Mexico is in a crisis. Political candidates are busy dancing on TikTok

Amid a critical election season, digital campaign strategies amount to chasing memes and sharing cringey dance moves rather than seriously engaging on policy.

Joanna Shan/Rest of World

By LORENA RÍOS

9 MAY 2024 • MONTERREY, MEXICOTRANSLATE

• Mexicans will cast ballots for more than 20,000 posts, including the presidency, amid an ongoing security crisis.
• Political campaigns have centered on viral choreography and shareable memes.
• Unimpressed voters are having to go sleuthing beyond social media for candidates’ proposals.

One afternoon in late March, Jorge Álvarez Máynez swayed to the beat of a vallenato tune before climbing off the stage, jumping over a barricade, and walking into a crowd of women.

To the untrained eye, the 38-year-old might have come off as a nascent rock star. In reality, Álvarez Máynez is a presidential hopeful, dancing his way across Mexico as the country prepares to head to the polls.

He’s not the exception. With only a few weeks to go before elections, candidates are pulling out their best dance moves. Awkwardly performed choreographies, viral memes, and TikTok challenges have been at the center of political campaigns. This strategy, experts told Rest of World, has been successful in drawing eyeballs even as it has failed to address many of Mexico’s urgent problems.

Candidates “are too caught up in the need to be present on social media, to be trending,” said Alejandra López, a political scientist at Anáhuac University. But, she added, “a like is not a vote.”

In June, Mexicans will vote for more than 20,000 posts, including for Congress, state governorships, and local representatives. Nearly a third of Mexico’s electorate — some 26.2 million people — is between 18 and 29 years of age. And the country is enthusiastic about social media: Last year, 93.2% of internet users were on Facebook and 76.5% on TikTok. It’s no surprise that a viral post, dance, or jingle is a top prize this campaign season.

Álvarez Máynez’s campaign jingle is a classic example of such virality: It has been played more than 3 million times on Spotify, and has found fans as far as South Korea. Another candidate from his party, Mariana Rodríguez, has upped the game, starring in several glitzy music videos in her signature neon-orange sneakers. Rodríguez, who is running for mayor of Monterrey, in northern Mexico, best embodies the current wave of new politicians and their bet on social media as an electoral strategy.

But similar experiments to gain popularity have failed.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/UcBdkcOQvwI?feature=oembedPresidential candidate Jorge Álvarez Máynez dances onstage at a campaign rally.

Claudia Sheinbaum, the leading presidential candidate, took a tumble while dancing to banda music in Mazatlán in April. Xóchitl Gálvez, the main opposition candidate, pulled out a few basic moves inside her cramped tour bus in March and danced awkwardly to Mexican regional music earlier this month. 

“That’s so uncomfortable to watch,” Manuel Alejandro Zamudio Rojas, a law intern, posted on X, referring to the latter episode.

While he hasn’t been immune to criticism, Álvarez Máynez, more than any other candidate, has become synonymous with dancing during this campaign season, twirling supporters to the rhythm of a quebradita song and replicating the choreography to his campaign song on an endless loop. Despite his visibility on social media, Álvarez Máynez is trailing in third place in most polls.

Mexico is currently in the midst of a crisis. During President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s term, homicides have risen 8% compared to the previous administration; a wave of extortions has taken over supply chains and paralyzed entire communities. At least 44 journalists have been killed since December 2018. More than 30 candidates have been killed during this campaign season. Immigration and water scarcity have also become pressing issues.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Jp_3ecyNg8g?feature=oembedLeading presidential candidate Claudia Sheinbaum falls while dancing to music on stage.

Prompted by moderators during two recent televised debates, the presidential candidates discussed their governance plans in greater detail than they have on their social platforms: Xóchitl Gálvez said she would strengthen prosecutors’ offices to tackle femicide. Claudia Sheinbaum promised to implement a national hotline to respond to calls about gender violence. Álvarez Máynez said his government would demilitarize the country.

While some analysts say social media-based strategies have generated sympathy and made young politicians relatable, others point out that candidates aren’t using them as a segue to detailed proposals outside the debates. “There is no one talking about affordable housing, the precarious jobs [young people] have to accept, the lack of opportunities to start a family,” said López.

Interspersed among gimmicky TikTok content are snippets of candidates’ plans, often containing few details about their cost, timeline, or implementation strategy.

Opposition candidate Xóchitl Gálvez (center) dances awkwardly to Mexican regional music. X

The offices of Álvarez Máynez, Gálvez, and Sheinbaum did not respond to a request for comment from Rest of World.

Mexicans have started sifting through the wannabe-viral content to try and find governance plans. Alfredo Velázquez, a 27-year-old economist with nearly 157,000 followers on TikTok, is one of them. In his videos, he boils down candidates’ policies, often after digging through their official websites.

“People want to know what was said, what wasn’t, and what is true,” Velázquez told Rest of World.

Voters are increasingly turning to TikTok for fact-checking and short summaries of televised debates. A video by Gerardo Vera, a 19-year-old content creator, on each candidate’s proposal regarding education has 1.2 million views.

While this electorate might find dances amusing, it takes more to get young people to go out and vote, Gisela Rubach, a political strategist, told Rest of World. “Young people are moved by causes. That’s the one thing that will get them to vote,” she said. To further lure young voters, Álvarez Máynez has visited a number of universities during his campaign.

Daniel Agüero, a 22-year-old architecture student from the state of Guerrero, told Rest of World he was not impressed by the current campaign strategies, but decided to vote for Álvarez Máynez after seeking out details of his plans directly on his website. He said he found the candidate’s plans on security and transparency compelling. 

“I understand that, in the end, people are ruled by emotions,” said Agüero. But when it comes to candidates’ campaigns, “I would expect better.” 

Lorena Ríos is a multimedia journalist currently based in Mexico.

Source: Rest of the world website

The WHO’s Proposed Pandemic Agreements Worsen Public Health

BY DAVID BELL  MAY 14, 2024  GOVERNMENT, HISTORY, PUBLIC HEALTH  7 MINUTE READ

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Much has been written on the current proposals putting the World Health Organization (WHO) front and center of future pandemic responses. With billions of dollars in careers, salaries, and research funding on the table, it is difficult for many to be objective. However, there are fundamentals here that everyone with public health training should agree upon. Most others, if they take time to consider, would also agree. Including, when divorced from party politicking and soundbites, most politicians. 

So here, from an orthodox public health standpoint, are some problems with the proposals on pandemics to be voted on at the World Health Assembly at the end of this month.

Unfounded Messaging on Urgency

The Pandemic Agreement (treaty) and IHR amendments have been promoted based on claims of a rapidly increasing risk of pandemics. In fact, they pose an ‘existential threat’ (i.e. one that may end our existence) according to the G20’s High Level Independent Panel in 2022. However, the increase in reported natural outbreaks on which the WHO, the World Bank, G20, and others based these claims is shown to be unfounded in a recent analysis from the UK’s University of Leeds. The main database on which most outbreak analyses rely, the GIDEON database, shows a reduction in natural outbreaks and resultant mortality over the past 10 to 15 years, with the prior increase between 1960 and 2000 fully consistent with the development of the technologies necessary to detect and record such outbreaks; PCR, antigen and serology tests, and genetic sequencing.

The WHO does not refute this but simply ignores it. Nipah viruses, for example, only ‘emerged’ in the late 1990s when we found ways to actually detect them. Now we can readily distinguish new variants of coronavirus to promote uptake of pharmaceuticals. The risk does not change by detecting them; we just change the ability to notice them. We also have the ability to modify viruses to make them worse – this is a relatively new problem. But do we really want an organization influenced by China, with North Korea on its executive board (insert your favorite geopolitical rivals), to manage a future bioweapons emergency?

