Now That The Spectacular Dr. Chelsea Clinton Is On The Case - I'm All In!!!

stanford  |  In a special episode recorded in front of a live audience, Dean Lloyd Minor welcomes Chelsea Clinton, a bestselling author and an advocate for public health and early childhood education. They discuss the importance of accountability for scaling global health initiatives, and the power of storytelling to counter misinformation in science and health. They also talk about finding motivation through conscious optimism and rebuilding public trust through support of individuals, families, and communities. Along the way, they share memories of Chelsea’s time as a Stanford undergraduate and their overlapping memories of their home state of Arkansas.

Chelsea Clinton is vice chair of the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Health Access Initiative, working to improve lives, inspire emerging leaders, and increase awareness around public health issues. At the foundation, she is active in the early child initiative Too Small to Fail, which supports families with resources to promote early brain and language development; and the Clinton Global Initiative University, a global program that empowers student leaders to turn their ideas into action. A longtime public health advocate, Chelsea uses her platform at the Clinton Health Access Initiative to address vaccine hesitancy, childhood obesity, and health equity. In addition to her foundation work, Chelsea also teaches at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and has written several books for young readers, including the #1 New York Times bestseller She Persisted: 13 American Women Who Changed the World. She is also the co-author of The Book of Gutsy Women and Grandma’s Gardens with Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton and of Governing Global Health: Who Runs the World and Why? with Devi Sridhar. Chelsea’s podcast, In Fact with Chelsea Clinton, premiered in 2021, and she is a co-founder of HiddenLight Productions. Chelsea holds a bachelor’s degree from Stanford, a master of public health degree from Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, and both a master of philosophy degree and a doctorate in international relations from Oxford University. 

Senseless Bloodbath In The Moscow Region

sonar21  |  Americans are by-and-large decent, genial folks. But when it comes to history, most have the memory of an Alzheimer’s patient. Sam Cooke was speaking for most Americans when he crooned, “Don’t know much about history …”. So I will make this simple — America’s hatred of Russia has its roots in the U.S. Government’s post-WW II embrace of Nazis. Tim Weiner writes about this in his essential book, Legacy of Ashes. In the immediate aftermath of the fall of Berlin, U.S. Army intelligence recruited and relied on German General Reinhard Gehlen:

“During World War II, General Gehlen had tried to spy on the Soviets from the eastern front as a leader of the Abwehr, Hitler’s military intelligence service. He was an imperious and cagey man who swore he had a network of “good Germans” to spy behind Russian lines for the United States.

“From the beginning,” Gehlen said, “I was motivated by the following convictions: A showdown between East and West is unavoidable. Every German is under the obligation of contributing his share, so that Germany is in a position to fulfill the missions incumbent on her for the common defense of Western Christian Civilization.” The United States needed “the best German men as co-workers…if Western Culture is to be safeguarded.” The intelligence network he offered to the Americans was a group of “outstanding German nationals who are good Germans but also ideologically on the side of the Western democracies.”. . .

“But in July 1949, under relentless pressure from the army, the CIA took over the Gehlen group. Housed in a former Nazi headquarters outside Munich, Gehlen welcomed dozens of prominent war criminals into his circle. As Helms and Sichel feared, the East German and Soviet intelligence services penetrated the Gehlen group at the highest levels. The worst of the moles surfaced long after the Gehlen group had transformed itself into the national intelligence service of West Germany. Gehlen’s longtime chief of counterintelligence had been working for Moscow all along.”

In the wake of this debacle, the CIA failed to recruit and run any significant sources in the Soviet Government. The CIA had very few officers who spoke Russian and swallowed whole hog the belief that the Soviets were intent on conquering the world and that it was up to the United States — relying heavily on the CIA — to stop the Soviets. That became the cornerstone of American foreign policy and explains the CIA’s obsession with regime change. No one in the intelligence hierarchy was encouraged or permitted to raise the alternative view — i.e., the Soviets, fearful of a Western invasion, took firm control of the European nations on its western border and installed governments that would served the Soviet interest. The CIA started its life as a new bureaucracy in Washington firmly committed to destroying the Soviet Union.

One of its first projects was recruiting and funding an insurgency with Ukrainians who had sided with the Nazis. While that effort was crushed by the Soviets, it served to further convince Stalin and others in the Soviet hierarchy that the West was in bed with Nazi survivors and could not be trusted.

The failure of the CIA to predict critical world events was an early distinguishing feature of the CIA from the start. The Soviets detonated their first nuke on August 29, 1949. Three weeks later a U.S. Air Force crew flying out of Alaska detected traces of radiation beyond normal levels. Weiner recounts what happened next:

“On September 20, the CIA confidently declared that the Soviet Union would not produce an atomic weapon for at least another four years.”

The CIA’s leaders knack for getting it wrong continued with the failure to heed warnings that China was going to intervene on behalf of North Korea in 1950. Here is Weiner’s account:

“The president left for Wake Island on October 11, 1950. The CIA assured him that it saw “no convincing indications of an actual Chinese Communist intention to resort to full-scale intervention in Korea…barring a Soviet decision for global war.” The agency reached that judgment despite two alarms from its three-man Tokyo station. First the station chief, George Aurell, reported that a Chinese Nationalist officer in Manchuria was warning that Mao had amassed 300,000 troops near the Korean border. Headquarters paid little heed. Then Bill Duggan, later chief of station in Taiwan, insisted that the Chicoms soon would cross into North Korea. General MacArthur responded by threatening to have Duggan arrested. The warnings never reached Wake Island.

At headquarters, the agency kept advising Truman that China would not enter the war on any significant scale. On October 18, as MacArthur’s troops surged north toward the Yalu River and the Chinese border, the CIA reported that “the Soviet Korean venture has ended in failure.” On October 20, the CIA said that Chinese forces detected at the Yalu were there to protect hydroelectric power plants. On October 28, it told the White H ouse that those Chinese troops were scattered volunteers. On October 30, after American troops had been attacked, taking heavy casualties, the CIA reaffirmed that a major Chinese intervention was unlikely. A few days later, Chinese-speaking CIA officers interrogated several prisoners taken during the encounter and determined that they were Mao’s soldiers. Yet CIA headquarters asserted one last time that China would not invade in force. Two days later 300,000 Chinese troops struck with an attack so brutal that it nearly pushed the Americans into the sea.

