraged and denied patients access to ivermectin.
Kennedy argues that many of the nearly 1 million American deaths from COVID-19 can be laid directly at the feet of “America’s Doctor,” whom he portrays as putting profits before people on behalf of his pharmaceutical company buddies.
But the grip of Fauci and Big Pharma may be slipping
More and more people are requesting ivermectin, and more and more doctors are willing to prescribe it. The first real crack in Big Pharma’s anti-ivermectin propaganda campaign came on December 8, 2020, with the testimony of Dr. Pierre Kory before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
Kory is the former chief of the Critical Care Service and medical director of the Trauma and Life Support Center at the University of Wisconsin. He is also president of the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance.
In his testimony, Kory urged the government to look at the rapidly growing medical evidence for ivermectin. He said the data show ivermectin not only prevents COVID-19, but can also stop early symptoms from getting worse, and even enable seriously sick patients to recover.
Kory testified that ivermectin was almost a “miracle drug” against COVID-19. He called on U.S. medical authorities — including the NIH, CDC and FDA — to immediately recommend doctors prescribe ivermectin for COVID-19.
That video testimony went viral, although YouTube quickly took it down under pressure from government and pharmaceutical interests — an ominous instance of a private company suppressing important medical testimony given before Congress.
Until Kory testified, most people had never heard of ivermectin, and those who did were afraid to try it because of the negative propaganda, or couldn’t find a doctor who would risk his license to prescribe it.
But although YouTube took down Kory’s testimony, it began popping up all over the internet. Requests for ivermectin prescriptions began to double and triple. Soon detailed clinical results began arriving from Peru, Argentina, India and other countries, along with simple-to-understand summaries, showing how COVID-19 infection rates dropped dramatically, sometimes virtually to zero, after those governments began distributing ivermectin.
Given the impetus of Kennedy’s spectacular book sales, It may only be a matter of time until worldwide studies on the effectiveness of ivermectin — currently unreported by mainstream media — become widely available.
But you don’t have to wait. Click here to see a summary of the clinical evidence for ivermectin’s effectiveness as reported by respected medical authorities throughout the world.
You may then make up your own mind — it is not the purpose of this article to convince you one way or the other.
But convincing you is exactly the purpose of Kennedy’s book. And judging by how many copies are being sold, and then excitedly shared with family members and friends, the book may succeed in convincing a lot of people — no matter how desperately Fauci and Big Pharma try to persuade people that one of the safest drugs ever created is “unsafe” or “dangerous.”
Perhaps the millions who are expected to read “The Real Anthony Fauci” will become so angry they will do the unthinkable: They will stop believing Fauci, Gates and Big Pharma are their friends.
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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Children’s Health Defense.
One Hour of Soviet Belarusian Communist Music
приди и возьми их – Russia To NATO
Younger Girl – The Critters – Mp3
Are You A Boy, Or, Are You A Girl? Audio Mp3 (2:17 min)
One Hour of Assyrian Revolutionary Music – Mp3
One Hour of Québécois Communist Music – Audio Mp3
Where Were the Great Covid Speeches? – by Gabrielle Bauer – 11 Feb 2022
Consider these words from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1933 inaugural address to Americans.
“Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
Roosevelt went on to state that happiness “lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort” and pledged to put people to work. His speech rang with courage and optimism. It inspired and united. Almost a century later it hasn’t lost its power.
The same grandeur infused Winston Churchill’s famous report to the House of Commons on June 4, 1940. “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills,” he proclaimed. The speech thrums with specificity, its rolling waves of “we shall fight” lifting it to the realm of poetry.
In support of a very different cause—equality for women—UK political activist Emmeline Pankhurst electrified the residents of Hartford, Connecticut with her “freedom or death” speech of November 1913. “Human life for us is sacred, but we say if any life is to be sacrificed it shall be ours,” she said. “We won’t do it ourselves, but we will put the enemy in the position where they will have to choose between giving us freedom or giving us death.” Women’s rights mattered enough to Pankhurst that she was prepared to raise the stakes to life itself.
The Covid pandemic is an epochal, planetary event, but speeches of this caliber have gone AWOL during the crisis. Where have the modern-day Churchills and Pankhursts been hiding? Why have none of our leaders found the words to elevate and inspire us, to send shivers up our spines? Instead of inspiration, we’ve been served platter after platter of banalities, self-righteous admonitions, or outright incoherence.
An embarrassment of words
Let’s start with Donald Trump. I suspect that even his most ardent supporters would not count oration among his strengths. This string of words, which flowed from his lips in July 2020, typifies what he had to say about Covid during his presidential tenure:
“We’re gonna beat it, yeah. We’re going to beat it. And with time, you’re going to be it — time. You know, I say, it’s going to disappear. And they say, ‘Oh, that’s terrible.’ He said — well, it’s true. I mean, it’s going to disappear. Before it disappears, I think we can knock it out before it disappears.”
I rest my case.
Not that Joe Biden wins any points for Covid discourse. Here’s a tidbit from his September 9, 2021 speech about America’s progress in fighting the pandemic:
“Even as the Delta variant 19 [sic] has — COVID-19 — has been hitting this country hard, we have the tools to combat the virus, if we can come together as a country and use those tools. If we raise our vaccination rate, protect ourselves and others with masking and expanded testing, and identify people who are infected, we can and we will turn the tide on COVID-19.”
The rest of his speech offered more of the same: get vaccinated, follow the rules, do the right thing. While more or less grammatical, his sentences failed utterly to surprise or inspire.
Let us now turn to Boris Johnson, who pounded the same drum in his speech of July 19, 2021, the UK’s designated Freedom Day.
“Though we can see the enthusiasm of millions of young people to get their jabs, we need even more young adults to receive a protection that is of immense benefit to your family and friends – and to yourselves. And so I would remind everybody that some of life’s most important pleasures and opportunities are likely to be increasingly dependent on vaccination.”
Like innumerable other statements of its kind, Boris’s speech never rose from the tactical to the transcendent.
