Dave DeCamp via : Antiwar.com
Editor’s note: When China holds a military exercise it takes place in China. When the Empire holds a military exercise it takes place across 17 time zones.
Monthly Archives: August 2021
America’s Criminal Bombing Democracy
A B-52 drops a load of bombs in this file photo, date unknown. © API/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
Maitreya Bhakal is an Indian commentator who writes about China, India, the US, and global issues. Follow him on Twitter @MaitreyaBhakal
A nation-state version of a psychopath, the US refuses to give up its addiction to bombing innocent people. In just over a month, it’s bombed Syria, Iraq, Somalia and Afghanistan – and shows no signs of developing a conscience.
Kill anything that moves
March 15, 1968 was a normal day in America. The sun was shining. The birds were chirping. Race riots in Mississippi were entering their fifth day or so. And at the other end of the globe, in Vietnam, soldiers of the Americal Division’s Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, were being briefed by their commanding officer, Captain Ernest Medina, about the exploits of the next day, which would later be dubbed the “My Lai massacre” – where 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians were systematically butchered in over four hours, not counting a lunch break the soldiers took in the middle of the carnage. The orders were clear and explicit: the soldiers were to kill every single human being, burn all houses, kill all animals, destroy all food supplies and poison all wells.
As the briefing progressed, one incident stuck in the mind of artillery forward observer James Flynn, which he would recall years later. A soldier, whose name has been lost to history, expressed some apprehension about the wide-ranging nature of the orders. “Are we supposed to kill women and children?” he asked naively.
“Kill everything that moves,” came the reply.
Kill everything that moves. This same phrase would be repeated almost verbatim two years later by none other than Henry Kissinger himself while relaying US leader Richard Nixon’s orders: “A massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves.”
My Lais and my truths
That the popular US media is allowed to discuss this event is not exactly praiseworthy, nor some sign of speaking truth to power, as they claim. The reason why the My Lai massacre was allowed to enter the popular US imagination was to hide America’s much larger war crimes. As Nick Turse points out in his award-winning book Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam: “Today, histories of the Vietnam War regularly discuss war crimes or civilian suffering only in the context of a single incident: the My Lai massacre… Even as that one event has become the subject of numerous books and articles, all the other atrocities perpetrated by US soldiers have essentially vanished from popular memory.”
The strategy worked. And it continues to work to this day. After all, what better way to distract attention from your larger crimes than focus attention on your smaller ones? As a bonus, this also allows you to portray yourself as an enabler and respecter of “free speech” and “open debate”.
Bomber barbarians
Yes – America loves killing anything that moves. Like the nation-state version of the psychopathic serial murderer, it loves bombing weak, poor, defenseless nations that cannot fight back – nations that have done no harm to it and pose no threat to it.
The US regime wouldn’t dare touch North Korea, of course, because it possesses nuclear weapons and can fight back. America killed Muammar Gaddafi’s nuclear weapons program, and then killed the man himself as soon as they got the opportunity less than a decade later (he was sodomized and then murdered in the open by pro-US forces). Iraq was attacked not because it had WMDs – but because it didn’t. The US regime knew it couldn’t defend itself, and went in for the kill. Syria would have probably become another Iraq if not for Russia, who Syria explicitly invited in to counter the twin terrorist threats of Islamic State (IS/formerly ISIS) and the US (via its proxies).
Between 1965 and 1975, the “democratic” US and its allies carried out the largest aerial bombardment in human history, dropping more than 7.5 million tons of bombs in Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia, twice as many as those dropped on Europe and Asia during the Second World War. They turned Laos, one of the poorest, most defenseless nations on Earth, into the planet’s most bombed country. From 1965 to 1969, the US military dropped 70 tons of bombs for every square mile of North and South Vietnam – or 500 pounds for each man, woman and child. As America’s head of the Strategic Air Command General Curtis LeMay put it, America’s aim must be to “bomb the Vietnamese back to the Stone Age.”
During the “Korean War” (i.e. the US-led invasion of Korea), North Korea was bombed almost to oblivion without the batting of an eyelid. Around 85% of its buildings were destroyed. Literally only two modern buildings were left standing in Pyongyang after the US was done. They bombed and they bombed – they bombed so much that they had to halt for a while because there was nothing left to bomb. By the end of the campaign, US bombers couldn’t find targets and were often reduced to bombing footbridges or simply ditching their bombs into the sea. And when they got bored with that, they started bombing dams, causing widespread flooding. According to historian Charles K. Armstrong, the bombing of the dams and the resultant floods threatened several million North Koreans with absolute starvation; only emergency assistance from socialist countries prevented widespread famine.
The US has largely continued its destructive bombing campaigns even after the Cold War – socialism and the ‘Domino Theory’ had just been the excuse. It found other excuses.
In response [Editor: to the self-staged 9/11], it killed 1 million people and displaced 37 million, creating the largest refugee crisis in decades. No nation since World War II has had the power, or indeed, the desire, to cause such death and destruction. The “War on Terror” increased terrorism globally, and also created IS, the most dangerous non-state terrorist actor in the world.
In the last 20 years alone, the US and its allies have bombed West Asia (or to use the Eurocentric term, “Middle East”) and North Africa at the rate of 46 bombs per day. That’s not a typo – that’s almost two bombs every hour, every single day, for 20 years.
But US leaders aren’t perturbed – it isn’t white people they’re killing after all, they’re only killing the proverbial “other” who were coming to destroy “us” innocent people, and we are simply fighting the good fight. On the highly nationalistic US internet, images of US Marines saying goodbye to their kids at airports often go viral, as they fly away to slaughter children much like their own.
The more things change…
When Barack Obama became US leader, people were led to imagine that things would be different. They even gave him the Nobel Prize to cement his promised legacy even before it was created. He was painted as a peaceful president and a reluctant, cautious warrior, if at all. In truth, he was America’s drone-warrior in chief, pioneering the art of such warfare at scale – which allowed him to reduce boots on the ground. He calculated that by bringing US troops back, he could achieve popularity at home – no matter how many people he killed abroad. He was right.
Obama dropped more bombs than Bush did during his presidency. This included 26,171 bombs in 2016, his last full year in office. That’s about 72 bombs every single day – for one whole year. And these are just the publicly known bombings. Civilian deaths are rarely acknowledged by the US regime.
President Joe Biden, Obama’s former vice president, has sought to continue the bombings now that he is in charge. In late June, the US regime bombed Iraq and Syria. Again. This was one week after Congress had voted to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) in Iraq.