Are you beginning to see a pattern here? While it is true there were some solid intelligence officers in the ranks of the CIA, any attempt to raise a warning that flew against conventional wisdom or defied what the leaders wanted to hear was ignored or punished. The failures of the CIA leadership to correctly predict the Soviets producing a nuclear bomb and the Chinese invasion of Korea are not isolated incidents. When it comes to big, critical issues — e.g., the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Tet offensive, the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the fall of the Shah of Iran and the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeni, Saddam’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 9-11 plot, weapons of “Mass Destruction in Iraq” and Russia’s ability to survive western sanctions and spin up its defense industry to outpace the U.S. and NATO countries combined — the CIA missed them all.

Evil Feminization of the West Won't Stop Short Of An Inquisition Level Bloodbath...,

racket  |  Hopkins reached out to me after listening in disgust to the Murthy v. Missouri Supreme Court hearing Monday. Standing was a big issue: our government said plaintiffs like Drs. Jay Bhattacharya and Aaron Kheriaty lacked definite proof that the government was responsible for suppressing their speech. No such issue exists in CJ’s case, as you can see.

Hopkins also wanted Americans who might be up in arms about the specter of legalized censorship in their own country to see that the phenomenon has also spread to virtually every Western democracy, often in more extreme forms than we’ve seen so far in the United States.

CJ’s unique insight involves his ludicrous German case, which as you’ll read in the Q&A below has taken bizarre turns since we last checked and will now go to trial yet again. As an expat following the American situation from afar, he’s seen how the authoritarian tide is rising in similar or worse ways all around the globe. 

Hopkins is facing the business end of the German version, among the worst. As detailed last June, he was charged with “disseminating propaganda, the contents of which are intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization.” The crime? Using a barely detectible Swastika in the cover image of his book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich. Far from “furthering the aims” of Nazism, he was criticizing them by comparing Nazi methods and laws to those of modern health authorities. The offending image:

Hopkins went to trial in January and delivered an impassioned plea to the court. “Every journalist that has covered my case, everyone in this courtroom, understands what this prosecution is actually about,” he said. “It has nothing to do with punishing people who actually disseminate pro-Nazi propaganda. It is about punishing dissent, and making an example of dissidents in order to intimidate others into silence.”

Though the judge was clearly not a fan of Hopkins — a courtroom account by Aya Velázquez, which I recommend reading, described how the judge said CJ’s statements were “ideological drivel,” just “not punishable by law” — he won on the law.

After acquittal, he was made aware that technically the case wasn’t over, because thanks to a quirk of German jurisprudence, the prosecutor had a week to file an appeal. Hopkins was unconcerned. “I doubt he will [re-file]. He made a total fool of himself in front of a large audience yesterday,” he wrote. “I can’t imagine that he will want to do that again.”

Bzzt! Wrong. The prosecutor re-filed charges. The prosecutorial theory in the Hopkins case was based on a bizarre interpretation of hate crime, essentially asserting that if you have to think about an image to realize it’s satire, it can’t be allowed. If that idea spreads, it would make comedy or even sharp commentary impossible. This is why his indictment, and the similar investigation of Roger Waters, are really serious moments. Not to be heavy-handed, but eliminating the loophole for satire or mockery is exactly what Waters meant by “Another Brick in the Wall.” Before you know it, it’ll be toohigh to see over.

 

What's That Smell? Like Censorship, Lawfare Is Yet Another Feminine Ethical Hygiene Problem....,

thehill  |  Channeling Tennessee Williams in his play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” Judge Scott McAfee wrote that, after their testimony, there remained “an odor of mendacity.”

That odor was particularly strong after the hearings indicated that Wade may have committed perjury in his earlier divorce case, and that both Willis and Wade were credibly accused of lying on the stand about when their relationship began. 

They are prosecuting defendants in the Trump case accused of the same underlying conduct, including  19 individual counts of false statements, false filings or perjury.

Yet, that distinct odor noted by Judge McAfee goes beyond the sordid affairs of Willis and Wade.

For many citizens, mendacity, or dishonesty, is wafting from various courtrooms around the country. The odor is becoming intolerable for many Americans as selective prosecution is being raised in a wide array of cases.

The problem is that courts have made it virtually impossible to use this claim to dismiss counts. Yet there is a disturbing level of merit to some of these underlying objections.

For years, conservatives have objected that there is a two-tier system of justice in this country. I have long resisted such claims, but it has become increasingly difficult to deny the obvious as selective prosecution in a variety of recent cases and opinions.

I have long stated that the charges against Trump over documents at Mar-a-Lago are strong and based on established precedent. However, the recent decision of Special Counsel Robert Hur not to bring criminal charges against President Joe Biden has undermined even that case.

Hur described four decades of Biden serially violating laws governing classified documents. The evidence included Biden telling a third party that he had classified material in his house and actually reading from a classified document to his non-cleared ghostwriter. There is evidence of an effort to destroy evidence and later an effort of the White House to change the report. There is also Biden’s repeated denial of any knowledge or memory of the documents found in nine locations where he worked or lived. 

Hur ultimately had to justify the lack of charges based on a belief that he could not secure a conviction from a D.C. jury with an elderly defendant with diminished mental faculties.  

Although Special Counsel Jack Smith could still proceed on obstruction counts, his prosecution of Trump for the retention and mishandling of national security documents is absurdly in conflict with the treatment Biden is receiving.

In New York, the legislature changed the statute of limitations to allow Trump to be sued while New York Attorney General Letitia James effectively ran on a pledge of selectively prosecuting him. She never specified any particular crime, just promising to bag Trump.

 

Arbitrary Enforcement Of Federal Law Roils Classified Documents Case

declassified  |  Jack Smith's Florida case. "[Judge Aileen] Cannon repeatedly asked both sides for examples of criminal prosecution for 'other officials who did the same.' She questioned the 'arbitrary enforcement' of the espionage statute, forcing the government to admit that no other former president or vice president has faced criminal prosecution for keeping similar documents and failing to return them.

'This speaks to the arbitrary enforcement...featuring in this case,' Cannon told Bratt. Cannon also pushed back on claims Trump should have expected to face prosecution for storing classified files. Once again noting no former president or vice president-Mike Pence also discovered classified records after Trump was indicted in 2023-has been charged, Cannon suggested it was fair for Trump to expect the same treatment since 'no historical precedent' is on the books. 'Given that landscape,' Cannon continued, Trump could argue he has been unfairly targeted. Which his team already has. 