In Canada, meanwhile, prime minister Justin Trudeau evidently drew inspiration from the prepubertal set when he described Covid as a “global pandemic that really sucks” in a fall 2020 address. A master of the sappy cliché, Trudeau could not resist shoehorning “we will get through this” and “better days are ahead” into the speech. Churchill would not have approved.
It gets worse. During a December 2021 television interview, Trudeau painted “the unvaccinated” with a single angry brushstroke: “They don’t believe in science/progress and are very often misogynistic and racist.” Coming from the dude who slathered dark paint on his face at more than one costume party, the accusation drips with unintended irony.
French president Emmanuel Macron apparently uses the same playbook as Trudeau, combining preteen language with a scolding finger in a January 2022 interview with Le Parisien: “As for the non-vaccinated, I really want to piss them off. And we will continue to do this, to the end. This is the strategy.” Gotta give the guy points for candor, if nothing else.
Speaking of puerile comportment, Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett and his predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu, saw fit to slam each other’s pandemic policies in a July 2021 session of the Knesset plenum. “We are succeeding in fixing what you abandoned,” Bennett said. “How did you succeed in destroying so much in such a short time in the struggle against corona?” Netanyahu shot back. During a crisis of Covid’s magnitude, one might hope that political leaders would model the collaboration they expect from their constituents, but scoring political points evidently ruled the day.
This lack of eloquence from our political leaders, while disappointing, should come as no surprise. From the start of the pandemic, public health advisors have pulled the strings. The politicians just did their bidding, reaching for such meaningless cliches as “Follow the science” to support their decisions.
Lacking the big-picture thinking and inner convictions to make tough calls, our ostensible leaders let themselves be pushed around by scientists whose ideas they did not understand. Nor did they have the guts to balance them with other measures of societal health. Mix in the fear of angering the Twitter mob and you get a recipe for timid, uninspired orations.
Missed opportunities
An analysis of speeches made by heads of state during the pandemic, published in the British Journal of Medicine in 2021, uncovered five primary themes across a total of 122 speeches: social welfare and vulnerable populations, responsibility and paternalism, nationalism, economics and financial relief, and emotional appeals. By and large, the speakers focused on the ravages of the virus and the need to save lives, but glossed over the harms of freeze-framing the activities of living. They promised financial relief, but didn’t acknowledge the loss of dreams that accompanies a business closure or an aborted concert tour. They offered support for declining mental health, without naming its source.
Above all, they told people to be scared: “Act like you have COVID,” said Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s prime minister, as her country headed into its first lockdown. “Every move you then make is a risk to someone else.” Over in Australia, Victoria premier Dan Andrews cranked up the volume even higher in an August 2020 tweet: “This virus is wicked. It doesn’t discriminate. It does not stop. And young or old—its impacts are brutal and potentially life-long.” The assertion that the “virus doesn’t discriminate” flies in the face of Covid’s clearly segmented risk profile, making it hard to avoid the conclusion that Andrews was gratuitously whipping up fear. It’s fair to say that he and other leaders failed at one of their critical functions: maintaining calm.
So many speeches, so many blunders. So many missed opportunities.
Good speakers imbue their listeners with calm and courage. They invite people to act together, while recognizing that each individual faces different circumstances. They don’t shame people for having human needs. They don’t scapegoat certain groups. Above all, they confront hard realities. They understand that you can’t have it all in a crisis, and to pay Peter you may have to rob Paul. They say the quiet parts out loud.
Ronald Reagan ticked these boxes when he gave his address to the [US] nation following the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle in 1986. While grieving the loss of life, he stepped boldly into the morally fraught terrain of tradeoffs. “I know it is hard to understand,” he said, addressing the schoolchildren of America, “but sometimes painful things like this happen. It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It’s all part of taking a chance and expanding man’s horizons. The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave.” Living boldly carries a risk, he told his country, but it also gives life its deepest meaning.
Among today’s world leaders, Angela Merkel, Germany’s recently retired chancellor, probably came closest to hitting such nuanced notes. At the beginning of the pandemic, she gave a national speech that acknowledged the moral complexity of the decision to lock down a country: “Allow me to assure you that, for someone like me, for whom the freedom of travel and the freedom of movement were a hard-fought right, such restrictions can only be justified if they are absolutely imperative. These should never be put in place lightly in a democracy and should only be temporary. But they are vital at the moment in order to save lives.”
But Merkel’s wide-angle view contracted over the course of the pandemic. “I once again emphatically ask you to take this tricky virus seriously,” she said in her final podcast before leaving office at the end of 2021. She went on to thank “those who are reasonable and understanding in this difficult period [and] stick to the rules to protect themselves and take care of others.”
Merkel’s admonitions—take the virus seriously, follow the rules—may have hit the mark in early 2020, but on the cusp of 2022 they sounded tired and churlish. As she stepped off the world stage, she missed an important opportunity to reflect on the morally complex tension between risks and benefits or to offer a more sustainable vision as the virus eases into endemicity.
After two years of divisive and finger-pointing rhetoric from our elected leaders, we need a shift not only in policy, but in prose. We need leaders to deliver the sorts of brave and towering orations that have carried countries through major social upheavals in times past. We need words that boldly confront the dilemmas exposed by the pandemic: the balance between life and living, between collective sacrifice and individual needs, between respect for a virus and a paralyzing fear of it. There’s little reason to believe such words are forthcoming, but one can hope.