Irrespective of growing evidence that Covid-19 was not a natural phenomenon, modelling that the World Bank quotes as suggesting a 3x increase in outbreaks over the next decade actually predicts that a Covid-like event will recur less than once per century. Diseases that the WHO uses to suggest an increase in outbreaks over the past 20 years, including cholera, plague, yellow fever, and influenza variants were orders of magnitude worse in past centuries.

This all makes it doubly confusing that the WHO is breaking its own legal requirements in order to push through a vote without Member States having time to properly review implications of the proposals. The urgency must be for reasons other than public health need. Others can speculate why, but we are all human and all have egos to protect, even when preparing legally binding international agreements.

Low Relative Burden

The burden (e.g. death rate or life years lost) of acute outbreaks is a fraction of the overall disease burden, far lower than many endemic infectious diseases such as malaria, HIV, and tuberculosis, and a rising burden of non-communicable disease. Few natural outbreaks over the past 20 years have resulted in more than 1,000 deaths – or 8 hours of tuberculosis mortality. Higher-burden diseases should dominate public health priorities, however dull or unprofitable they may seem. 

With the development of modern antibiotics, major outbreaks from the big scourges of the past like Plague and typhus ceased to occur. Though influenza is caused by a virus, most deaths are also due to secondary bacterial infections. Hence, we have not seen a repeat of the Spanish flu in over a century. We are better at healthcare than we used to be and have improved nutrition (generally) and sanitation. Widespread travel has eliminated the risks of large immunologically naive populations, making our species more immunologically resilient. Cancer and heart disease may be increasing, but infectious diseases overall are declining. So where should we focus?

Lack of Evidence Base

Investment in public health requires both evidence (or high likelihood) that the investment will improve outcomes and an absence of significant harm. The WHO has demonstrated neither with their proposed interventions. Neither has anyone else. The lockdown and mass vaccination strategy promoted for Covid-19 resulted in a disease that predominantly affects elderly sick people leading to 15 million excess deaths, even increasing mortality in young adults. In past acute respiratory outbreaks, things got better after one or perhaps two seasons, but with Covid-19 excess mortality persisted. 

Within public health, this would normally mean we check whether the response caused the problem. Especially if it’s a new type of response, and if past understanding of disease management predicted that it would. This is more reliable than pretending that past knowledge did not exist. So again, the WHO (and other public-private partnerships) are not following orthodox public health, but something quite different.

Centralization for a Highly Heterogeneous Problem

Twenty-five years ago, before private investors became so interested in public health, it was accepted that decentralization was sensible. Providing local control to communities that could then prioritize and tailor health interventions themselves can provide better outcomes. Covid-19 underlined the importance of this, showing how uneven the impact of an outbreak is, determined by population age, density, health status, and many other factors. To paraphrase the WHO, ‘Most people are safe, even when some are not.’ 

However, for reasons that remain unclear to many, the WHO decided that the response for a Toronto aged care resident and a young mother in a Malawian village should be essentially the same – stop them from meeting family and working, then inject them with the same patented chemicals. The WHO’s private sponsors, and even the two largest donor countries with their strong pharmaceutical sectors, agreed with this approach. So too did the people paid to implement it. It was really only history, common sense, and public health ethics that stood in the way, and they proved much more malleable.

Absence of Prevention Strategies Through Host Resilience

The WHO IHR amendments and Pandemic Agreement are all about detection, lockdowns, and mass vaccination. This would be good if we had nothing else. Fortunately, we do. Sanitation, better nutrition, antibiotics, and better housing halted the great scourges of the past. An article in the journal Nature in 2023 suggested that just getting vitamin D at the right level may have cut Covid-19 mortality by a third. We already knew this and can speculate on why it became controversial. It’s really basic immunology. 

Nonetheless, nowhere within the proposed US$30+ billion annual budget is any genuine community and individual resilience supported. Imagine putting a few billion more into nutrition and sanitation. Not only would you dramatically reduce mortality from occasional outbreaks, but more common infectious diseases, and metabolic diseases such as diabetes and obesity, would also go down. This would actually reduce the need for pharmaceuticals. Imagine a pharmaceutical company, or investor, promoting that. It would be great for public health, but a suicidal business approach.

Conflicts of Interest

All of which brings us, obviously, to conflicts of interest. The WHO, when formed, was essentially funded by countries through a core budget, to address high-burden diseases on country request. Now, with 80% of its use of funds specified directly by the funder, its approach is different. If that Malawian village could stump up tens of millions for a program, they would get what they ask for. But they don’t have that money; Western countries, Pharma, and software moguls do. 

Most people on earth would grasp that concept far better than a public health workforce heavily incentivized to think otherwise. This is why the World Health Assembly exists and has the ability to steer the WHO in directions that don’t harm their populations. In its former incarnation, the WHO considered conflict of interest to be a bad thing. Now, it works with its private and corporate sponsors, within the limits set by its Member States, to mold the world to their liking.

The Question Before Member States

To summarize, while it’s sensible to prepare for outbreaks and pandemics, it’s even more sensible to improve health. This involves directing resources to where the problems are and using them in a way that does more good than harm. When people’s salaries and careers become dependent on changing reality, reality gets warped. The new pandemic proposals are very warped. They are a business strategy, not a public health strategy. It is the business of wealth concentration and colonialism – as old as humanity itself. 

The only real question is whether the majority of the Member States of the World Health Assembly, in their voting later this month, wish to promote a lucrative but rather amoral business strategy, or the interests of their people. 

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Author

• David BellDavid Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. He is a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), Programme Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland, and Director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in Bellevue, WA, 

IDF reveals Hamas terrorists use UN vehicles, UNRWA compound as cover in Rafah – watch

Several terrorists and gunfire can be seen near UN vehicles and in the area of UNRWA’s logistics warehouse compound in eastern Rafah, which is a central point for the distribution of UNRWA’s aid.

By JERUSALEM POST STAFFMAY 14, 2024 21:25Updated: MAY 14, 2024 21:37

The IDF revealed on Tuesday that during operational activity in eastern Rafah on Saturday, terrorists were identified in UNRWA’s central logistics compound alongside UN vehicles. 

In the footage, several terrorists and gunfire can be seen near UN vehicles and in the area of UNRWA’s logistics warehouse compound in eastern Rafah, which is a central point for the distribution of aid on UNRWA’s behalf in the Gaza Strip.

Following the event, representatives of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) conveyed the findings to senior officials in the international community and called on the UN to conduct an urgent investigation into the matter.

Footage of Hamas terrorists using UN facilities for cover and transport, May 14, 2024 (credit: IDF SPOKESPERSON’S UNIT)

Hamas presence threatens civilian safety

In addition, COGAT representatives warned the UN against the presence of terrorists in the area and the seriousness of the danger their presence brings to the logistics center compound concerning the continued protection of the organization’s facilities. 

The IDF promised at the end of the announcement that it would continue to act in accordance with international law to distribute aid to the residents of the Gaza Strip. 

RFK Jr.’s Threat to Trump

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Once warm to the independent, the former president calls him a ‘left lunatic.’ 

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By William McGurnFollow

May 13, 2024 at 4:57 pm ET

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks at an event in New York, May 1. PHOTO: ANDREA RENAULT/ZUMA PRESS

Even for Joe Biden, his recent suggestion that cannibals in New Guinea ate his uncle Bosie was a doozy. But Robert F. Kennedy Jr. just topped him with his worm-ate-my-brain reveal.