In a motion emailed to the court and the government last month, Trump's attorneys asked to dismiss the case based on 'selective and vindictive prosecution.' Although the motion is not public, Jack Smith quickly responded to defend the Department of Justice's choice to pursue Trump and not Biden. 'Trump, unlike Biden, is alleged to have engaged in extensive and repeated efforts to obstruct justice and thwart the return of documents bearing classification markings, which provides particularly strong evidence of willfulness and is a paradigmatic aggravating factor that prosecutors routinely rely on when making charging decisions,' Smith wrote in a March 7 response. 'Second, the evidence concerning the two men's intent-whether they knowingly possessed and willfully retained such documents-is starkly different.' 

In an almost comical passage, Smith admits Biden unlawfully retained classified records-just not as many as Trump. 'Biden possessed 88 documents bearing classification markings, including 18 marked Top Secret. By contrast, Trump possessed 337 documents bearing classification markings, including 64 marked Top Secret.

Too Many Feminized Oligarchs In The 4th Reich

unherd  |  The US Supreme Court has been hearing arguments today on what could be one of the most consequential rulings related to free speech in decades. The case, Murthy v. Missouri, revolves around efforts by US Government agencies, including the CDC and the FBI, to influence the narrative around major events, such as Covid-19, by leaning on social media platforms to censor posts, topics and accounts.

The case — brought by two states, Missouri and Louisiana, as well as five individuals against the federal government — was in part animated by Elon Musk’s decision to publish the Twitter Files, a trove of emails, text and other company correspondence which showed the extent to which Government agencies ranging from the CDC to the CIA were in contact with managers at social media platforms over issues such as claims about the vaccine and the effectiveness of lockdowns.

The case could not be more significant for American society as far as freedom of speech is concerned. The reason is that at the heart of the case is what constitutes disinformation and what steps governments can take to combat it. In this case, many of the claims censored by social media companies at the behest of the Government turned out to be true. This includes widespread censorship of social media posts claiming that the Covid-19 vaccines carry health risks and that the lockdowns were not only ineffective but also damaging.

Republicans have alleged that the same dynamic was at play when social media giants censored the New York Post’s reporting on the now infamous Hunter Biden laptop story, arguing that deep state actors leant on the platform to block the coverage. Twitter executives involved in the decisions denied this, with one of them, Yoel Roth, saying “I believe Twitter erred in this case because we wanted to avoid repeating the mistakes of 2016.”

The irony, of course, is that “the mistakes of 2016” refers to the widespread allegations that Trump colluded with the Russian government to sway that year’s election, including on Facebook. None of these claims have been proved true — and some, like the effect of “fake news” on the election, have been debunked.

Nevertheless, the “Russiagate” narrative — itself one of the most sweeping disinformation campaigns of recent years — took a firm hold in American public life, in large part thanks to claims of disinformation that lay at the heart of the campaign.

This speaks to the central challenge of the case: while the Government’s critics argue that disinformation is a cudgel to silence dissent, proponents argue that a core Government function is to police information, especially during times of emergency.

What Will It Take To Get MAGA To Open Fire?

I have a weird feeling about Mitch McConnell stepping down today pic.twitter.com/GSYhH6G2ll

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) February 29, 2024

The Times Article Was Authorized By The CIA

scheerpost  |  The New York Times on February 25 published an explosive story of what purports to be the history of the CIA in Ukraine from the Maidan coup of 2014 to the present.  The story, “The Spy War: How the CIA Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin,” is one of initial bilateral distrust, but a mutual fear and hatred of Russia, that progresses to a relationship so intimate that Ukraine is now one of the CIA’s closest intelligence partners in the world.  

At the same time, the Times’ publication of the piece, which reporters claimed relied on more than 200 interviews in Ukraine, the US, and “several European countries,” raises multiple questions:  Why did the CIA not object to the article’s publication, especially with it being in one of the Agency’s preferred outlets?  When the CIA approaches a newspaper to complain about the classified information it contains, the piece is almost always killed or severely edited.  Newspaper publishers are patriots, after all.  Right?  

Was the article published because the CIA wanted the news out there?  Perhaps more important was the point of the article to influence the Congressional budget deliberations on aid to Ukraine?  After all, was the article really just meant to brag about how great the CIA is?  Or was it to warn Congressional appropriators, “Look how much we’ve accomplished to confront the Russian bear.  You wouldn’t really let it all go to waste, would you?”

The Times’ article has all the hallmarks of a deep, inside look at a sensitive—possibly classified—subject.  It goes into depth on one of the intelligence community’s Holy of Holies, an intelligence liaison relationship, something that no intelligence officer is ever supposed to discuss.  But in the end, it really isn’t so sensitive.  It doesn’t tell us anything that every American hasn’t already assumed.  Maybe we hadn’t had it spelled out in print before, but we all believed that the CIA was helping Ukraine fight the Russians.  We had already seen reporting that the CIA had “boots on the ground” in Ukraine and that the U.S. government was training Ukrainian special forces and Ukrainian pilots, so there’s nothing new there.  

The article goes a little further in detail, although, again, without providing anything that might endanger sources and methods.  For example, it tells us that:

• There is a CIA listening post in the forest along the Russian border, one of 12 “secret” bases the US maintains there.  One or more of these posts helped to prove Russia’s involvement in the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.  That’s great.  But the revelation exposes no secrets and tells us nothing new.
• Ukrainian intelligence officials helped the Americans “go after” the Russian operatives “who meddled in the 2016 US presidential election.”  I have a news flash for the New York Times: The Mueller report found that there was no meaningful Russian meddling in the 2016 election.  And what does “go after” mean?
• Beginning in 2016, the CIA trained an “elite Ukrainian commando force known as Unit 2245, which captured Russian drones and communications gear so that CIA technicians could reverse-engineer them and crack Moscow’s encryption systems.”  This is exactly what the CIA is supposed to do.  Honestly, if the CIA hadn’t been doing this, I would have suggested a class action lawsuit for the American people to get their tax money back.  Besides, the CIA has been doing things like this for decades.  The CIA was able to obtain important components of Soviet tactical weapons from ostensibly pro-Soviet Romania in the 1970s.
• Ukraine has turned into an intelligence-gathering hub that has intercepted more Russian communications than the CIA station in Kiev could initially handle.  Again, I would expect nothing less.  After all, that’s where the war is.  So of course, communications will be intercepted there.  As to the CIA station being overwhelmed, the Times never tells us if that is because the station was a one-man operation at the time or whether it had thousands of employees and was still overwhelmed.  It’s all about scale.
• And lest you think that the CIA and the U.S. government were on the offensive in Ukraine, the article makes clear that, “Mr. Putin and his advisers misread a critical dynamic.  The CIA didn’t push its way into Ukraine.  U.S. officials were often reluctant to fully engage, fearing that Ukrainian officials could not be trusted, and worrying about provoking the Kremlin.”

