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Fact-checking Fortune: Has Polio Vaccine Saved 20 Million Children From Paralysis?

The Defender | December 23, 2024

A Dec. 13 article in Fortune called the polio vaccine used in the U.S. today “not only safe but also effective.”

The article also claimed that because 3 billion children have been vaccinated against polio since 1988, according to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, that means “20 million people who would’ve otherwise been paralyzed by polio are walking today.”

How accurate is the 20 million figure?

According to the World Health Organization (WHO) website, in 1988, there were 350,000 reported polio cases worldwide in a global population of 5.1 billion people. If, as the WHO website states, “One in 200 infections leads to irreversible paralysis,” that would amount to 1,750 cases of irreversible paralysis linked to polio in 1988.

Using that figure — 1,750 cases in 1988 — and factoring in 1.2% annual population growth, the estimated number of cases of irreversible paralysis between 1988 and 2024 would total approximately 80,910 — not 20 million, as Fortune reported.

Here are four other facts about polio vaccines the Fortune article doesn’t address.

1. Polio vaccines used in U.S. don’t prevent infection or transmission.

According to Fortune, the polio vaccine is “safe and effective.” Here’s why that statement oversimplifies the issue of polio vaccines and leads to misleading conclusions.

There are two kinds of polio vaccines used in the world today, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). They are the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) and the oral polio vaccine (OPV).

The OPV is used for mass vaccination campaigns of children outside the U.S., as was recently done in Gaza. However, the U.S. exclusively uses IPV polio vaccines, according to the CDC.

The IPV products, which are injected, contain an inactivated — or dead — poliovirus. According to the CDC, the IPV protects against “severe disease caused by poliovirus” but “does not stop transmission.”

According to the Polio Global Eradication Initiative, the IPV also doesn’t prevent infection.

Two stand-alone IPV products are licensed in the U.S. by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Both are manufactured by Sanofi. The other five are combination vaccines that target polio plus other illnesses, including diptheria, pertussis and tetanus.

One of the two stand-alone IPV products, Poliovax, was discontinued. The FDA page on licensed polio vaccines doesn’t explain why.

That leaves IPOL as the sole stand-alone polio vaccine licensed in the U.S.

2. Global polio vaccine campaigns can lead to ‘vaccine-derived’ polio outbreaks. 

As its name suggests, the “oral polio” vaccine, or OPV — used only outside the U.S. — is delivered orally. The OPV contains a weakened vaccine-virus that activates an immune response in the body, according to the WHO.

Unlike the IPV products used in the U.S., the OPV prevents transmission, according to the CDC and the WHO. However, the weakened vaccine-virus used in the OPV can cause polio variant outbreaks.

The CDC states that the U.S. stopped using OPV “to eliminate the risk of polio variants that can occur with OPV.”

According to the WHO, the continued use of the OPV “poses a risk to wiping out the disease” because the weakened vaccine-virus originally contained in the OPV can begin to circulate among people who didn’t get the vaccine.

“When this happens,” the WHO said, “if it is allowed to circulate for sufficiently long enough time, it may genetically revert to a ‘strong’ virus, able to cause paralysis, resulting in what is known as circulating vaccine-derived polioviruses.”

Vaccine-derived polioviruses were responsible for the recently reported cases of polio in Gaza and the 2022 case reported in New York.

In March 2023, seven children were paralyzed by vaccine-derived polio linked to the novel oral polio vaccine type 2 (nOPV2) developed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, according to health officials in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi and the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.

In other words, the viral infections in these cases resulted from exposure to the vaccine-virus used in the OPV — not from exposure to a naturally occurring, or “wild,” strain of the poliovirus.

The last wild poliovirus case reported in the U.S. was in 1979, according to the CDC.

3. Risk of paralysis from poliovirus infection is roughly 0.001%.

Approximately 90-95% of poliovirus infections are asymptomatic, according to the FDA package insert for IPOL, the only stand-alone IPV product used in the U.S. The package insert also provides general information on polio, including this:

“Nonspecific illness with low-grade fever and sore throat (minor illness) occurs in 4% to 8% of infections. Aseptic meningitis occurs in 1% to 5% of patients a few days after the minor illness has resolved.

“Rapid onset of asymmetric acute flaccid paralysis occurs in 0.1% to 2% of infections, and residual paralytic disease involving motor neurons (paralytic poliomyelitis) occurs in approximately 1 per 1,000 infections.”

In other words, according to the FDA, the risk of becoming paralyzed as a result of a poliovirus infection is roughly 0.001%.

4. All polio vaccines used today are genetically modified.

Unlike the original polio vaccines developed in the early 1950s by Dr. Jonas Salk and Dr. Albert Sabin, the IPV and OPV being administered today are genetically modified.

In 2020, the WHO authorized a new genetically modified OPV for emergency use in polio outbreaks. According to a 2023 article in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, nOPV2 was developed through a global partnership between public health, governmental, philanthropic and nonprofit organizations, including the Gates Foundation.

IPOL, the only stand-alone polio vaccine used in the U.S., uses technology that involves growing the poliovirus on monkey kidney cells whose chromones were modified to cause them to multiply forever.

In 2022, attorney Aaron Siri, on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network, petitioned the FDA to “withdraw or suspend the approval for IPOL for infants, toddlers, and children until a properly controlled and properly powered double-blind trial of sufficient duration is conducted to assess the safety of this product.”

The petition stated that modified monkey kidney cells “are susceptible to infection by dozens of viruses, including HPV, measles, rubella, reovirus, SV40 virus, and SV-5.”

According to the petition, Sanofi’s IPOL vaccine hasn’t been adequately proven safe because the clinical trials relied on for licensing the product did not include a control group and declared the vaccine safe after following the trial participants for up to only  three days after injection.

The FDA has not withdrawn or suspended its approval of IPOL as requested by Siri, and the agency continues to rely on the existing clinical trials and the agency’s own safety assessment lasting only up to three days.

The CDC recommends children receive four doses of IPOL, starting at age 2 months. The second dose is given at 4 months. The third is given at 6-18 months, and the fourth is given anytime between 4 and 6 years.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

This article is part of a series of articles by The Defender responding to the latest media coverage of vaccines, triggered by the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

December 23, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

ATTORNEY DETAILS NY TIMES MISINFO ON ICAN POLIO PETITION

The HighWire with Del Bigtree | December 19, 2024

December 22, 2024 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Let’s Retire Overused Words. First, ‘Misinformation’

By Dr. Pierre Kory & Mary Beth Pfeiffer | Real Clear Health | December 16, 2024

In a seismic political shift, Republicans have laid claim to an issue that Democrats left in the gutter—the declining health of Americans. True, it took a Democrat with a famous name to ask why so many people are chronically ill, disabled and dying younger than in 47 other countries. But the message resonated with the GOP.