Mr. Kennedy’s worm admission comes amid heightened interest in his campaign for president. That’s especially true in the attention he is now getting from Mr. Trump. Recent Trump attacks reflect fears that RFK Jr. could siphon more votes from him than from Mr. Biden.

On Thursday Mr. Trump released a blistering video that opens: “RFK Jr. is a Democrat plant, a radical left liberal who’s been put in place in order to help Crooked Joe Biden. . . . Republicans, get it out of your mind that you’re going to vote for this guy because he’s conservative. He’s not. . . . RFK’s views on vaccines are fake as is everything else about his candidacy.” 

He followed this by rattling off specific issues on which he says RFK’s views run counter to Republican principles. He labeled Mr. Kennedy a “big-time taxer,” “antimilitary,” “antigun,” an “open-border advocate,” “an extreme environmentalist,” etc. As a resident of New York, Mr. Trump added, he saw firsthand how Mr. Kennedy’s influence led to disastrous policies such as the state’s ban on fracking.

All this marks a clear shift in tone. In September, two weeks before Mr. Kennedy announced he was leaving the Democratic Party to make an independent run for the presidency, Mr. Trump spoke warmly of Mr. Kennedy. “I like him a lot,” he told journalist Sharyl Attkisson on her syndicated Sunday TV show, “Full Measure.” “I’ve known him for a long time. He’s very much a libertarian in a certain way. And I think I have certain qualities along those lines too, if you want to know the truth.” 

Mr. Kennedy, who heads to the Libertarian Party convention in Washington this month, for his part claims he turned down an offer from Trump emissaries to be the former president’s running mate. The Trump campaign denies it.

No one really knows which of his rivals Mr. Kennedy’s candidacy will hurt more. Mr. Biden sees Mr. Kennedy as possibly reprising the role played by the Green Party’s Jill Stein in 2016. Her vote totals were slim—in Pennsylvania she received 0.82%, in Michigan 1.07%, in Wisconsin 1.04%—but had her votes gone instead to Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump wouldn’t have been president.

With Mr. Kennedy polling today in the low double digits, Mr. Biden is taking no chances. He has gathered endorsements from almost the entire Kennedy family and even set up a war room to track the RFK campaign and make it harder for him to get on state ballots. Team Biden is trying to portray Mr. Kennedy as a creature of MAGA, citing his antivax stands and his financial support from Trump donor Timothy Mellon.

Mr. Trump is smart to hammer Mr. Kennedy on the issues and cast him as further to the left than Mr. Biden. For one thing, it clarifies things for Republican and independent voters who might buy the nonsense that Mr. Kennedy is conservative. For another, the more vehement Mr. Trump’s attacks on Mr. Kennedy are, the more the former president increases RFK Jr.’s attractiveness to Democrats already disenchanted with the president.

But it will be messy. Mr. Kennedy’s appeal is that he is the authentic outsider challenging the Beltway establishment. He might say some kooky stuff, but his antivaccine activism predates Covid. His antigovernment and antiestablishment tone resonates with voters disaffected with the two parties. 

Certainly Mr. Kennedy embraces many principles that can’t be reconciled with traditional Republican conservatism. But so does Mr. Trump. In 2016 Mr. Trump recognized this and chose Mike Pence, a politician with a solid Reaganite record, to reassure Republicans doubtful of what MAGA stood for. He might be wise to make a similar choice this year to drive home the point to voters who view Mr. Kennedy as a plausible conservative alternative.

But Mr. Kennedy has a vulnerability that may make him unpalatable to left-leaning voters who might otherwise be Mr. Kennedy’s natural constituency. These are the protesters denouncing the president as “Genocide Joe.” They might be surprised to learn that RFK Jr. has taken a harder line in favor Israel’s right to defend itself than Mr. Biden has. That aligns Mr. Kennedy with Mr. Trump’s pro-Israel stance—and leaves those protesting the war in Gaza in search of another option.

Mr. Kennedy calls himself a “classic liberal or Kennedy Democrat.” Mr. Biden’s campaign calls him a tool of the MAGA movement. Mr. Trump calls him a “left lunatic” and a “Democrat plant.” 

What they all now realize is that November’s election may be decided by whose definition of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. voters find most persuasive.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Brampton Doctor Backed by Elon Musk to Appeal Court Decision Upholding Rebuke for Anti-Lockdown Tweets

The Ontario Superior Court building in Toronto in a file photo. (The Canadian Press/Colin Perkel)

By Adam Brown

5/13/2024

A Brampton doctor, with financial backing from Elon Musk, plans to seek a reversal of an Ontario court’s refusal to quash three cautions placed on her public file by medical regulators for questioning the COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccines on social media.

Doctor Kulvinder Kaur Gill said in an X post that she will appeal the May 13 refusal by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice’s divisional court to quash three cautions placed on her public file by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario for her series of 2020 tweets.

Dr. Gill, who said she has spent her life savings on legal fees fighting lawsuits and “smear campaigns,” announced in March that X, Mr. Musk’s social media company, had pledged to help her with her legal fees.

Dr. Gill’s lawyer Lisa Bildy told The Epoch Times that although X has already confirmed funding for an appeal, “we need to get leave from the Court of Appeal first, as is normal after a divisional court ruling.”

“We will be focusing argument this time on errors made by the divisional court, rather than those made by the CPSO screening committee,” said Ms. Bildy, who is from the firm Libertas Law.

Dr. Gill, who drew attention for questioning anti-COVID measures in 2020 and again last month when Musk offered to pay her legal fees, had argued in court April 10 that the CPSO’s cautions and its related notice to hospitals and regulators across North America were punitive and stifled debate about the COVID measures. She sought to have them overturned.

The three cautions examined by the court relate to two posts Dr. Gill published on Twitter, now known as X, during the lockdowns of August 2020.

The first read “There is absolutely no medical or scientific reason for this prolonged, harmful and illogical lockdown” and the second said “If you have not yet figured out that we don’t need a vaccine, you are not paying attention.”

The court said in its decision released May 13 that “when the college chose to draw the line at those tweets which it found contained misinformation, it did so in a way which reasonably balanced Dr. Gill’s free speech rights with her professional responsibilities.”

The court said the CPSO “did so in a manner that offered some protection to the public, but was minimally intrusive to Dr. Gill. In other words, its response was proportionate.”

The court also dismissed Dr. Gill’s arguments that the CPSO cautions were punitive, stating that “cautions are educational and remedial in nature and do not reflect a finding of professional misconduct.”

Libertas Law argued in a May 13 press release that the court has not considered “the fact that cautions have, only in recent years, become a public rebuke rather than a private ‘correction’ of a professional by their peers.”

The appeal by Dr. Gill, a specialist in pediatrics, allergies, and clinical immunology with 340,000 followers on X, will receive the support of Mr. Musk “since her posts were made on the X platform which supports free expression and dialogue, even on contentious issues and particularly on matters of scientific and medical importance,” Libertas Law said.

The legal battles caught the attention of X in March, prompting the company to offer to pay Dr. Gill’s costs.

“Because she spoke out publicly on Twitter (now X) in opposition to the Canadian and Ontario governments’ COVID lockdown efforts and vaccination mandates, she was harassed by the legacy media, censored by prior Twitter management, and subjected to investigations and disciplinary proceedings by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario that resulted in ‘cautions’ being placed on her permanent public record,” X said. “X will now fund the rest of Dr. Gill’s campaign so that she can pay her $300,000 judgment and her legal bills.”