Ostensibly, the attacks were against “weapons storage facilities” used by “Iranian-backed militias” – shorthand for any group that opposes US occupation. Just like Nazi Germany justified killing resistance fighters opposing its occupation by calling them “partisans,” the US regime dismisses resistance fighters opposing its occupation as “militants” or “combatants,” often referring to them as “Iran-backed” as a bonus. None of these statements can be trusted or verified, of course; the US regime has a long history of publicly lying and misleading the world.
Continuing its addiction, the US regime also recently bombed Somalia, one of the world’s poorest countries. The Pentagon’s “initial assessment” found that no civilians were killed, which is a standard US claim for all its bombing raids in that impoverished country. Human rights groups – the same ones that the US cites and trusts wholeheartedly when criticizing its enemies like China and Russia – disagree. In 2017, the US regime relaxed bombing rules for Somalia, increasing the risk of civilian deaths.
According to the regime’s bombing guidelines, the Pentagon is allowed to bomb only Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq without White House approval. Thus, it is likely that Biden personally approved the Somalia airstrike. Ostensibly, it targeted the Al-Shabaab militant group, and was carried out in “coordination” with the Somalian government.
A few days later, the US regime launched multiple airstrikes in Afghanistan too, a nation it is apparently withdrawing from, after being thoroughly trounced and defeated in a 20-year-old war. This time, it was ostensibly to come to the “aid” of the Afghan government against the Taliban. Lest anybody think that a US “exit” from Afghanistan means an end to its bombings, a top US general clarified that the regime had no such intention.
More bombings can be expected in the future. The US regime will not develop morals because it has no incentive to do so – it faces little criticism from the international community for its bombings and killings, and faces even less criticism at home, even from the “anti-war” lobby.
However, one thing is beyond doubt: it will continue claiming that it is the moral leader and guardian of the world; that the most war-mongering nation on Earth is the paragon of peace and virtue; and that it deserves the divine right to lecture others and hold them “accountable” for their “human rights violations”. Old habits die hard – and lie harder.
TUCKER CARLSON:’The Anglosphere is committing suicide’
This is a rush transcript from “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” August 2, 2021. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS HOST: Good evening and welcome to TUCKER CARLSON TONIGHT. We’re coming to you this evening from Budapest, Hungary right over the Danube River. It’s a place we’re going to be telling you a lot about in the coming days.
If you care about western civilization and democracy and families and the ferocious assault on all three of those things by the leaders of our global institutions, you should know what is happening here right now. But more on that to come, a lot more.
First tonight though, we’re continuing to follow the bizarre and very fast changing guidance on COVID from the White House. Remember when they told you the last administration was incompetent? We’ve never seen anything like this. It’s beyond belief.
It was just a week ago that Rochelle Walensky of the C.D.C. did her best to terrify all of us over the new Indian strain of COVID. Walensky described the so-called delta variant as quote, “one of the most infectious respiratory diseases we know of and that I have seen in my 20-year career.” An internal C.D.C. document summed it up in marshal terms, quote, “The war has changed,” wrote the C.D.C.
In response to those horrifying developments, the administration immediately re-implemented indoor mask mandates, even for people who’ve been fully vaccinated, and that was enough to get even the deeply and curious American news media asking questions. Wait a second, if the vaccines work, why the masks? So, they started digging and they didn’t have to dig much.
On Friday morning, “The Washington Post” ran this headline, quote: “Vaccinated people made up three-quarters of those infected in a massive Massachusetts COVID-19 outbreak, pivotal C.D.C. study finds.” End quote. “The New York Times” ran a similar piece, again, it was based on numbers from the C.D.C. and yet just minutes after those articles appeared, the White House panicked.
A senior member of its COVID-19 response team, a man who is not a doctor, but instead a career flak called Ben Wanaka jumped on social media to attack the media, and in fact attacked the administration’s own scientists.
Here was Wanaka’s message to “The New York Times” on Twitter over the weekend. He wrote it in all caps as if he was shouting quote, “Vaccinated people do not transmit the virus at the same rate as unvaccinated people and if you fail to include that context you’re doing it wrong.” He barked.
He went on to call “The Washington Post’s” coverage of it irresponsible, and he added this quote: “Let’s be clear, if 10 vaccinated people walk into a room full of COVID about nine of them would walk out of the room with no COVID. Nine of them.” But is that true? Ben Wanaka, the one who is not a doctor, but instead a flak did not provide a citation for that statistic.
In fact, judging by the C.D.C.’s own numbers, it appears to be wrong. In other words it is classic misinformation, possibly Russian in origin; and yet strangely, Ben Wanaka who knows much less about science than say Alex Jones was not banned from the internet. He just kept tweeting.
And then a few hours later, he got back up support from Rochelle Walensky herself. “The vaccine works,” Walensky shouted. In fact, it works so well, you may soon be forced to get it.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BRET BAIER, FOX NEWS CHANNEL CHIEF POLITICAL ANCHOR: Now, are you for mandating a vaccine on a Federal level?
DR. ROCHELLE WALENSKY, DIRECTOR, CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION: You know, that is something that I think the administration is looking into. It is something that I think we are looking to see approval from the vaccine.
Overall, I think in general, I am all for more vaccination, but you know, I have nothing further to say on that except that we are looking into those policies and quite honestly, as people are doing that locally, those are individual local decisions as well.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So, we’re looking into a Federal vaccine mandate, but then just minutes after she said that, Rochelle Walensky went on Twitter to take it back, quote: “To clarify, there will be no nationwide mandate. I was referring to mandates by private institutions and portions of the Federal government.” End quote.
But of course that’s not at all what she said. She said, we are looking into a Federal mandate nationwide.
Then on Sunday, the head of the N.I.H., the highly political Francis Collins explained that those, quote, “mandates” by private institutions might look like this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: Do you think as a public health measure, it would be good for more businesses to require vaccine credentials in order to have vaccinated customers?
DR. FRANCIS COLLINS, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH: As a public health person who wants to see this pandemic end, yes, I think anything we can do to encourage reluctant folks to get vaccinated because they’ll want to be part of these public events, that’s a good thing. I’m delighted to see employers like Disney and Walmart coming out and asking their staff now to be vaccinated.
I’m glad to see the President has said all Federal employees. I oversee N.I.H. with 45,000 people I need to also get vaccinated or if they’re not, to get regular testing, which is inconvenient. All of those steps I think are in the right direction.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Who is this old fool? The employers asking their employees to get vaccinated? They’re not asking, they’re requiring them as a condition of employment. They are forcing them. Oh, but that’s not a mandate. Just get vaccinated or you can’t live in the United States anymore. That’s the message from the head of the N.I.H. who still has not explained to what extent his agency funded the development of this virus in the first place. Okay.