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Source
The Radical Liberal “Tankie” Insult to Hard Leftists (Reddit) Feb 2022
https://www.reddit.com/r/EuropeanSocialists/
In 1991, with the fall of the First Socialist Republic of the world having achieved impressive feats in health, education, industrialization, economic growth, massive reduction in poverty and unemployment, at the forefront of the cause of women’s rights , workers’ rights, and anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, the capitalist and imperialist forces believed that Socialism was definitely dead and buried, that Eastern Europe was going to accept very wisely to become a new Euro-American colony tinged with crime, corruption, unemployment and poverty, and that the red flag would stop flying around the world, and that the anarchists and social democrats would celebrate with them the Death of Socialism screaming “it’s not the real thing…”…
Fortunately, these capitalist forces were wrong: the populations of Eastern Europe are still nostalgic for socialism, In Russia, the Communist Party remains the main opposition force, Korea and Cuba still remain faithful to Socialism despite blockades, assassination attempts and intensive propaganda, while the actually existing socialist states such as China, Vietnam and Laos despite a form of revisionism, remain Dictatorships of the Proletariat, led by Marxist-Leninist Parties of proletarian and revolutionary vanguard involving democratic centralism and economic, agricultural and social planning, and a nationalization of the strategic sectors of the economy while having refused to reinstate land ownership, the abolition of which is the primary stage of Socialism. Communists have also had obvious electoral success whether in Kerala, Nepal, Nicaragua,Chile, Russia, Peru, or Austria.
The Communists are still fighting with radical and sometimes reprehensible practices, whether in Nepal, India, Peru, the Philippines against the reactionary states set up there and the anti-imperialist states are currently leading an alliance between the national bourgeoisie and the proletariat represented by a very powerful communist party whether in Syria, Venezuela, Uzbekistan, Bolivia, or Belarus.
In short, we must realize that Socialism is still well on its feet and proves that it is still a major adversary against capitalism and can surpass it, especially since the Covid crisis demonstrating the clear victory of socialist China against the capitalist India, socialist Cuba against capitalist Belgium, or socialist Vietnam against capitalist Brazil in the management of the pandemic..
But the anarchists, having celebrated the victory of the Soviet Union unwilling to admit their own failure to achieve a single functioning revolution and a single functional state, were forced to react to Western Marxist-Leninist forces resuming power by stupidly finding a new term in the closet to qualify them: “tankie”
“tankie” is a term made to describe the person who supported the Soviet intervention in Hungary, or in Prague, but it became a word to describe every Marxist-Leninist, exactly like the Judeo-bolchevik.
Do you critically support USSR? Tankie ! Do you support Cuba? Tankie! Do you want to do a materialistic analysis of China apart of “they’re capitalist because there are billionaires bruu”? Tankie ! Are you against the EU? Tankie !
This term became the anarchist weapon to fight any person who opposes the liberal democracy, the Western imperialism, and the transnational treaties that want to create a Supranational world where everything is controlled by private sectors, even health, education, or working conditions, and everything made by the social-democrat reforms after the War is destroyed to create the New Capitalist Order with only a people obsessed by their poverty and individual liberty.
But the anarchist is basically a Westerner petty-bourgeois from the Western capitals who thinks that he’s better than everyone else and that he’s better than the Third World People who fight for the socialism, he thinks that his ” Perfect Socialist Revolution” will be better than the “dirty African and Asian peasants and workers” and became an anarchist only by personal rebellion against his bourgeois-conservative parents and for protecting his capitalistic views of the world in the Liberal-Libertarian Westerner Society, a society fusionning the Libertarian-Left and the Liberal-Right that confuses freedom and liberalisation, which implies permissiveness for the consumer and repression for the producer, according to the American model of mass consumption governing morality and politics, by valuing LGBT and feminism against worker’s rights, a society that became popular in Western Europe since the Marshall Plan, weapon of American Imperialist Economical and Cultural Supremacy in the Europe.
The anarchist thinks that he is, as the guy who reads books and theory cause of his cultural capital,THE real communist, the man that can be the real superior communist compared to those pathetic Eastern European barbaric countries and those ridiculous asian countries that are/were supposedly “fascist states” (witch is a complete denial of the marxist definition of fascism by Dimitrov and a complete denial of the nature of class the winners of Stalingrad and of the defeated of Berlin, witch is the difference between the highest stage of Imperialism and Capitalism represented by Fascism and the proletarian and anti-imperialism represented by Marxism-Leninism)
The anarchist has only a fantasized vision of a worker and when he discovers that a worker doesn’t care about his perfect Revolution, and thinks about the desindustrialisation of the country that will makes him the great mass of unemployed poor proletarian, the Supranational treaties witch pits him against all the other proletarians of the world, the EU-NATO imperialism, the privatization of health and education services, the destruction of strategic economical sectors, and simply the destruction of the country, the anarchist will become a pro-bourgeoisie people who will completly forgets class struggles for creating the sex struggles and the race struggles with a liberal ideology that they embraced with joy : identity polic.
In short, the anarchist is a point of detail of capitalism and is only a Westerner White Petty bourgeois who will soon or later intend to destroy the Socialism, the Proletariat and the Actually-Existing Socialist States in the name of bourgeoisie and Imperialism.
The Anarchist only cares about his individual rights and random generic lines (“Girl Power!” “Seize the State !” “It is forbidden to forbid!”) but has never been an analyser of material conditions and was never a revolutionnary apart from the “badass” part of it.
The concept of “Left Unity” can be useful if we have a common enemy (the Fascism or Capitalism).
But us, as marxist-leninist, should never playing the game of the words with them, and rather convincing the proletariat and the intelligentsia still lost in the abstention and alt-right anti-nationalist who do not want to oppose EU and American Imperialism of the feasibility of Socialism in their country.
Let’s never forget that Anarchist will be the first counter-revolutionaries and the weapons of the bourgeoisie during the Socialist Revolution.
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Massachusetts: Tales about Ted Kennedy, in case anyone’s actually interested – by Howie Carr
I got an email this week from a former bow-tied bum kisser at the Globe about a book he’s writing on Fat Boy — the late Sen. Ted Kennedy.
“My editors have asked me, in this Me Too era, to make sure that I have done a thorough search for incidents in which Sen. Kennedy’s behavior caused injury or harm to women.”
Wow. Talk about an open-ended order. The hagiographer, er biographer, mentioned that the usual incidents — Chappaquiddick, Palm Beach, La Brasserie — will “of course” rate chapters in his tome.
Of course they will.