We have a proposal in this unfolding milieu. Let’s have a serious, nuanced discussion. Let’s retire labels that have been weaponized against Robert F. Kennedy Jr., nominated for Health and Human Services Secretary, and many people like him.

Start with discarding threadbare words like “conspiracy theory,” “anti-vax,” and the ever-changing “misinformation.”

These linguistic sleights of hand have been deployed—by government, media and vested interests—to dismiss policy critics and thwart debate. If post-election developments tell us anything, it is that such scorn may no longer work for a population skeptical of government overreach.

Although RFK has been lambasted for months in the press, he just scored a 47 percent approval rating in a CBS poll.

Americans are asking: Is RFK on to something?

Perhaps, as he contends, a 1986 law that all-but absolved vaccine manufacturers from liability has spawned an industry driven more by profit than protection.

Maybe Americans agree with RFK that the FDA, which gets 69 percent of its budget from pharmaceutical companies, is potentially compromised. Maybe Big Pharma, similarly, gets a free pass from the television news media that it generously supports. The U.S. and New Zealand, incidentally, are the only nations on earth that allow “direct-to- consumer” TV ads.

Finally, just maybe there’s a straight line from this unhealthy alliance to the growing list of 80 childhood shots, inevitably approved after cursory industry studies with no placebo controls. The Hepatitis B vaccine trial, for one, monitored the effects on newborns for just five days. Babies are given three doses of this questionably necessary product—intended to prevent a disease spread through sex and drug use.

Pointing out such conflicts and flaws earns critics a label: “anti-vaxxer.”

Misinformation?

If RFK is accused of being extreme or misdirected, consider the Covid-19 axioms that Americans were told by their government.

The first: The pandemic started in animals in Wuhan, China. To think otherwise, Wikipedia states, is a “conspiracy theory,” fueled by “misplaced suspicion” and “anti-Chinese racism.”

Not so fast. In a new 520-page report, a Congressional subcommittee linked the outbreak to risky U.S.-supported virus research at a Wuhan lab at the pandemic epicenter. After 25 hearings, the subcommittee found no evidence of “natural origin.”

Is the report a slam dunk? Maybe not. But neither is outright dismissal of a lab leak.

The same goes for other pandemic dogma, including the utility of (ineffective) masks, (harmful) lockdowns, (arbitrary) six-foot spacing, and, most prominently, vaccines that millions were coerced to take and that harmed some.

Americans were told, wrongly, that two shots would prevent Covid and stop the spread. Natural immunity from previous infection was ignored to maximize vaccine uptake.

Yet there was scant scientific support for vaccinating babies with little risk, which few other countries did; pregnant women (whose deaths soared 40 percent after the rollout), and healthy adolescents, including some who suffered a heart injury called myocarditis. The CDC calls the condition “rare;” but a new study found 223 times more cases in 2021 than the average for all vaccines in the previous 30 years.

Truth Muzzled? 

Beyond this, pandemic decrees were not open to question. Millions of social media posts were removed at the behest of the White House. The ranks grew both of well-funded fact-checkers and retractions of countervailing science.

The FDA, meantime, created a popular and false story line that the Nobel Prize-winning early-treatment drug ivermectin was for horses, not people, and might cause coma and death. Under pressure from a federal court, the FDA removed its infamous webpage, but not before it cleared the way for unapproved vaccines, possible under law only if no alternative was available.

An emergency situation can spawn official missteps. But they become insidious when dissent is suppressed and truth is molded to fit a narrative.

The government’s failures of transparency and oversight are why we are at this juncture today. RFK—should he overcome powerful opposition—may have the last word.

The conversation he proposes won’t mean the end of vaccines or of respect for science. It will mean accountability for what happened in Covid and reform of a dysfunctional system that made it possible.

Dr. Pierre Kory, M.D., a pulmonologist and critical care specialist, is president emeritus of the FLCCC Alliance. Mary Beth Pfeiffer is an investigative reporter and author.

December 21, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | 1 Comment

‘Forced labor’ narrative on Xinjiang chili pepper ‘one lie after another’: FM

Global Times | December 20, 2024

Spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Lin Jian on Friday slammed Western media saying that chili pepper products sold in UK and US supermarkets contain ingredients from Xinjiang are probably produced using “forced labor” by citing a report by an anti-China academic Adrian Zenz, noting that the so-called report mentioned by certain media outlets is deeply flawed, and it pretentiously quotes some vague accounts by so-called anonymous witnesses, but does not provide any factual basis, and even lacks the most basic field investigation.

Lin said that, the fact is, the farming process of chili peppers in Xinjiang has largely been mechanized already in some major production areas, 100 percent of the chili peppers are now harvested by machines. “Is the report suggesting that there is ‘forced machine labor?'” he asked.

Earlier this week, an international symposium on employment and social security was held in Urumqi, said Lin, noting that more than 200 participants from over 40 countries, regions and international organizations attended the event, and many said the Xinjiang they saw is very much different from the false propaganda they had seen from sources outside China.

“They condemned the ‘forced labor’ narrative, calling it a lie that deprives people in Xinjiang of their right to work, subsistence and development,” Lin said.

Lin stated that from cotton to tomato and now to chili pepper, a handful of Western media and long-time disinformation manufacturers have concocted one lie after another about Xinjiang.

“But what’s made up will not hide the truth; and a lie is still a lie even if it’s told a thousand times. For those behind these same old clumsy theatrics, it is high time they quit this ‘creative’ business for good,” Lin said.

December 21, 2024 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

Wrong, NBC News, Climate Change Isn’t Causing Rising Coffee Prices, Production Is Increasing

By Anthony Watts | Climate Realism | December 16, 2024

NBC News recently published an article asserting that climate change is driving up coffee prices by adversely affecting production titled Your daily cup of coffee could get more expensive because of climate change. Production data proves this claim blatantly false.

NBC News writes:

The price of arabica coffee beans, the high-quality beans found in most restaurants and shops, spiked this month, recently jumping to $3.50 a pound. […]

And today, experts say, climate change is to blame.

“We’ve seen significant drought in some of the key coffee-growing areas in the world, places like Brazil, which is the largest coffee exporter in the world,” said David Ortega, a professor of food economics and policy at Michigan State University. […]

“We’re going to see these types of [climate] events just get more frequent into the future. And so we have to start taking this seriously and make investments in agricultural research and development to be able to mitigate and tackle the impacts of climate change on our agricultural production and agricultural system,” Ortega said.