But Francis Collins at the same time also wants you to know that even if you have been vaccinated, you can’t go back to your normal life. The vaccine is perfect, but you still have to wear a mask and can’t go outside. Large gatherings, for example, are out of the question. Why? Because the possibility a handful of people who aren’t vaccinated may be hurt, quote: “If there are a hundred people,” Collins said recently, “How are you really going to be sure about people’s vaccination status?”
On the other hand, why would you need to be sure if vaccination is a choice? Collins did not explain by the way how unvaccinated people could possibly pose a threat to vaccinated people because remember, the vaccines work so well we have to mandate them for public health reasons. But at the same time, people who have been vaccinated are threatened by those who don’t.
You following this? Does it make any sense to you at all? Do you need a medical degree to know it is complete nonsense? No, you don’t. Here’s one thing you should know, these restrictions do not apply to everyone.
Prominent Democrats have been exempted from them. Barack Obama for example, just announced that he is inviting 500 people to his 60th birthday party at his $12 million spread on Martha’s Vineyard, the house which despite climate change by the way is right on the ocean.
Pearl Jam will perform, Steven Spielberg has been invited. There will be 200 staff. Why 200? Because when you’re as oppressed as Michelle Obama is, you really can’t have too many servants, and she doesn’t. Two hundred is not too many.
So it turns out Martha’s Vineyard is exempt from the new COVID rules. Aspen will be, too, for sure. Parts of Washington, D.C. have already been given a pass. We know that because Mayor Muriel Bowser delayed the implementation of her masked mandate long enough to celebrate her own birthday party. Dave Chappelle came, dozens of others did, too.
And then after the mask mandate went into effect on Saturday, Muriel Bowser who is the mayor and can do whatever she wants, officiated a wedding at a high price hotel in a very pale neighborhood, not a diverse place.
Now, you’d think all of this, the lack of equity and diversity and the hypocrisy would bother CNN. They’re on the lookout for those things, but they weren’t. Muriel Bowser is part of the ruling class and their job is to defend her no matter what she does, so they did.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Here’s the thing, right, she wasn’t actually as far as we know violating the new rules, correct?
BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN ANCHOR: I think that that is fair to say. I mean, I look at the photo and I see, it seems like it could be during the toast, right? Everyone’s heads are pointed in a certain direction it seems like maybe they are listening to someone is what it appears to me.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Can you imagine? You’re a news network and you’re taking your air time to defend the hypocrisy of politicians because why? Are they paying you or do you feel a moral duty to do that? You’re more loyal to them than you are to your viewers, to the country.
So where does this lead? What does Civil Rights mean when they’re not enforced across the board? When your rights are given to you based on who you vote for, they’re not really Civil Rights, are they? They are privileges and that’s exactly what’s happening. In fact, it is happening around the world. Rights that we took for granted, that we believe we were born with in the English-speaking world have disappeared.
Australia is a former prison colony, increasingly, it is looking like it once was. The Australian military is now enforcing martial law. People are not allowed to leave their homes, that’s because of a COVID outbreak this summer that led to a grand total — get your pencils — of nine deaths. Nine people died of the virus and they are shutting down Australia and they’re using the military to do it.
Police helicopters are clearing people off the beach. Is there scientific justification for this? No, but they’re doing it anyway.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TEXT: Will everyone congregating Gordon’s Bay move on.
The local police have been notified and will be attending shortly.
Anyone breaching the public health order will be issued a fine.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: The Anglo-sphere committing suicide collectively. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, and Great Britain — what do they have in common? They speak the same language, they have the same culture and all of them are allowing COVID to defeat them.
In Australia, people not allowed on the beach and not allowed to ask why either. We know that because Sky News Australia, which has the same owners as this channel, has just been banned on YouTube in Australia. Why is that?
Well, Sky News Australia reported that outdoor mask mandates and universal lockdowns may not be necessary to defeat COVID or very effective in defeating COVID. They reported that the science is far from settled on those questions, and they are right. It is far from settled.
It is obvious to anyone who has watched the Biden administration berate its own scientists on social media this weekend. The science is not settled. Science rarely is settled, in fact, it’s a process of seeking the truth. It is not the same as a political directive, just because the person in power tells you something doesn’t mean, it is quote “science” just because CNN defends that person exempting himself from his own rules does not make that science.
But rather than admit this obvious truth, the truth that almost all Americans understand intuitively, the people running our government, including the public health establishment, which they employ panic.
How long until they’re kicking us off beaches and locking us in our homes? Will we be allowed to complain about it when they do?
Vivek Ramaswamy is the author of “Woke Inc.” He spent a long career in business and has taken a break from that because he thinks the country is in trouble, not least because of things like this. Vivek, thanks so much for joining us tonight. We appreciate it.
So, what should we make — what lesson should we draw when politicians exempt themselves from their own rules? When Barack Obama has his guests, 500 guests and 200 servants to his oceanfront home in Martha’s Vineyard at a time when the rest of us aren’t allowed to do that — what should we learn from that?
VIVEK RAMASWAMY, BIOTECH ENTREPRENEUR AND AUTHOR, “WOKE, INC.”: We should learn, Tucker, that the guiding principle is, “Do as I say, not as I do,” when it comes to government officials policy on COVID-19. It is funny, it reminds me a lot of a white-collar criminal in the 1980s, Leona Helmsley who famously said, “We don’t pay taxes, only little people pay taxes.”
Well today, only little people are the ones who are expected to abide by these COVID-19 restrictions. It is laughable if the consequences weren’t so serious and the government has given the public absolutely zero reason to trust anything they have to say, Tucker.
The government did not trust the public at the start of this pandemic and now, the public doesn’t trust the government in return and that’s a problem.
CARLSON: Well, it is a problem particularly in public health. I mean, you’ve been in public health. You ran a pharma company, a successful one developing new drug treatments for disease. If the public doesn’t believe physicians or public health authorities, like what kind of country do you have over time?
RAMASWAMY: That’s absolutely right, and now we see the censorship to top it off. I’ll tell you this, Tucker. I was a Harvard trained scientist. I started a biotech company. I care about the integrity of science and science is not what some government official says on a given day depending on what side of the bed he woke up on.
Science is a method. It is a method of pursuing truth that requires free speech, open debate, and skepticism. Yes, skepticism is part of science and instead, science — we’ve seen science transform into becoming this institution. I think of it as a church, what I call the church of scientism.