“I am writing to see if you had been sent, or collected, reliable information on other incidents of untoward behavior that you believe I should pursue.”
First of all, pal, get copies of my two books on America’s “First Family,” “Kennedy Babylon: A Century of Scandal and Depravity,” Vols. 1 and 2, for sale at howiecarrshow.com/store.
When it comes to Kennedy behavior, I’d describe those volumes as “seminal,” except for that word’s derivation, if you get my drift. Kinda like describing the JFK presidency as “Camelot.”
Anyway, I forwarded the email to Gayle Fee, the last gossip columnist at this newspaper, who broke innumerable scandals about the family in general and Fat Boy in particular.
“The problem I always found,” she said, “was that you could never get anyone to go on — or off — the record about his bad behavior because they were either afraid or paid off or both …”
Exactly, Gayle. We all had that same problem.
Here’s one I never wrote about, until now. It’s second-hand, so it’s hearsay. But I believe it. A woman I went to college with had a close female friend who after Bobby’s assassination in 1968 worked briefly one summer as one of Ethel Kennedy’s nannies.
Teddy was often lurking around, playing the role of caring uncle, but at the same time, usually drunk as a skunk.
One afternoon in the early 1970’s, this young woman was down in the basement at Hickory Hill, rummaging around for a toy or something for one of the kids. Suddenly she heard a noise behind her. She turned around and saw the Liberal Lion, a drink in one hand, his swimsuit down around his ankles, swaying a bit, with a full … well, you know.
Horrified, she ran upstairs and immediately quit. Ethel lost more nannies that way.
How about the conversations on the Nixon White House tapes about Teddy’s alcoholism, and his abominable behavior at the Carlyle Hotel in New York, the site of so many Kennedy family orgies, some documented in FBI files.
At one point, Henry Kissinger tells Nixon how Teddy drunkenly chased an heiress up to her room and began beating on her door, demanding to be let in. She finally asked through the locked door, what happens if the newspapers find out about your behavior.
Kissinger told Nixon that this is what Fat Boy, drunk and in heat, responded: “No newspapers are going to print anything about me. I’ve got that covered.”
He was right about that, wasn’t he? At least when it comes to the Boston Globe.
Since the guy says he’s going to do a chapter on Chappaquiddick, he might include a little more background on Mary Jo Kopechne than most of these worshipful tracts dare to print.
Her first employer in Washington was Sen. George Smathers of Florida. Pre-Castro, Smathers and JFK used to travel to Havana together and patronize the Mob’s brothels, owned by gangsters Meyer Lansky and Santo Trafficante Jr. The hoods used to watch the senators in flagrante delicto, on the other side of the two-way mirrors they had installed in their bodello.
This is all on the record in T.J. English’s book, “Havana Nocturne,” easily available online. English is still around.
When Mary Jo was working for Smathers, her landlord was Bobby Baker, a longtime fixer in the Senate for Lyndon Johnson who later went to prison.
In addition to his, uh, duties for LBJ, Baker ran a “club” out of a D.C. hotel that offered an array of his own high-end ladies of the evening, one of whom was a gorgeous Elizabeth Taylor lookalike named Ellen Rometsch.
Baker introduced, shall we say, Rometsch to JFK. The president was so impressed with her services that he called Baker and thanked him for providing the hooker who JFK said had given him the best, uh, Lewinsky he had ever enjoyed.
A couple of months later, the suspected East German spy was deported. They had to get rid of her because Senate Republicans were sniffing around. RFK begged FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover to shut down the probe, and he did, in his usual way, threatening to release his XXX-rated blackmail material against senators of both parties.
I mention this only in context of the social circles in which Mary Jo Kopechne ran before Ted Kennedy drowned her, the first confirmed kill in the War on Women.
Any honest biographer of Ted would certainly want to recount all of this, I’m sure.
One last point: to put the whole Palm Beach scene into context, perhaps the scribe should mention how segregated PB was back in the days when the Kennedys were running amok.
Here’s a direct quote from National Review, in the April 10, 1962 issue, which no one has ever disputed: “No Negro is permitted to own a home in the President’s winter town.”
One more point, germane to both Palm Beach and Chappaquiddick, now that I think about it. After killing Mary Jo, one of the first calls Teddy made the next morning was to another of his girlfriends, Helga Wagner.
He needed the phone number of his brother-in-law, Steve Smith, the family fixer, who happened to be the father of William Kennedy Smith.
Willie was Teddy’s nephew, who was accused of raping the blue-dot woman at the family mansion in Palm Beach, Comfortably Numb
by the Sea, in 1991.
Helga Wagner is still around. She’s given interviews to People magazine. Her West Palm Beach jewelry shop has a listed phone number.
I hope this has been helpful to the bow-tied bumkisser emeritus. It’s the least I could do for a fellow hack.
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US Teacher’s union head Randi Weingarten is COVID’s most evil official (NY Post) 9 Feb 2022
There will very soon come a time in this miserably long pandemic where the only sizable group left wearing masks by order of the government will be the cohort threatened the least by COVID-19 — school-aged kids. And for this anti-science, anti-education, anti-childhood-development outrage we have one person above all to blame: American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten.
During an MSNBC interview Tuesday, Weingarten tried to sustain the gaslighting fiction that she is “in favor of an off-ramp on masks” in schools, while contradicting that claim in the very same paragraph.
“The real issue becomes . . . is the spread low enough so that there’s no dissemination or transmission in schools,” the union chief said. “That’s why I like what Massachusetts has done, because what they’ve said is that on a school-by-school basis, if there’s an 80% vaccination rate, then those schools can lift the mask mandates.”
Poor Randi: Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker Wednesday pulled the rug right out under her arbitrarily and unreachably high vaccination standard (recall that the vax percentage for 12- to 17-year-olds is still just 56% nationwide) by announcing the removal of the state masking mandate altogether.