“One impact of this is a rise in cost, which then gets translated to a rise in price for consumers,” he added.

NBC’s article attributes recent coffee price increases to climate change by pointing to specific weather events. This approach wrongly conflates short-term weather phenomena with long-term climate patterns. As discussed at Climate at a Glance, weather refers to short-term atmospheric conditions, while climate denotes long-term averages and trends. Attributing isolated weather events directly to climate change without considering broader climatic data is misleading and scientifically unsound, especially when long-term weather trends show no worsening conditions in coffee growing regions.

NBC’s story also ignores substantial data demonstrating that global coffee production has increased significantly over the past four decades, a fact that Climate Realism has addressed multiple times, highlighting the fact that coffee production has been resilient and even thriving despite concerns over climate change.

Repeated analyses show that both coffee and cocoa have set production records multiple times during the recent period of slight warming, contradicting assertions that climate change is driving price increases.

For example, global coffee production has seen substantial growth over the past 40 years, as data from U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization reveals, with countries like Vietnam experiencing a more than 1,500 percent rise in production between 1992 and 2022. Vietnam is not alone. Almost every coffee growing region has experienced significant growth, as the graph below shows:

This upward trend underscores the adaptability and resilience of coffee cultivation practices, even amid the gradual warming experienced globally.

NBC’s portrayal of climate change as a primary driver of rising coffee prices reflects a bias by the media outlet toward blaming nearly every bad thing that occurs on climate change. NBC wrongly aggregates short-term weather events and long-term climate trends, and more importantly, ignores the fact that coffee production has increased significantly over recent decades, regularly setting records for production. Rather than looking at actual data, NBC News relied on “expert opinion” without any factual basis. Such sloppy reporting lacks due diligence and fails to provide a comprehensive view of the factors influencing coffee prices, including economic dynamics and agricultural practices. NBC News completely failed to consider these data and variables, instead resorting to a tired and worn-out false climate catastrophe narrative.

December 19, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

How the Captive Media Divides Us

By Thomas Eddlem | The Libertarian Institute | December 19, 2024

Most political differences in America today aren’t a result of moral differences, or even policy opinions. Rather, they are generated by divergent media consumption. There’s a huge difference between those whose news comes primarily from the corporate Big Five (CBS-Viacom, ABC-Disney, NBC-Universal, Fox-NewsCorp, and CNN-TimeWarner) and that handful of midsize legacy publications like PBS, The New York Times and Washington Post, than from those who get their news from independent media.

While the independent media can be inaccurate, it’s often when they contradict themselves. On the other hand, when the Big Five and its satellites are inaccurate, it’s typically in union, as a bloc, and always in defense of the Washington establishment.

I could detail one hundred of these blatant lies spun by the unified, corporate media over the past two decades, but for purposes of brevity let’s take a quick look at just ten widely reported lies in three sentences or less (and I’ll include extra links to news stories with the same false take, to total five sources for each story), refuted by primary sources or recanted by these same establishment media organs.

  • Lie #1: Wearing cloth masks helps prevent COVID. “Public health messages should target audiences not wearing cloth face coverings and reinforce positive attitudes, perceived norms, personal agency, and physical and health benefits of obtaining and wearing cloth face coverings consistently and correctly,” the CDC inveighed on July 17, 2020, even though the same report acknowledged “widespread use of cloth face coverings has not been studied among the U.S. population.” The captive media dutifully lectured the public (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) about the alleged benefits of cloth masks in preventing COVID, even though the CDC had just re-published a meta-study of all nineteen public scientific studies of mass masking in May 2020 which concluded there was no scientific benefit for mass public cloth masking. And a giant study by Yale and Stanford researchers in Bangladesh in 2021 confirmed the earlier research, finding a very small benefit in wearing surgical masks “but see no statistically significant effect for cloth masks.”
  • Lie #2: Donald Trump is a Russian spy. “A New Report Adds Evidence That Trump Was a Russian Asset,” a Slate.com headline blared in 2021, adding in the subtitle, “He helped Putin manipulate the U.S. election in 2020, as he did in 2016” (2, 3, 4, 5). But the reality is that the Durham Report of the special prosecutor concluded on May 12, 2023 that “neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation” and found the entire affair was devoid of evidence and had been a joint operation between the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and friendly senior FBI officials, spread by a compliant media.
  • Lie #3: COVID vaccines have no serious side effects. “No serious safety concerns were found in the clinical trials of the vaccines that have been authorized for use in the United States,” FactCheck.org claimed on March 4, 2021 (2, 3, 4, 5), but within months the same “fact-checker” site had amended its claim to include deadly reactions in the Johnson & Johnson vaccine (later pulled from the market for these reasons) and several serious side effects including myocarditis from the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. Likewise, the CDC has now published a long list of side effects, including myocarditis, pericarditis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, and anaphylaxis.
  • Lie #4: Russia put bounties on American soldiers in Afghanistan. “American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan—including targeting American troops,” New York Times reporter Charlie Savage claimed on June 26, 2020, in the heat of the election campaign, adding that President Trump “has yet to authorize any step” to counter it (2, 3, 4, 5). But, after the election, even NBC News admitted the whole story was fake from the beginning, as did other establishment-controlled outlets that echoed Biden administration admissions of the lack of proof for the highly politicized claim.
  • Lie #5: Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation. “More than 50 former senior intelligence officials have signed on to a letter,” Politico claimed of the Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020, “outlining their belief that the recent disclosure of emails allegedly belonging to Joe Biden’s son ‘has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation’” (2, 3, 4, 5). But the reality is the FBI testified under oath that the laptop story, which was suppressed on Facebook, Twitter and other social media before the election, was legitimate all along. And a congressional investigation revealed the “Russian disinformation” story was a result of the Joe Biden presidential campaign colluding with senior CIA officials.
  • Lie #6: Donald Trump said there were “good people on both sides” of a white supremacist rally. “Trump Defends White-Nationalist Protesters: ‘Some Very Fine People on Both Sides’” blared the headline in The Atlantic, adding “The president backtracked from his remarks on Charlottesville just a day earlier” (2, 3, 4, 5). Even the fact-checkers observed this claim that Trump’s “both sides” quote was false from the start, and that the “both sides” quote was about a totally different topic, though establishment organs continue to repeat the lie to this day.
  • Lie #7: Donald Trump said Liz Cheney should face a firing squad. “Now he’s talking about a firing squad,” Joe Scarborough ranted on MSNBC, on November 4, 2024, “for a Republican who is long ranked as one of the most conservative Republicans in Washington, DC” (2, 3, 4, 5). But Trump did no such thing. He simply called former Congresswoman Cheney a chicken-hawk, saying she’d have a less bellicose worldview if she were on the front lines. This is why the fact-check sites quickly called out this lie, and even uber chicken-hawk Jonah Goldberg had to recant the same claim as Scarborough.
  • Lie #8: Hamas decapitated dozens of babies on October 7. “Dozens of babies were reportedly found dead, including some that had been beheaded,” NBC reported, “in an Israeli kibbutz Tuesday after the terrorist organization Hamas stormed the community” (2, 3, 4, 5). The reality that emerged from the widely spread story of Israeli propaganda was that no babies were beheaded, according to a France 24 investigation that looked through the names of the victims of the terrorist attack several weeks later, though one ten-month-old baby was killed by gunshot wounds in the combat crossfire.
  • Lie #9: Joe Biden is in the best shape of his life and sharp as a tack. “F you if you can’t handle the truth,” Joe Scarborough lashed out on MSNBC on March 5, 2024, “This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever” (2, 3, 4, 5). Progressive YouTuber Matt Orfalea did a nice compilation of how official Washington dutifully recited the lines from the “sharp as a tack” talking points memos circulated by the DNC. But the reality was admitted almost universally after Biden’s disastrous June 27 debate with Donald Trump, ending talk about “cheap fakes.” CNN and the Associated Press published stories in July admitting the media ran cover for “forgetful” Biden as they tried to ramp up pressure to unceremoniously dump the winner of all the Democratic primaries that year and replace him with Kamala Harris at the Democratic National Convention in August.
  • Lie #10: Internet censorship was just corporations being responsible. “Twitter permanently suspended President Donald Trump’s account on Friday,” NBC news reported January 8, 2021, citing “the risk of further incitement of violence” and not mentioning that the decision was based on extraordinary pressure from the FBI and Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The removal of the sitting president of the United States from social media and many other prominent people was widely reported as entirely a corporate decision across the establishment media spectrum (2, 3, 4, 5). But the #TwitterFiles revealed these decisions were primarily the result of government pressure and not organic corporate decisions, with the U.S. Court of Appeals ruling in Missouri v. Biden that the censored plaintiffs “presented extensive evidence of escalating threats—both public and private—by government officials aimed at social-media companies concerning their content-moderation decision.”