It’s at this point in the article that the Times reveals what I believe to be the buried lead: “Now these intelligence networks are more important than ever, as Russia is on the offensive and Ukraine is more dependent on sabotage and long-range missile strikes that require spies far behind enemy lines.  And they are increasingly at risk: “If Republicans in Congress end military funding to Kiev, the CIA may have to scale back.”  (Emphasis mine.)

Why Did The NYTimes Report On CIA Operations In Ukraine?

scheerpost  |  We can start, logically enough, with that desperation evident among those dedicated to prolonging the war. The outcome of the war, in my read and in the view of various military analysts, does not depend on the $61 billion in aid that now hangs in the balance. But the Biden regime seems to think it does, or pretends to think it does. The Times’s most immediate intent, so far as one can make out from the piece, is to add what degree of urgency it can to this question.

Entous and Schwirtz report that the people running Ukrainian intelligence are nervous that without a House vote releasing new funds “the CIA will abandon them.” Good enough that it boosts the case to cite nervous Ukrainians, but we should recognize that this is a misapprehension. The CIA has a very large budget entirely independent of what Congress votes one way or another. William Burns, the CIA director, traveled to Kyiv two weeks ago to reassure his counterparts that “the U.S. commitment will continue,” as Entous and Schwirtz quote him saying. This is perfectly true, assuming Burns referred to the agency’s commitment.

More broadly, The Times piece appears amid flagging enthusiasm for the Ukraine project. And it is in this circumstance that Entous and Schwirtz went long on the benefits accruing to the CIA in consequence of its presence on the ground in Ukraine. But read these two reporters carefully: They, or whoever put their piece in its final shape, make it clear that the agency’s operations on Ukrainian soil count first and most as a contribution to Washington’s long campaign to undermine the Russian Federation. This is not about Ukrainian democracy, that figment of neoliberal propagandists. It is about Cold War II, plain and simple. It is time to reinvigorate the old Russophobia, thus—and hence all the baloney about Russians corrupting elections and so on. It is all there for a reason.  

To gather these thoughts and summarize, This piece is not journalism and should not be read as such. Neither do Entous and Schwirtz serve as journalists. They are clerks of the governing class pretending to be journalists while they post notices on a bulletin board that pretends to be a newspaper.

■

Let’s dolly out to put this piece in its historical context and consider the implications of its appearance in the once-but-fallen newspaper of record. Let’s think about the early 1970s, when it first began to emerge that the CIA had compromised the American media  and broadcasters.

Jack Anderson, the admirably iconoclastic columnist, lifted the lid on the agency’s infiltration of the media by way of a passing mention of a corrupted correspondent in 1973. A year later a former Los Angeles Times correspondent named Stuart Loory published the first extensive exploration of relations between the CIA and the media in the Columbia Journalism Review. Then, in 1976, the Church Committee opened its famous hearings in the Senate. It took up all sorts of agency malfeasance—assassinations, coups, illegal covert ops. Its intent was also to disrupt the agency’s misuse of American media and restore the latter to their independence and integrity.

The Church Committee is still widely remembered for getting its job done. But it never did. A year after Church produced its six-volume report, Rolling Stone published “The CIA and the Media,” Carl Bernstein’s well-known piece. Bernstein went considerably beyond the Church Committee, demonstrating that it pulled its punches rather than pull the plug on the CIA’s intrusions in the media. Faced with the prospect of forcing the CIA to sever all covert ties with the media, a senator Bernstein did not name remarked, “We just weren’t ready to take that step.”

We should read The Times’s piece on the righteousness of the CIA’s activities in Ukraine—bearing in mind the self-evident cooperation between the agency and the newspaper—with this history in mind.

America was just emerging from the disgraces of the McCarthyist period when Stuart Loory opened the door on this question, the Church Committee convened, and Carl Bernstein filled in the blanks. In and out of the profession there was disgust at the covert relationship between media and the spooks. Now look. What was then viewed as top-to-bottom objectionable is now routinized. It is “as usual.” In my read this is one consequence among many of the Russiagate years: They again plunged Americans and their mainstream media into the same paranoia that produced the corruptions of the 1950s and 1960s.

Alas, the scars of the swoon we call Russiagate are many and run deep

May Golan Looks And Sounds Just Like A Pig Grunting....,

#Israel official states:
"I am personally proud of the ruins of Gaza, and that every baby, even 80 years from now, will tell their grandchildren what the Jews did."

— May Golan, Israeli Minister of Social Equality & Women's Advancement

-MyLordBebo pic.twitter.com/b9KRRMAJX2

— Arthur Morgan (@ArthurM40330824) February 23, 2024

AA  |  Israeli Minister of Social Equality May Golan said she is "proud" of the destruction caused by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip.

Speaking during a session held by the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) Wednesday evening, Golan threatened Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, with decapitation or arrest.

"We are not ashamed by saying that we want to see the soldiers of the IDF (Israeli army) catching Sinwar and his terrorists by their eyes and dragging them across the Gaza Strip on their way to the dungeons of the Prison Authority," she said in a widely circulated video of her speech.

"I am personally proud of the ruins of Gaza, and that every baby, even 80 years from now, will tell their grandchildren what the Jews did," she said. "No dove and no olive branch, only a sword to cut off Sinwar's head, that's what he will receive from us.”

Israel has pounded the Gaza Strip since an Oct. 7 Hamas attack that Tel Aviv says killed nearly 1,200 people.

The ensuing Israeli bombardment has killed at least 29,410 victims and caused mass destruction and shortages of necessities. Nearly 70,000 people have been injured.

The Israeli war on Gaza has pushed 85% of the territory's population into internal displacement amid acute shortages of food, clean water and medicine, while 60% of the enclave's infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.