The law firm said after the April 10 hearing that Dr. Gill’s tweet stating that “we don’t need a vaccine” came before any vaccine was actually available, and was referring to a statement by Chief Public Health Officer of Canada Theresa Tam that lockdowns could persist for two or three years despite plans to release a vaccine.

Dr. Gill came to be smeared as an “anti-vaxxer” even though she “has always been a proponent of routine childhood vaccines in her clinical practice,” Libertas Law said.

Dr. Gill faced constant investigations and disciplinary actions by the CPSO beginning in August of 2020 because of her online advocacy, the law firm said. She also became the target of a “malicious online campaign” by other physicians, media, and members of the public to generate complaints against her tweets.

“In total, seven public (non-patient) complaints were made to the CPSO about her online commentary on X, and a separate high-level Registrar’s investigation was also initiated,” the firm said.

The CPSO wasn’t immediately available for comment.

Source: Epoch Times

‘The End of Everything’ Review: When War Means Total Destruction

Thebes, Carthage, Constantinople, Tenochtitlán: These civilizations were cut down in their prime, some with little warning.

By 

Robert D. Kaplan

May 10, 2024 at 11:47 am ET

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Gift unlocked article

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There is no modern world. Despite technology, human nature remains the same. Indeed, the march of technology can lead to moral regression, as affluence and leisure corrode the character of individuals and nations, tempting destruction. That is the underlying message of the Hoover Institution classicist Victor Davis Hanson in his book, “The End of Everything: How Wars Descend Into Annihilation.”

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The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation

Mr. Hanson makes his point by telling the story of four states and civilizations that were completely obliterated by war and by their own hubris and naiveté: Greek Thebes, Punic Carthage, Orthodox Christian Byzantium and Aztec Tenochtitlán. In each case, few saw it coming. “It cannot happen here,” murmur the victims, moments before they are slaughtered. The most chilling word in this book is “erased,” which has many times been the fate of cultures no less exalted than our own. One thinks of Ozymandias, King of Kings, in Shelley’s poem, whose “colossal” works have vanished, replaced by “lone and level sands.”

“The End of Everything” focuses only on “man-made Armageddons,” not “lost civilizations” like those of the Mycenaeans (ca. 1200 B.C.) or Mayans (ca. A.D. 900), nor “smaller extinctions” such as the Athenian destruction of Melos (416 B.C.), made famous by Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue. There are no examples of internal decay or disappearances here. This book is about flourishing civilizations cut down in their prime, often with relatively little warning, with vast geopolitical consequences. Alexander the Great’s destruction of Thebes in 335 B.C. essentially ended the city-state system in the Greek archipelago. Rome’s final destruction of Carthage in 146 B.C. changed the Mediterranean from a bipolar world to a unipolar one. The Ottoman Turkish sack of Greek Constantinople in 1453 formally ended an Orthodox Christian imperium in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Spanish conquest in 1521 of Aztec Tenochtitlán ended the city-state system of Mesoamerica and led history north into the temperate latitudes of what would eventually become the United States. The equivalent today (the reader can’t help thinking about this) would be a nuclear war, the implosion of a great power, the military decimation of one great power by another, or, say, a war with China that goes global. As the author repeats, don’t say “it cannot happen to us,” because it can.

Thebes, Mr. Hanson writes, “was the most hallowed of the city-states,” the mythical home of heroes and gods like Herakles and Dionysus, a place synonymous with the archetypes of Greek tragedy: Antigone, Oedipus, Teiresias. But that didn’t help it against the military innovations employed by the 21-year-old Macedonian Alexander, who together with his father, Philip II, had turned the Macedonian army from a rustic force into what the author calls “a symphony of killers.”

Mr. Hanson compares Alexander’s rout of the Theban phalanx, which had a formidable reputation, to the collapse of the French army in World War I. The Thebans, reputationally drunk on past conquests and a romantic conception of themselves, had expected a general uprising of allies throughout Greece; theirs is a story about how excessive pride and high ideals can get a whole people killed. In fact, the Thebans were defeated in just one day. Then began the sickening slaughter of men, women and children at the hands of Alexander’s Thracian mercenaries. War crimes are an old story in history, and the victims are always the weak and defenseless who have been stripped of the means of deterrence. Mr. Hanson makes all of this relevant to the modern reader by combining granularity with big-picture analysis and teasing out meaning from a mastery of details.

The story he tells of Rome’s destruction of Carthage is equally heart-rending. The erasure of Carthage had greater consequences than that of Thebes: Its population was 10 times as large, and the city was the center of a civilization that extended throughout the Mediterranean. The three Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage from the mid-third century B.C. to the mid-second century B.C., each lasting years or decades, were in actuality world wars that engulfed the center of the Mediterranean basin.

By 149 B.C. Rome had already twice defeated Carthage, dramatically reducing its power and majesty, so that the North African empire was a mere remnant of its former self. Despite its allies and trading partners, it was no longer a threat to Rome and was complying with all of Rome’s demands. Yet human nature can be perverse, and Rome still loathed the civilization it had already laid low, nursing the painful memory of Hannibal’s scorched-earth rampage through Italy in the Second Punic War a half-century earlier.

So Rome not only defeated Carthage a third (and superfluous) time, it went on to massacre Carthage’s civilian population and to level its buildings down to the ground—an ancient version of Hiroshima. “The killing required the exhausted legionaries to work in shifts,” the author writes; the grotesque job of clearing away so many bodies with pickaxes and hatchets “delayed the final conquest.” The slaughter and destruction of Carthage was the high-water mark of the Roman Republic, as it afterward descended into decadence and transformed into an imperial juggernaut. But nothing good comes from the large-scale slaughter of noncombatants, and not even ancient writers justified Rome’s slaughter of the Carthaginians.

The Greeks of medieval Constantinople, much like the Thebans and Carthaginians, believed in their cultural destiny. They believed that the Orthodox Christian god evoked in the architectural and spiritual majesty of the great cathedral Hagia Sophia would save them. Perhaps never before in history had there been such a fusion of political power and mystical religion as in the Byzantine Empire, which by the time of the fateful Ottoman siege in 1453 had already lasted a thousand years longer than its western Roman predecessor.

There seemed to be something eternal about it. But not so eternal that it could overcome the poor state of its fortifications. Or the enormous siege cannons employed by the Ottomans. Dull facts on the ground like these defeated what was arguably, in terms of its arts and architecture, the greatest medieval civilization.

With the destruction of Constantinople came the end of virtually three millennia of sovereign Greek civilization in Asia Minor. The Muslim defeat of the Greeks in the east shook Western Christendom to the core. Suddenly, it seemed, there were Turks in the Balkans and Asia Minor who were turning their eyes west. European powers would survive partly by turning toward a New World across the Atlantic, to some degree driven by a newfound fear of the East.

The Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés’s “obliteration” of the Aztec city-state of Tenochtitlán in the early 16th century manifests, even more than these other destructions, an almost absurd imbalance of forces, showing how very little may be required to annihilate very much. It took some 1,500 Spanish soldiers, aided by superior weaponry and a smallpox epidemic, to defeat this inland-Venice with its fabulous canals and population of four million, in an empire that spread over central and southern Mexico. The Aztec leader Montezuma II, when he first greeted Cortés, could never in his worst nightmares have imagined such annihilation.

The scale of killing rivaled the 10 months of Verdun in 1916, Mr. Hanson writes, made worse by the “muscular fury” required to slaughter thousands in an age without modern technology. Like the Byzantines, who made frantic calls for help to Western Christendom, and the Thebans who thought their neighbors would rally to them, the Aztecs called on their supposed allies. But it was in vain, as the other indigenous Nahua sided—and in fact fought with—Cortés, seeing him as an opportunity to topple their murderous Aztec rivals. A great city-state in the heart of the New World was destroyed utterly. The Spanish would build magnificent churches atop its flattened pyramids, replacing a native culture of human sacrifice with that of a Christian god, whose defenders were cruel in their own way. One civilization would abruptly replace another.