These lies help explain why independent media personalities like Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan, a comedian with a microphone, regularly get more than twenty million viewers for two-hour interviews with few commercials while CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News, with their billion-dollar studios and networks, rarely crack one million viewers with their forty-four minutes of content in an hour. The American people no longer trust what I’ve come to label the “captive media,” and consume far more independent media content. The captive media can call Trump a rapist, a fascist, a threat to democracy, and, as the November election revealed, most Americans will simply no longer believe their claims.

And the #TwitterFiles reveal why the media organs pushing official lies are best labeled the “captive media” and not the mainstream media, legacy media or the corporate media. They have been captured by the U.S. intelligence agencies, often with dozens or even hundreds of “former” intelligence officers in place on-air and on staff.

The American national mental health crisis that emerged as a result of Trump’s election in 2024 was entirely one-sided; the people who raged like infants on social media and said Trump voters were horrible people were limited to those who digested nothing but captive Media outlets like CNN, NBC, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, Fox, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the censorious Big Tech companies.

Why is it only the Democrats who are saying they can’t have Thanksgiving dinner with their family? Why didn’t Republicans have the same reaction after their loss to Joe Biden in 2020? Although many Republicans who watch Fox News did avoid Thanksgiving as a result of fear-mongering over the COVID vaccine skepticism.

Part of the answer to the question “Why just the Democrats?” is the structure of the media which political partisans consume. Democrats consume media solely within the FBI, CIA, ODNI matrix that the #TwitterFiles revealed to the public and rarely or never encounter media that contradicts the official narrative being sold. Google searches, like Facebook and most other social media, are curated by precisely the same intelligence agencies. So it’s possible for Democrats to live entirely within the captive media echo chamber (even as they earnestly believe they are getting “both sides” by listening to Republican Senator Lindsay Graham talk about Israeli babies being slaughtered on October 7 or former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney talk about Trump as a Putin asset) and assume that anyone with a heterodox opinion gets his information from some sketchy “dark web.” Republicans get a slightly different take with Fox News, and more importantly have trended toward relying progressively less on the captive media.

Republicans and independents hear something other than the captive media narrative.

The captive media echo chamber can occasionally be bipartisan, however. Back in 2020, in the throes of the COVID hysteria, Fox News viewers were also running around like fools with cloth masks on, viewing family members as ambulatory disease vectors, and judging those who took rational risks (or in the case of the experimental vaccine on young people who were getting myocarditis, avoided risks rationally) as bad or selfish persons.

Many Democrats are increasingly engaged in classic cult-like behavior as a result of the captive media drumbeat. “If you are going into a situation where you have family members, where you have close friends who you know have voted in ways that are against you,” Dr. Amanda Calhoun of Yale University told ABC’s The View, “it’s completely fine to not be around those people and to tell them why.” The idea that Democrats should separate themselves from family and friends because they have different political opinions has become widespread in the captive media (2, 3, 4, 5). And it’s part of the very definition of cultish behavior, which includes when “subservience to the leader or group requires members to cut ties with family and friends.”

The way to bring your friends and family out of the cult of the captive media matrix is to cut cable television out of your home, and to track the lies of the captive media and discuss them with family and friends as they’re exposed and recanted. Nobody likes being lied to.

Many of these captive media organs are engaging in a campaign against “disinformation” (as a ruse to resume government social media censorship), and this can be used to the advantage of people trying to rescue friends and family from the cult. Explaining in detail how the captive media reliably lies on behalf of the military-industrial-complex, the intelligence community and Big Pharma can bring them out as it has brought hundreds of millions of others out of the captive media matrix already.

December 19, 2024 Posted by | Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

Congo’s Health Ministry Confirms ‘Disease X’ is Malaria

Outbreak began shortly after Congo’s rollout of the novel R21 virus-like particle malaria vaccine

By Nicolas Hulscher, MPH | Courageous Discourse | December 17, 2024

The Democratic Republic of Congo’s health ministry announced today that the previously unidentified illness coined as ‘Disease X’ by the media and Africa CDC circulating in the Panzi health zone has been confirmed as a severe form of malaria:

“The mystery has finally been solved. It’s a case of severe malaria in the form of a respiratory illness,” the health ministry said in a statement, adding that malnutrition in the area had weakened the local population, leaving them more vulnerable to disease.