There has been in recent days a glorious stampede away from pandemic restrictions in the very Democratic states that have always been most fond of them — California announced the end of indoor masking mandates Monday. Connecticut, Delaware, Oregon, Rhode Island and New Jersey have all scaled back restrictions over the past week. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul ditched the onerous vax-or-mask requirement on businesses Wednesday.
By far, the two biggest predictors of whether a given school district during the pandemic has been open or closed, masked or unmasked, have been the size of the local vote margin for or against Donald Trump and the comparative strength of teachers unions. There are 13 states that still have mask mandates for schools; all but Nevada favored Joe Biden in 2020 by at least 10 percentage points.
New York, California and Delaware — three states where teachers unions are especially powerful — are extending the kiddie mandates long after the exponentially more at-risk adults are free to do what they please. This is the exact opposite order such liberations should go.
People under the age of 18 comprise 22.1% of the US population, yet not even 0.1% of the COVID-19 deaths. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, fewer kids 5-17 have died from the coronavirus (497) than have died from pneumonia (618).Thanks in part to Weingarten’s influence — remember, she was at the White House on day two of the Biden presidency — teachers got to the front of the line for vaccination, not that that prevented her from backing foot-dragging efforts on school-reopening by affiliated locals in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC.
Demanding that student mask mandates remain in place until their vaccination rates hit 80% raises the question: Who again are we aiming to protect? Every adult has long had access to the vaccine, the kids aren’t getting seriously ill in significant numbers, and any immunocompromised individual can use effective mask protection (unlike kids, who understandably have a hard time keeping even their less-effective masks in place all day).
Those of us parents who have chafed at living in Weingarten-dominated environments can at least enjoy the schadenfreude of her playing a central role in the current Democratic flight away from pandemic restrictions. After all, she was literally at the scene of the Dems’ biggest recent trauma — the shock loss of favorite Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe (at whose final campaign rally Weingarten spoke) to relative unknown Glenn Youngkin, who ran on parental dissatisfaction with public schools.https://995f299ad1a7962334d9a3297f7ca7e6.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html?n=0
It’s no accident that the main driver behind the sudden Democratic push away from restrictions is a guy who almost lost the same day of the McAuliffe debacle: New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, who was startled to discover that pissed-off Democratic parents were ready to vote Republican now that Donald Trump is no longer on the scene.
Weingarten’s influence may be on the wane, but it’s still evident in two places that matter: big-city school districts (which may well continue masking even after the state mandates go away) and the CDC itself. Director Rochelle Walensky, who has been successfully bullied by Weingarten in the past, insisted yet again this week that “now is not the moment” to remove mask mandates on kids as young as 2.
On behalf of those of us still living in the dwindling number of toddler-masking jurisdictions, here is my plea to enterprising mask manufacturers: Please, please personalize the last masks with the most appropriate face — that belonging to Randi Weingarten.
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Matt Welch is an editor at large at Reason.
The poisonous US reaction to China’s America-born gold medalist is very revealing – by Tom Fowdy – 9 Feb 2022
Eileen Gu is an 18-year-old Chinese American Olympian from San Francisco who made the decision to compete for China, her mother’s native country, in the Winter Olympics, rather than the United States. On Tuesday, Eileen won a gold medal in her ski event – an outstanding achievement, but one that was quickly mired in political controversy.
While her victory was widely praised and celebrated on the Chinese internet, and heralded by the Foreign Ministry, many Americans reacted with disdain and attacked her. Fox News’ Will Cain effectively branded her “shameful” for “betraying the United States”, accusing her of having pursued her career pathway “for money.” Fellow Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson called her “dumb” and said Americans should feel “revulsion,” while notorious anti-China journalist Melissa Chan accused her of being naive and a “propaganda tool.”
Mainstream media outlets relentlessly quizzed her on her nationality, and the coverage largely focused on this, not her sporting success. The Global Times, the Chinese state media outlet, interpreted this as an inability by America to come to terms with China’s rise and success in the world, stating: “The US has grown to be a global power by attracting global talent. Now Washington criticizes those who choose Beijing over it, displaying American elites’ calculated snobbery.”
The row over Gu has become a microcosm of China-United States tensions and the broader political conflict around them. That is, the inflammation of mutual nationalist anger and the increasing sense of insecurity that has dogged the American psyche surrounding China, the fear of its own displacement in a changing world, the fear of a loss of status, the twilight of its own unipolarity, and the desire to re-establish America’s rightful position. Gu’s achievements have been overshadowed by the firestorm, which follows America’s wholesale politicization of the Winter Olympics as part of its propaganda war against China, which has poisoned the media environment.
Throughout the event, the narrative has been relentlessly negative, from astroturfing the complaints of athletes, to hammering endless reports about Uighurs and the ‘missing’ tennis player Peng Shuai, to attacking the country’s zero-Covid policies, and so on. This politicized narrative seeks to deprive China of any increased legitimacy or positive perceptions from the event. So the story of an American-born athlete achieving gold for China descends into a political tug of war, despite the fact that it is very common in all sports for athletes to choose to play for other countries through their parentage.
Whilst some in America cry foul, Gu becomes a key figure for China in how it strives to present itself, as a country that is open, achieving, and rising, and capable of attracting talent from all over the world. America’s vitriolic response to her exposes its total unwillingness to accept why one might legitimately identify with China. The US has whipped up a binary narrative depicting everything as being orchestrated as a villainous plot by the Communist Party, which does not authentically represent the will of the Chinese people, as per the Western assumption of “enlightenment.”
In line with these assumptions, American politicians and media outlets effectively dehumanize all Chinese people as spies, thieves, and propagandists, who inauthentically toe the party line. China’s rise is portrayed as being at the expense of America through “theft” and so-called “unfair practices” (like producing better goods, more cheaply, than American businesses can).
Anyone who contradicts this narrative is dismissed as paid, brainwashed, or in cahoots with the Communist Party. The ability for balanced discussion has been closed down amid surging new McCarthyism. This phenomenon has been shown relentlessly in the saga with Peng Shuai, where the mainstream media and the Women’s Tennis Association will simply not leave her alone or trust anything she says, unless she gives them the anti-China narrative they want to hear.