Though the author of this profound book doesn’t mention it, what stands out in these four accounts is the working of time. We believe that what we have built is so magnificent it must go on forever. But then it is eradicated, and the world does not come to an end. Only our own world has done so. Another is built in its place and goes on endlessly into the future, so that we become the ancients. In this context, one has to think of the fate of the U.S. and the West, and how—and if—it will come to an end: whether by internal decay or by a sudden cataclysm. Rather than saying it can’t happen to us, for the sake of our own self-defense we should always contemplate that it very well might.

Mr. Kaplan holds the geopolitics chair at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and is the author, most recently, of “The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, From the Mediterranean to China.”

Copyright ©2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Source: Wall Street Journal

GIESBRECHT: Kamloops… $8 million spent, no bodies and no proof of an outrageous blood libel

Opinion

Writer Brian Giesbrecht questions how $8 million of taxpayer money could be spent by the Kamloops band, and not either prove their claims of murdered children in unmarked graves, or withdraw it.Western Standard files

Western Standard Guest Columnist

Published on: 

11 May 2024, 9:30 am

They spent $8,000,000 without putting one shovel in the ground.

That’s how much money the Kamloops Band spent on… exactly what we have no idea. If you remember, that indigenous band claimed that the people running the local residential school had, for unexplained reasons, secretly buried 215 of the students under their care. 

To back up that highly unlikely claim, they presented no evidence that would have stood up in any court in the western world. But the federal government immediately gave them $8,000,000 to… well, that’s the mystery. What did they spend that money on? 

They have not put one shovel in the ground, but apparently they have somehow spent the $8,000,000 of taxpayers’ hard-earned money. 

It was claimed that the money would be used to uncover the “heartbreaking truth”. But the only heartbreaking truth seems to be the complete waste of tax dollars.

But it gets worse. A whole lot worse.

Because the Trudeau government — in addition to lowering the flag for six months, and performing teddy bear pantomimes in community ceremonies — then went on to promise not just $8,000,000, but $320,000,000 to any other indigenous community that wanted to make similar claims. 

It should come as no surprise to any sentient being that dozens of poor indigenous communities immediately took the bait and claimed the prize.

So, the result is that hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent somehow. But with no graves found. In fact, none have even put a spade in the ground.

Well, that’s not completely correct. The Pine Creek community in Manitoba was absolutely convinced that the stories about indigenous children dying under sinister circumstances, and being secretly buried under the local church, must be true. After all, they had all heard those stories.

But the stories weren’t true. Excavations went ahead, and what was found? Stones.

The stories about priest murders and secret burials are just that. Stories.

Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of dollars that should be spent on useful endeavours — like providing better health-care for indigenous and non-indigenous Canadians — are being wasted. 

Rural paramedic services are being constantly cut back, for example. How many rural residents — indigenous as well as non-indigenous — will die from heart attacks because the paramedics were simply too far away from them to get them to the hospital in time to save their lives? 

There’s no money to improve rural medical services because millions are being wasted searching for phantom “missing children” and “unmarked graves”? 

Canadians are beginning to wake up to the fact that they have been had. Somebody is getting rich on all of this government largesse. 

But it’s not poor indigenous Canadians. They remain stuck on the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder. And medical and other essential services go wanting, because of this complete waste.

So, are there people in “unmarked graves”? 

Absolutely. Billions of them in fact. This planet is basically one huge graveyard. The number of marked graves, with headstones naming the person interred, is a tiny fraction of the billions of people who have died on this planet. 

Are the remains of some of the children who died from disease while attending residential school in unmarked graves? 

Absolutely. For that matter, so are the remains of many of the children who attended day schools, or no school at all in unmarked graves. There is nothing sinister about this fact of life. It simply means that the families of those children did not keep up the graves and cemeteries where the children were interred. (The vast majority of children who died while enrolled in residential schools are buried on their home reserves.)

This is not a criticism of those families. In fact, some of those families might have died out, and cemetery upkeep became impossible. Others just had different priorities. 

So, what we have is just a sad fact of life. Many children died of diseases a hundred plus years ago who would not have died today. Modern medicine is a wonderful thing. And indigenous children died in much greater numbers, for many different reasons. Tuberculosis, in particular, was a major killer of indigenous people.

In fact, tuberculosis is still 290 times higher in the indigenous community than in the mainstream community.

But the fact that death from disease was so much higher in the indigenous community than in the non-indigenous community has nothing to do with residential schools. It has nothing to do with the people running the schools, many of whom devoted their lives to working with indigenous people.

So, we come around to the question —why is $320,000,000 being spent to find the long lost burial places of children, simply because their families decided — for reasons of their own — to not keep up their gravesites? 

Because it is not true that there are thousands of “missing children” as alleged. Rather, as Professor Tom Flanagan puts it, in “Grave Error”, there are thousands of “forgotten children.” [Watch here.]

And as the special interlocutor, Kimberley Murray puts it, “These children are not missing, they are buried in local cemeteries.”

Perhaps that’s the reason that Murray’s upcoming National Gathering on Unmarked Burials has been postponed. Because there is nothing to say. 

Her six-figure salary, and those of all of her staff and associates, to say nothing of the $320,000,000 that has been spent — somehow — on searching for phantom graves and phantom “missing children,” could have been better spent on the real needs of living children.

We are approaching the three year anniversary of the Kamloops claim that 215 children from the local residential school had been somehow killed and secretly buried in the apple orchard on the school grounds. 

There was no good reason to believe that highly improbable claim in the first place. 

It was only the foolish and emotional reaction of the Trudeau government, and the incompetence of the media that persuaded Canadians that they should take that nonsensical claim seriously in the first place.

It is time to get back to sanity. Treat those who claim — with no real evidence — that priests murdered and secretly buried children, exactly the same way that we treat those who claim that the Martians have landed, or that aliens have abducted their mothers. 

Be polite. But don’t finance their delusions.

Brian Giesbrecht is a retired provincial court judge in Manitoba.

As Whites Go, So Goes the Nation

Pedro Gonzalez

Jeremy Carl’s arguments on race should be heeded.  

It’s September 13, 1890. The Union Jack is hoisted above Fort Salisbury, a place that will become the seat of the Southern Rhodesian government (and then eventually Harare, the capital of modern Zimbabwe). The men standing at attention beneath its colors are the Pioneer Column, a volunteer force organized by Cecil Rhodes. Here in the African hinterland, these white men spearhead what looks to be the birth of a civilization.

With their settlement came the beginnings of peace and order. Hannes Wessels, who grew up in Umtali on the Mozambican border, wrote that “the native rebellions were suppressed with a mixture of force and diplomacy, but with conquest, the white interlopers put an end to the endemic tribal genocide and quickly insisted upon changing the mindset that killing another human being was a right of might.” The intervention of whites in the region prevented the Matabele tribe from crushing the Zezuru people. Had that occurred, a Zezuru boy named Robert Gabriel Mugabe likely would have never existed. But exist he did. And in time, Mugabe became an African nationalist and a dictator who supported seizing land from whites and justified their persecution in explicitly racial terms. “His journey into the living world was made safe by the white man he would grow to revile,” wrote Wessels.