This confirms our observations made last week, where we expected this to be malaria based on early testing. However, health agencies continued to ignore that possibility until now:

‘Disease X’ Situation Update

This entire situation reinforces how the mainstream media consistently attempts to generate as much fear as possible. They were caught propagating severe malaria coupled with malnutrition as the ominous ‘Disease X,’ fueling unnecessary panic:

In an emailed statement to USA TODAY, the World Health Organization (WHO) still claims it hasn’t conclusively determined the cause of the illness yet and lab testing is ongoing. This is similar to when the WHO falsely claimed that an individual in Mexico died of H5N2 bird flu. Soon after the claim, the Mexican government clarified: “A team of experts from the Health sector ruled that the person identified with influenza A (H5N2) did not die because of this virus, but as a result of chronic conditions that generated septic shock.” They added, “The diseases he suffered were long-term and caused conditions that favored the failure of several organs, specialists concluded.” The individual suffered from kidney disease, type 2 diabetes, and systemic arterial hypertension for more than 14 years.

Right before this malaria outbreak began, in late October, the Congo introduced the novel R21 malaria vaccine into their national immunization program. “R21 is a virus-like particle comprising the central repeats of Asn-Ala-Asn-Pro (NANP) and C-terminal sequence of circumsporozoite protein fused to the hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg).” It would not be surprising if this new vaccine played a significant role in triggering or exacerbating the severe malaria outbreak.

December 18, 2024 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | | 1 Comment

Scandal deepens around CNN’s Clarissa Ward staging Syria prison scene

By Wyatt Reed · The Grayzone · December 16, 2024

Footage showing CNN’s regime change-crazed correspondent supposedly freeing a forgotten prisoner from a Syrian jail has been exposed as a scandalous fraud, yet the network continues to re-air it, while defending its correspondent.

“In nearly twenty years as a journalist, this was one of the most extraordinary moments I have witnessed.”

That’s how veteran CNN journalist Clarissa Ward described her foray into a Syrian prison on December 12, where she promptly claimed to have rescued a forgotten inmate after three months in jail. But there was just one problem with the “extraordinary moment”: a review of a dramatic story depicted by CNN reveals a number of glaring inconsistencies, the greatest of which is that the man stands accused of being an impostor.

After countless social media users shredded CNN’s story, a fact-checking organization with ties to the US government has exposed the prisoner seemingly liberated in Ward’s theatrical performance turns out to have been a low level Syrian intelligence official jailed for corruption and abuse charges.

CNN finally addressed the deepening scandal on December 15, declaring that it would investigate the subject of Ward’s piece. However, the network continues to protect the correspondent responsible for the journalistic flim-flam, while rebroadcasting the staged report for its viewers day after day.

With Ward still stationed in jihadist-held Damascus, it appears that her bosses are refusing to allow any editorial standards or professional ethics get in the way of a successful Western-backed regime change operation.

“It moved! Is there someone there?”

In CNN’s original Dec. 11 video report, Ward enters a jail she says was previously operated by Syrian Air Force intelligence, which she claims was “one of many secret prisons across [Damascus]” – and was “specifically tasked with surveillance, arrest, and killing of all regime critics.” Ward was apparently searching for signs of Austin Tice, an American journalist who the US government claims was being held by the Assad government prior to its fall.

“We don’t find any hints of Tice,” Ward insists in a voiceover, “but [we] come across something extraordinary.” At this point, “the guard makes us turn the camera off while he shoots the lock off the cell door,” she says. Viewers are not shown their entrance. Afterwards, Ward and her entourage appear in a clean but windowless cell, where a blanket lies heaped on the ground.

“It moved!” Ward exclaims, before asking the blanket, in English: “Is there someone there?”

Upon being prodded by her armed rebel guide, a man crawls out from under the blanket, revealing himself to the CNN crew. Eyes widened, he raises his arms. “‘I’m a civilian,’ he says, ‘I’m a civilian,’” Ward translates. “He tells the fighter he is from the city of Homs and has been in the cell for three months.” Ward is shown pacing in the background, hand clasped dramatically to her chest.

“He clutches my arm tightly with both hands,” she intones, her voice quivering with emotion. She then asks breathlessly: “Does anyone have any water?” Someone off-screen produces a bottle, which the man drinks quickly. As he walks outside, he looks up. “My God, the light,” he says, while staring directly and unflinchingly at the sky. “Left alone for days without food, water or light, the man was unaware Bashar al-Assad’s regime had fallen,” Ward declares gravely.

By her stated estimation, he had been left for dead and deprived of all food and water for at least four days. A 2022 study published in Science determined that “despite adaptations to minimize dehydration, humans can survive for only ~3 days without consuming water.” The Mezzeh Air Force intelligence prison in question was reportedly overtaken by anti-government militants on Dec. 6, a full five days before the report was published.

Yet rather than immediately seeking medical care for the man after his release, a rebel fighter pulls up a chair, and the CNN crew elects to conduct an interview with the supposed former prisoner. At some point, someone hands him a plate of food, and he collapses into Ward’s arms after taking a bite. “He can barely lift it to his mouth. But his body can’t handle it,” Ward declares mournfully.

The segment ends as the man, who Ward identifies as “Adil Gharbal,” is guided into an ambulance by men wearing Red Crescent jackets. “It is the end of a very dark chapter for him and for all of Syria,” Ward concludes.

And perhaps it would be – if it actually happened. But it now appears the man rescued by CNN’s Clarissa Ward was a corrupt Syrian government official, not an innocent political prisoner.

US government aligned site exposes CNN’s Syria prison theater

According to a Western-backed fact-checking organization known as Verify, “Adil Gharbal” is actually Salama Mohammad Salama, who they identified as “a first lieutenant in Syrian Air Force Intelligence,” a figure they claim was “notorious for his activities in Homs.”

Verify, which describes itself as “a verified signatory of the International Fact-Checker Network (IFCN) and a trusted partner of Facebook in the MENA region since 2019,” writes that “residents of the Al-Bayyada neighborhood identified him as frequently stationed at a checkpoint in the area’s western entrance, infamous for its abuses.”

Per Verify, Salama was imprisoned due to his involvement in “theft [and] extortion,” and “his recent incarceration—lasting less than a month—was due to a dispute over profit-sharing” of “extorted funds.”

The IFCN’s parent group, the “Poynter Institute,” has taken huge sums from organizations including George Soros’ Open Society Foundation (OSF) and the CIA cutout National Endowment for Democracy. In 2017, Poynter took in a whopping $1.3 million from OSF and Omidyar Foundation, the main vessel for spending by Democratic Party-aligned billionaire Pierre Omidyar. Given its US-aligned financial ties, Verify has very little incentive to undercut CNN’s regime change narratives.