And ironically, the church of scientism has put science itself on the altar as a sacrificial lamb. What we really need is a revival of the open discourse that allows us to discover what of our ideas will be proven wrong in the future, and without open debate, without open dialogue, we can’t do that.
CARLSON: And isn’t that why — I mean, you would know, since you started a biotech company, but the United States has led the world in scientific innovation for a hundred years because it is the most open country.
RAMASWAMY: That’s right. I mean, we have to be humble about what we do know and what we don’t. History teaches us that most of our beliefs will either be proven false or modified in some way, but the only way we get there is not through censorship, it is not through government government- coordinated censorship with these so-called private companies, but through open discourse, and honesty, and humility, and skepticism. That is what science depends on.
And now, in the name of science, the worst kind of betrayal of science, Tucker, is in the name of science itself and that’s what we’re seeing.
CARLSON: That’s totally right. Humility is the root of wisdom and it is the root of science, and thank you for reminding us of that. Vivek Ramaswamy, great to see you tonight.
RAMASWAMY: Thanks, Tucker.
CARLSON: So, you often hear people say, yes, I’m required to wear a mask, but what’s the harm? It’s a small price to pay. But is it a small price? Is there an effect on people and the society that we live in?
Jeffrey Anderson maybe more than anyone in recent months has thought deeply about that question. He just wrote a brand new piece in the “Claremont Review of Books” called “The Masking of America,” which we strongly recommend. We probably should just read it on the air, but instead we’re going to have him join us right now.
Jeffrey Anderson was the Director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics at D.O.J. and he joins us. Jeffrey Anderson, thanks so much for coming on.
JEFFREY ANDERSON, FORMER DIRECTOR OF THE BUREAU OF JUSTICE STATISTICS AT D.O.J.: Hi, Tucker.
CARLSON: So, you hear that all the time, I heard it this afternoon from an old friend of mine. You know, it’s a small price to pay. I’m willing to do my part.
Why should we pause before we agree to this?
ANDERSON: I think it’s a huge price to pay, Tucker, for society as a whole. Masks are uncomfortable, they’re unhygienic. They profoundly compromise human interaction, human communication, human sociability, and human understanding.
There is a reason that we have not concealed the face in the West, it’s because we know that each individual human being is a unique individual and the way we can tell that is largely — the way we identify someone is largely by his or her face.
A country that forgets the importance of the face is probably also going to forget the importance of certain unalienable rights. When we walk around looking like faceless Storm Troopers, it doesn’t exactly inspire a lot of confidence that we are fit to be a free, self-governing citizens in a Republic.
CARLSON: Such a deep point. I just want to write out what you said and put it on my refrigerator.
The importance of the human face reminds us of the importance of the human individual. We’re not all the same, that’s why we don’t wear uniforms.
So, do you think their insistence that we cover our faces, that everyone look exactly alike reveals how they feel about us?
ANDERSON: I think it certainly suggests that to some degree, and our willingness to go along with it says something about how we view ourselves in relation to them. We’ve had way too much government by public health official in recent months or by executives who act like they are kings or emperors, rather than by representative legislatures, who are supposed to be the ones representing us on these questions.
CARLSON: So this — I mean, it does seem and I don’t want to overstate anything or make anyone more fearful or more paranoid, but it does seem like democracy to some extent, our understanding of our relationship to the state is at stake here.
ANDERSON: I think that’s right. I mean, this is — it is interesting to compare this experience with say 1918 and the Spanish flu and some of the other pandemics that have hit and American’s reaction to that.
If we compare COVID to the Spanish flu, an American under 40 years of age have more than a hundred times the chance of dying of the Spanish flu than of COVID-19. The Spanish flu was more than a hundred times as deadly than COVID for Americans under 40. You certainly don’t hear that.
There’s a culture of fear being inculcated and we simply — so far, we’ve been going along with it way too much and I think that the we need to actually look at the science, which suggests masks are really not that effective and they’re — and look at the full picture which shows that they are doing a great deal of harm.
CARLSON: I think that’s exactly right. Thank you for reminding us that. Terrific piece in the “Claremont Review of Books.” Jeffrey Anderson, I appreciate it.
ANDERSON: Thank you, Tucker.
CARLSON: Meanwhile, as our public health authorities try to terrify us about a resurgence of the delta variant, people were dying all over the country of the violence that they have allowed.
In the City of New Orleans for example, several people were shot on Bourbon Street where you’ve probably been in the French Quarter if you’ve been a tourist in that city. Now, another major American city is about to set an all-time record for violent crime, we’ll tell you where.
We’re coming to you as we said, live from Budapest, Hungary on assignment for our documentary series. We’ll tell you a lot more, coming up.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So, we’re standing in front of the Hungarian Supreme Court Building which is directly across from the Parliament, and like a lot of buildings in the central square in Budapest, one of the better side of the Danube, there are bullet holes in the marble of the building, and they are all over.
Some have been patched, some haven’t been, and they’re either from the siege of Budapest, it was at the end of the Second World War, or they were from the 1956 Hungarian uprising, Soviet bullet holes, and they are a reminder of how many times this country has been dominated by foreign powers. They are kind of a living testament to the violence that has unfolded here, and again to the foreign domination of this country, and it really affects the way Hungarians feel about themselves and their government.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
CARLSON: Welcome back from Budapest, Hungary.
Well, the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis last Memorial Day has inadvertently perhaps led to the deaths of many thousands more American citizens. Violent crime continues to surge in American cities across the country, thanks to policies put in place since then.
Just over the past weekend, there were several shootings in the City of New Orleans. Five people were shot in the city’s French Quarter early Sunday. You can see the crowd fleeing gunfire on your screen. Keep in mind that’s Bourbon Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans. That’s where people go when they visit the city. Now, it’s too dangerous for people to go a lot of the time.
In New York City, the biggest in the country, 10 people were shot, three were killed following a gang shootout in front of a laundromat. Bill de Blasio was busy playing volleyball over the weekend, but at least, mayoral nominee, Eric Adams had something to say about that. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ERIC ADAMS (D), MAYORAL CANDIDATE, NEW YORK CITY: We are losing the grip on public safety and we have to respond immediately and treat this like the crisis that it is.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voice over): Brooklyn Borough President and democratic mayoral candidate, Eric Adams in North Corona Queens condemning the suspected gang-related mass shooting on 37th Avenue that left 10 injured there Saturday night.
Adams’s comments coming just as another suspected gang member was arraigned for shooting an NYPD officer struggling to disarm him in the Bronx just after midnight, Saturday.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Tragedy, every one of them, Heather Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, she joins us now.