The example of Southern Rhodesia’s transformation into Zimbabwe is a reminder that the wheel of history turns on irony. The greatest irony in our time is that whites—the people descended from those settlers who carved civilization out of the North American wilds—have become public enemy number one in their own land. No other group has been subjected to so much cultural humiliation and expropriation in modern memory, a long struggle session that whites often eagerly participate in to demonstrate their anti-racist bona fides.

Jeremy Carl is working to educate Americans on both the practical realities and consequences of this dispossession. The argument he presents in The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart is necessary and cerebral. And if the early reception is any indicator, there is an appetite among Americans for what Carl serves up in those pages.

Indeed, most people understand on an intuitive level what Carl cogently puts forth. They know something is wrong, even if they can’t articulate it or are afraid to do so. The timing of the book, then, seems ideal as this discussion swiftly moves closer to the mainstream of political discourse.

It’s worth reiterating that nothing Carl is arguing is conspiratorial or even hard to prove. The facts and policies are there for all with eyes to see.

In 2021, for example, President Joe Biden announced that his administration would prioritize aid for businesses hurt by the COVID-19 pandemic based on race. In effect, this amounted to redistributing money from whites to nonwhites. But Democrats aren’t alone in backing policies like this. Republicans like Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker have also bragged about implementing similar redistributive schemes. Of more than 10,000 small businesses that applied for grants amid the pandemic, Baker said that 95 percent of the awards went to minority-owned businesses. Massachusetts is 74 percent white.

The implementation of these policies, whether in the political or corporate sector, has been accompanied by what Michael Anton coined the “celebration parallax.” Anton defines it this way:

In contemporary speech, on any “controversial” topic—or, to say better, regime priority—the decisive factor is the intent of the speaker. If she can be presumed to be celebrating the phenomenon under discussion, she may shout her approval from the rooftops. If not, he better shut up before someone comes along to shut him up.

Put simply, you are not allowed to notice these things unless you’re celebrating them, like Bloomberg did last September.

Bloomberg lauded that corporate America made good on its promise to hire a greater number of “people of color” after the Black Lives Matter riots. Of more than 300,000 jobs added to the S&P 100, 94 percent went to nonwhites. These hiring numbers could only be made possible by actively discriminating against equally or more qualified white applicants—a civil rights violation for any other group. But there is the rub: civil rights law, intentionally or not, created a new racial hierarchy in this country, with whites at the bottom. What would be considered discrimination against any other group is permissible against whites in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Much of this has been said before and said better than I could by men like Pat Buchanan and Sam Francis. But only now, when the abuses have become too great and absurd to ignore, does it seem like the way has been opened for change.

This has also made it possible for whites to be reduced to the status of a permanently aggrieved class that is exploited by those who explicitly or implicitly speak to their concerns without offering real solutions, or even doing things that run contrary to their interests. Consider that Donald Trump campaigned in 2020 on what was essentially $500 billion in reparations for the black community in the form of the Platinum Plan. Much of that money would have come from increased federal contracting opportunities. In other words, Trump proposed to enact one of the greatest race-based wealth transfers of our time.

Of course, Trump is not alone in this regard. A new kind of pundit has emerged who seeks to gin up white outrage for monetary gain, like a cadre of Marcus Garveys promising liberation in exchange for likes and retweets. Perilous times lie ahead in navigating this new era in racial politics.

The challenge that people like Carl now face is ensuring that this moment in history and the arguments in his book are not squandered on empty outrage. What happens to whites in this country will ultimately determine what happens to us all. For proof, see Zimbabwe.

Pedro Gonzalez writes the Contra Substack and is a columnist at Chronicles.

Source: American Mind Website

SOS: Stop the World Health Organization’s Tyrannical May 27 Power Grab

by Robert Williams
May 13, 2024 at 5:00 am

• The proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations give the WHO Director General the authority to declare not just an actual but a potential international public health emergency and set out binding recommendations on how to address it, whether individual states agree with him or not.
• Worse, no criticism of the new WHO regime and its decisions to declare potential or actual pandemics, lockdowns and treatment, including vaccines, will be allowed under the amended IHR… In other words, the government lies, obfuscations and cover-ups that so dominated the last pandemic will become normalized, and all criticism outlawed.
• Already, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (not a medical doctor) has castigated critics of the planned amendments and new Pandemic Treaty as conspiracy theorists who spread “fake news, lies and conspiracy theories.”
• Since the UN claims that to “owns the science,” it is now brainwashing the public into believing that “climate change” threatens global health. This view makes it likely that you will one day find yourself in a WHO-mandated lockdown to mitigate the effects of the “climate crisis,” along with limits on where you go, how you may get there, what you do, and what you can own.
• The US is already seeing forerunners of this in the Biden administration’s unconstitutional executive orders, possibly including his attempts to ban internal combustion engine vehicles and gas stoves; mandating dishwashing machines that may need repeated cycles to clean dishes, and new stricter regulations on air conditioners, washing machines, refrigerators, and even leaf-blowers — and this is only the beginning.
• The WHO is not elected, has no democratic legitimacy, is not accountable to anyone and has no control mechanisms to restrain its reach. After the horrifying failures of the WHO during Covid-19, the answer is not to give the organization more power, but to disengage from it entirely.
• The UN and the WHO evidently want unlimited control. If they are not stopped right now by national governments that refuse to approve the new Pandemic Treaty and proposed International Health Regulations amendments, unlimited control is what they will have — and it is we who will have given it to them.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is not elected, has no democratic legitimacy, is not accountable to anyone and has no control mechanisms to restrain its reach. After the horrifying failures of the WHO during Covid-19, the answer is not to give the organization more power, but to disengage from it entirely. Pictured: WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (left) shares a moment with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Beijing on January 28, 2020. (Photo by Naohiko Hatta – Pool/Getty Images)

Most countries have not initiated any mainstream critical public debate about how Covid-19 was addressed. The governments responsible for the outrageously botched response to the virus have not been held accountable. Communist China, despite having unleashed the virus on the world by deliberately lying about its human-to-human transmissibility, has not suffered a single negative consequence. Nothing has been done either about the duplicitous role played by World Health Organization (WHO), which parroted Chinese Communist Party propaganda about the virus, even after having been informed in writing early on by Taiwan that the virus was highly transmissible.

The WHO, still led by the reportedly corrupt (here and here) Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, covered up for China, and repeatedly praised China for, in effect, having murdered more than seven million people worldwide, including more than one million just in the US .

No one has held to account either China’s way of handling the virus by recalling protective gear so it would have enough for itself; made billions exporting “useless” defective protective gear (here and here), for sending its citizens abroad to infect the world while it closed down its own borders and tried to isolate Wuhan, where, in a laboratory, the virus seems to have begun. China imposed lockdowns, literally: physically barring 25 million of its own citizens from leaving their apartments. Some who were locked in from outside burned to death in a fire; others, including scientists who tried to warn about the lethality of the virus, or mentioned China’s role in spreading the virus, or expressed any skepticism about cures, were either arrested, silenced, or “disappeared“.

The same governments and organizations that lied and covered up how Covid-19 was mishandled are now in the process of finalizing negotiations on amendments to WHO’s International Health Regulations (IHR) and the new Pandemic Treaty that together will give the WHO Director General unprecedented power over public global health.

At present – at least until the World Health Assembly, the parent organization of the WHO, meets in Geneva from May 27-June 1, the WHO is able to declare a public health emergency of international concern, but now the organization’s recommendations are not binding. So far, so good.

The proposed amendments to the IHR, however, give the WHO Director General the authority to declare not just an actual but a potential international public health emergency and set out binding recommendations on how to address it, whether individual states agree with him or not.