Alongside hundreds of social media users, Verify has also pointed out that the timeline described by CNN simply defies belief. As geopolitical analyst Arnaud Bertrand noted, “most humans cannot survive without water for 4-5 days, especially if it’s without food either and in stressful prison conditions. At the very minimum, they would have extremely dry, cracked lips and mouth, severely sunken eyes, a very tight grayish skin and they wouldn’t be able to speak coherently.”

The man CNN claims to have liberated shows no signs of long-term incarceration, however, and instead appears well-fed, neat, and relatively clean-shaven. Another popular post drew attention to “the manicured nails of a man who was in a Syrian dungeon without light for 3 months until CNN rescued him.”

Anti-imperialist commentators weren’t the only ones to push back on CNN’s gratuitous propaganda. One Kurdish activist wrote that the incident “raises some serious serious questions about journalistic integrity” because “the air force intelligence prison was entered by the Syrian rebels and all cells [were already] opened” two days before CNN showed up. “The prison has been liberated for days now; several Syrian reporters were there already – families have come to look for the remains of their family members – prisons were searched by search teams [sent] by the Turkish government; yet somehow all of them ignored this 1 prison cell? – with exactly 1 prisoner inside despite this being a prison cell for multiple prisoners?”

The same activist pointed out that even journalists affiliated with Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, the US-designated terrorist group which largely oversaw the overthrow of the Syrian government, were mocking CNN’s coverage in a post on Telegram: “if it wasn’t a play to achieve a scoop for CNN and laugh at the West’s stupidity, it is more likely that one of the detainees has no place to go and prefers to stay in prison and sleep there.”

Others, who claim to have been jailed by the former Syrian government also questioned the report, with one commenting: “I was detained twice in Syria. I think this is staged. CNN should investigate. Happy to be proven wrong.” Another suggested the video piece did a disservice to those who had actually been jailed: “CNN journalist Clarissa Ward fabricated a scene showing a prisoner inside Syria’s notoriously brutal prisons. This is demeaning and exploitative to Syrian detainees. As a former Syrian detainee, I call for boycotting her and exposing her actions.”

Ward’s history of shameless regime change cheerleading, collaboration with AQ figures

It’s certainly not the first time Ward has been accused of fabricating a story and staging a scene to boost her ratings. While covering Israel’s post-October 7 assault on Gaza, Ward earned widespread mockery when she fell to the ground and took cover from a Hamas rocket attack, when, in fact, no munitions were falling anywhere in her vicinity.

Two weeks later, Ward’s lopsided coverage of the Israeli genocide in Gaza provoked a viral confrontation by Egyptian journalist Rahma Zein, who lambasted the CNN correspondent in a viral video: “Cover this! Say the truth! We understand… You’re just a puppet, you’re just a mouthpiece,” she proclaimed, but in many ways, “you represent your government.”

“We’re watching an occupation” and it’s “the result of your silence,” Zein concluded.

Ward’s presence in Damascus, where jihadist militias have taken control while Israeli forces seize Syrian territory without a fight, represents the culmination of over a decade of propagandizing for regime change.

Back in 2012, Ward claimed to have “sort of slipped off into an alleyway in the [Damascus] old city, put a headscarf on, and went and lived with some activists for a week.” She returned with a de facto commercial for the Free Syrian Army, the Contra-style militia created with CIA arms and support.

CNN’s Clarissa Ward, then of CBS, with the FSA in 2011

In 2017, Ward was granted special entry to Idlib, the Al Qaeda carveout in Northwestern Syria protected by the Turkish military. To gain access to jihadist leaders, Ward hired Bilal Abdul Kareem, an American who joined the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda in 2012 and subsequently served as its top English language propagandist, as her fixer. When Ward won a Peabody Award for her report inside Idlib, Kareem took to Twitter to complain that CNN “barely mentioned my name! I’m telling you, somehow CNN must have forgotten that I was the one that filmed it, I guess they forgot that.”

Ward appeared soon after at the UN Security Council as a guest of the United States delegation. There, she described “the Islamist factions” in the Idlib province as “heroes on the ground” who have “filled the void” in the war to overthrow the Syrian government.

In 2019, when The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal posted a Twitter thread containing non-staged photos and videos documenting his visit to Damascus, including his interviews with Syrians who had been wounded or tortured by Western-backed opposition forces, Ward flew into a petulant frenzy, claiming she was “getting palpitations” that graduated to “spasms of rage,” even wondering if Blumenthal’s critical reporting was driven by drug addiction.

Sober or not, when Ward participated in a clearly staged prisoner rescue – what she called “one of the most extraordinary moments” in her media career – she was clearly drunk on her own entitlement and obsession with advancing the priorities of the US regime change machine. And though her network appears to be protecting her, it seems the morning after has finally arrived.

December 16, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | 1 Comment

RFK Jr. and the Samoan Measles Outbreak

By David Marks | Brownstone Institute | December 15, 2024

When the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Health and Human Services Secretary comes before the Senate, the specter of the Samoan measles outbreak of 2019 will dramatically be invoked to challenge him. Kennedy’s critics have repeatedly relied on this topic, citing stories that claim he was responsible for an epidemic in 2019 that caused at least 83 children to die due to vaccine hesitancy. In recent articles, reporters quote previous news coverage relying on unsubstantiated and minimal data to justify their analysis.

These stories repeat dubious assertions, fail to discuss any pathological analysis, and dismiss Kennedy’s considered support of healthcare in Samoa. He had assisted the Samoan government in developing a system for health officials to assess the efficacy and safety of medical interventions or drugs, including vaccines.

In November 2019, while the deaths of Samoan children were rapidly increasing, Kennedy wrote a comprehensive letter to the Samoan Prime Minister, presenting some possible causes of the unprecedented, virulent outbreak of measles. His concerns about the epidemic in Samoa highlight striking anomalies that were apparent to a few investigators at the time, although they remain unexplained.

The most convenient and generally accepted explanations of the outbreak claim the epidemic was the result of hesitancy, causing the population to be under-vaccinated. Measles vaccination rates were low due to the previous deaths of two infants given improperly formulated injections, which had nothing to do with Kennedy’s views.

Any considered analysis of the accessible facts soundly contradicts the conjecture that the high death count was related to low vaccination rates.

In most measles epidemics, mortality is on average one in one thousand, and dying children are often malnourished or immunocompromised. From October through December of 2019, over one in a hundred Samoan children with the disease died, ten times more than any previous outbreak in the world. No accounting for this overt statistical deviance has been published.

Despite the presumptions of those who attack Kennedy, there was never any investigation into any aspect of this baffling tragedy. Edwin Tamasese, a health advocate who questioned Samoan government policies during the outbreak, gave Kennedy some insight into what was happening.