Heather, thanks so much for coming on. It’s infuriating and grief-making to watch those videos because you know they didn’t have to happen, those shootings, they did happen because of bad policies and the people who made those policies will never be held to account for them and never be forced to apologize.
You’ve covered this from a social science point of view for decades. It must enrage you to watch it.
HEATHER MAC DONALD, FELLOW, MANHATTAN INSTITUTE: It certainly does, Tucker. We’re all living through a real-time experiment testing the left’s theories about crime and human nature. According to much of the media, the Democratic elite establishment, crime is just a racist fiction and the criminal justice system has been designed to oppress blacks, therefore we can dismantle law enforcement without negative effects and will liberate blacks from racist oppression.
Well, the results of this experiment have been in for a year, as you say since the George Floyd riots and what we’ve seen is the largest increase in homicide in this nation’s history. Dozens of black children mowed down fatally by drive-by shootings and senior citizens thrashed, beaten mercilessly by racist hate-filled thugs.
This crime wave is coming to a neighborhood near you via carjackings, flash mobs, and street robberies, and if we don’t completely rebut without apology the false narrative that policing is racist, civilization is going to continue to unwind right before our eyes.
CARLSON: I’m not sure most Americans understand that not all cities are like that. I’m standing in a city of 1.7 million people where nothing like that ever happens — ever happens in Budapest, Hungary. Probably a lot of problems with Budapest, but there’s nothing like that.
Do Americans, have they come to believe that we have to live like this? That it’s like mandatory for some reason?
MAC DONALD: Well, we’ve reverted to that absolutely. In the early 1990s, criminologists were saying for New York City that it was inevitably violent, that that is simply the American character. That was the norm and Rudolph Giuliani and Police Commissioner William Bratton disproved it through effective law enforcement.
The root cause of American crime, Tucker, you bring about — you mentioned Hungarian families, is the breakdown of the family in the inner city. As long as that continues and young boys are raised without any sense of impulse control, deferred gratification, the police are the only thing that stands between the law-abiding residents of poor neighborhoods and utter complete annihilation.
So, this narrative far from helping blacks is hurting them and the solution to it ultimately is not law enforcement, it is social cohesion and a return to the understanding that children need mothers and fathers.
CARLSON: Yes. One of the things I love about talking to you is you actually care about what happens to the people we see on our screen being murdered on the sidewalk. No one in charge seems to care, so bless you for that.
Heather Mac Donald, thank you.
MAC DONALD: Thank you, Tucker.
CARLSON: So, the southern border is completely open, transforming the country. The Biden administration has allowed many thousands, very soon it’ll be millions of foreign nationals from other nations to enter our country.
Now, there is an effort underway to make sure all of them can vote. Oh, but don’t say it out loud, that’s a conspiracy theory. Right? We’ve got details for you coming up live from Budapest.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MATT FINN, FOX NEWS CHANNEL CORRESPONDENT: Welcome to “FOX News Live.” I’m Matt Finn.
The White House calling on states and local governments to take action after an eviction moratorium expired over the weekend. The Biden administration says the Federal government has provided more than $45 billion to keep renters in their home and is accusing states and cities of being quite, “too slow to act.”
President Biden has faced criticism that he was slow to address the end of the moratorium imposed at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Senator Lindsey Graham has tested positive for COVID-19. The South Carolina lawmaker is the first senator to test positive despite being vaccinated.
Senator Graham says he is quote, “very glad he received the vaccine” and that without it, his current symptoms would be far worse.
I’m Matt Finn, now back to TUCKER CARLSON TONIGHT.
For all your headlines, log in to foxnews.com.
CARLSON: So the Biden administration started doing all kinds of things almost immediately after Joe Biden was inaugurated in January, but the very first thing they did, the first big policy change they made and the one they have stuck to most deciduously has been to open our southern border, not simply to Latin America, but to the world.
Now why did they do that? Why is that the one thing they did immediately and have kept doing? Well, of course because they want to change who lives in this country and they’re doing that to undermine democracy itself. When you change who votes, you change the outcome of elections, and they believe by opening the border, they can ensure permanent control of our political system by the Democratic Party for generations.
That’s not a conspiracy theory, they say it out loud all the time, and attacked you if you noted.
Dick Durbin who is a senator purportedly from Illinois just said it out loud on the floor of the Senate a few days ago. Last week “The New York Times” published an op-ed — and we’re giving the title here directly — quote, “There is no good reason you should have to be a citizen to vote.”
In other words, the millions coming in should be able to choose your government. The author of that piece argues that actually non-citizens contribute just as much to this country as people who are born here and they should be allowed to pick your government.
If that doesn’t scare you, nothing will.
Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He joins us tonight.
Professor, thanks so much for coming on. So, they scream at you if you repeat their own words back to them, but I think it’s pretty clear, they are not even hiding it that the whole point of their immigration policy is to ensure political control, replace the population, get a different outcome.
Am I misreading this?
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON, SENIOR FELLOW, HOOVER INSTITUTION: No, you’re not, and I think it was really important you stressed the urgencies just as we’re seeing the efforts to destroy the Electoral College or pack the court or have a national voter law. They feel that the constituency of the present demography is not on their side, so they can’t wait to legally have residents come with green cards and go through a lengthy process of citizenship because they don’t think they’re going to be in power or they won’t have this moment.
So, they want to have residents immediately become equal to citizens and they forget that citizens — they know that citizenship is the foundation of western civilization, Tucker. We had a long period of settled civilization, but was only 2,700 years ago when, in the classical world, people said, wait a minute, we are a permanent fixed peoples. We have identifiable borders. We can make our own laws and elect our own officials and take governance in our own hands. We can’t do that if we’re migratory tribes or we don’t have a settled space or we don’t have shared and collective customs and traditions that develop from settlement.
So, when we look at people crossing the border, two million of them are scheduled in the next 12 months, we don’t know who these people are, Tucker. We don’t know if they speak their language and we don’t know if they share our values, and we don’t even know if they’ve ever voted before.’
And the idea that the moment they come across and that’s the first decision they made was to break U.S. law, the second will be to reside here illegally, they would be co-equal to a citizen defies the whole concept of civilization.
And remember, citizenship has already eroded. It started out — it is mentioned several times in the Constitution as an assumption. You don’t even have to define it, but it used to be the idea that a citizen could only elect — hold elected office, could only vote, could only go in and out of the country at his own permission and will, and could serve in the military and was subject to the laws of the United States.