For the first time since its creation in 1948, Israel stands accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice, the highest judicial body of the United Nations.

An interim ruling in January ordered Tel Aviv to stop genocidal acts and take measures to guarantee that humanitarian assistance is provided to civilians in Gaza.

RIP Coach Red Pill (Should've Placed A Higher Priorirty On Your Wife And Daughter)

Gonzalo Lira, Sr. says his son has died at 55 in a Ukrainian prison, where he was being held for the crime of criticizing the Zelensky and Biden governments. Gonzalo Lira was an American citizen, but the Biden administration clearly supported his imprisonment and torture. Several… https://t.co/F0nOG9qGvv

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) January 12, 2024

Gov. Kathy Hochul Is Extra Special....,

dailycaller  |  Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York warned colleges and universities in a letter on Saturday that she would order legal action against them if they fail to address antisemitism on campus.

Three university presidents appeared before Congress on Dec. 5 to testify about antisemitism on their campuses, after which they were heavily criticized for failing to say whether “calling for genocide against Jews” violated their institutions’ codes of conduct. Hochul wrote to all colleges and universities in New York that a failure to address antisemitism would result in legal action from the state under New York State Human Rights Law and Title VI of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964.

“I assure you that if any school in New York State is found to be in violation, I will activate the State’s Division of Human Rights to take aggressive enforcement action and will refer possible Title VI violations to the federal government,” Hochul wrote in the letter, which was posted to X, formerly known as Twitter.

UPenn’s president and chairman of the board of trustees resigned on Saturday, while Harvard’s president issued a public apology amid calls for her removal.

“The moral lapses that were evidenced by the disgraceful answers to questions posed during this week’s congressional testimony hearing cannot and will not be tolerated here in the State of New York,” Hochul wrote.

Hochul has previously dealt with fallout from an antisemitic controversy at a university in her own state. Police arrested Cornell University undergraduate student Patrick Dai on Oct. 31 for allegedly making violent threats to commit a mass shooting against Cornell’s Center for Jewish Living.

“Gov. Hochul cannot command colleges and universities to violate the First Amendment. Nor may she enforce state law to compel action against speech protected by the First Amendment,” the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Broad, vague bans on ‘calls for genocide,’ absent more, would result in the censorship of protected expression.”

 

Kissinger Understood You Can't Be Both Oppressor And Victim

NYTimes  |  Richard M. Nixon has long been the Freddy Krueger of American political life. You know in your bones that he is destined to keep returning.

Sure enough, though dead 16 years, Nixon is back onstage, with the release of a fresh batch of tapes from his Oval Office days. They show him at his omni-bigoted worst, offering one slur after another against the Irish, Italians and blacks. Characteristically, he saved his most potent acid for Jews. “The Jews,” he said, “are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality.”

But Nixon’s hard-wired anti-Semitism is an old story. What has caused many heads to swivel is a recording of Henry A. Kissinger, his national security adviser. Mr. Kissinger is heard telling Nixon in 1973 that helping Soviet Jews emigrate and thus escape oppression by a totalitarian regime — a huge issue at the time — was “not an objective of American foreign policy.”

“And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union,” he added, “it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

In New York, the epicenter of Jewish life in the United States, some jaws are still not back in place after dropping to the floor.

Bad enough that any senior White House official would, without prodding, raise the grotesque specter of Jews once again being herded into gas chambers. But it was unbearable for some to hear that language come from Mr. Kissinger, a Jew who as a teenager fled Nazi Germany with his family, in 1938. Had he not found refuge in this country and in this city — the Kissingers settled in Washington Heights — he might have ended up in a gas chamber himself.

“Despicable,” “callous,” “revulsion,” “hypocrite,” “chilling” and “shocking” were a few of the words used this week by some leaders of Jewish organizations and by newspapers that focus on Jewish matters.

Conspicuously, however, many groups and prominent individuals stayed silent. They include people who would have almost certainly spoken up had coldhearted talk of genocide come from the likes of Mel Gibson or Patrick J. Buchanan, neither a stranger to provocative comments about Jews.

Even some who deplored Mr. Kissinger’s remarks tempered their criticism. The Anti-Defamation League called the recorded statements “outrageous,” but said they did not undermine “the important contributions and ultimate legacy of Henry Kissinger,” including his support of Israel. The American Jewish Committee described the remarks as “truly chilling,” but suggested that anti-Semitism in the Nixon White House might have been at least partly to blame.

“Perhaps Kissinger felt that, as a Jew, he had to go the extra mile to prove to the president that there was no question as to where his loyalties lay,” the committee’s executive director, David Harris, said in a statement.

There was no hedging in editorials by Jewish-themed newspapers like The Forward and The Jewish Week. Separately, in a Jewish Week column, Menachem Z. Rosensaft, a New York lawyer who is active in Holocaust-related issues, dismissed Mr. Kissinger as “the quintessential court Jew.” And J. J. Goldberg, a Forward columnist, wrote, “No one has ever gone broke overstating Kissinger’s coldbloodedness.”

Now 87, Mr. Kissinger confined himself this week to a brief statement that said his taped comments “must be viewed in the context of the time.”

Back then, American Jewish groups strongly supported legislation that would have made any improvement in American-Soviet trade relations contingent on freer emigration by Soviet Jews. The president and Mr. Kissinger rejected that approach, which was rooted in human rights concepts not suited to their power politics, or realpolitik. They were bluntly angry at Jewish organizations for pushing hard on the issue.

In his statement, Mr. Kissinger said of Jewish emigration that “we dealt with it as a humanitarian matter separate from the foreign policy issues.” That approach, he said, led to a significant rise in the number of Jews permitted to leave the Soviet Union. In fact, it did, for a while anyway.

Still, that “gas chamber” line is about as ugly as it gets. It seems unlikely to change many views of a man who is both widely admired and widely hated, but there is one word that just might haunt Mr. Kissinger to his final days.

Genocide is “not an American concern,” he said, but “maybe a humanitarian concern.”

Maybe, the man said.

 

 

 

The Simple Answer To Democrats Reality Censoring Desperation

Dana White to the liberal mob: "Go f*** yourself."

Tucker Carlson to the liberal mob: "F*** you."

Elon Musk to the liberal mob: "Go f*** yourself... Hi Bob!"