Tamasese was concerned about the number of sick and dying Samoan children and began to assist families whose children were severely ill. He and his colleagues encountered conditions that contradicted the government’s narrative.

While the press condemned him as an anti-vaxxer, Tamasese’s interventions and observations are revelatory. In an interview after the outbreak subsided, he said, “We were very careful to take statistics when we were going in to try to identify trends. When we assessed our numbers, 98 percent of those who were getting ill had been vaccinated consistently six to seven days prior to illness. The excuse was that the vaccine did not have time to become effective. However, according to an immunologist on the team, the six to seven-day period was also the length of time it would take an under-attenuated vaccine to make the recipient sick.”

Doctors in hospitals also reported that the very ill and dying children did not have symptoms consistent with normal cases of measles. When the outbreak began, blood from the first thirty-nine cases had been sent to Australia; only seven samples were positive for measles.

The government stopped testing to confirm the cause of these deaths in early November 2019. Without scientific confirmation, illness and mortality were attributed to low immunization rates. Samoan health authorities continued to claim that the only remedy for the deadly epidemic was a drive to increase vaccination; however, the campaign appeared to increase the number of measles cases.

Neighboring Pacific island countries, Tonga and Fiji, which had concurrent outbreaks of the virus — and had a different source of the measles vaccine — did not suffer the same dramatic mortality rates. This should have raised concerns, yet there hasn’t been an inquiry into why the Samoan government switched vaccine sourcing from India to Belgium midway through the crisis.

A renewed effort to vaccinate with this alternate supply began in the first week of December 2019; it was hailed as the reason the outbreak subsided. Measles vaccines take at least 10 days before creating an immune response. There has been no explanation for the data confirming that the onset of cases dropped dramatically two weeks before this vaccination drive could have had any effect.

The government response was not driven by factual analysis; the effort focused on promoting the vaccine and silencing those questioning authority.

With Samoan officials and the press deriding his work and views, Tamasese was arrested and charged with incitement of a government order and treating children without a license. Although this was deemed appropriate justice by the international news media as they echoed the government’s praise of the vaccine, reporters again failed to present the questions raised by the outbreak.

The prosecution’s primary witness against Tamasese was a nurse whose child had measles. He had suggested that administering vitamins A and C could be helpful — and standard medical treatment for measles patients. She had taken his advice and admitted that her child recovered soon afterward.

Tamasese reported that when the nurse left the courtroom, the judge, in throwing out the case, said, “That witness may as well have represented the accused.” There was relative silence from the news media when all charges against him were dismissed.

While worldwide attention on Samoa ignored dramatic inconsistencies, Kennedy was one of the few people who asked detailed and important questions. His views were marginalized; it was easier and politically correct to blame the tragedy on low rates of vaccination.

The relatively few details known about the Samoan measles outbreak indicate that forces intent on presenting vaccines as an infallible, unquestionable remedy will not tolerate scrutiny or admit failures. This continuing devious tactic is applied internationally and is eagerly supported by most governments and the press.

Analysis of the Covid-19 pandemic has only recently vindicated those who were scorned for questioning the response. The parallels to the unfolding of the epidemic in Samoa are not obscure, and support Kennedy’s contention that vaccine development, manufacturing, and application need much more effective evaluation and monitoring to prevent complications and death.

When the US government assures the public that any vaccine or medication is safe and effective, this must come from an independent, thorough, and transparent process, rather than relying only on the words and actions of those with vested interests.

The current criticism of Kennedy is an endeavor to make him look dangerously ignorant and irresponsible to sway members of the Senate. Much to the chagrin of those who vilify him, his efforts to understand and assist in the Samoan measles outbreak exemplify his thoughtfulness and capabilities.

RFK, Jr. is at the forefront of healthcare oversight; his confirmation as HHS Secretary will ensure that Americans benefit from his experience and knowledge.

December 15, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | 2 Comments

West shamelessly whitewashes barbarism in Syria

Strategic Culture Foundation | December 13, 2024

One week after the dramatic collapse of the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad, it is too early to give a precise prognostication of how the Arab country and the wider region will emerge politically.

But already, there are grim signs of the nation surging in bloody conflict and barbarism. Predictably, the West is covering up its guilt for creating another epic horror, with its news media shamelessly propagandizing and denying the reality of Syria’s new rulers as terrorist factions.

Syria is facing a fate similar to Libya in 2011. The North African country was turned into a killing field by a NATO regime-change aggression under the cynical guise of “liberation.” NATO-backed jihadists brutally murdered Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, and the former oil-rich country has been wrecked as a failed state, riven by warlordism ever since without a functioning national government.

Syria’s former president Assad escaped to Moscow and has been granted asylum by his Russian ally. Apart from that difference, Syria’s future looks ominously like Libya’s. Cruelly, that is rather fitting. The overthrow of Libya in 2011 was used by the United States and its Western allies to mount the regime-change war on Syria that also began in 2011, as recounted in our SCF editorial last week.

Thirteen years on, the takeover of Damascus by the terror group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) is unleashing murderous reprisals, internecine warlordism, and sectarian hatred. The U.S. and its Western allies are strenuously covering up the huge imperial crime that has befallen Syria, as with Libya before.

In an audacious denial of reality, Washington and its European partners are talking up a “new beginning” for Syria. It’s a charade of optimism aimed at lulling the world into acceptance of heinous Western criminality.

This outpouring of Western optimism is while the Western-backed Israeli regime immediately launched a blitzkrieg on its northern neighbor, viewing the chaotic events in Syria as an opportunity to annex more land. The Israeli military extended its illegal occupation of the Golan Heights and carried out a massive bombing campaign across Syria.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made a hurried tour of the region this week, no doubt to ensure an orderly carving up of Syrian territory and resources between Washington and its allies Turkey and Israel – all of whom have worked for years to pursue regime change in Damascus.

While Washington is urging the formation of a non-sectarian government in Syria that “respects religious minorities and women’s rights” – the cringemaking rhetoric of public relations – the reality on the ground told a different story.

The black flags of Wahhabi Islamism supported by HTS and its other al Qaeda-type associates were hoisted in Damascus and other cities. There are palpable fears among Syrian Shia and Alawite Muslims, as well as Christians, that they will be subjected to a reign of terror, as was seen during the years of U.S.-led proxy war from 2011 onwards with beheadings of infidels and apostates, among other atrocities.

Credible videos have shown HTS supporters executing unarmed captives and shouting obscenities about their victims’ perceived religious affiliation. There have been appalling scenes of barbarism where corpses are dragged through streets tied to trucks. Mothers holding the bodies of their slaughtered sons have been abused by jostling crowds in deranged bloodlust.