The idea that a talented and high-achieving American-born girl could opt for China above the United States is simply impossible for the average American to understand. She must, therefore, be a traitor, an opportunist, or in it for the money. A brilliant act of athleticism poisoned by an orchestrated hate campaign.
Yet much to the dismay of America, Gu has brushed off the criticism of her. She has declared that she has no regrets and says China is where she finds her belonging. Who are we to judge this? And who are we to show resentment towards her? Gu, who decided in 2019 to compete for China (where she is well known as Gu Ailing), has an incredible future ahead of her, and the US reactions to her astounding victory only show how ugly, how bitter, and how poisonous America has become in its approach towards China. It is the collective loss of sanity of an entire nation.
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The Notorious Board Game That Takes 1,500 Hours To Complete – by Luke Winkie
9/8/17
The thick, black-and-white rulebook packaged with every copy of the 1979 war-game The Campaign For North Africa is full of obtuse decrees, but the tabletop community always had a special appreciation for entry 52.6 – affectionately known as the “macaroni rule.” The Italian troops in World War II were outfitted with noodle rations, and in the name of historical dogma, the player responsible for the Italians is required to distribute an extra water ration to their forces, so that their pasta may be boiled. Soldiers that do not receive their “pasta point” may immediately become “disorganized,” rendering them useless in the field. It’s a fact of life really: if the Italians can’t boil their pasta, the Italians may desert.
It was a joke, by the way. Richard Berg, the legendary game designer and author of The Campaign For North Africa, says so himself. He’ll happily admit that this was an unreasonable game for unreasonable people, but still, a pasta point? There’s attention to detail, and then there’s taking the piss. As Berg explains, the rule wasn’t even entirely factually accurate. “The reality is that the Italians cooked their pasta with the tomato sauce that came with the cans,” he says. “But I didn’t want to do a rule on that.” Yes, at the pinnacle of North Africa’s ridiculous excess, even Berg couldn’t help but poke a little fun at the obsessives in his wake.
It’ll take you about 1,500 hours (or 62 days) to complete a full play of The Campaign For North Africa. The game itself covers the famous WWII operations in Libya and Egypt between 1940 and 1943. Along with the opaque rulebook, the box includes 1,600 cardboard chits, a few dozen charts tabulating damage, morale, and mechanical failure, and a swaddling 10-foot long map that brings the Sahara to your kitchen table. You’ll need to recruit 10 total players, (five Allied, five Axis,) who will each lord over a specialized division. The Front-line and Air Commanders will issue orders to the troops in battle, the Rear and Logistics Commanders will ferry supplies to the combat areas, and lastly, a Commander-in-Chief will be responsible for all macro strategic decisions over the course of the conflict. If you and your group meets for three hours at a time, twice a month, you’d wrap up the campaign in about 20 years.
This is transparently absurd. Richard Berg knew it himself. He’s designed hundreds of war-games, focusing on everything from The Battle of Gettysburg to the Golden Age of Piracy, and The Campaign For North Africa was an outlier from the start. It was intended to be a collaborative mega-project for all of the wargaming experts employed by the storied, (and now defunct) imprint Simulations Publications Inc.
Initially, all Berg was responsible for was the map. Six months later, after the other designers had dropped out, SPI asked Berg if he was interested in finishing the game by himself. He was, and two years later he delivered history’s most infamous board game.
Berg has never completed a playthrough of The Campaign For North Africa. The game never received any of the compulsive testing required to iron-out inconsistencies and balance issues that are usually present in a freshly inked rulebook. Berg didn’t care. He never saw the point. “When I said ‘let’s publish this thing’ they said ‘but we’re still playtesting it! We don’t know if it’s balanced or not. It’s gonna take seven years to play!’ And I said ‘you know what, if someone tells you it’s unbalanced, tell them ‘we think it’s your fault, play it again.’”
The Campaign For North Africa arrived in the summer of 1979 and sold for $44 in a chunky, four-inch deep box. The game was never a massive commercial or critical success. It harbors a middling 5.8 on community tastemaker BoardGameGeek, and objectively speaking, the systems are exasperatingly finicky and require an eagle-eye for obscure rules and exceptions. In many ways, North Africa is simply a product of its time. The late ‘70s served as the commercial peak for wargaming, with dozens of new designs hitting store shelves every week. The Campaign wasn’t unique, as much as it was a standard archetype blown out to its extremes. Naturally, you do have to pay a premium price for used copies of the game on eBay, but that has more to do with the novelty of owning the “world’s longest board game” than anything else.
However, there is still a handful of players who regard Berg’s design as a triumph, rather than an extremely long-term gag. Geoff Phipps, a 54-year old software engineer living in Seattle, is one of them. Phipps never owned North Africa, but he did rent it from a local hobby shop after enjoying a slew of other, less-hefty Berg outings. He had no idea what he was getting into. The thing he remembers best is the way the fuel reserves worked. [Correction – 5:35pm, September 19: We initially misspelled Phipps’ last name as Phillips. We apologize for the error.]Geoff, a Campaign For North Africa player: “The pasta rule is funny, but this is what the game is about. Just doing tedious calculations all the time.”
“Every military division has a sheet of paper, and on it you’ve got a box for every battalion. It’ll tell you how many guns you have, but more interestingly, it’ll also list the fuel and water. Every game turn, three percent of the fuel evaporates, unless you’re the British before a certain date, because they used 50-gallon drums instead of jerry cans. So instead, seven percent of their fuel evaporates,” explains Phipps. “Every fucking turn you go around and make a pencil note of how much fuel you have. The pasta rule is funny, but this is what the game is about. Just doing tedious calculations all the time.”
As you may expect, Phipps did not finish The Campaign For North Africa. He and his friends played for exactly one session, resolving to get through the first day of the war for a taste of the combat systems and resource management, before quickly moved onto something that wasn’t going to demand of a decade of his time. His reasons were clear: the game is fastidious, non-intuitive, and it forces some seriously awkward fractional equations. But nearly 40 years later he still daydreams about the experience. “We did have a blast because some of the rules you’re not going to find in any other game,” says Phipps. “Just the fact that they cared about what kind of fuel tank the British had!”