There are few men with real influence in this country who have the guts and are willing to raise the middle finger to… pic.twitter.com/wRKIRm4z2I

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) December 1, 2023

TheHill |  Across news sites, Democrats are warning of the imminent death of democracy. Hillary Clinton has warned that a Trump victory would be the end of democracy. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is warning of “executions.” Even actors like Robert DeNiro are predicting that this may be our very last democratic election.

Yet these harbingers of tyranny are increasingly pursuing the very course that will make their predictions come true. The Democratic Party is actively seeking to deny voters choices in this election, supposedly to save democracy.

Henry Ford once promised customers any color so long as it is black. Democrats are adopting the same approach to the election: You can have any candidate on the ballot, as long as it’s Joe Biden.

This week, the Executive Committee of the Florida Democratic Democracy told voters that they would not be allowed to vote against Biden. Even though he has opponents in the primary, the party leadership has ordered that only Biden will appear on the primary ballot. 

And if you want to register your discontent with Biden with a write-in vote, forget about it. Under Florida law, if the party approves only one name, there will be no primary ballots at all. The party just called the election for Biden before a single vote has been cast.

This is not unprecedented. It happened with Barack Obama in 2012 and, on the Republican side, with George W. Bush in 2004. It was wrong then, and it is wrong now. 

As Democratic presidential candidate Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) noted, “Americans would expect the absence of democracy in Tehran, not Tallahassee. Our mission as Democrats is to defeat authoritarians, not become them.”

In Iran, the mullahs routinely bar opposition candidates from ballots as “Guardians” of the ballots.

There is good reason for the Biden White House to want the election called before it is held. A CNN poll found that two out of three Democrats believe that the party should nominate someone else. A Wall Street Journal poll that found 73 percent of voters say Biden is “too old to run for president.”

The party leadership is solving that problem by depriving Democratic voters of a choice. 

In other states, Democratic politicians and lawyers are pursuing a different strategy: “You can have any candidate, as long as it isn’t Trump.” 

They are seeking to bar Trump from ballots under a novel theory about the 14th Amendment. In states from Colorado to Michigan, Democratic operatives are arguing that Trump must be taken off the ballots because he gave “aid and comfort” to an “insurrection or rebellion.” Other Democrats have called for more than 120 other Republicans to be stripped from the ballots under the same claim tied to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. 

This effort is being supported by academics such as Laurence Tribe, who previously called for Trump to be charged with the attempted murder of former Vice President Mike Pence.

 

 

 

 

Between Gaza And Ukraine

globaltimes  |  The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is exacerbating. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has made four visits to Israel since October 7, but what he talked about was the US support for Israel instead of a ceasefire.

With each day that a ceasefire is delayed, Palestinians' animosity toward Israel deepens. It will definitely create a longer-term and more devastating disaster in the region already plagued by decades of war.

When the conflict between Palestine and Israel first broke out, China immediately expressed its stance, emphasizing that the top priority is to prevent a broader humanitarian disaster and that the fundamental way out is to implement the "two-state solution." On many occasions since then, China has repeatedly stressed the importance and urgency of returning to the "two-state solution."

However, the US and European countries have not actively responded to this call of conscience. Instead, they have been constrained by domestic politics and wavered, preventing major countries from  reaching an immediate consensus.

It was not until Israel's military operations in Gaza had caused tens of thousands of casualties, including scores of women and children, and displaced hundreds of thousands of people that leaders in the US and European countries seemed to realize the need to return to the two-state solution. US President Joe Biden and some European leaders have expressed their stance on this recently.

Although the current suffering in the Middle East is not directly caused by the US and Europe, as countries deeply involved in the geopolitical game there since World War II, they bear a heavy responsibility for the resumption of the war.

It is precisely because of the US' unlimited support for Israel and the cowardice of the US and Europe that led to the failure to take action to maintain peace. Israel marched into Gaza without any scruples, carrying US-made weapons and equipment. 

So far, the US has not called for shifting the focus to a ceasefire. Instead, it supported Israel's retaliatory strikes against Gaza and enhanced the deployment of force to restrain the involvement of other forces in the Middle East.

There Isn’t A Single Working mRNA Covid Vaccine Right Now...,

This picture is worth a thousand words:

The Nobel Prize laureates do not trust their own 'innovation' and instead rely on pseudoscience—face diapers. https://t.co/pudNl9wIq9 pic.twitter.com/klgoBiklOo

— Dr. Simon Goddek (@goddeketal) October 2, 2023

There isn’t a single working mRNA vaccine right now...,

How can you give a Nobel Prize for it?

Reduce transmission? – you seriously must be kidding at this point. I could never even dream to make that claim with a straight face at this point. Seriously, this is the kind of thing that is causing the damage to the reputation of medicine to be hyper-driven.

Morbidity – Given the number of instant severe problems that many patients had with the vaccine – even in the early days. Blood clots, pulmonary emboli, autoimmune and neurological issues…. And now that it is becoming obvious that it is the multiply boosted and vaxxed that seem to be having many more problems with getting infected over and over again – multiple studies are now showing this.

Again – if someone can please answer the question – If it seems that the multiply boosted are getting infected more often – and it seems that multiple infections increase the incidence of all kinds of problems – how are the vaccines helping?

Extreme morbidity and mortality – hospitalizations, etc. —– in the first year of the pandemic, this may have been so. However, as with any mitigation scheme, one must keep track over the entire event – and one also must keep track of those being harmed by the mitigation procedure.

The overwhelming majority of patients who are being admitted right now are vaxxed/boosted. I think the claim of improvement in morbidity early on was justified. I am not seeing this now. When taken in its entirety – I am not certain that we can make the claim that this vaccine program has been a success. It is going to take the entirety of the raw data over the entire country/world to really ascertain this. But yet, the authorities are completely unwilling to do so. Can you explain to me why that is? What about releasing all raw data is so problematic? Especially for “The Scientists”?

With regard to Nobel prizes. We all must remember that the Medicine Prize went to the gentleman who pioneered frontal lobotomies. The Peace Prize went to Obama who spent the next 8 years bombing weddings with drones. Sometimes Nobel prizes go pear-shaped.

It should truly be an award for those whose work has stood the test of time. I wonder what will be thought of this one awarded yesterday a generation from now.

It is significant that the Nobel recipients were not involved with the development of the mRNA spike protein vaccines. Their work was in developing a mechanism for repressing the immune system response to allow cells to absorb mRNA. This mechanism was then utilized by Moderna and BioNTech/Pfizer in their vaccines.