And now, we see those are mostly eroded and we’re down to just — the only thing that separates a citizen from somebody crossing the border on day one was that they could not hold office and they could not vote. Yet, already people in some jurisdictions, school board elections in California are voting and there is talk about even people holding office.
When that happens, then we’re no different than Rome with people just in the late 5th Century A.D. coming across the Roman borders, Huns, vandals, goths with no difference in their status than Roman citizens and you know what happened after that.
CARLSON: Yes, and this is being done intentionally, stealing our country from American citizens. That’s exactly what this is and we’re allowing it.
HANSON: Yes. It is.
CARLSON: Victor Davis Hanson, I appreciate your coming on tonight.
HANSON: Thank you.
CARLSON: So Joe Biden has only been in office for a little over six months, he has already radically changed this country in a lot of different ways. He has accused a huge part of the population of being white supremacists, criminals, enemies of the state, and with very few exceptions, Republicans have not even mentioned it, not said a word, and of course done nothing to protect their own voters. Why is that?
We talked to one journalist, a man who long considered himself a member of the hard left, why this is and his answer — bracing. It’s coming to you in just a moment.
We’ll be back from Budapest, Hungary.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So, we’re in the Central Square in Budapest. This is really the scene of all modern Hungarian history. At various points, there have been executions in this square, revolutions fomented in this square.
Right now, this is the seat of the legislative branch. Now, there are three main buildings in this square and they were the product of a competition in the 19th Century. The Hungarian people were asked, what kind of Parliament Building do you want? And so there were three entries in that competition and they built all three, first, second, and third.
The winner is now the Hungarian Parliament, right behind me. Neo-gothic as you can see. The second is the Supreme Court, which is as you’ve noticed neo-classical, and that’s the third place, right there. We’re not even going to name the architectural style, but I think they got it right, first, second, and third.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
CARLSON: So 20 years ago, the U.S. government built a massive National Security state to fight the threat from Islamic extremism. That entire apparatus has now been turned on the American population itself, the white supremacists that Joe Biden says live in our midst.
White supremacy, Joe Biden has told us is the greatest threat this country faces. What is it exactly? Who are these people? Why have none been arrested? No one has asked that question. No one in Congress has, not even Republicans. Why is that exactly?
David Horowitz is a long time conservative writer, but he began his career on the hard left. He is the son of communists. He understands exactly what’s happening. He has been predicting it for quite a bit of time. We just spoke to David Horowitz for a brand new episode of “Tucker Carlson Today.” Here’s part of that conversation.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DAVID HOROWITZ, AUTHOR: Republicans are poor defenders of our country because they are poor messengers. The Democrats control and have controlled every major city, inner city in America for 50 to a hundred years, controlled them a hundred percent.
Every injustice, real or imagined in the inner cities done to minorities and the black people in particular, Democrats are one hundred percent responsible for, and yet Republicans are too polite to ever mention this. It’s as though they don’t want to embarrass their enemies by confronting them with their worst crimes.
So everything that we’ve seen, all these protests and this tearing up the cities, which was over the summer, which were done with Democratic support, these racist mayors largely black and a hundred percent Democrat encouraged the riots, did not call out the proper forces to suppress them, to arrest these people, allowed them to occupy our cities and burn them. There were over 600 violent riots in 220 American cities.
This is the problem in our country, everything is upside down. The racism in our country is an epidemic of anti-white racism. You can say anything about white people, you can fling terms like white supremacy around with no evidence, no basis in reality.
America is not a racist society, in the least, and you know Joe Biden — what has he said? The greatest threat is not ISIS, it’s not china, it’s not the Iranian terrorists, the greatest threat to America is white supremacy. Well, he must be talking about himself because he has been a lifelong white supremacist.
And I guess, he is doing some kind of what he thinks is a personal atonement by dumping that charge unjustly on his country, but it’s a monstrous lie.
Now, why aren’t Republicans referring to the Democrats as the racists that they are? This is a racist party. Equity programs are designed to help black people and minorities like small business people, but not whites. How racist is that?
Yet the only Republican I know who has called the Democrats are racist is Donald Trump. That’s why they hate Donald Trump. Republicans have to stop being so nice and going along with this language control.
You know, the border crisis, this is treason. You can’t blow up the southern border in the midst of a pandemic. It is not only — I mean, the conservative estimate is that a hundred thousand coronavirus carriers will come in illegally into the country this year, thanks to the Democrats; but of course there’s the, you know the billion dollar cartels that they are empowering, there are the sex traffickers. People are dying.
You don’t hear rhetoric coming from the Republican Party that even approaches the seriousness of the problem that the Democrats have created.
They have betrayed the country.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Our conversation with David Horowitz, fascinating. It went on for about an hour. You can find it on foxnation.com under “Tucker Carlson Today.”
Well, as we told you a moment ago, Barack Obama is having a 60th birthday party and when you’re king of the Democratic Party, why wouldn’t you go big? And he has — 200 servants at Barack Obama’s oceanfront estate in Martha’s Vineyard. Who are they exactly? It must be a pretty diverse group.
Mark Steyn has looked into it. That’s next.
We’ll be back live from Budapest.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
CARLSON: No one is more oppressed than Michelle Obama, she has told you that many times. She can barely go outside. But when she is at home, she goes big. She and her husband, the King of the Democratic Party, he is turning 60, so naturally, they are celebrating at Martha’s Vineyard with 200 servants.
Will there be elephants that will be brought in on a litter? And what will Rochelle Walensky have to say about it? Talk about a super spreader event. We don’t have answers, but would you believe Mark Steyn might?
He is our high society correspondent. Needless to say, he is based in Martha’s Vineyard. He joins us tonight.
So, do you think 200 servants seems like a lot even for Barack Obama? What do you think they will be doing?
MARK STEYN, AUTHOR AND COLUMNIST: Well, actually, in fairness, I think all these under butlers and deputy footmen are actually be the only diversity because the 500 guests, seem to be the same guests who go to — we are basically back to Medieval Era, where it is the same 500 people who go to all the parties.
As you know, Barack Obama has got Oprah and George Clooney, just as Oprah and George Clooney went to Harry and Meghan’s wedding even though they had never met either of them. I mean, you have to feel sorry for George and Oprah just going to the parties of people you don’t know is a really sad and miserable existence.
But I have to say when you look at this, 500 guests, 200 fawning footmen and under butlers, what is interesting to me is the way people are actually perfectly happy with this. You have been talking about citizenship on this show, but actually, a disturbing number of people are quite happy to be subjects.