As an amateur game-designer himself, Phipps plans on returning to North Africa after he’s retired to modernize some of the shortcomings in the design. The awkward flight combat module, which has caught the ire of many people in the game’s community, will be his first target, (Berg himself happily volunteers that the system “sucks.” The flight units are handled as individual planes and individual pilots, which is outstandingly fussy, even for wargame standards.) But with Phipps’ keen eye for revisions, perhaps someday he will still cross the Sahara.
Jake was enchanted in a similar way. He’s a 16-year old in Minnesota who obtained a copy of North Africa a few months ago by printing out giant PDF copies of the rulebook and map (he says it was the only way to avoid paying $400.) Like most people in the board game hobby, he learned of The Campaign For North Africa as a fable – that it was long, that it was rare, that it was occasionally silly. As he pored over the rulebook, his curiosity was piqued by the stringent regulations on the treatment of POWs, and how they could defect into their own militia and potentially plunge the campaign into an unwinnable state. Imagine that, the world’s longest board game ending with two losers.
Jake, a Campaign For North Africa Player: “Some of my friends just like the idea of playing the world’s longest game…But that’s not it for me. I love the structure, I love the complexity.”
Jake’s goal is to finish North Africa before he graduates high school. Last month he emailed the rulebooks to each of his recruited friends before their first session. Together they sat down in the family dining room to make their first moves. Jake has two years left before college, which is already cutting it close.
“For me, this is a passion. Some of my friends just like the idea of playing the world’s longest game, which is great, I don’t care,” he says. “But that’s not it for me. I love the structure, I love the complexity.”
This is the resolve of The Campaign For North Africa’s cult. They’re drawn to the game not for its cleverness or flair, but for its absurd, maximalist nature. Board games tend to prioritize a friendly communion with their players, simply because it’s difficult to sell copies of a design that nobody understands. But North Africa never got that memo. It is ornery and intentionally difficult, its commercial release feels like a grave miscalculation or an ultimate dare issued by a hysterical publisher. But its audacity touched a special few. Finally, the chance to have your courage and resilience challenged by a pile of cardboard.
Richard Berg has a pretty flat attitude towards the mystification of his most notorious work. As with every other product in his repertoire, the man built North Africa solely because someone was paying him, and he regards anyone earnestly attempting to conquer the full campaign to be either idealistic or foolish. “Has anyone completed the game? I think people have,” he says. “But the point with The Campaign For North Africa was that it was kinda fun to play for a couple weeks or a couple months. After that? Get a life.”
Berg sold his last copy of North Africa a handful of years back, because a “whole bunch of dollars seemed to be [a] more worthwhile thing to have.” He’s being flippant, but that’s not because he thinks the game was poorly conceived. “It did what it set out to do,” explains Berg. “It was supposed to be an intensive eurythmic manual, and I think it functioned at that level. Is this game something you should sit down and play? No, there are plenty of good Africa games, unless you really want to get down to that level.”Richard, the man who made Campaign For North Africa: “[The game’s publisher said, ‘We don’t know if it’s balanced or not. It’s gonna take seven years to play!’ And I said, ‘You know what, if someone tells you it’s unbalanced, tell them, “We think it’s your fault, play it again.”’”
We’re in the midst of a tabletop renaissance. Global board game sales have boomed over the past few years, and a renewed interest in the hobby has seeped into coffee shops, video game publishers, and publications like ours. Despite that, the classic hexagonal historical war-game—the true bones of the industry—are a dying breed. This is the Catan generation: millennials weaned on the crisp, instinctual gameplay perfected by the German masters. Phipps has fond memories of the late-’70s “the golden age” of war-gaming – where publishers routinely tried to out-convolute each other with their designs, because surely, the more complex a game is, the grander it must be. “After that golden age the designs got better,” he says. “But at the time there’s this sense of excitement, everything is new and possible.”
Perhaps someday war-gaming will make a comeback, but in the meantime, there will always be the Campaign. The Italian water rations, the thousand-plus cardboard shards, the unrepeatable, era-specific panache to market and sell a 1,500 hour experience. It’s a blessing to be thrilled by evaporating gas, to finally find a board game that embraces your obsessiveness note for note. It’s all way too much. It is drunk and full of hubris. And yet, The Campaign For North Africa will seduce new players for the rest of time.
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XenagogueVicene Offers Joe Rogan $101 Million To Move Podcast to Blog
After Rumble video hosting site made some news by offering Joe Rogan a ‘free speech’ no censorship platform for his podcast interview programs I thought, “anyone can do that.”
Just say you want to give a lot of money publicly. I thought my father was too cynical when he told me as a youth that “reporters have to write about something.”
I am a kind of reporter, so I made up some stories to post about offers of $101 million for Joe Rogan on my subreddits on Reddit.
Joe Rogan Offered $101 Million To Host Podcast on r/Leftwinger – Offered Freedom Of Expression
Joe Rogan Offered $101 Million To Move Podcast To r/HarpiesBizarre
r/BritishCommunist Offers Joe Rogan $101,000,000 To Move To Subreddit
Dame La Noche
CCCP – Через сезон дождей
UK Labour Leader “Sir” Keir Starmer – Was a Youthful Trotskyist Editor of Communist Magazine
“Mass Formation Psychosis” Is A Thing—And It Applies To BLM As Well As Covid
Dr Robert Malone, whose research helped develop the mRNA vaccine, recently suggested on The Joe Rogan Experience that the public hysteria about Covid-19 has been an example of “Mass Formation Psychosis.” Despite the subsequent screeching, I think he might be right. I think it applies to the Black Lives Matter hysteria of 2020 too.