I think this was simply a way to award “The Nobel Prize” to the vaccines without actually giving it directly to Big Pharma. – i.e. it is a propaganda move.  Heaven forbid we get into the DAPRA project with Moderna concerning the Pathogen Protection Platform, which was to use mRNA to spur antibodies to send soldiers into an environment where the pathogen of interest was used as weapon. That was 2013, and DARPA stopped.

Why?

Bought And Paid For By The CIA: International Fascism And Anglo-American Foreign Policy

cynthiachung  |  [This is a chapter from my newly released book ‘The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set: the Birth of International Fascism and Anglo-American Foreign Policy.’ For further details on different formats and how to purchase click here.] The audio version of this chapter is available here.

Read full story

However, this is not the only blunder that the Canadian government has made recently and has blamed “ze Russians” for.

On February 27, 2022, Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland held a scarf bearing the slogan “Slava Ukraini,” meaning “Glory to Ukraine,” with the “Blood and Soil” colors of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) (who collaborated with the Nazis during WWII and massacred Jews and Poles).

According to Freeland’s press secretary, this was just another case of a “classic KGB disinformation smear… accusing Ukrainians and Ukrainian-Canadians of being far right extremists or fascists or Nazis,” which is a confusing statement on multiple levels.

It is not clear how this was a case of “Russian disinformation,” since the picture is indeed authentic, Freeland did not deny this. And she was indeed holding a “Blood and Soil” emblem, which originated with the Nazis, clear for everyone to see. Lastly, it is confusing as to why the Canadian government seems to be unaware that the KGB no longer exists. Are they also under the impression that the Soviet Union still exists?

Not irrelevant in all of this is the fact that Freeland’s grandfather was the chief editor of a Nazi newspaper during WWII in Galicia and that she is indeed aware of this and apparently unapologetic. Whenever she is questioned about this, she does not deny anything, but simply blames such a focus of inquiry on Russian disinformation with the intent to “destabilize Western democracies.”

Interestingly, it was the Canadian newspaper “The Globe and Mail” who reported this story, titled “Freeland knew her grandfather was editor of Nazi newspaper,” thus, not a Russian publication last time I checked. And upon whom did they base such information? None other than Freeland’s own uncle, John-Paul Himka, who was at the time professor emeritus at the University of Alberta.

 

THEY Take A Deep Dive Into The Ukro-Canadian Nazi's Family And Background

forward  |  After the Forward article about Hunka’s past was picked up by news outlets around the world, Canadian lawmakers and Jewish groups rushed to condemn House Speaker Rota for inviting him. In his mea culpa, Rota made it sound like Hunka was a constituent from his district (called a “riding”) whom he did not know much about. “This initiative was entirely my own,“ Rota said, “the individual in question being from my riding and having been brought to my attention.” 

But Rejean Venne, an independent Canadian journalist, wrote in his Substack newsletter this week that Rota and Hunka family members have had numerous chances to cross paths over the years. Among Venne’s examples:

• One of Hunka’s sons, Martin, was chief financial officer of Redpath Mining, a multinational corporation headquartered in Rota’s district. Redpath has contributed to Rota’s campaigns and Rota has provided government funding for recreational facilities operated by Redpath. (The company did not respond to inquiries from the Forward made Thursday.)
• Martin Hunka has also served as chair of the board of trustees for North Bay Hospital, which is located in Rota’s district and which Rota has supported. Hunka’s name can no longer be found on the hospital’s website and social media posts. (The hospital did not respond to a request for comment emailed Thursday.) 
• North Bay Pride, an LGBTQ+ organization, gave an award to Rota nine months after Yaroslav’s granddaughter Leshya Lecappelain joined its board of directors. In 2022 and 2023, North Bay Pride received more than $100,000 in funding from Rota. (Asked about this, a spokesperson for North Bay Pride said Lecappelain had not been on its board for several years.)

“Rota’s response that this was a last-minute request doesn’t add up,” Venne said in an email interview. “The Hunka family appears well connected in Rota’s district.” 

The Forward could not determine whether Hunka and Rota met before he was honored at Parliament. Rota and others at the House of Commons did not respond to several requests for comment sent Wednesday and Thursday. 

Efforts to reach Yaroslav, Martin and Peter Hunka, Lecappelain and other members of the family for comment were also unsuccessful.

Endowments honoring Hunka and others tied to the SS

On Wednesday, the University of Alberta said it would return the CA$30,000 endowment that Hunka’s sons donated in 2019 in their father’s honor. The money was intended to fund research at the school’s Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies.

But Per Anders Rudling, a university alumnus and expert on Ukrainian nationalism who teaches at Sweden’s Lund University, said the Hunka fund is just “the top of an iceberg.” 

In an email to the Forward, Rudling said the University of Alberta has “much larger endowments” honoring other figures connected to the Waffen SS unit. The “most problematic,” he said, is the Volodymyr and Daria Kubijovych Memorial Endowment Fund. At CA$450,000 — about $334,000 — it’s 15 times larger than the Hunka fund the university is returning.

Rudling described Kubijovych as Ukraine’s chief collaborator with Hans Frank, the Nazi governor of occupied Poland. Kubijovych played a crucial role in convincing the Third Reich to create SS Galichina. He also lobbied for Ukrainians to seize Jewish property and advocated for ethnic cleansing. 

In comparison to Kubijovych, Rudling said, Hunka is “small fry.” 

In a Facebook post Thursday, Rudling also questioned university endowments named for other Galichina Division veterans, including Roman Kolisnyk, Levko Babij and Edward Brodacky.

Pointing to research he published in The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Rudling said, “I have tried to raise this issue in the past, to no avail.” 

Asked about Rudling’s concerns, Michael Brown, a spokesperson for the University of Alberta, reiterated a statement in which interim provost Verna Yiu said the school is “reviewing its general naming policies and procedures, including those for endowments, to ensure alignment with our values.” Yiu also expressed the school’s “commitment to address anti-Semitism in any of its manifestations, including the ways in which the Holocaust continues to resonate in the present.” 

The honors given to SS Galichina fighters extend beyond academia. One of the University of Alberta’s endowments is for its former chancellor Peter Savaryn, another SS Galichina member. In 1987, Savaryn was awarded the Order of Canada, among the nation’s highest honors, bestowed by Canada’s governor general, the representative of the British Crown. Mary Simon, the current governor general, has condemned the Hunka scandal as “a shock and an embarrassment.”