In an incredible wave of psyops, Western news media organizations have been whitewashing the events in Syria as a kind of “liberation from the tyranny of Assad rule.”

There have been multiple reports of crowds celebrating in the streets of Damascus and Aleppo, tearing down symbols of Bashar al-Assad and his father Hafez. However, the Western media have omitted or downplayed any reports that might indicate a descent into barbarism and sectarian killings.

If there was a prize for propaganda, the British state-owned BBC might have won it with this article headlined: “From Syrian jihadist leader to rebel politician. How Abu Mohammed al-Jolani reinvented himself.”

The truth is it is the Western media, like the BBC and CNN, that have “reinvented” al-Jolani.

The years of al-Jolani carrying out mass killings as a commander in Al Qaeda, Islamic State, Al Nusra as well as HTS have suddenly been shoved down the memory hole, and he is now presented as a statesman supposedly leading Syria to a brighter future.

His belated words about respecting religious minorities and pluralism are reported with cloying gullibility by the Western media. Washington and other Western governments are moving to recognize the new Syrian regime by delisting HTS as a terrorist group and indulging al-Jolani’s rhetoric about reconciliation and tolerance as somehow plausible.

Of course, Washington is euphoric about its apparent success in Syria. Damascus has long been a target for regime change, going back to the Eisenhower administration more than 70 years ago when the Arab state was perceived as being too independent.

More recently, as former U.S. Senator Richard Black explained in this 2016 article, Syria became a renewed target for Washington’s regime change in 2007 when then-President GW Bush’s administration decided Bashar al-Assad had to go. To achieve that illegal result, the U.S. and its regional allies deployed murderous proxies, one of which was Hayat Tahrir al-Sham – the new ruler in Damascus.

The covert proxy war continued under Obama, Trump, and Biden. Russia and Iran’s intervention to defend their Syrian ally managed to impede the regime-change objective, but, in the end, they did not succeed for various reasons, as adduced in a SCF commentary this week.

For over a decade, the Western media have systematically and blatantly lied about Syria to cover up for the U.S.-led imperial aggression against that country. They lied about Assad’s alleged despotism when, in reality, Syrians enjoyed religious and social freedoms. They lied about Assad using chemical weapons when it was the Western-backed jihadist terrorists who used them in false-flag provocations, as Seymour Hersh reported.

The overthrow of Assad appears to be a great victory for the Western imperialist agenda and a blow to Russia and Iran. Washington and its allies are in a celebratory mood over the spoils of victory.

But the signs of bloody disintegration are impossible to conceal even for the lying Western media. In the short term, the Western powers and their propaganda media are trying to present the new rulers of Syria as somehow reformed and benign. This is while Israel annexes territory and U.S. and Turkish-backed factions begin fighting over strongholds.

Syria’s descent into untold mayhem has begun, and in the usual Orwellian fashion, the Western culprits are trying to sell the infernal outcome as a liberation. This is typical of the whitewashing deception that comes as a matter of routine following every imperial regime-change operation. It never ends well.

The people of Syria and the region are facing more turmoil, chaos, conflict, and suffering. The criminal Western imperialist axis is emboldened, but lies are never a sound foundation for the future.

December 14, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , , | 1 Comment

How Does Western Media Try to Defame Calin Georgescu?

Calin Georgescu, running as an independent candidate for president, speaks to media in Bucharest, Romania, Oct. 1, 2024.
By Oleg Burunov – Sputnik – 13.12.2024

Amid uncertainty surrounding Romania’s botched presidential elections, Western media has launched an information campaign against independent candidate Calin Georgescu, who earlier made it to the country’s presidential runoff.

His progress, however, was annulled by the country’s constitutional court, which accused Georgescu of money laundering and being “Moscow’s man” – allegations he denies.

How does Western media paint the 62-year-old politician?

  • The Financial Times : Romania shocked the world by voting for “a pro-Putin TikTok star” and “an outsider with ultranationalist views who was polling poorly just weeks before the election.”
  • The BBC: Georgescu is “a figure from the extreme fringe of Romanian politics.”
  • Sky News: He “has emerged from obscurity to top the polls in Romania’s presidential election. But the Anglophile and Trump supporter is also his country’s most divisive figure for decades.”
  • AP : “A self-professed Donald Trump supporter”, Georgescu remained “a little-known entity until just weeks ago.”
  • France 24: “The pro-Russian outsider candidate”.
  • The Week : The “Putin of Romania” and “the EU and NATO’s worst nightmare.”

Romania held its presidential election on November 24, with Georgescu winning the first round with 22.94% of the votes. The leader of the liberal Save Romania Union, Elena Lasconi, who favors the partnership with NATO and the US, came second with 19.18%.

The second round of elections was scheduled for December 8. However, on December 6, the Constitutional Court ruled to cancel the results of the first round, paving the way for a rerun. The Romanian government must now set the date of a new presidential vote. Both Georgescu and Lasconi criticized the ruling.

Georgescu earlier told Western media that he had spent “zero” on his TikTok campaign and had “zero” ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he praised as “a patriot and a leader”.

The country’s opposition parties and politicians slammed the court’s decision as anti-democratic. Georgescu, for his part, insisted that the ruling “is more than a legal controversy” and that “it is basically a formalized coup d’état.”

December 13, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | | 1 Comment

Iran’s Syria envoy rejects reports on cash theft from embassy

Press TV – December 11, 2024

Iran’s ambassador to Syria has rejected reports that some $42 million worth of cash was stolen from the Iranian embassy in Damascus just after staff left it in anticipation of a change of government in the Arab country.

“There was a single dollar. Why should there be $42 million in an embassy,” said Hossein Akbari on Wednesday during an interview with Tasnim news agency.

Akbari said the ransacking of the Iranian embassy, which took place on Monday, was the work of a group of thugs who were not related to armed militants taking control of Damascus after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad left the country last weekend.

He said that only the embassy’s furniture had been damaged during the ransacking, adding that the staff had evacuated all other important items, including computers and technical equipment.

The ambassador said that Iran’s embassy in Damascus is currently under protection like other foreign missions in Syria upon orders issued by the ruling militants.

“I’m sorry for those media outlets that gave such extensive coverage to this fake news,” he said while referring to the domestic circulation of the story on cash theft from the embassy in Syria which he said had originally been reported by anti-Iran platforms outside of the country.

Akbari said that some 10,000 Iranians are currently working or studying in Syria and need to receive regular consular services.

He added that the ruling militants in Damascus have been urging foreign missions to continue their activities, adding that Iran will resume offering consular services in Syria once the Arab country’s transitional government sets up its foreign ministry.

December 11, 2024 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | 1 Comment

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