They say, “Oh, yes, I couldn’t go to granny’s 90th birthday, but it is perfectly fine for Barack Obama to have 500 people,” because our rulers are so much better than us.
The last 18 months has actually clarified this. The Governor of California eating at the French Laundry, oh, well, that is different. He is a great man. Obama is a great man. Fly in George Clooney and Oprah in, that is appropriate. Oh, I’m just going to put my mask back on and go back in the house for another 18 months.
CARLSON: That is the saddest observation — the fierce egalitarian spirit of America society dying and that is our fault. I agree with you completely. Mark Steyn, sometimes it takes a foreign eye to see the truth about our country. Great to see you.
STEYN: Or sometimes, you have to be in Budapest to see America clearly. I envy that, Tucker.
CARLSON: Yes. Safe, clean Budapest. The Great Mark Steyn.
Now, we are signing off tonight from this city, on the Danube. We will be coming from here all week. We are filming a “Tucker Carlson Original,” part of the documentary series.
We will be back every night at 8:00 p.m. The show that is the sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness and groupthink.
See you tomorrow.
Covid “Casedemic”: The Banking Cartel is Driving the Agenda
by AKRAINER via The Naked Hedgie blog on 27 Aug. 2020
For weeks now, the media and “health” authorities have relentlessly promoted a fear-inducing narrative about the Covid 19 “pandemic” as if the daily count of new “cases” were a major public health emergency, sensationalized by the media nearly 24/7. The official narrative is sharply at odds with the gathering voices from hundreds of doctors, virologists and epidemiologists.
Incoherence of the official narrative
Supposing that we are up against a “once-in-a-century” pandemic, this would be a great challenge for humanity, wrought with uncertainty. One would expect to encounter a lively debate, discussions, much doubt and controversy. Journalists should seek out as many domain experts as possible so we can all gain the clearest possible understanding of the new health challenge and how to confront it. Effective treatments should be promoted, celebrated, screamed from the rooftops. But the reality is very different.
Public health measures – virtually identical in most nations – are handed down from the World Health Organization through shadowy bureaucratic hierarchies that claim monopoly on truth. Discussion is discouraged and hundreds of experts are being aggressively silenced. Several effective treatments have been identified, but the officialdom has been borderline hostile to any mention of them.
Concealment of effective treatments
Already in early March 2020, President Trump started mentioning Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) as a treatment for Corona virus infections. The media promptly ridiculed him, even accusing him of putting lives in danger. However, as it turned out, HCQ was shown to reduce mortality from Covid 19 by more than 50%, and when used together with zinc and vitamins by as much as 85%.
Dr. Stella Immanuel claimed that she treated more than 300 patients with HCQ, many of them elderly and with one or more co-morbidities and she had ZERO fatalities among her patients. Today the video with her statements is difficult to find on YouTube, but you’ll easily find dozens of videos that ridicule her and smear her character. Much more recently, Dr. Brian Tyson testified that his clinic had treated 1,700 Covid-19 positive patients – again with zero fatalities.
Regardless, doctors and patients have been strongly discouraged from using Hydroxychloroquine and in some nations HCQ was abruptly pulled from the market. In Australia, prescribing HCQ has even been made a criminal offence. Meanwhile, the authorities seem to favor mandating hastily developed, untested, experimental vaccines, although the disease itself has proven lethal for only 0.004% of the population (even by the overinflated U.S. CDC statistics).
Officialdom’s puzzling entrenchment
The utter incoherence of the official positions has by now become so obvious that they have long lost all credibility. But rather than declaring victory against the virus and celebrating that life can return to normal, the officialdom has become even more deeply entrenched in their own contradictions, turning increasingly aggressive with ever more restrictive “public health” measures. Meanwhile, the media have escalated the ‘project fear’ propaganda to nauseating proportions.
We insist: the edifice is sound, do not believe your lying eyes, do not do your own research!
The situation became surreal: how can seemingly intelligent, learned people remain so stubbornly attached to a narrative that’s as obviously flawed? Why are the media relentlessly inciting fear and hysteria over a mild flu virus? In addition to the American and British media, I’ve been following the media reports in Croatia, Spain, France and Italy – the same thing everywhere: it’s all Covid all the time, with nonstop fearmongering and calls for compliance with increasingly silly “measures.” For example, more than four months into this “pandemic,” 71 nations have issued strangely similar mandates for people to wear masks in public spaces, even though there is strictly no scientific proof that this serves any purpose.
Has everyone worldwide gone insane? If it is not science and logic that’s informing the public health measures, then what is it? And then it hit me…
The curious case of the IMF loans for Belarus
Back in June I noted that Belarus’ president Alexander Lukashenko publicly snubbed a $940 million line of credit from the International Monetary Fund. He rejected it because the IMF conditioned the loan on Belarus imposing a strict Covid 19 lockdown policy and a curfew. At the time I thought it was very strange that the IMF would offer loans to a nation while setting conditions that severely impair that nation’s ability to repay.
Apparently, a number of other nations received similar offers from the IMF and/or the World Bank. We know about the Covid 19 conditionality only because the president of Belarus disclosed it publicly. Significantly, Lukashenko mentioned on several occasions that the IMF negotiators wanted Belarus to do “like in Italy.” Other nations and governments who accepted the money may have quietly agreed to the conditionality which they never disclosed to the rest of us.
As of April 2020, 85 nations have requested financial assistance from the IMF. Deeply in debt and with severely damaged economies, most governments worldwide needed loans, making them prey to the dictates of money power. To secure the needed funds they may have agreed to shutting down their economies, restricting their population’s freedom of movement, created stasi-like contact-tracing structures and closed down the schools.
Further evidence that the agenda is being driven by the bankers was the recent Op-Ed in the New York Times by Neel Kashkari, the president of Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank calling for the government to issue strict 4 to 6 week shelter-in-place orders “for everyone but the truly essential workers.” Kashkari advocated that the lockdowns should be as comprehensive and strict as possible and done aggressively, using “the testing and tracing capacity we’ve built…”
Banking cartel’s fingerprints can also be found in the document “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development,” published by the Rockefeller Foundation in 2010. On page 18, titled “Lock Step,” the document presciently describes our current reality as “A world of top-down government control and more authoritarian leadership, with limited innovation and growing citizen pushback.” The scenario envisions a “pandemic the world had been anticipating for years…” And today we do have that “pandemic,” as well as the world of top-down government control and more authoritarian leadership.