Controversial church leaders 

When the Hunka endowment was announced in 2020, the university said it would fund research on two “leaders of the underground Ukrainian Catholic Church,” Cardinal Josyf Slipyj and Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky. (A metropolitan is akin to a bishop.)

Slipyi was a deputy in Ukraine’s 1941 self-proclaimed government, which pledged to work closely with Germany under Hitler’s leadership. Slipyi also assigned chaplains to SS Galichina and celebrated the unit’s inaugural Mass. After the war, the Soviets sent him to gulag prison camps.

But Sheptytsky’s legacy is layered. He helped “dozens of Jews find refuge in his monasteries and even in his own home,” according to Yad Vashem, while also supporting “the German army as the savior of the Ukrainians from the Soviets.” 

Harvard University also houses a Ukrainian Research Institute. Asked, after Alberta’s announcement, whether that institute’s funding would be scrutinized for Nazi ties, the university said in a statement that the institute had never received money from the Hunkas, nor had it received donations designated for research related to SS Galichina. 

Harvard did, however, in 1974 establish a fellowship and faculty position in European studies with money from a foundation named for Alfred Krupp, who was convicted of war crimes for using slave laborers from Auschwitz to build and work in a factory.

Please, If You Can, Stay Free....,

thesun  |  The Canada-based platform has come under scrutiny after being used by Brand to share videos as he denies allegations of rape and sexual assault.

He has been posting daily episodes of his Stay Free programme on Rumble since signing a deal with the website a year ago.

It now faces being regulated by UK media watchdog Ofcom under the new Online Safety Bill, which was approved by Parliament last week and is due to become law next month.

Tougher new rules could prompt Rumble's bosses to stop broadcasting to Britain, a tech expert has now suggested.

The new law says internet firms must prevent children from seeing pornography as well as any material promoting eating disorders, self-harm and suicide.

Violent content and material harmful to health, including misinformation about vaccines, will also be barred.

And platforms will also be told to take down illegal material such as videos inciting violence or race hate.

Former Facebook executive Lord Allan of Hallam told The Times a new crackdown could deter Rumble's management.

He said: "You can’t get out of this by saying, 'I’m a crazy American platform, that’s not OK’, and that somehow you get a free pass - they don’t get a free pass.

"Their whole philosophy is freedom of expression, a kind of 'screw you'.

"So when they get a letter from Ofcom saying, ‘Here are all the things you’re going to have to do’, it seems to me the most likely reaction is going to be they’re going to say, ‘Well, we won’t operate in the UK any more'."

Failing to co-operate with Ofcom could put Rumble executives at risk of arrest if visiting Britain, it has been suggested.

Dame Caroline Dineage, who chairs the Commons' Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, wrote to Rumble last Thursday asking whether they would be "suspending Brand's ability to earn money".

The comic and film star has 1.4million followers on Rumble.

Her letter came as YouTube announced it would be demonetising his account on their platform, meaning Brand could no longer cash in on ads accompanying his clips there.

The BBC and Channel 4 also removed content featuring Brand from their streaming sites.

 

 

The U.K. KARENWAFFEN Caroline Dinenage And Mark Lancaster

thegrayzone  |   Caroline Dinenage served as the UK government’s Digital and Culture minister from February 2020 to September 2021, making her de facto chief of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). 

In this capacity, she was personally responsible for overseeing construction of the repressive, World Economic Forum-endorsed Online Safety Bill, which has been criticized by rights groups for threatening the rights to free expression, and privacy. For her leading role in crafting the speech-muzzling bill, Dinenage was honored by Princess Royal with the title of Dame Commander of the British Empire.

Moreover, during this period, the DCMS was home to the shadowy, intelligence official-run Counter-Disinformation Unit (CDU), which policed “COVID-19 disinformation narratives” online.

Investigations by the civil liberties organization Big Brother Watch have revealed that instead of suppressing content that posed risks to public health, the CDU was preoccupied with censoring and deplatforming reasonable online criticisms of the British government’s Covid-19 response, including opposition to lockdowns and vaccine passports. 

According to an official fact sheet, the CDU’s focus turned to the Ukraine proxy war in 2022, and particularly to targeting content suggesting “the Bucha massacre and the bombing of the maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, were both hoaxes.”

Dinenage’s husband is Mark Lancaster, a fellow information warrior dedicated to advancing the propaganda goals of the British government. Lancaster reportedly left his wife and four-month-old daughter in 2013 when he began dating Dinenage, who was herself married at the time to a British Naval officer.

A former Conservative MP and Armed Forces minister, Lancaster helped lead London’s blitz on pandemic dissent as deputy commander of the British Army’s 77th Brigade between June 2018 and July 2022.

Specialized in “behaviour and attitudinal change,” the 77th Brigade maintains a vast militia of real, fake, and automated social media accounts to disseminate and amplify pro-state messaging, and discredit domestic and foreign enemies.

During the pandemic, the 77th Brigade targeted people within Britain and across the West with advanced psychological manipulation strategies honed on battlefields against enemy militaries. The online profile of a 77th Brigade veteran notes they were deployed straight from a tour of the Middle East – where they “successfully implemented behavioral change strategies against ISIS” – to “countering dis- and misinformation during the Covid-19 crisis.”

However, in January, an ex-Brigade whistleblower revealed how the Ministry of Defence and RRU routinely circumvented British law to advance the government’s crusade against pandemic dissent:

“To skirt the legal difficulties of a military unit monitoring domestic dissent, the view was that unless a profile explicitly stated their real name and nationality, they could be a foreign agent and were fair game. But it is quite obvious that our activities resulted in the monitoring of the UK population…These posts did not contain information that was untrue or coordinated [emphasis added].”

As The Grayzone revealed in June 2023, British journalist Paul Mason had attempted to submit a “formal complaint” about The Grayzone to DCMS, believing it would trigger a government investigation into this outlet’s “funding and activities,” and ultimately its deplatforming. Mason’s handler, a British intelligence agent named Andy Pryce, boasted in leaked emails of his personal role in YouTube’s banning of “Russian stuff” in Britain. The CDU has been confirmed as the government body responsible for these censorship demands.

Now, this shadowy, intelligence-linked entity appears to be the spearhead of the campaign to silence Russell Brand.