This means that the WHO will be able to declare whatever it deems to be an actual or potential health emergency and mandate lockdowns, medical examinations, require vaccination or other prophylaxes, place individuals under public health observation, implement quarantine or other health measures.

In addition, the IHR will adopt the worldwide use of digital vaccine passports. Already in June 2023, the European Union and the WHO announced “a long-term digital partnership to deliver better health for all.”

“This partnership will work to technically develop the WHO system with a staged approach to cover additional use cases, which may include, for example, the digitisation of the International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis. Expanding such digital solutions will be essential to deliver better health for citizens across the globe.”

The proposed amendment to the IHR, will ensure a “global digital exchange of health information” under WHO.

Worse, no criticism of the new WHO regime and its decisions to declare potential or actual pandemics, lockdowns and treatment, including vaccines, will be allowed under the amended IHR:

“WHO shall collaborate with and promptly assist States Parties, in particular developing countries upon request, in countering the dissemination of false and unreliable information about public health events, preventive and anti-epidemic measures and activities, in the media, social networks and other ways of disseminating such information.”

In other words, the government lies, obfuscations and cover-ups that so dominated the last pandemic will become normalized, and all criticism outlawed.

Just last month, Germany woke up to revelations that the country’s public health authority had lied about Covid. Newly released documents obtained by investigative journalists after a two-year court battle, showed that Germany’s public health authority, also known as the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) advised the German government that the flu posed a greater risk than Covid, masks would be useless, and that lockdowns were more dangerous than the virus and could lead to increased child mortality. None of these concerns were addressed in practice. The German government – as most other governments – instead chose draconian, totalitarian measures inspired by China.

In addition, the RKI’s concerns were never communicated to the German public.

Already, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (not a medical doctor) has castigatedcritics of the planned amendments and new Pandemic Treaty as conspiracy theorists who spread “fake news, lies and conspiracy theories.”

The power grab will not only give the corrupt WHO unprecedented powers, but also benefit the special interests who effectively control WHO — primarily Communist China.

Gebreyesus is a long-time friend of China, which secured the director general’s job after Beijing threw its weight behind his candidacy, over the emphatic objections of Ghana and Ethiopia.

Gebreyesus, a former foreign minister and health minister of Ethiopia, who was accused in 2017 of being “fully complicit in the terrible suffering” caused by three cholera epidemics in Sudan and Ethiopia, used his role at the WHO to aid China’s global campaign for economic dominance. He even appointed Beijing’s ally, Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, as a WHO “goodwill ambassador.” Gebreyesus further repaid his debt to Beijing when the Covid-19 pandemic began. He failed to challenge Chinese misinformation about the outbreak, delayed declaring an international emergency, and protected China’s economy by discouraging governments from introducing travel controls. “This,” the Sunday Times wrote, “allowed the virus to spread across the globe in the crucial early weeks.”

The WHO is not elected, has no democratic legitimacy, is not accountable to anyone and has no control mechanisms to restrain its reach. After the horrifying failures of the WHO during Covid-19, the answer is not to give the organization more power, but to disengage from it entirely.

The WHO’s illiberal designs to silence all dissent as “disinformation” represent a corruption of both science and freedom of speech – an outcome that is hardly surprising given the outsize influence that China evidently wields on the body and UN member states. Just look at the willingness with which ostensibly liberal Western governments implemented authoritarian measures from the Chinese Communist Party.

Once the new legal instruments are passed, there will be nothing to stop the WHO from making insane decisions based on their corrupted view of science. One such view, totalitarian in its mindset, is that there is one true science, apparently the WHO’s, and there can be no discussion of it. “We own the science and we think that the world should know it,” Melissa Fleming, Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications at the UN, said at the 2022 World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. She also revealed that the social media platforms already “know” that the UN “owns” the science:

“You know, we partnered with Google, for example, if you Google climate change, you will, at the top of your search, get all kinds of UN resources. We started this partnership when we were shocked to see that when we Googled climate change, we were getting incredibly distorted information right at the top. So we’re becoming much more proactive.”

Since the UN claims that to “owns the science,” it is now brainwashing the public into believing that “climate change” threatens global health. This view makes it likely that you will one day find yourself in a WHO-mandated lockdown to mitigate the effects of the “climate crisis,” along with limits on where you go, how you may get there, what you do, and what you can own.

The US is already seeing forerunners of this in the Biden administration’s unconstitutional executive orders, possibly including his attempts to ban internal combustion engine vehicles and gas stoves; mandating dishwashing machines that may need repeated cycles to clean dishes, and new stricter regulations on air conditioners, washing machines, refrigerators, and even leaf-blowers — and this is only the beginning.

The WHO wrote in a press release on March 22 about its new “toolkit empowering health professionals to tackle climate change”:

“Climate change presents one of the most significant global health challenges and is already negatively affecting communities worldwide. Communicating the health risks of climate change and the health benefits of climate solutions is both necessary and helpful…

“Climate change affects health through various pathways, including extreme weather events, air pollution, food insecurity, water scarcity and the spread of infectious diseases. Heatwaves, changing weather patterns and air pollution contribute to a range of adverse health effects, including cardiovascular diseases, respiratory illnesses, mental health issues and malnutrition. Moreover, health systems face increasing strain from climate-related challenges, amplifying the urgency for action…

“By empowering health and care workers to communicate about climate change and health, it aims to drive collective action towards mitigating climate change, building resilience and safeguarding public health.”

The UN and the WHO evidently want unlimited control. If they are not stopped right now by national governments that refuse to approve the new Pandemic Treaty and proposed International Health Regulations amendments, unlimited control is what they will have — and it is we who will have given it to them.

Robert Williams is a researcher based in the United States.

Source: Gatestone Institute

New Book , ‘Vax-UnVax—Let The Science Speak ‘ By Robert F. Kennedy and Brian Hooker PhD

Reactions & Book Reviews

Learn what people are saying upon reading Vax-Unvax.

“In ‘Vax-Unvax,’ Kennedy and Hooker shine a blinding light on the appalling lack of research and blatant propaganda behind the entire inflated and ever-expanding childhood vaccine schedule. The authors’ painstaking investigation and rigorous analyses are rivaled only by their bravery in exposing the depth and breadth of the lies we’ve been told. I hope this explosive and important book finds a worldwide audience and becomes a staple in every pediatrician’s and parent’s library.”

“Millions of people — myself included — initially believed the COVID-19 vaccine disaster to be a one-off, the result of a novel, rapidly evolving virus combined with a rushed therapeutic packaged in an experimental delivery system. Today, I laugh at such naïveté. In ‘Vax-Unvax,’ Kennedy and Hooker shine a blinding light on the appalling lack of research and blatant propaganda behind the entire inflated and ever-expanding childhood vaccine schedule. The authors’ painstaking investigation and rigorous analyses are rivaled only by their bravery in exposing the depth and breadth of the lies we’ve been told. As a physician who never dreamed of questioning the safety and efficacy claims of routine immunizations and who believed he was protecting his patients and his own children by endorsing them, I am humbled and enraged. Our government, the media, and the powerful and rapacious pharmaceutical industrial complex have deceived, endangered, and gaslit the public for far too long. I hope this explosive and important book finds a worldwide audience and becomes a staple in every pediatrician’s and parent’s library.”

— Pierre Kory, M.D., author of “The War on Ivermectin,” cofounder of the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance, cofounder of the Leading Edge Tele-Health Clinic

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“In this book, Kennedy and Hooker provide the complete, definitive demolition of the mythos and propaganda that tells the public vaccines improve the health of children. Not a plank of this false house remains by the end of this book. The lies are dismantled in cool, clear language void of bombast, which allows the facts, figures, and data to shine through, to a devastating conclusion. This is the book you can hand to people who are still in trance states about vaccines.”