Predictably—because it makes the unthinking follower of government instructions seem irrational—Malone’s comment has led to the entire theory being dismissed as “discredited.” Oscar Gonzalez, a journalist for the news website CNet, has proclaimed that “It’s bunk . . . It isn’t real.” [Discredited ‘mass formation psychosis’ theory spreads COVID misinformation, by Oscar Gonzalez, C-Net, January 20, 2022].
Various well-known but out of date musicians, such as Neil Young, have withdrawn their music from Spotify in protest at The Joe Rogan Experience being allowed to use the same platform and so share “misinformation” [Timeline of a Crisis: Spotify, Neil Young and Joe Rogan, by Diana Bradley, PR Week, February 1, 2022]. Naturally, this kind of petulant action implies these musicians—assuming they are not merely virtue-signaling—have been “triggered.” They are experiencing “cognitive dissonance,” where there is a painful disconnect between how they want the world to be and how it is, with the result that they try to shut down the source of “dissonance.”
Thus in attacking Mass Formation Psychosis, CNet’s Oscar Gonzalez tried to argue that the concept is pseudo-science because 250 medical professionals don’t agree with it (So what? Medical professionals can be wrong. They used to believe in humors and balance them out using leeches), and that the concept is not in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders upon which professional psychologists rely.
But there’s a problem with this appeal to authority for Leftists: until 1973, this same manual was quite clear that homosexuality was a mental disorder [Out of DSM: Depathologizing Homosexuality, by Jack Drescher, Behavioral Sciences, 2015].
Reuters also “fact checked” the “Mass Formation Psychosis” concept and rolled out compliant academics to declare that it is “reductionist”—although all science tries to reduce things down to the simplest explanation—and, of course, not in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [Fact Check-No evidence of pandemic ‘mass formation psychosis’, say experts speaking to Reuters, by Reuters Fact Check, Reuters, January 7, 2022].
However, I can’t find any media accounts that have looked in any detail at Mass Formation Psychosis, so I think it’s time to do so.
Dr Matthias Desmet is lecturer in psychoanalytic psychotherapy at Ghent University in Belgium and it is upon him that Robert Malone drew. Specifically, he drew on interview that Desmet gave in November 2021.
According to Desmet, Covid-19 had led to large scale “mass formation.” He does not use the term “psychosis.” When humans, as pack animals, are subject to extremely difficult and frightening conditions, they crave stability and order. This elevated stress makes them susceptible to a kind of “mass hypnosis” at the hands of those who can provide them with the order which they crave and, so hypnotized, they can be persuaded to do irrational or evil things.
According to Desmet, there are four key conditions that permit for the emergence of mass formation and all of these have been met of late. These are:
- “Lack of social bonds,” meaning that people lack intimacy, community and, thus, something to help them through a crisis.
- “A sense of meaninglessness”: Research implies that is high, so people will crave meaning and structure.
- “Free floating anxiety”—a high level of generalized anxiety, as evidenced in prescriptions levels of anti-depressants.
- General frustration. This is also, apparently, relatively high according to surveys.
If we add to these conditions a specific object of intense anxiety—the Great Recession, or the Covid Pandemic—then you have ideal conditions for “Mass Formation.”
According to an editorial pithily summarizing the Desmet interview:
Participation in the strategy has nothing to do with facts; it’s to preserve this new social bond created by fighting together to defeat the Object of their collective anxiety. By obeying the strategy, people can go from a very negative, isolated state to the polar opposite—a state of maximum connectedness. That creates a kind of mental intoxication that makes people willing to go along with anything, even if it is utterly wrong and illogical, or if they stand to lose everything that is important to them personally. They parrot the corporate narrative and adopt the same authoritarian, shaming language they hear from their leaders[EDITORIAL: Has everyone gone insane? Check your mass formation, Wisconsin Citizens Media Cooperative, November 5, 2021].
We can also see how this applies to the Black Lives Matter Hysteria of 2020. The COVID lockdown had interfered with the maintenance of social bonds and there was a very high level of pent-up anxiety, due to fear of the disease. The highly anxious were able to alleviate this by making themselves feel better through moral protests. The result was an extreme “Mass Formation” situation, which sucked in vast numbers of people.
I should note that one form of attack against the Mass Formation Psychosis theory is that it is based in psycho-analytic theory. The original concept—“Massenbildung”—is, in effect, drawn from the works of Sigmund Freud, according to an exploration of its history [Group formation and ideology. Text and context, by M. Hernandez, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1988].
Desmet is a psychoanalyst himself who discusses the concept in terms of struggling against “the Object” and “free floating anxiety,” which is a general sense of anxiety that is somehow disconnected from its original cause. But philosopher Ernest Gellner fairly comprehensively proved in his book The Psychoanalytic Movement: The Cunning of Unreason that psycho-analysis works no better than any other kind of therapy and most of models cannot be reduced to science.
The Mass Formation Psychosis theory, however, almost certainly can be reduced to science. There is abundant evidence from the scientific study of religion that people become more religious at times of intense stress and especially during heightened mortality salience [The Origin and Evolution of Religious Pro-Sociality, by Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff, Science, 2008]. In other words, we become more indoctrinatable—hypnotizable—at times of stress, putting us in touch with our “cognitive bias” to be religious. According to psychologists of religion, such as Pascal Boyer, religion is based around dogmas and blind belief, collective rituals to please the gods and ward off evil (getting the Vax?), obedience to authority and, often, the casting out of heretics [Religion Explained, by Pascal Boyer, 2001].
“Mass Formation,” in other words, is what the late biologist E.O. Wilson called “consilient” [Consilience, by Edward O. Wilson, 1998]—it is reducible to the hard science, even if it has been developed in the social sciences or in psycho-analysis.
It is not, as CNet’s Gonzales claims, “bunk.” It is very real.
Lance Welton [email him] is the pen name of a freelance journalist living in New York.
If you love yourself, keep a journal – If not…
If you don’t like yourself… write fan fiction about yourself with flattering aspects highlighted, exaggerated, or fabricated. What could go wrong with words on a page or screen or in the air. What could go wrong?
xenagoguevicene 