As Napoleon Bonaparte understood all too well, “When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation.” In each nation we seem to be opposed by some government bureaucracy. But while those bureaucracies and the officials who work there are becoming the targets of public resentment, it is critical that we recognize the puppeteers behind the agenda that’s playing out.
There can be little doubt that the enemy is the international banking cartel headquartered in the City of London and on Wall Street, together with their agencies like the Bank of International Settlements, the IMF, World Bank, the global systemically important banks and institutions like the World Economic Forum, big pharma corporations, World Health Organization, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, GAVI and numerous others.
As Lord Acton warned over a century ago, “the issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks” This fight is now upon us. It might be the ultimate struggle between humanity’s emancipation or our final enslavement. To prevail, we must understand our true enemies and the financial, economic, political and social structures enabling their agenda.
As the Rockefeller Foundation document reveals, they have anticipated our pushback and have surely planned diversions to misdirect our grievances toward the visible enablers of their top-down authoritarian rule. One of the greatest means of diversion are wars. We must therefore guard against believing that our enemies are the Russians, the Chinese or whomever the logic of divide-and-rule would pit us against.
When our governments tell us that we face a grave threat from another nation, send troops to its borders or warships near its shores, we must demand they stand down. We must also guard against demonization of other nations and their leaders because they frequently lead to military escalation (think Saddam Hussein, Moammar Ghaddafi, Bashar al Assad…). Ron Paul warned us that, “It is no coincidence that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking.” I explained the systemic roots of west’s war lust in this article: “Deflationary Gap and the West’s War Addiction.”
In short, we must not be distracted by the bullfighter’s red cloth: the ultimate culprits, the super-predator are the bankers: a handful of families and individuals who control and manage the present monetary system. We’ve no choice but to reject fear and confront them. Today we are armed with truth and information that past generations could not have dreamt of. Today, we can make the difference and gift our children and their children a world of prosperity and liberty beyond anything what we can imagine at present. We really are the ones we’ve been waiting for and we must seize this opportunity for this struggle is worth everything.
Some 2019 EVALI patients in the US may have been infected with COVID-19
It’s possible that some of the patients of the mysterious vaping-related lung disease that swept through all of the 50 US states in 2019 were actually COVID-19 patients, according to a group of Chinese scientists and radiologists after reviewing some 250 chest CT scans from published papers. These scientists urged the US to start screening for COVID-19 patients in 2019 e-cigarette or vaping use-associated lung injury (EVALI) patients.
Questions about CT scan comparison between EVALI and COVID-19 patients in the US
The Global Times learned from sources close to the matter on Saturday that after studying 250 chest CT scans of 142 EVALI patients selected from some 60 related studies that have been published, Chinese scientists found that 16 EVALI patients were involved in viral infections, which indicates that they could have had COVID-19. Five of the cases were determined as “moderately suspicious.”
The 16 EVALI patients were all from the US, and in 12 patients symptoms started before 2020.
They concluded that there were viral infection cases among EVALI infections reported in the US in 2019, and the possibility of COVID-19 in the vaping-related lung disease in the US cannot be ruled out, sources said.
Sources explained that five patients were deemed as “moderately suspicious” because their CT scans had the characteristics of scans for COVID-19 patients, which consisted of ground-glass opacities that were mainly distributed near the periphery of the lower lungs. In serious conditions, their CT scans showed multiple extensive consolidations in both lungs. Meanwhile, these clinical features are similar to those of COVID-19 patients.
Yang Zhanqiu, a virologist at Wuhan University, told the Global Times on Friday that due to the similarity of symptoms between EVALI and COVID-19 patients and since no nucleic acid detection kits were available then, it’s highly likely that some COVID-19 patients were actually misdiagnosed as EVALI patients in 2019, Yang said.
CT scans are part of the evidence, the US can now run antibody tests on blood samples of EVALI patients to find out how many of them were actually COVID-19 patients, and share the data with the global community to help the world get closer to the COVID-19 origins, Yang said, noting “it’s a very easy job.”
According to media reports, the vaping-related lung disease was reported in the US as early as July 2019, the same month the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (US CDC) issued a “cease and desist order” to halt most research at Fort Detrick.
According to the USCDC, the emergency department visits related to e-cigarette or vaping sharply increased in August 2019, and peaked in September.
As of February 18, 2020, the first COVID-19-related deaths were being reported in the US, a total of 2,807 hospitalized EVALI cases or deaths were reported to the USCDC in all 50 states. As of today, there is still no confirmed cause of the e-cigarette pneumonia, and the contagiousness of the disease is still unknown.
In September 2019, vaping-related lung illness cases also doubled in Maryland where Fort Detrick lab is located, adding to the suspicion of Fort Detrick. This is especially because the lab stores some of the deadliest viruses in the world, including Ebola, smallpox, SARS, MERS and the novel coronavirus.
As a result, a group of Chinese netizens issued an open letter urging the WHO to investigate Fort Detrick lab and entrusted the Global Times to publish it and launch an online petition. So far, the petition has drawn more than 23 million signatures.
In the meantime, the timeline of early cases in the US has been constantly dialed forward. A study of over 24,000 samples taken for a National Institutes of Health (NIH) research program in the US between January 2 and March 18, 2020 suggested that seven people across five US states may have contracted COVID-19 at least a month before the country’s first officially confirmed cases on January 21, 2020.
Instead of addressing these concerns, the Biden administration called off the scientific research on early cases of COVID-19 in the US and engaged in what the Chinese Foreign Ministry called “origins-tracing terrorism.”
The US attempted to link the origins of the virus with China and even Asian countries as a group, which has triggered rising anti-Asian sentiments in the US and other Western countries. Asians are facing discrimination, oppression and even physical abuse, experts noted.
The US has also been suppressing scientists who do not conform to its narrative. Some scientists were even verbally assaulted. Some media have compared such behaviors of the US with acts of terrorism, Zhao Lijian, spokesperson of Chinese Foreign Ministry, said at a Thursday’s media briefing.
Zhao on Friday urged the US to take four steps on COVID-19 origins tracing if it wants to show transparency, including disclosing data on early COVID-19 cases, inviting the World Health Organization (WHO) to probe Fort Detrick, the University of North Carolina, and the team of Ralph S Baric, particularly, and publishing data on sick soldiers who attended the Wuhan Military World Games in October 2019.
Zhao urged the US to disclose data on early cases, including the unexplained respiratory disease in Virginia, vaping-related lung disease in Wisconsin in July 2019 and flu patients in the winter of 2019.
“The US should conduct nucleic acid testing and antibody tests on serum samples of these patients to find out how many of them were actually COVID-19 patients,” Zhao said.