— Celia Farber, journalist and author of “Serious Adverse Events”

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“With the rise of hyper-vaccination, Kennedy and Hooker uncover a concurrent explosion of childhood allergic, immune, and neuropsychiatric illnesses. Massive systemic perturbation of the immune system with indiscriminate immunization has come at a sobering cost. Read ‘Vax-Unvax’ carefully and keep it close at hand — this dawn of a new age in public health will be tumultuous for years to come.”

— Peter McCullough, M.D., author of “The Courage to Face COVID-19”

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“This clear, compelling, timely book lays to rest most myths about the ‘science’ and safety of many existing vaccines and exposes shoddy testing, shocking damage to health, and corrupt business practices. An important follow-up to Kennedy’s ‘The Real Anthony Fauci.’”

— Naomi Wolf, bestselling author of “The Beauty Myth and The Bodies of Others”

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“RFK Jr. and Dr. Hooker present the science that supports what I have personally witnessed in my twenty-five years as a pediatrician — unvaccinated children are healthier and have fewer chronic medical problems compared to vaccinated kids. Today’s parents and a growing number of my colleagues are now coming to recognize this grand irony in our modern pediatric health care system.”

— Bob Sears, M.D., author of “The Vaccine Book” and host of TheVaccineConversation.com podcast

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“‘The Science’ is finally here in one place. If you want to follow the science related to vaccines and health problems, this is a must-read. With over one hundred references, the actual harm being caused by vaccines is exposed. Parents, don’t listen to an authority figure without doing your own research. This book is required reading for every informed parent.”

— Paul Thomas, M.D., author of “The Vaccine-Friendly Plan” and “The Addiction Spectrum;” founder and host of With the Wind: Science Revealed; cofounder KidsFirst4Ever.com

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“With easy-to-understand graphics and explanations of statistics, you can analyze data from clinicians and researchers from around the world. You may find yourself doubting the simplistic ‘safe and effective’ doctrine repeated by health authorities. You will find yourself more empowered to make vaccine decisions for your child.”

— Elizabeth Mumper, M.D., IFMCP, president & CEO, Rimland Center for Integrative Medicine

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“While the CDC continues to refuse to do the type of vaccinated versus unvaccinated study that parents have long been demanding, independent researchers have forged ahead, and the results are now quite clear: unvaccinated children are healthier. In ‘Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak,’ Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Brian Hooker review those data as well as many additional studies comparing health outcomes between those who did or did not receive individual vaccines. This is an essential resource for the serious researcher and a valuable guide for anyone wishing to exercise truly informed consent. The graphs helpfully included with the discussion of each study covered speak for themselves. It is past time for the ‘public health’ establishment to stop deceiving the public with their proclamations of official dogma about the ostensible safety of these pharmaceutical products.”

— Jeremy R. Hammond, independent journalist and author of “The War on Informed Consent”

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“Bobby Kennedy and Brian Hooker are tireless heroes on the front line of a great battle to protect our health freedom. Biomedical studies are being falsified, and the masses are being deceived by health authorities, the vaccine industry, and a complicit media. Read this book and let the true science speak!”

— Neil Z. Miller, author of “Miller’s Review of Critical Vaccine Studies”

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“When I met Dr. Hooker on August 29, 2014, he was more than a decade into his relentless efforts through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to reveal not only the studies the CDC refused to do but the plague of corruption surrounding CDC whistleblower William Thompson’s confession regarding the censorship and fraud in the MMR vaccine trial by the CDC to cover up the fraud in the in clinical literature surrounding all vaccines. Stunned by the blatant corruption in Dr. Hooker’s presentation that day, Kent Heckenlively and I, in collaboration with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., began to write Plague of Corruption. Throughout 2019, Dr. Hooker and Kennedy collaborated to reveal much of the CDC, FDA, and NIH corruption in the thirty-four-page foreword to Plague of Corruption that revealed manipulation of hundreds of basic research studies showing dangers of xenotransplantation, microbial contamination, and environmental toxins, including mercury, aluminum, PEG, and the corruption of the agencies tasked to protect public health.

‘Vax-Unvax’ is the result of their heroic effort to reveal the censored science and truth behind the role of a failure by these agencies tasked to conduct safety studies in three decades of liability-free vaccines and the resultant explosion of chronic disease and disability facing our world today. Given the massive push to vaccinate a new generation, this book is a must-read supporting a moratorium on inoculations in favor of oral and mucosal immunization strategies.”

— Judy A. Mikovits, Ph.D., author of “Plague of Corruption”

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“In ‘Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak,’ authors Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Brian Hooker have provided a deep dive into vaccine safety by looking at published data from independent researchers. The resulting review of vaccinated and unvaccinated children’s health outcomes clearly shows the damage, much of it neurological, that blind adherence to the CDC’s current vaccine schedule can induce. The studies highlighted are those that both the FDA and CDC have routinely refused and continue to refuse, to do themselves. The official reason for not providing such studies is based on the erroneous notion that conducting vaccinated-unvaccinated evaluations would somehow be ‘unethical.’ Kennedy and Hooker demolish this argument and then proceed to review the safety of different vaccines, many that contain adjuvant aluminum or Thimerosal, the latter an ethyl mercury compound. Overall, for those trying to understand the often-confusing claims and counterclaims, particularly lay people, the book provides some badly needed clarity.

The book also considers the current COVID-19 mRNA vaccines in the context of the older childhood vaccine platforms. This is a particularly timely contribution in that the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting vaccine mandates have paradoxically served to make more people question the official ‘safe and effective’ mantra that tends to surround all vaccines: If the conventional vaccine platforms using compounds with aluminum and mercury are not safe, then why should anyone trust the completely new and largely experimental vaccine platforms developed for COVID (and soon numerous vaccines)? For parents, it can be both confusing and frightening to consider the pros and cons of vaccines against childhood diseases: what if they make the wrong decision, in either direction, and their child is harmed?

While many in the medical profession may not like the book because it exposes the outright deception of the pharmaceutical industry, the CDC, and the FDA, I strongly believe that many parents, or parents-to-be, will be grateful for the information it contains. Simply put, at the end of the day the ability to consider all aspects of vaccine safety in order to make an informed choice for one’s children, or oneself, is an absolutely critical aspect of real health freedom. In turn, health freedom is intimately tied to the concept of ‘security of the person,’ perhaps the most fundamental of natural rights.

Kennedy and Hooker should be commended for tackling this crucial issue in order to bring clarity to the mass of ‘dis-’ and ‘mis-’ information peddled by the health establishment and the mainstream media. If indeed the ‘truth can set you free,’ then this book is a huge step in the right direction.”

— Christopher Shaw, neuroscientist and professor of ophthalmology at University of British Columbia, author of “Dispatches from the Vaccine Wars”

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“If there is only one book you read in your entire life, let it be this one! If you want the science to speak . . . then have the courage to look at the actual science, data, and truth found in the pages of ‘Vax-Unvax.’ Arm yourself with the information that puts the power back into the hands of parents where it belongs, not in the hands of corrupt Pharma, captured government officials, and incentivized doctors spouting catchphrases with little to no evidence to back it up. RFK Jr. and Dr. Brian Hooker are the bold voices of truth, presenting evidence that cannot be disputed. The main purpose of a parent is to love your child and keep them safe. If you have not had the courage before, I boldly implore you to find the courage now and educate before you vaccinate!”

— Leigh-Allyn Baker, actress, producer, and star of the global hit “Good Luck Charlie”

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